Torsten Reil
speaker
213 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Torsten Reil’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And for that, you need to have founders that have that ambition, first-time founders, or you need founders that are second-time or third-time founders who've already learned a lot. And go back and do it one more time, because quite often you're actually much faster the second time around for reasonably obvious reasons.
That doesn't happen as often in Europe as it does in the States, from what I can tell. And I always wonder why that is. And sometimes maybe it's because Europe is a really nice place to retire in. Lots of things that you can do with a house in Italy or whatever and not work. But that is not good. We need all of those people back to start a second or third company. How do we change that?
The founder community needs to talk about it more. It's a mindset thing. I personally think we all have a contribution to make and a contribution to make as a society, as founders, I think we have a responsibility to actually contribute. Some of that contribution is to help Europe become sovereign, and particularly around key technologies.
So I think we are falling behind, but that trend isn't new. That already started a few years ago. And part of the reason we wanted to build Helsing was to show that you can build a company in Europe fast to scale in deep tech and just provide a shortcut. Actually, this is doable. And we wanted to show that it's doable, including the fundraising.
So I think Europe is falling behind, but it doesn't have to be that way. So the things that we have in Europe, and particular talent, we have incredibly good talent, including on the engineering side. We hire almost exclusively from Europe at the moment and the talent is amazing. The talent pool is amazing. People's attitudes are amazing. There's none of this nine to five mentality.
People really want to make a difference and they work hard and they work intensely wherever that's required. So I think that's a myth.
It plays an important role, I think, later on. The ability for European investors to provide growth capital, that's lower than it is in the US. But I don't think that's a problem. In fact, in many ways, I think that's probably a feature, not a bug, because I think exposure to US culture, but also investors, is extremely useful. I was lucky to have it.
Natural Motion Benchmark is one of our investors, with Mitch Lasky as our partner. Part of the reason why we eventually took off was also Mitch and the way he thought about how big this company could be, how I should think about portfolio, not think too small. That was extremely helpful. And so I think that injection of US mentality to European companies at the right point is extremely helpful.
And the cap table, true for Helsing as well, it's still Europe dominated. We did our seed round entirely from European investors. Then Daniel and Prima Materia came in. Again, European. So later on, we took American money, but the company is still a European company.
I think it's pretty clear that the current narrative is a caricature of Europe. There are some elements of truth in it, but they've been extremely exaggerated, particularly over the last six to 12 months, I think, if you go on X. But when you look at where Europe is today, and I try and be positive.
is a trend right now. Even three and a half years ago when we started the company, that trend was already there. The question with all of these situations is, what can we do to change it? What are you doing to change it? We felt we had agency by looking at, for example, the problem of European sovereignty and specifically around defense.
And we felt, as founders, you have the privilege of having a massive lever, which is, if you can build a successful company in this space, you can actually make a difference. I'm pretty sick of people just commenting. I mean, you know, there's a whole LinkedIn economy built around just complaining, same is true on X, and just commenting. And those comments, they're worth nothing.
None of the commentary is worth anything. The only thing that matters is if people actually, you know, do something. That is, start a company, build a company, go into politics, start a new party, whatever it is. But the current attitude of just complaining drives me crazy. All right, okay. Point taken.
Yeah, it's interesting. I also think that people over-index on the environment and about having the right regulatory settings and tax and everything else around it. I actually think none of the stuff really matters that much. I think what really matters is founder quality and founder ambition. For a country to be successful, they should attract the most aggressive founders.
And everything else is a lot less important.
Certainly companies in energy. Energy sovereignty is a huge issue. Some of that may be in conventional technologies. Some of it may be in future technologies like fusion. We need sovereignty ideally around semiconductors. It's going to be very hard to achieve unless there are big changes in technology and various other areas. Obviously, defense is another one and a few others.
I'm not sure whether we'll be able to create those companies kind of in the next two or three years to a point where they provide sufficient sovereignty, but I'm very sure we can do it over the next five to ten years.
It is very hard to predict. We just don't know how things are going to pan out over the next few months and a couple of years. But I think we do have to take the threat to the NATO Eastern flag seriously. I think we have to take it much more seriously than we are doing it right now in the UK and in Germany and other countries.
I think Scandinavian countries take it a lot more seriously as do the Baltics. They take it extremely seriously and I think we should listen to them. I think the threat is extremely plausible in the next few years.
What happens in China and Taiwan? Again, I think it's plausible that there will be a conflict. I don't think it's 10 years away if it happens. It's probably quite a lot sooner than that. But it depends on how the next, again, few months and years are going to pan out. Again, I think there is a danger, and it's obviously a clearly stated goal of China to reunite, as they put it.
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