EU Inc needs to happen now - not in 2 years

there’s not a ‘a French way’ of building companies but still taboo saying that you want to make billions

France has a strong AI ecosystem and 1/3 of the Station F population is non French

Europe has a more thoughtful approach than the US and is building a future I want to be part of

being a minority in Europe is a huge asset, it gives you a hedge

Last week’s results:

Let’s see your say this week - click on the link of your choice below - we’ll add the result next week.

that means breaking Apple’s gatekeeping i.e. people with iPhones can now tap to pay with these wallets just like with Apple Pay, but using third-party wallets rather than being tied to Apple’s own wallet.

funny observation - their UK page shows me content in Russian, but maybe it’s a feature not a bug as there’s still a lot of Russian money in London.

mentioned this already in a previous email, banks want to own the rails and remain financially relevant in a digital economy that might otherwise bypass them. There’s also a sovereign play, as an euro-backed stablecoin owned by Europeans is better than one owned by an American company - a serious issue now that Europe’s trajectory is a matter of American national security.

interesting to follow how a premium financial product will fare, especially since BNPL is mostly a choice for people with lower income.

It also opened offices in Zurich and Lausanne and is hiring in Poland - going to secondary markets shows that the war for talent is real, no wonder OpenAI just bought an AI shop in Warsawa, where Google is already active btw.

fyi - some US compensation benchmarks for AI talent.

Eventbrite’s made $80 million in tickets sales at $20M FCFF in 2024, considerably less than in 2018 when it IPO-ed at $1.8B.

the Italians are trying to make a case of how AI will proxy Eventbrite’s lack of PMF - fwiw, the roll-up thinking is keeping flat/lower costs while squeezing operational efficiencies into as many EBITDA margin points as possible in order to make it for a later interesting flip.

the assumption, of course, is that there’s also some residual revenue growth, at least at market rates - which is harder in the case of the ‘has been brands’ like BS is acquiring, as said brands lost to competitors mainly due to lack of customer appeal rather than being run at higher costs.

will Bending Spoon succeed reviving those businesses? Maybe, there’s some serious PE investors betting on them to do so at a $11B price tag, all while the market prices software roll-ups nicely these days i.e. beyond PE, the likes of GC and Thrive are doing it at high levels in the US.

I expect an ‘AI agent-assisted shopping’ frenzy next year, especially since OpenAI will push its ads business, which in turn is fuelled by ecommerce (OAI just poached the chief of staff to Amazon’s retail chief btw) - and more payment operators will launch MCPs i.e. WorldPay just launched one and so did Mercury. In Europe, folks are still sleeping - the proverbial European tech lag, I know Mollie did something tho.

Speaking of new things for next year, will GPTs start serving video ads during their thinking? Interrupted experience is a mass consumer model for freemiums whereas the user is the product - look at YT which is basically un-usable on a free account because of the ads. It’s just a matter of time until GPTs’ free availability will be only justified by data collection and ad serving - just like Google has been doing for the past 30 years, right?

Now is a good time to sell, if you’re in the startup business - better a good exit now than a great exit that never comes.

Top consulting firms have frozen starting salaries for the third consecutive year while Accenture calls their employees reinventors just because they got them hooked to a GPT account - probably on McKinsey advice on how to be perceived as AI thought leaders. 😀

US retail sales on Black Friday were up 4.1% compared with last year - but gains are actually flat since don’t account for higher prices due to inflation. Meanwhile, ChatGPT referrals to retailer apps on Black Friday grew 28% over last year.

Good podcast produced by Elad Gil with Henry Kravis, a guy who’s been doing PE for 50 years.

Btw, there’s an explosion of those as lately a new batch of investors has discovered media marketing and made it their core GTM. We’re in that part of the cycle where content is cool again but sadly most are just sucky slop contributors to social media channels already not comestible - SM has become almost useless for signal capturing unless really sophisticated these days.

And if human slop is not enough as is on the social media, Google is experimenting with AI slop replacing news headlines with AI clickbait nonsense.

This is a type of un-ethical case I know of first hand as it recently happened to people I work with, twice - i.e. VCs using "diligence" as a pretext to harvest customer contacts and funnel them to competitors.
It’s just a bad practice that gives the whole VC industry a bad rep, and you don’t want to deal with this type of people to begin with. Hard to protect either as a founder, as you usually talk to investors in good faith, without thinking they have an agenda other than doing their core job - vetting and personal references are and will be even more important in the future, I guess. How do you guys deal with this espionage kind of stuff? HMU!

Berlin wants to attract more companies from the security and defence industry.

The EU is super slow to improve and do good by its tax payers yet their time from complaint to antitrust investigation is 6 weeks.

Silicon Valley’s man in the White House is benefiting himself and his friends.

The American administration wants to make Russian deals that Europe now regrets:
It’s the stupidest thing ever to think the Russians will let Americans get a single penny out of this. […] The US and Europe didn’t export democracy to Russia. Instead, the West (London in particular) imported Russian corruption. The Europeans were always ahead on this - less idealistic about changing the Russian system, and quicker to capitalize on the strategic and material deals that eluded American investors. The Nord Stream pipelines, which kept German energy prices low and German politics pro-Russian, were the crown jewels.

In 2025, the number of world billionaires rose from 2,682 to nearly 3,000.

Students are flocking to get AI majors at MIT.

People are uploading their medical records to AI chatbots despite privacy concerns - the problem is when the AI gets it wrong.

China is undergoing an astonishing awakening of terroir.

Thieves have stolen €90,000 worth of snails from a farm in northern France that supplies gourmet restaurants.

52 things I learned in 2025.