Europe does not have an innovation problem. It has a capital recycling problem.

The continent can produce great companies, and it already does. The harder question is whether Europe can build the capital base required to help those companies compound for long enough, at enough scale, and with enough conviction to become global category leaders.

That is the argument Jaap Vriesendorp, Managing Partner at Marktlink Capital, made in a recent conversation with David Cruz e Silva. Europe’s weakness, he argues, is often misdiagnosed.

The issue is not a shortage of founders, talent, technology, or ambition. It is that European capital too often fails to flow back into European innovation at the scale required.

Jaap’s point is simple, but uncomfortable: many US technology companies did not pull ahead of their European peers only because they were structurally better companies. They also benefited from a deeper, more aggressive, and more available capital market. As he put it, “there was just more money.”

That matters because capital is not a neutral input in technology. It shapes hiring, product velocity, market expansion, pricing power, acquisition strategy, and the ability to survive long enough to achieve category leadership. When capital is abundant on one side of the Atlantic and fragmented on the other, the outcome should surprise no one.

Europe creates wealth, but too much of that wealth is recycled elsewhere. Entrepreneurs sell companies, create liquidity, and then often end up invested in global public markets, where the easiest exposure to technology is the Magnificent Seven.

Jaap argues that Marktlink wants to enable Dutch entrepreneurs, Belgian entrepreneurs, and, over time, entrepreneurs across Europe to invest in other European entrepreneurs, rather than be “skewed into the public market where you end up investing in a Magnificent Seven.”

That is the real capital recycling problem: Europe is not failing to invent. It is failing to turn enough of its own success into long-term ecosystem capital.

This is why scale sits at the centre of Jaap’s thinking.

In private markets, scale is not just about managing more assets or building a larger platform. Used well, it changes what investors can access, how flexibly they can invest, and how reliably they can support managers across cycles.

That logic was behind the merger that created Marktlink Capital. Jaap describes the belief clearly: together, the teams could create something where “one plus one was more than two.” The point was not institutional vanity, but strategic necessity.

If Europe wants stronger private-market capital formation, it needs platforms that can aggregate entrepreneurial wealth, professionalise access, and allocate consistently into the managers backing Europe’s future winners. Small pools of capital can be useful, but scaled, repeatable and long-term pools of capital can change ecosystems.

One of the sharper lessons in the conversation is that the biggest LP mistakes are often not technical. They are structural.

When Marktlink studied other fund-of-funds managers, one recurring regret stood out: “We sometimes ran out of money to re-up in a really good fund and we’ve never gotten back to them.”

That line captures something essential about venture: access is not earned once. It is renewed fund after fund, cycle after cycle, through trust, consistency, and the ability to show up when it matters.

This is why Marktlink raises annual venture funds and why Jaap puts so much emphasis on vintage diversification, primaries, secondaries, and equal-sized positions. The model is designed not only to manage risk for investors, but to ensure the platform can keep backing the managers it believes in over time.

In venture, the right to re-up may be more valuable than the first cheque.

The most important implication of Jaap’s argument is cultural as much as financial.

Europe has already proven it can produce great technology companies. The more important question is whether European entrepreneurs, families, institutions and platforms will recycle enough capital back into the ecosystem to help those companies scale into global category leaders.

That requires more European wealth flowing into venture, more LPs investing across cycles and more support for the managers backing outlier founders early.

As Jaap argues, the next chapter of European tech will be shaped not only by the founders building great companies, but by the entrepreneurs, investors, and institutions willing to turn success into new sources of growth.