Red Carpets
(I had moved on. Beef Bourguignon Turned Tex-Mex was published, the conversations with peers were starting to roll, and I was already thinking about other things. Then a few days ago I read an interview the FT published with Christophe Fouquet, CEO of ASML – “ASML chief warns EU against directing chip supplies” – and I couldn't avoid seeing how much he is touching on the central points of my previous Beef Bourguignon Turned Tex-Mex post, mindful that I had used ASML as an example of several factors on that post. I guess we need to keep the momentum around Europe/Growth/New Capital Models going.)
Christophe Fouquet, ASML’s CEO, gave an interview this week in the FT entitled “ASML chief warns EU against directing chip supplies”. Three things stood out from the interview. First, on the EU's instinct to intervene directly in semiconductor supply chains: "If you don't have your own supply chain, then how do you intervene?" In response to the "buy European first" rhetoric currently fashionable in Paris and elsewhere: "I think it's great, but you have got to have something to buy from." The framing he reached for is the one that should already be the default in Brussels – build the capacity first, then talk about how to direct it. The other two points get to where they belong in what follows.
A Few Brave Men and Women
It is worth pausing on something that does not get named often enough, because we have been so busy diagnosing what is wrong that we have missed the early shape of something starting to go right.
There is a small but real pattern emerging across European industry. Mate Rimac kept his engineering team in Sveta Nedelja when conventional wisdom said move somewhere else in the world with more access to capital and human resources, and built a Tier-1 automotive supplier from a garage in fifteen years. Christophe Fouquet has just publicly committed ASML's balance sheet to act as patient strategic capital for the next generation of European companies, citing existing investments in Mistral and Carl Zeiss: "As the company becomes more wealthy, we of course have more means to do that. I can promise you that we will be looking at more opportunities to do that because it's a good thing. First for the company, for people and ultimately for Europe." The Velux Foundation launched Kompas VC as an explicitly Velux-anchored growth vehicle. The Riedel family has spent three generations building the world's most successful wine-category development engine out of the Tyrol. Nik Storonsky and the Revolut team built what is now the largest European fintech in a generation on top of the regulatory and banking heritage that already existed across the continent — not as a Silicon Valley import, but as a modern continuation of an industry Europe has historically led.
None of these people are coordinating. None of them are working from a Brussels white paper. Each of them is solving their own business problem in their own way, and each of them — almost incidentally — is acting out a version of the European industrial-capital model the rest of the continent has been arguing about in the abstract.
These are, in the slightly old-fashioned phrase, a few brave men and women doing things the prevailing consensus said were impossible or sub-optimal: building a Tier-1 supplier from a Croatian garage, anchoring a global semiconductor company in a Dutch town of 46,000 and now using its balance sheet to back European peers, putting the long-term protection of a family business above the gains available from a quick sale to a global buyer, building a continent-scale fintech without leaving the continent to do it. They are not heroes; most of them would resist the label. They are operators making decisions inside their own businesses that happen to add up, when you stand back, to the early outline of a continental capital and industrial model.
Fouquet put it more directly: Europe needs "as many champions as possible." This is, if you squint, the Tex-Mex Part I argument almost word for word. The reason Porsche-Rimac was the wrong story to obsess over was not that Porsche didn't matter; it was that Rimac mattered more, and we had only one of them. We should be asking why we don't have twenty Rimacs, not whether the Porsche brand survives the decade. The brave men and women named above are evidence that the recipe works. The job now is to recognise the pattern, accelerate it, and build the connective tissue around it before it is once again written off as a series of charming exceptions.
Red Tape vs. Red Carpets
The standard European industrial-policy conversation is almost entirely about red tape. Remove this regulation. Streamline that permit. Lighten the AI Act. These are reasonable conversations to have, but they are also defensive ones. Removing tape is necessary but not sufficient. It stops you tripping. It does not help you run.
The more useful framing is the difference between red tape and red carpets. Red tape is the floor: don't actively obstruct the companies you want to build. Red carpets are the ceiling: actively roll out the operating runway in front of them. Europe is good at the floor when it chooses to be. We are not yet practised at the ceiling. Airbus is the clearest proof that, when Europe does roll out the carpet, it does it world-class. The opportunity is to do that deliberately, in the categories where the next generation of brave men and women are already building.
To make the point properly, we need a few concrete carpets European public institutions could roll out in the next two to three years (merely illustrative):
Cities granting structured operating hours to Verne and others like it. Europe already runs some of the most sophisticated urban mobility networks in the world: Munich, Milan, Lyon, Lisbon, Vienna, Hamburg are global benchmarks for safe, regulated transport. The opportunity is to extend that leadership by becoming the first major regulator to grant structured AV operating hours to European platforms. The moat in autonomous mobility is fleet-hours on real streets. European cities are the only entities on the planet that can grant those hours to a European company. The trade: structured, regulated pilot access in exchange for safety guarantees, data-sharing obligations and local jobs.
AI-accelerated permitting at national level. European permitting exists for good reasons: environmental protection, labour standards, public input – that other regions are now scrambling to retrofit. Those reasons should not be diluted. What can be compressed is the operational throughput of the process. Modern tooling (AI-assisted environmental assessment, parallel-track permitting, fast-track designation for strategic-category projects) could compress Fouquet's four-year factory timeline to twelve or eighteen months without compromising standards. The trade: governments designate a small number of strategic categories and apply the accelerated track only to those, against stricter post-build audit obligations.
Electrification infrastructure as adoption pull, not just supply push. Europe already leads the world in per-capita charging density across the Nordics, the Netherlands and parts of Germany. The opportunity is to turn that infrastructure into structured demand pull for European EV, battery and component suppliers – local procurement preferences for European-built electrified vehicles in municipal and corporate fleets, dedicated lanes and parking and tax treatments that make European electrified tech the easiest commercial choice. The trade: cities and regions get a faster transition; European suppliers get a domestic demand floor on which to build international scale.
Brand stewardship for assets worth defending. The cautionary tale here is MG. Founded in Oxford in 1924, the brand was left to die through the 1990s and early 2000s with no European industrial or capital intervention. It was acquired out of administration by Nanjing Automobile in 2005, folded into SAIC in 2007, and is today one of the fastest-growing automotive brands in Europe – selling nearly a quarter of a million vehicles a year, paying the EU's highest tariff on Chinese-made EVs at 35.3%, and now opening its first European manufacturing plant in Galicia to operate inside the tariff wall. The British brand, now Chinese-owned, is being assembled on European soil to compete against European OEMs. The factories are coming back, however the brand now in foreign hands benefiting from its value. Leica is the live version of the same decision being made right now. The Wetzlar camera maker founded in 1869, reportedly fielding interest from buyers including HSG (formerly Sequoia Capital China) and Sweden's Altor. A European outcome is possible, but only if European patient-capital structures are in the room at deal speed. Right now, in most categories, they are not. That is a fixable problem with the right instruments.
Public visibility for European champions. Most Europeans cannot name three European industrial champions outside their own country. That is a strategic problem in a continent whose industrial future will depend on the public's willingness to vote for, fund, work for, and buy from those champions. Public-service broadcasters, education curricula and public communication budgets could, if there were the will, do for European industrial companies what these institutions already do for European culture. The trade: governments invest in the visibility of the companies they say they want to back; in exchange, those companies engage seriously with the public-interest obligations that come with strategic-category status.
More Airbus-shape structures. The example I keep coming back to is hyperloop, because almost nobody is talking about it as the Airbus-shape opportunity it is. The European Hyperloop Center, a 420-metre test facility in Veendam, opened in 2024 and is already setting European speed records. Around it sits the Hyperloop Development Program, with 25+ partners spanning Hardt (NL), Zeleros (ES), Nevomo (PL), EuroTube (CH) and the Institute of Hyperloop Technology (DE), plus material suppliers Tata Steel and POSCO, backed by the European Commission and the Dutch government. The cross-country structure is already there. The test infrastructure is already there. The technical roadmap to 700 km/h is already there. The vision is also there: Amsterdam to Barcelona in a few hours, the European mainland networked at speeds that make domestic flights look slow. What is missing is the operational red carpet: route designations, accelerated certification, political cover for the categories of risk only governments can underwrite, and public communication that gives European citizens permission to dream out loud about sub-two-hour journeys between major European cities. This is, structurally, the Airbus moment for hyperloop. We are not being asked to imagine an Airbus from a blank sheet. We are being asked to recognise one in front of us.
The bottleneck is not capability. The bottleneck is conviction, coordination and speed. Or dare I say in a more qualitative way, passion. Europeans need to start passionately and collectively dreaming and allow ourselves to go big.
Patient, Not Slow
Most of the press coverage of Fouquet's interview focused on the regulation complaints: AI rules, lengthy permitting, capital access. Familiar grievances, predictable headlines. But that framing buries the more important point. Fouquet is making two arguments at the same time, and they sit together for a reason. The first is the capital argument. The second is the speed argument: "it still takes about four years to build a factory in Europe because of planning constraints and lengthy permitting processes." Read them side by side and the implicit claim is clear. Patient capital is the right financial posture. It is not, under any circumstances, an excuse for slow execution.
This is also where the labels we have inherited stop being helpful. In Venture(s), the first thing I wrote on this blog over a year ago, I argued that we needed to free ourselves from Series A-Z industry jargon and assess businesses for what they actually are – a vision, a product, a purpose – rather than where they sit in someone else's funding taxonomy. That argument was a year ago, and it feels more urgent now. The brave men and women acting out a new European capital model are doing so because the existing labels don't describe what they are building or what they need. The capital industry's job is to catch up to what the operators are already showing us, not to keep insisting that everything fit into the funding round naming conventions of a different continent.
Beef Bourguignon Turned Tex-Mex argued at length that Europe's structural capital strengths (foundations, family ownership, sovereign anchoring, multi-decade horizons) are real, distinctive and worth defending. But this kind of capital only delivers if it can operate in real time. The cultural commitment to long horizons cannot become an alibi for institutional sluggishness. Verne does not have unlimited time before the autonomous-mobility category matures elsewhere. Hyperloop does not have unlimited time before the Chinese state pushes its own vacuum-transport programme to commercial scale. Leica does not have unlimited time before the next ownership decision is taken. Patient capital wins when it is patient and fast. It loses when it confuses patience with delay.
A Question, Not An Answer
The responsibility for keeping this conversation alive, for moving it from diagnosis to action, sits with all of us. The good news is that it is already being carried, visibly, by a small number of brave men and women whose decisions are pointing the way. The harder news is that the capital architecture around them has not yet caught up.
Some of the family money is already adapting. In certain cases, they have been doing patient-capital work for generations, and the next wave (e.g. Kompas VC and others) is professionalising it. The corporate money is starting to adapt. Fouquet at ASML, with the explicit Mistral and Zeiss positions, is opening a door that most other European industrial CEOs have not yet walked through, but the direction of travel is clear. The brave men and women on the operating side are demonstrating, decision by decision, that a European capital model is real and works.
The question that remains is what the rest of the capital industry (the growth equity, private equity and venture capital community I work in) does next. We have spent two decades importing a model that was never quite designed for the continent we actually have. The operators are showing that a different model is possible. The family money is recognising it. The corporate money is recognising it. The capital industry and its architecture, broadly, has not yet, and the question of who in our industry will, and how, is the most interesting one left on the table.