Europe Can Build Trillion-Euro Companies. Here's the Proof | Tom Wehmeier, Atomico

Описание: Europe has more tech talent than ever, more capital, more repeat founders. And yet conviction remains uneven.
Tom Wehmeier has tracked European tech through data for 11 years as Partner at Atomico and author of the State of European Tech report.
What he sees now: the fundamentals have compounded, but the collective psychology has not kept pace.

On Follow the Gradient, Tom breaks down what the data says versus what founders feel, where the ecosystem has genuinely matured, and where the gaps in European venture capital, talent retention, and market fragmentation still hold companies back.
Essential listening for founders scaling from Europe, operators weighing US expansion, and anyone building where speed and regulation collide.

In this episode, we cover:
Why European tech sentiment is fragile even as ecosystem infrastructure compounds year over year
How talent from Apple, Meta, and Palantir is now cycling into European startups and what that unlocks
The three barriers keeping pension funds from venture allocation, including the least obvious one
Why the Series C relocation problem is driven by customer pull, cap table influence, and capital markets gravity
What DeepL, Lovable, Spotify, and Framer have in common: product velocity, talent bar, and narrative clarity
How fragmentation across European markets builds global resilience rather than slowing companies down
Where sovereignty matters most: energy, compute, defense, and economic infrastructure
The single misunderstood metric in European tech: exit rates

Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
03:07 Europe's ecosystem fundamentals have never been stronger
10:51 Where the friction shows up: go-to-market and fragmentation
13:21 What will improve soon vs what founders must design around
17:09 Europe's 4.6 million tech workers and where the talent advantage breaks down
19:52 The compounding talent flywheel across generations
24:38 Why 30% of companies relocate abroad at Series C
28:45 The pension fund bottleneck: perception, regulation, and talent
37:20 What breakout European companies do differently
43:59 Rapid fire

Our biggest takeaways, including Tom's view on what founders consistently misread about Europe's exit data:
https://www.followthegradient.io/p/to...

Where to find Tom
LinkedIn:   / tomwehmeier  
Email: [email protected]
State of European Tech: https://stateofeuropeantech.com
Atomico: https://atomico.com


🎙 Follow the Gradient: conversations about building a business from Europe while staying sane.

Hosts:
Melanie:   / melaniexgabriel  
Christian:   / christian-woese  

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