What it takes to build and scale companies in Europe
Spotlighting Europe’s Venture Leaders: Impact Leader & Achievement of The Year
Hi friends 👋
This week, we’re digging into what it actually takes to build enduring companies in Europe, where timelines are long, markets are unforgiving, and execution matters more than stories.
We sit down with founders who’ve lived through the hard parts. With Sacha Michaud, co-founder of Glovo and investor, we unpack survival and scale in last-mile delivery, one of venture’s most brutal categories, and what changes once you’ve seen a hyper-competitive model tested at full scale.
With Simon Thomas, CEO of Paragraf, we go deep into the long road from lab to fab, and what it really costs to turn breakthrough science into industrial reality in Europe.
Alongside the founder conversations, David reflects on a year of discussions with LPs on the EUVC podcast. The takeaway is clear: European venture is entering a more adult phase, where definitions matter again, liquidity is a first-order concern, and manager judgment still dominates outcomes.
Alongside the conversations, we continue spotlighting the EUVC Awards with nominations still open, highlighting Impact Leader and Achievement of The Year.
We also share updates on our community initiatives designed to raise the bar across Europe’s venture ecosystem, including our masterclass on VC fund modelling or the LP AMA with Chris Wade.
As always, thank you for reading, sharing, and pushing the conversation forward. It genuinely makes this community stronger.
Hope you enjoy,
with 💖 David & Andreas
Table of Contents
Insights of the Week
EUVC Awards Spotlights
Podcasts of The Week
Sacha Michaud, Glovo: Scaling a Hyper-Competitive Marketplace (and Knowing When to Exit)
Simon Thomas, Founder of Paragraf: Graphene Chips, AI Energy, and the Hard-Tech Road from Lab to Fab
Insights of the Week
Lessons from last year’s EUVC LP episodes about LP behaviour and fund design
European venture isn’t suffering from a lack of innovation or ambition. It’s navigating the consequences of success. As the asset class has grown, ambiguity has become harder to tolerate. LPs now want to know exactly what they’re underwriting: how structures really work, where liquidity comes from, and who they’re backing when judgment matters most. This isn’t retrenchment but maturation: a market learning to value clarity, cash, and people over narratives.
In this Insights piece, our co-founder David Cruz e Silva shares what stood out from a year of LP conversations and why it suggests European venture is growing, not pulling back.
EUVC Awards Spotlights: Impact Leader & Achievement of The Year
EUVC Awards: Impact Firm & Achievement of the Year
The EUVC Awards recognise excellence in European venture in context — where performance, responsibility, and long-term contribution matter as much as outcomes.
Two categories bring this to life especially clearly. Impact Firm of the Year honours a venture firm combining strong financial performance with meaningful, measurable impact across its investments and practices. Achievement of the Year recognises specific projects or initiatives that have positively shaped the European VC ecosystem and helped move industry practices forward.
A big thank you to everyone who has already submitted nominations. Nominations remain open across all categories. If you know a firm or initiative strengthening the ecosystem for those who follow, we encourage you to nominate them.
[Masterclass] Fund Modelling in VC: Assumptions Sheet Construction
This 2-hour advanced online workshop covers how to build and analyze an assumptions sheet for VC fund modelling and how assumptions drive fund performance. It focuses on three areas—Core Assumptions, Asset Development, and Equity Valuation Dynamics—and examines how different levers and scenarios affect outcomes.
Designed for emerging and established VCs, family offices, CVC professionals, and HNIs, the session combines expert overview, hands-on analysis, interactive model building, and Q&A. Participants will learn how to develop, analyse, and apply assumptions sheets to better understand strategic levers and improve fund decision-making.
Register using the code EUVC50OFF for €50 OFF.
Members of the EUVC community receive a 50% discount.
🎧 Podcasts of The Week
Sacha Michaud, Glovo: Scaling a Hyper-Competitive Marketplace (and Knowing When to Exit)
In a special episode, we speak with Sacha Michaud, co-founder of Glovo and founding partner at Yellow VC, and one of Europe’s most accomplished founders turned investors, about what it really takes to survive and scale in one of venture’s most brutal categories: last-mile delivery.
The conversation starts far from venture capital. Long before Glovo became one of Europe’s most iconic on-demand delivery companies, Sacha left home at 16 to become a professional racehorse jockey. Life on the track taught him discipline, repetition, and how to perform under constant pressure — traits that later became deeply embedded in Glovo’s operating culture.
From there, we get into the real operator playbook behind Glovo’s rise: moving fast, expanding internationally with limited capital, choosing battles carefully, and walking away from markets once the numbers made it clear the flywheel wouldn’t spin.
Key takeaways from the episode:
▪️ Discipline beats hype: From professional jockey to founder, Sacha’s story highlights how discipline, repetition, and focus are the real throughline behind durable companies.
▪️ Speed is survival in network-effect markets: Glovo launched its first product in ~2.5 months, prioritising time-to-market over polish and rebuilding later once real learning began.
▪️ Europe isn’t enough: International expansion wasn’t optional. Glovo built a repeatable launch playbook inspired by Uber, deploying small elite teams, installing local GMs, and moving on fast.
▪️ Fundraising is a hidden tax on founders: The “lead investor problem” can consume 60–70% of a CEO’s time. Multi-stage investors can help, but capital constraints inevitably shape strategy.
▪️ Know when to walk away: In markets like Brazil, where incumbents and capital dynamics made winning unrealistic, Glovo exited fast. Sunk costs are not strategy.
▪️ Network effects in delivery are brutal: Consumers, restaurants, and couriers reinforce each other. Being second or third isn’t a business model but a fundraising problem.
▪️ Selling isn’t failure: Sacha rarely meets founders who regret selling, but often meets founders who regret not selling, especially when incentives between founders and VCs diverge.
▪️ From operator to investor: Yellow was built to retain operator sharpness while adding discipline — co-investing with top pre-seed funds and supporting founders with real execution leverage.
This is a must-listen for founders and investors navigating competitive, capital-intensive markets.
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or queue it for later with chapter markers ready to go.
Simon Thomas, Founder of Paragraf: Graphene Chips, AI Energy, and the Hard-Tech Road from Lab to Fab
We sat down with Simon Thomas, CEO of Paragraf, to tell the story of one of Europe’s rare hard-tech successes: taking graphene from the lab to industrial-scale electronics.
Graphene has been called a “wonder material” for over 20 years.
Faster electronics.
Lower power consumption.
Longer device lifetimes.
The promise was never the issue. Execution was.
Paragraf is building the missing bridge with the world’s first graphene electronics foundry, turning a single layer of carbon atoms into manufacturable, repeatable, commercial devices.
Paragraf is building:
▪️graphene grown directly on semiconductor wafers
▪️electronics that dramatically reduce power consumption
▪️a foundry model for next-generation materials
▪️real commercial products — not just lab demos
▪️a new materials platform for the post-silicon era
The conversation goes deep on what it actually takes to build venture-backed hardware in Europe:
▪️how you fund capex-heavy deep tech
▪️how you align investors when timelines stretch a decade
▪️how you survive national security reviews and forced pauses
▪️how boards evolve from tactical operators to strategic stewards
▪️and why AI may accelerate discovery, but can’t replace manufacturing reality
Simon is blunt about the hard parts: long timelines, painful financing math, and the emotional load of keeping teams motivated when progress is slow and uncertainty is high.
Paragraf now employs ~110 people, operates two UK sites, runs a US subsidiary, and is expanding globally, proof that graphene’s story is finally moving from papers to production.
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or queue it for later with chapter markers ready to go.
This Week in European Tech with Dan, Mads & Lomax
Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen and Lomax Ward go behind the headlines shaping European tech, capital, and power and it’s a high-velocity sprint.
The trio unpack the frontier model arms race as Anthropic and OpenAI drop flagship releases just 20 minutes apart while China keeps shipping open models that are creeping uncomfortably close to frontier performance at a fraction of the cost. From there, they zoom out to the hyperscaler capex supercycle (and Wall Street’s growing nerves), before digging into the “SaaSpocalypse” narrative: why agents could force a structural repricing of seat-based software.
The episode also covers early signs of a European sovereignty push against US big tech, Spain’s evolving approach to social media regulation, and the week’s most entertaining rabbit hole: Muskanomics — the SpaceX/xAI logic, the ‘data centers in space’ narrative, and whether any of it survives contact with physics.
Key takeaways from the episode:
▪️ The model war is now a brand war: Anthropic vs OpenAI is no longer subtle. When flagship launches are 20 minutes apart, this isn’t “research cadence”, it’s market signaling.
▪️ Switching costs are becoming workflow-deep: The real stickiness isn’t the model but the tooling and habits teams build around it. Ripping out an agentic workflow isn’t like switching search engines.
▪️ China is closing the gap faster than most expect: Open models like Kimi K 2.5 and Qwen3 Max are getting close enough to matter and “swarming” may be where the innovation frontier is shifting.
▪️ Capex is the anti-bubble signal: Alphabet’s $180B plan spooked markets, but the panel reads it as the opposite of exuberance, it’s a capacity-constraint signal from the most important infrastructure builders.
▪️ SaaS won’t die — it will retrade: Seat-based licensing is vulnerable, but the more realistic outcome is utility-style compression, not extinction. The tools survive; the multiples don’t.
▪️ Europe’s sovereignty push risks fighting yesterday’s war: France moving civil servants off Zoom/Teams is symbolically powerful, but building state-backed forks isn’t a startup strategy — procurement and founder support matter more.
▪️ Social regulation is being reframed as public health: Spain’s crackdown shifts the battleground from “free speech” to “harm,” which is politically effective, but raises censorship and enforcement questions.
▪️ Muskanomics is incentives wrapped in science fiction: ‘Data centers in space’ may be physically hard and commercially distant, but the narrative only needs to be plausible enough to move capital and justify governance decisions.
▪️ Sovereignty isn’t real without minerals: Europe can’t talk cloud independence while remaining structurally dependent on China for critical inputs into hardware and infrastructure.
This episode is a must-listen for anyone tracking where AI, software economics, and European power dynamics are heading next.
🎧 Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or queue it for later with chapter markers ready to go.
Save the Date: EUVC Summit 2026
📅 Date: 22/04/2026
📍 London
Europe’s builders take the stage.
The EUVC Summit returns with founders, operators, VCs, and LPs focused on one question: how Europe wins.
From what it really takes to build category-defining companies in Europe, to how capital, conviction, and long-term alignment must evolve to compete globally — this is a working room, not a trends conference.
More details coming soon.
Europa Disco by George Henry, General Partner at LocalGlobe
In Europa Disco, George Henry, General Partner at LocalGlobe, reflects on a cultural shift underway in Europe — one where confidence is replacing defensiveness.
Through memes, music, and the momentum of Europe’s tech ecosystem, he argues that the continent is rediscovering its voice and beginning to tell its own story, rooted in heritage, engineering depth, and ambition. As innovation accelerates, belief and narrative become not just cultural signals, but strategic advantages for Europe’s future.
[Webinar] Is Luxembourg right for you? | 18 March, 12-1PM CET, Online
Brought to you in partnership with Fundcraft, join leading fund managers and operators for a candid discussion on whether Luxembourg is the right jurisdiction for your fund. Our expert panel will break down the practical realities—from structuring and regulation to operations and scaling— to help you understand when Luxembourg makes sense, and when it doesn’t. Expect real-world insights, clear trade-offs, and actionable takeaways for emerging and established fund managers alike.
A small step toward better fund models (for all of us)
We’ve been digging deep into fund modelling through masterclasses, podcasts, and countless GP/LP conversations. One thing is clear: everyone’s wrestling with similar challenges, but almost nobody talks about them openly.
So we’re pulling together a shared snapshot for the whole community. Not an ask, just something we’re building together so we can all get a clearer picture of where the real friction points are in fund modelling today.
You can read about it here, but more importantly, please add your voice 👇.
We’ll gather the themes and share them with everyone. No fluff, just continuously striving to raise the bar and giving Europe’s venture ecosystem the signal it’s been missing.
Grateful to be building this with you all.
LP AMA with Isomer Capital’s Chris Wade
Join us on February 17th, 2026 at 12pm GMT for an intimate, no-BS AMA with Chris Wade, Partner at Isomer Capital. In this 60-minute live AMA (Virtual) session (capped at 20 seats), you will engage directly with Chris in a candid discussion under Chatham House rules. There are no scripts, no sales, just real questions and real answers.
EUVC Academy members get priority access, with remaining seats available on a first-come basis.
Non-members can still register on a first-come, first-served basis while seats last.
Private Off-Site for Corporate Venture Leaders | 11–14 May | Piedmont
We are hosting a private, invitation-only off-site for corporate venture leaders and senior executives in the Piedmont region of Italy.
Designed as a deliberate alternative to traditional conferences, the off-site brings together a small group of experienced leaders for thoughtful dialogue, peer exchange, and reflection. Set in Piemonte’s wine country, the experience combines guided vineyard walks, unhurried meals at family-run wineries, and intimate fireside conversations in a private residential setting that fosters trust and candour.
This is a rare opportunity to step back, connect with peers, and reflect on leadership, strategy, and long-term perspective.
Learn more and request to join below.
Join our team in Lisbon!
We’re looking for a Content Production Assistant to help bring EUVC’s podcasts, newsletters, and content to life. You’ll work closely with our Content Lead and founders in a hands-on, early-career role that’s perfect for someone curious, organized, and excited to learn how great content gets made. If you love storytelling and want to grow inside Europe’s venture platform, we’d love to hear from you. Lisbon-based.
🤗 Join the EUVC Community
Looking for niche, high-quality experiences that prioritize depth over breadth? Consider joining our community focused on delivering content tailored to the experienced VC. Here’s what you can look forward to as a member:
Exclusive Access & Discounts: Priority access to masterclasses with leading GPs & LPs, available on a first-come, first-served basis.
On-Demand Content: A platform with sessions you can access anytime, anywhere, complete with presentations, templates, and other resources.
Interactive AMAs: Engage directly with top GPs and LPs in exclusive small group sessions — entirely free for community members.