Tech founders and talent want to build in Europe. Let’s empower them
Top tech operators are making big moves. To Europe. Former British PM Nick Clegg has returned to the UK to join VC firm Hiro, Yann LeCun has moved back to France from the Bay Area, Jacomo Corbo is building PhysicsX in London after stints in the US and Canada, and Maryanne Caughey has relocated to Sweden to join Lovable, following a Chief People Officer role at Notion. “The energy here is palpable,” she posted on LinkedIn. “Creative minds working together to build something revolutionary.”
It’s a good summary of the energy we see brewing across Europe more broadly, where ambition has levelled up and such headline hires will continue. Data in this year’s State of European Tech supports this. Forty-two percent say it’s more attractive to become a founder in Europe right now, the tech workforce has hit a record 3M, with almost half in VC-backed companies, and “made in Europe” has become a higher calling; 85% of the continent’s founders say this is where they want to build.
In my near-decade as a US transplant to London, I’ve seen the mindset shift. A move to Silicon Valley or San Francisco used to be the tech dream; today, the growth rates and scale of European companies have changed the conversation, as has seeing Klarna, Wise, Spotify and others go public and return value to employees and executives.
It’s a powerful story, but in reality achieving such professional and financial rewards can still be challenging in Europe. Country-by-country employment laws make it hard to scale pan-European teams, relocation is slow and complex, and incentives aren’t there for those wanting to move with families, or for Europeans weighing the risk and reward of stock options. Europe is a net beneficiary of tech talent for now, but we found that the numbers are trending down among the most experienced, indicating a potential talent gap for the next generation of $100B+ European companies if not addressed. As a new study from the European Investment Bank and the European Commission this week found, access to larger talent pools can be a driver for European startups that relocate to the US.
It’s obvious our tech companies can attract top-tier talent, so now we must pull policy levers to prevent friction from pushing exceptional talent away. In an ideal world, we would have a single visa process that works across Europe and makes relocation as seamless as possible, rather than country-by-country frameworks. A unified, pan-EU (plus UK) methodology for treating pre-IPO shares, benchmarked to ‘Not Optional’ gold standards, is also needed to reward those who take career risks with new technologies.
Now is a great time to make these changes, as geopolitical allegiances shift and “made in Europe” becomes a powerful rallying call for local talent in deeptech fields. We’d also be foolish not to leverage the US’s protectionist turn towards H-1B visas. China is launching a K visa for STEM workers in response; where is Europe’s unified equivalent?
There may be pushback to the idea that tech CEOs and their workers should get preferential tax or immigration treatments, but European leaders need to be bold in selling a bigger vision. While we wait for the IPO window to open, the growing number of secondary share sales in Europe continue to demonstrate the life-changing impact a career in innovation can have. Revolut’s secondary sale in November, for example, reportedly made over 200 current and former staff paper millionaires.
Most crucially, though, these changes will get the European tech flywheel spinning faster and more powerfully, bringing more people into the fold to build, grow, exit and recycle capital into an ecosystem that’s generating more wealth and economic value by the year.
Andrew Duncan is a Talent Director at Atomico. Read more on Atomico’s call to Empower Talent here.
