Bottom-up investing in Europe
The state of European venture
This is really a warning against investing in Europe by map, sector label, or borrowed Silicon Valley template. The strongest European outcomes tend to come from companies that either solve a Europe specific problem, like cross border money movement at Wise, or turn Europe’s fragmentation into infrastructure, like Adyen stitching together payments across countries, currencies, and rules. That is why bottom up work matters more than country level narratives.
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European winners often emerge from local market quirks, not copycat logic. Booking.com grew out of Europe’s dense travel economy, Wise attacked expensive international transfers, and Zalando built around Europe’s fashion and logistics reality rather than cloning a single US playbook.
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Europe’s fragmentation can be an asset when the product is built for it. Adyen’s edge came from giving merchants one system to accept payments across many countries, payment methods, currencies, and channels, which is hard to copy with a single country product.
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That changes how venture work should be done. Instead of saying France is good for AI or the UK is good for fintech, the better question is what specific workflow is broken, who feels that pain most, and whether the company can build a product that travels beyond one local market.
Going forward, the best European companies are likely to look less like regional replicas and more like focused infrastructure or category leaders built from a real local insight. The investors who win will be the ones who underwrite concrete customer pain, distribution, and cross border complexity, not broad national or sector stories.