I'm excited! The European startup ecosystem is on a tear. Let me explain.
I started working for a startup 12 years ago. That was Uber expanding globally. Back in the day in Europe, working in startups was not the path most families expected for their kids. Raising capital was tough, knowledge of equity packages was nonexistent, and startups signing meaningful contracts with enterprises was rare. Enterprises didn't see startups as a reliable partner.
Fast-forward to today:
• European startups are competing at the same level as US ones. The level of ambition is off-the-charts.
• You can build a decacorn / unicorn in Europe without relocating to the Bay Area. Look at ElevenLabs, Revolut, Fuse, Mistral, Synthesia, Legora, and many many more.
• Startup building is a way of life.
• Wealth is being created & shared. We have plenty of cases where founders & employees have made money from building successful companies. Secondaries are also a normal thing now.
• Enterprises have adopted startup tech like never before. This is what's helping them transform their businesses and compete globally.
• We have EU Inc in the works. @ProjectEurope_ is an awesome initiative backing Europe-built businesses. Also, the latest "Built in Europe" campaign led by @balderton is 🔥
• Money is a commodity. More VCs means more opps to build crazy ideas.
We still have a long way to go, primarily reforming (a) Equity packages & taxes, (b) political alignment, (c) getting more talent, (d) bridging European cultural differences & market protections, (e) getting more people to speak English fluently, (f) removing exit taxes in some markets (founders & operators need movility to win), (g) incentivising wealth creation.
One step at a time but the future is bright
If big companies can't make a net return on their LLM token costs, that doesn't mean it's impossible to. In fact this is exactly what you'd expect to happen with a new technology. Incumbents can't use it well, and are replaced by upstarts who can.
All through YC's history, investors (for obvious reasons) have tried to tell founders that YC wasn't worth it. In 2010 they just said we sucked. Now, since it's obvious we didn't, they've had to change the claim: now it's YC *used* to be great, but has declined from what it was.
Anton Osika (@antonosika) is the co-founder and CEO of @lovable, where anyone can build software through conversation.
His working thesis: the most underrated moat in AI is trust, and earning it takes craft, care, and obsession.
I HOPE OPENAI CLONES https://t.co/4Ijk78Z2bL
I HOPE SUNDAR SHUTS OFF THEIR PUBLIC API
I HOPE DARIO ONLY GIVES MYTHOS TO OUR COMPETITORS
WHEN THE ENDING IS KNOWN AND THE DISTANCE IS UNKNOWN, THAT'S WHEN YOU KNOW WHO YOU REALLY ARE. STAY HARD
Customer requests are useful for gathering feedback from customers, but it’s also important to add ideas and refine those thoughts instead of treating everything as an issue.
It’s similar to what you were doing in the video: you were trying a bunch of designs that work for the front end, but many of them may not work well for the back end or other use cases of iterations I do not know if does it make sense?
Who invented token pricing?
It made sense for simple LLM calls, but it’s a broken abstraction for agents.
A token is not cost.
Cost is GPU time, memory bandwidth, batching, latency, context, external API calls, concurrency, output length, energy, and utilization.
As models go up/down in price, tokens don’t map cleanly to the real supply chain of agents.
The future pricing unit shouldn’t be tokens.