The Future Is Being Built Elsewhere
Why I’m worried and why founders can’t afford to wait for Europe to wake up.
I read Pierre Chapuis’ post Inexorable Progress last week, and a line stuck with me:
“You cannot stop the flow of progress. You can only decide to be an innovator, an early adopter, or a laggard.”
He’s right. And if you work in tech in Europe, you feel it every day: in the conversations, in the pace, in the mindset, in the decisions people around you consider “reasonable.”
I live in France. I build a global product. I talk to US companies daily. And honestly?
I’m worried too.
Not because we lack talent. We don’t.
Not because we lack engineers. We don’t.
But because we lack the mental model required to compete in the world we’re entering. And the gap is accelerating.
We Think We’re in the Same Race. We’re Not.
When I look at what’s happening in the US and China in AI, SaaS, robotics, automation… it feels like watching a different timeline.
They’re scaling models that can refactor codebases.
They’re shipping companies that go from idea to revenue in weeks.
They’re pushing robotics into homes.
They’re pouring capital at a pace that dwarfs what Europe raises in a quarter.
Meanwhile, in France:
We think regulation is a moat.
We believe “solving the French market” is a global strategy.
We look at the US and assume “we’ll catch up later.”
We treat AI like a temporary trend we can ignore until it stabilizes.
This isn’t a mindset gap. It’s a timeline gap.
Europe is acting like it has time. It doesn’t.
The Most Dangerous Bias: Thinking France Is the World
When I hear founders say:
“We’ll win the French market first.”
I always think: France is 0.8% of the world’s population.
0.8%.
China is 20× bigger. The US tech market is 10× bigger.
The next wave of software will not be built for 0.8%.
If your plan is to build only for France, culturally, financially, technically, you’ve already chosen to lose.
Not because you’re bad.
But because you’re playing a local game while everyone else is playing planetary-scale chess.
The Mindset Problem Nobody Talks About
Here’s the part that founders and engineers will immediately recognize:
Most people here fundamentally don’t understand ROI, time, capital, or scale.
They understand tasks. They understand constraints. They understand regulation.
But they don’t understand leverage.
They want to “optimize costs” when the problem is growth.
They want to “avoid risk” when the problem is irrelevance.
They want to “comply first” when the problem is competing at all.
This is why hiring is more complex here, why product velocity is slower. Why teams hesitate on AI adoption, just as they did with cloud in 2008.
It’s not a technology gap.
It’s a worldview gap.
We’re Living Like a Rich Country Without Creating Enough Value
This part is uncomfortable, but founders feel it viscerally.
For 50 years, France has lived on increasing debt and the assumption that we can keep funding our lifestyle without producing equivalent value.
But look at our major industries:
Our car industry is fighting Brussels just to be allowed to sell pollution past 2035, not to compete.
Our energy leadership was squandered by 20 years of indecision.
Our tech ecosystem celebrates being five years behind the US, as long as it’s “sovereign.”
If we stop exporting cars, software, tech, heavy industry, how do we pay for everything?
How do we fund innovation? How do we stay competitive?
We don’t.
We shrink.
We tax more.
We lose ground.
And we pretend everything is fine.
Dropping Out of the Race Isn’t Ethical — It’s Surrender
When Pierre wrote:
“If you slow down, you are simply letting those who do not care about these issues in the first place win.”
That hit me hard.
Because this is the mindset I see too often in Europe:
“We shouldn’t build this.”
“We should regulate it.”
“We should wait until we’re sure.”
“We should be cautious.”
Caution is fine.
Except when you’re in a race you didn’t choose but cannot opt out of. You don’t get to be “ethical” by refusing to play.
You just hand the steering wheel of the future to people who don’t share your ethics.
What Founders Should Take Away
I’m not writing this to doomscroll. I’m writing this because founders and engineers need to hear one thing:
Build globally. Don’t wait for permission.
The world is not waiting for Europe to catch up. The next decade will be brutal for anyone playing local games. Whether we like it or not, the next wave of innovation will be:
AI-native
global from day one
capital-efficient
ruthlessly fast
engineered by people who want to win, not just exist
And we can be part of that — if we choose to.
Closing
I love France. I live here. My kids grow up here. But love doesn’t blind me.
I see the same thing Pierre sees:
A continent with world-class talent… and a mindset preventing it from playing the actual game.
I don’t have the solutions. But I see the problems clearly. And as entrepreneurs, our best chance isn’t waiting for a savior.
It’s building, ambitiously, globally, unapologetically, before the gap becomes irreversible. Because the world is moving.
And this time, if we hesitate, we’ll be spectators. Not players.
Sadly, I would not remove one word of what you are writing, Julien...
100% aligned. Is it because the average age of the population is 43 that we are slowing down our ambition? That there are so many forces continuing to slow us down, making us think about how to reduce noise rather than how to build factories? How not to hurt ourselves instead of how to take risks?