The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
First Time Founders with Ed Elson – How This German Founder Built The Nation’s Most Valuable Startup
Sun, 05 Jan 2025
Ed speaks with Alex Rinke, co-founder and co-CEO of Celonis, a process mining and intelligence company. They discuss how his management style evolved as the company scaled, the challenges facing Europe’s startup scene, and his advice for founders navigating the fundraising process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Scott, why are there so few unicorns in Europe? Oh, wow. We're going to need a bigger boat.
I get asked that a lot here. One, it starts with immigrants. And that is the example I use when I'm asked that in London is that my father in Glasgow and my mother in London in their, you know, like when they were 19 and 23 left and took a chance to come to America.
So risk-taking, a crazy idea that willing to kind of give up a good career or great prospects and take a chance on a crazy idea that might become crazy genius, we just have more of that secret sauce than anyone in the world. We have the best universities in the world.
I've said often that you can't find a $50 billion-plus company in tech that isn't a bike ride from a world-class engineering university, and we have most of them. You have more kind of hardball, full-body contact competition where the government— opts for a lack of regulation and capitalism over regulation, we have a much greater risk appetite.
There's $5 million in venture capital for every one startup in the United States. And there's 1 million for every startup in Europe. And there's five times as many entrepreneurs per capita in the United States. So we're more risk aggressive. We have stronger IP. We have more capital.
And it just kind of all adds up to what is an ecosystem where there's been more wealth created in the last 24 months in a seven-mile radius of SFO International because of AI than in the last 10 years in Europe. These are big, big issues baked into the DNA of America. And I don't, quite frankly, I don't see anything really changing in the short or the medium term.
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