Partner @atomico — investing in the AI application layer, Seed to Series B, in Europe 🇪🇺🚀. Football fan, skier, engineer.
Joined March 2015
- Tweets 1,922
- Following 1,373
- Followers 3,289
- Likes 7,246
252 Photos and videos
Andreas Helbig retweeted
Jun 13
For anyone wondering what this means:
- Anthropic (and potentially future OpenAI, Google, xAI) models that cost billions to develop will make 0 revenue outside the US
- a big double digit percentage of Anthropic (and potentially OpenAI, Google, xAI) workforce can no longer work there, because they are foreigners and are not allowed to use those models
So Trump just made frontier model development effectively unprofitable and tremendously slowed down Anthropic (and potentially others in the future)
He's handing China the win on a gold platter.
*potentially: if the same restrictions are imposed on other frontier labs and models
Jun 13
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
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Jun 13
The latest in a series of wake-up calls for Europe. We have to build, and we have to invest - more than ever. Us Europeans need to be pushing hard to become strong in our own right. Otherwise, we will become the museum that (some) Americans claim we are. Luckily, many of us are - but we need more.
Jun 13
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.
The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Access to all other Claude models is not affected.
We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.
Read our full statement: anthropic.com/news/fable-myt…
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Andreas Helbig retweeted
Jun 13
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.
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Jun 13
.@shaunmmaguire’s most controversial take
Jun 13
I have been a keen observer of Reyna’s since he got minutes at Dortmund in Jan 2020
He’s one of the highest skill ceiling players in the world
I don’t think there’s anybody that’s better from a cold start
He lacks movement but is currently severely underrated
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Andreas Helbig retweeted
Where’s “Skin In The Game”?
This 20 year chart tells a remarkable story about Germany. This chart is not merely describing a decline. It is explaining it:
820,000 public-sector jobs
−800,000 self-employed
Wealth is created through entrepreneurship, innovation, capital formation, and voluntary exchange—not through the expansion of the administrative state.
Germany became wealthy through builders, engineers, industrialists, family businesses, and entrepreneurs. Yet the incentives increasingly reward compliance over risk-taking, administration over innovation, and redistribution over production.
The result is visible in plain sight.
A society that attracts its brightest minds to government desks rather than company formation is slowly consuming its economic seed corn. Exceptions, such as Singapore, may prove the rule.
Prosperity cannot be regulated into existence. It must be created first.
Germany needs fewer barriers to entrepreneurship, lower taxes, less bureaucracy, and more capital formation.
#Germany does not suffer from a shortage of bureaucrats. It suffers from a shortage of entrepreneurs.
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Andreas Helbig retweeted
Jun 6
My favorite thing about this monstrosity of a software product: sometimes it opens a browser inside the app that tells you to download the app
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Jun 5
Sweden I love you but please install passport eGates at Arlanda 🫶🥲
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Jun 2
March 2026: VfL Wolfsburg announces a huge partnership with OpenAI. A full shiny case study on the OpenAI website - using AI in scouting, partnerships, backoffice.
May 2026: VfL Wolfsburg gets relegated after 29 consecutive years in the top flight, and winning the league title back in 2009.
Lesson in there:
AI is not a magic silver bullet that fixes your core business overnight. Wolfsburg had been underperforming for years, second-worst transfer deficit (behind league dominators Bayern), bad results, only kept alive by €80m/y subsidies from Volkswagen. AI can't magically fix what humans mess up. Especially not a model provider out of the box, without a clear direction or strategy.
The case study is actually quite telling - I'll link it below.
It's full of AI slop, and it shows how incoherent AI adoption seems to have been. What kind of strategy is "Turf Disease GPT, Football School Invoicing GPT, Hannah (HR GPT Builder), and ESG Check GPT" supposed to be?
Another fantastic, completely nondescript example: "By focusing on people, not pilots, the Bundesliga club is scaling efficiency, creativity, and knowledge—without losing its football identity."
If you're an enterprise, and you're serious about AI adoption, you need a proper strategy - and probably an internal champion, and a partner. The whole case study is a silent cry for an FDE / deployment strategy team to bring order into the AI adoption chaos.
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Jun 1
The issue isn’t the hard work - intensity is a necessary condition to success, and that means putting in at least a sufficient amount of hours.
The issue isn’t that Corgi “does all of this, only for insurance.” Some people are passionate about rockets, others about more obscure things like insurance. The first group is bigger than the second. Doesn’t make the second group invalid.
The issue I take is how patronizing the statements are. This is not the only path to success. Intensity is a necessary condition, but it comes in many shapes and forms. For some, it’s the raw hours (like for @nico_laqua) - for some, it’s thinking about the business on a walk or in the gym - for others, family gives them a purpose - for some, it’s the Zen mastery that @karrisaarinen describes - and for others, it’s different again.
Find your own way, find a mission that’s motivating for you (even if some might be condescending to it), make it healthy for you (it’s a marathon, not a sprint), and don’t preach your own way of working as “the only way or you’ll lose”.
May 30
"If you are not working 7 days per week, you are going to lose".
Corgi Insurance is the most intense workplace culture in startups.
- The company works 7 days per week.
- Founder (@nico_laqua) lives and sleeps in the office.
- He built a cafe in the office because there was no local cafe that was open 24/7.
- 2/3 of the first 30 team members have the Corgi logo as a tattoo.
Today I went behind the scenes with Nico, who has used this culture to scale the company to a $2.6BN valuation in just two years.
My condensed notes below:
1. If You Are Not Working 7 Days Per Week, You Are Going to Lose:
Whatever you can get done in 5 days, you'll get more done in 6 and 7. If you are trying to solve the world’s hardest problems, a standard 5-day workweek will not cut it.
2. Work Trials Repel the Mediocre:
Corgi forces candidates into mock work trials over the weekend. If seeing a full office on a Saturday scares them, they don't belong. True intensity acts as a natural filter to attract killers and repel clock-watchers.
3. Lead from the Front Lines
You can’t demand 7-day weeks while sitting on a yacht. Nico sleeps 3–4 hours a night on a mattress inside the office. If you want your troops to bleed, you have to be in the trenches with them.
4. Culture Only Means One Thing: Winning
Forget superficial jargon like "hackers" or "ex-founders." Strip away the corporate fluff. A great startup culture is aggressively optimized around one single word: Winning.
5. Lifespan vs. Victories
Building something world-historic requires radical sacrifice. When asked if he'd rather build a trillion-dollar company and die at 50, or fail and live to 80, the answer was easy. "I would rather measure my lifespan in victories."
6. Reject the Comfort of "Quiet Quitting."
If you are operating in a hyper-growth environment and your days off happen to be Saturday and Sunday every single week, you are quiet quitting. To win, you must deliberately bypass the off-ramps of personal comfort and low volatility.
Corgi isn't for everyone—and that’s exactly the point.
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Jun 1
"Berlin is dead" 🙃
Congrats team @contentful !!
Jun 1
BREAKING: Contentful has been acquired by Salesforce! 🇩🇪
The German company was founded in 2014 by Sascha Konietzke and Paolo Negri, but is now headed up by Karthik Rau.
They created an API-driven Content Management System to allow developers and content creators to manage content centrally and distribute it across any digital channel or device.
It has JUST been announced that it has been acquired by Salesforce!
The company last raised at a $3bn valuation in 2021 although no price has been disclosed as part of the acquisition.
That being said, it will almost certainly be a great result for its early investors Point Nine and Balderton.
AMAZING NEWS - CONGRATS ALL 👏
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May 30
A is the best value for money / getting most € out of the all-expenses paid offer — Lofoten, Lapland, Greenland, Iceland, Faroe are insanely expensive but worth it.
B is the underrated pick — Scotland & Nordics & Baltics is quite the combo. Scenery, space, tranquility.
C has the best cities — London, Copenhagen, Berlin, Amsterdam, Warsaw all in one is hard to beat.
D is the best place to live — Alps > everything.
E is the obvious pick — Best scenery, most diverse, best cuisine. You get the touristy corners in Spain, Southern France and Italy, but there’s enough hidden secrets in Northern Spain, the Balkans, and Turkey.
F is the most fun — Algarve, Ibiza, Sicily, Greece, Morocco are insanely vibrant.
What an amazing continent. 🇪🇺🫶
May 29
You just won a 2-week, all-expenses-paid vacation. But there’s a catch: you have to stay within one region the whole time. What are you picking?
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May 30
Spot on, and not just in Sweden but all over Europe.
I studied industrial engineering at one of the top universities in Germany, in Karlsruhe. When I graduated in 2015, 60-70% of my classmates went into old-school Automotive, to Automotive suppliers or to machine manufacturing.
I don’t want to blame them, this was just the “normal” choice at the time. But for a university that produced four out of the five founders of SAP, one would hope that tech would have been a more natural career choice.
This is changing with the younger generations. And it’s one of many reasons why to be bullish on Europe.
Latent engineering talent is finally getting deployed in the right places.
This is spot on by Viktor (early Lovable, ex-Stripe)
There's so much latent engineering talent in Stockholm
It's insane
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May 29
My most American opinion about Europe is we should actually build more ACs
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May 28
Current view on European tech hubs — this is based on vibes only, after having taken 50 flights this year across the best continent in the world. 🫶🇪🇺
Tell me where I’m brutally wrong!
🔥🔥🔥
🇸🇪 Stockholm — unmatched energy, community, and ambition. THE applied AI capital. Lovable, Legora, Neko, Pit, plus so many more. This is insanely strong.
🇬🇧 London — highest volume, most mature, most diverse: everything from AI Apps to Infra to Fintech to DeepTech. If Europe had a tech capital, it would still be London.
🔥🔥
🇨🇭 Zurich — true DeepTech / Robotics hub, ETH is doing an amazing job at training and inspiring young founders.
🇪🇸 Barcelona — great energy, highly commercial, becoming an expat hub for European founders, highly (!) underrated.
🇫🇷 Paris — continues to build great companies, seems a bit more Fintech and consumer focused vs other hubs, plus Mistral as the clear European AI lighthouse.
🔥
🇩🇪 Berlin — too much self loathing / inner-German Berlin hate. Quiet builders, more B2B than ever, definitely underrated. Needs more momentum and confidence.
🇩🇪 Munich — CDTM is the best thing that happened to this city. Fantastic technical founders. Waiting for more of the second gen of founders out of Celonis, Lilium, Isar, Helsing, Quantum etc to emerge though.
🇩🇰 Copenhagen — underrated, quiet and reliable producer of great companies. Light, Flatpay, Corti are amazing next gen leaders. Naturally a bit lower volume.
[honorable mentions]
🇱🇹 Vilnius — Punches above its weight, great energy among young founders, NordVPN and Vinted are underrated beasts, too often forgotten among the European greats.
🇳🇴 Norway — quietly emerging as a DeepTech hub, need to sort out some of their policies though
🇵🇱 Warsaw — the most dynamic economy in Europe, needs even more true tech entrepreneurs
🇮🇹 Milan — emerging expat hub, better energy than ever, still too low in volume for what it could be, one to watch
🇮🇪 Dublin — big tech talent is finally starting to leave and build companies, this would be a game changer
🇳🇱 Amsterdam — good volume, good energy, needs a bit more momentum and confidence, Framer and Mews are underrated
🇺🇦 Kyiv — Defense capital of Europe, incredibly technical, iterative, scrappy, pragmatic, resilient. So much love and respect for these guys 🫶
🇪🇪 Tallinn — still the most entrepreneurial per capita, feel it needs a lot more momentum though, Pactum and Starship are some of too few AI leaders
🇫🇮 Helsinki — FR8 / Founders House / Slush are re-igniting much needed momentum. Very DeepTech overall with IQM, Varjo etc
🇨🇿 Prague — getting there. Duvo, Aisle are ones to watch. Still low volume
I’ve been in European Tech for over eleven years now. This is the best it’s ever been, by far. Let’s continue that momentum, no matter what the Euro haters on this platform say. 🇪🇺🔥🫶
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May 28
Some great views in the comments — summary:
This shouldn’t be a “my hub is better than yours” post, Europe has many great ecosystems and we should stop the stupid sibling infighting (looking at you Berlin-Munich, Barcelona-Madrid, Stockholm-Copenhagen rivalries ;) )
🇪🇸 Madrid probably deserves an honorable mention, sorry
🇪🇸 People surprised by Barcelona rated so highly — they are really strong at GTM, very commercial. Underrated skill and trait in Europe I think. Plus we have an awesome portfolio there ;)
🇵🇹 Lisbon more of a bootstrapping hub so I might miss some of the action there
🇩🇪 Shoutout to the southwest Germany cluster Freiburg-Karlsruhe-Heidelberg (hometown!) with Black Forest Labs, Codesphere, Aleph Alpha. Probably worth a mention even if home bias 🫶
And yes flying is bad for the environment but you can’t be a serious pan European investor by sitting at home — sorry not sorry
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May 28
Rumors are true, next yapping VC influencer is @enricomellis
I’ll be investing early, this will be huge
Also, the content is actually strong this time
As is the sunglasses game and the unexpected Prenzlauer Berg tour
🫶🔥
May 26
it's come to this. joined the yappers.
first up: the 4 types of angel investors (one's a trap)
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