Originally published here.

Philippe de la Chevasnerie is Founder & CEO of Papernest, a European scaleup which simplifies utilities and subscription management for households and small businesses. Founded in 2015, Papernest has grown rapidly to over 900 employees. The platform helps more than 1.5 million users gather, subscribe, and cancel services across France, Spain, and Italy which, understandably, means that Philippe supports a more unified Europe.

It starts with education. We have a good education system in France. We have excellent engineers and are already leading in areas like AI. But I see very few comrades from engineering school who have created their own companies. Engineering schools are trying to create engineers rather than leaders. They’re not teaching people how to launch and lead successful companies. So we need to adapt the curriculum of these universities.

We need more scientific people in leadership roles and founding companies. And we need to teach more soft skills around management, hiring, negotiation, and running your business. Not just the engineering hard skills that many of them already have.

And I do think we would benefit from a shift in mindset. We can’t do everything: increase wealth, work less, defend ourselves, manage the climate transition, and more. If we want to take the top position, we will have to make hard choices. We need to decide on our priorities and encourage people to push themselves towards them.

It would be great if Europe could act more as one entity and not 27 different states. We are far too small to compete with China and the US, so we need to encourage unity.

A good initiative right now is a single corporate status to let companies operate in all EU countries. That would be a great thing and would solve a lot of issues. We also need better equivalencies between the licenses you get in each country. Once you get them, licenses should be valid in all EU countries.

Right now we need 27 different licenses just to operate across Europe, which is a huge hurdle. On top of adapting to different languages, cultures, and client bases, you also have to deal with local regulations.

We should regulate smaller and better. GDPR is a classic example: Europeans lose something like 500 million hours per year just clicking on useless cookie banners. Europe could have focused this regulation on the six browser companies most people use. Millions of businesses had to spend hours with GDPR lawyers to set up cookie policies. It doesn’t seem to have had any impact on spam or privacy, and it’s wasting a huge amount of time and energy for companies.

Artificial intelligence is similar. We should regulate only when it’s necessary and not before. We need politicians who will make the tough choices and regulate less and better.

We’re trying to build a complex system to avoid just executing the obvious initiatives (instead of mainly taxing oil, gas and coal, governments create very complex layers of incentives to reduce emissions instead of relying on price signals). Regulations become very complex, and ultimately useless.

Since 2020, from my point of view, volatility has exploded. You had Covid, political instability, wars, economic crises, and energy crises. And it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. To be prepared, you need to diversify, especially internationally. The more geographies you’re in, the more you can cope with issues in any one of them. Having a portfolio attitude to risk is good. You need to be one step ahead and have mitigation plans in mind.

You also have to be obsessive about cash efficiency. Be lean, and don’t just throw money at problems.

Be very willing to adapt. It’s about risk taking and the willingness to try new things. We had to pivot almost right away when we launched.

Finally, create a great team. A small team of highly engaged, hard-working people will really drive efficiency. We have to be proud of working hard and giving a lot for the business to succeed.