Funny you ask, we actually worked on this over months. Borrow freely: europe2031.ai

Europe 2031 just dropped. A five-year scenario of our continent's slide into AI irrelevance, by Judith Dada & the people who advised European leaders. It’s pretty dystopian. But it doesn't have to end where it ends. A few weeks ago I sat down with Judith in front of the Acropolis, birthplace of Western civilization, to find out what it takes to make Europe into a global AI powerhouse. Judith Dada is one of the sharpest voices on Europe, AI, and what needs to happen next. She is a GP at Visionaries Club, runs Relativity Collective, writes one of the best blogs on AI and Europe. The numbers she lays out are brutal. Europe has 5% of global compute. The US has 80%. Europe is 25% of global GDP. That math ain’t mathing. So we talked about the hard trade-offs: - Why Europe shouldn't try to rebuild every layer of the stack from day one, but instead own a few choke points where the world can't circumvent us, and use that leverage to build the rest over time. - Why we need the second-best AI labs here even if they never become number one, because those teams spawn the next generation of companies that do AI for medicine, energy, research. - And why the real problem isn't regulation or paper trails. It's that not enough people in Europe have had their wake-up moment yet. Her bet on fixing it: get the best young people across Europe to know each other from the youngest age. Exposure to ambition breeds ambition. It's the single most powerful force anyone can experience. Full conversation in the video. Filmed where it all started. 🦾🇪🇺

Every European VC, and any VC with European portfolio companies, and every European company building with AI, should be pushing Europe to face hard trade-offs and build leverage - NOW. Drastic action must follow today.

Today feels like a good day to reshare this clip of Ariane Aerospace’s CEO calling SpaceX’s reusability plans “a dream”

Most of Europe has not yet absorbed what AI is about to do to us. The few who have are not saying it loudly enough. We wrote Europe 2031: a five-year scenario of the continent's slide into irrelevance, how AI is driving it, and what can still be done to change course.

.@EU_Commission reply on Siri AI roll-out in the EU

the Belgian Prime Minister today at the “One Europe, one market” event: "there are twice as many people working on compliance compared to innovation in Europe."

"It's an incredible opportunity to strengthen the European economy." Former Italian PM @EnricoLetta tells #EuropeToday the EU Inc initiative that will see corporate rules seamlessly applied to start-ups across the EU is Europe's chance to become "more united." Watch:

this dude doing beach boys harmony builds really scratches a brain itch ( @ chriscronmusic on IG)

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man. The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero. The FBI located the man within a few days. He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City. The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave. He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father. He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris. When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship. He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion. He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg. He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry. He decided he wanted to fly. In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed. Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation. Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first. Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it. Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet. He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red. He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket. The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service. His application was rejected. The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service. He was the only one who was not. For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word. When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him. He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years. He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp. He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was. He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life. He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center. He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for. A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it. He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday. He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday. He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag. In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously. It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him. He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history. The French had been calling him a hero since 1917. The Americans got around to it in 1994.

“It was one of the most monumentally unselfish things one group of people did for another.” -#DDay veteran Andy Rooney on the young 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy 82 years ago. Required watching for every young person today!

The agency model is built on waiting to be asked. @rorysutherland thinks that's about to break. Love the bold prediction about the future of Cannes becoming a marketplace of ideas!

I am so hype for this World Cup bc we’re going to hear sentences like this that have never been uttered before

This is such an important point. Another reason the EU‘s new Scale Up Fund is more than just a funding mechanism. @EZaharievaEU

If Helmut Kohl was Chancellor right now he would have already proposed a 10 point plan for Europe‘s future, with an expanded federal system like this.

Does anyone else need more proof that a) the Polish tech ecosystem is zooming up b) @mati will be to his country‘s trajectory what @eldsjal is to his and c) Europe is just getting started on living up to its potential — still time for investors to get on board and go long.

What a week in Warsaw. 2,500 leaders, builders, founders, researchers, investors and public leaders came together for the @ElevenLabs Summit in Grand Theatre. There were a lot of moments that felt very special. Poland is full of energy and optimism right now. Our researchers and builders are at the frontier of AI, and the economy keeps growing at a pace that is hard not to be excited about. It was a privilege to bring so much of the ecosystem together in Warsaw - to celebrate how far we've come, and to talk about what we can build next A few personal highlights: - Welcoming the President and Deputy Prime Minister, who shared their perspectives on innovation, security and Poland’s future - with a lot of energy and optimism - Hosting former President Lech Wałęsa and showing him our original machine - assembled by @dabkowski_piotr in his Warsaw apartment at the very beginning - Previewing our newest, most expressive models yet, and live demoing the future of customer journey when booking experiences (ending with iconic voice of Piotr Fronczewski)! - Speaking with @RBrzoska about reinventing parcel delivery in Europe, and Piotr Zak about positioning an iconic Polish company, Polsat Plus Group for the decades ahead - Announcing our partnership with @LOTPLAirlines to transform customer experience with voice agents - Introducing investors from across Europe and the US to Polish founders and builders - including all our board members - thank you @slpierre, @JenniferHli, @andrew__reed - for the first time! - Having my parents come to an ElevenLabs event for the first time Thank you to everyone who came from across Poland, Europe and further afield!

An incredible bit of sports journalism by The Guardian here. A short summary of the playing style of all 48 World Cup nations and a short profile of all 1248 World Cup players. Bookmark and refer to the resources when watching the obscure matches: theguardian.com/football/ng-…

One of the heroes of the European startup ecosystem. The Not Optional campaign alone was game-changing for Europe. Bravo @vojtech !

After more than 12 wonderful years, this will be my last month @IndexVentures. When I joined in 2013, Index was just beginning its journey to build the first truly transatlantic VC firm. We'd just opened our SF office, an ambitious goal for a European upstart taking on the titans of Sand Hill Road. Our brand colour was blue. Single-digit billions were impressive exit valuations, not early funding rounds. The European ecosystem was finding its feet. Back then, I was just getting to know the founders of our new seed investments: Revolut, Deliveroo, Figma and Robinhood. In the decade-plus that followed, I was lucky enough to work with more than 200 founders and their teams, bring entrepreneurs together at countless events in Europe and the US, organise 13 Index AGMs, launch 13 funds, and build Index Press. I also led two policy campaigns for Index: Not Optional and @euinc_petition — the first time a VC in Europe directly campaigned for, and won, legislative change in support of startups. Behind each of these was a mammoth team effort: the work of my colleagues, the support of many external champions, the trust of the Index partners, and collaboration that goes well beyond the walls of Index. As I say goodbye to the firm Bloomberg recently called “Silicon Valley’s Quiet Kingmaker”, my main feeling is one of gratitude: to the Index crew I learned so much from, the startups I was lucky enough to work with, the journalists who listened to my seventeen-thousandth pitch, the politicians who did something that earned them exactly zero votes, and the founders who dived with me — often for the first time – into the world of brand and comms. I'll admit, I'm addicted. This world has my heart. Working with people mad enough to shape the future never gets boring. Thank you ❤️