No, Europe Is Not Doomed to Tech Failure!

Breakfast meeting on the sidelines of the AI Summit in Paris. A room full of entrepreneurs, investors, and decision-makers. And then, once again, the same tired narrative.

“Why is America ahead of Europe? Because over there, there’s this unique entrepreneurial atmosphere. A hunger for success, a culture of risk-taking. In the US, they’re winners. Here, we lack ambition, funding, vision.”

I listen. I sigh. Because this myth needs to stop. This endless European bashing, this self-inflicted defeatism, is both false and harmful.

History Tells a Different Story

Europe has never been behind in technology. It has simply been consistently ignored by its own decision-makers.

• The internet? Someone told me again yesterday that the US invented it. Really? The truth is, the foundations of the internet were laid in France by Louis Pouzin and the Cyclades project. Datagram technology? That was his work. But nobody listened. And so, the Americans deployed it.

• Artificial intelligence? This isn’t some new discovery from 2023. Back in 2018, the Villani Report already detailed how AI would transform the world. Everything was written down. We knew exactly where it was going. But, once again, nothing happened.

• Cloud computing? In 2010, when I founded Clever Cloud, we already knew it was the future. We had studied it, we saw the trajectory, we understood the market. And yet, I was told that “it will never work”, that there was “no market”. Now, the same people have suddenly realized that “cloud computing is strategic.”

It’s always the same pattern. Europe has the researchers, the engineers, the ideas. But it refuses to listen to the people who actually build.

The Numbers Speak for Themselves

Look at French Tech: only 15% of startup co-founders are engineers or scientists. Compare that to Big Tech in the US: 100% of the founders were engineers.

Look at how innovation is funded: in the US, DARPA backs disruptive projects, and the state massively invests in applied research. In Europe, we fund consultants who build nothing.

And then people tell us the problem is “atmosphere”?

Time to Ditch the Myth and Take Action

Europe’s problem isn’t a lack of ambition. It’s not a lack of drive. It’s a system that excludes engineers and researchers from key decision-making roles.

So what’s the solution?

• Put engineers and scientists at the center of economic decisions.

• Invest massively in real innovation—the kind that involves risk.

• Stop waiting for The New York Times or a BFM Business analyst to tell us something is important before we act.

We already know what will happen in the next ten years. Our researchers write it down, our engineers build it. It’s time to start listening.

Because no, we are not doomed to watch our ideas succeed elsewhere. We are simply sabotaging ourselves. It’s time to end this myth.