The Real Reason Europe Missed the Tech Boom

Europe didn’t lose the tech race because of talent, it lost it because it failed to scale.\nIn this talk, Andreas Klinger, Founder and Investor at Prototype, breaks down why Europe missed the last major tech boom in cloud, AI, and internet-scale companies, and why fragmentation is the real bottleneck.\nWhile the US and China operate at continental scale, Europe remains split into isolated markets with fragmented capital, regulation, and stock exchanges. The result? Founders struggle to raise pan-European rounds, scale globally, and build truly massive companies.\nAndreas explains:\nWhy scale beats talent in power-law tech markets\nHow Europe’s fragmented startup system limits outcomes\nWhy exporting capital to US markets weakens Europe long-term\nWhere Europe still has a real edge: hardware, robotics, and precision engineering\nWhat needs to change to build the next generation of European tech giants\nThis isn’t a pessimistic take, it’s a structural one. Europe has the ingredients. The question is whether it can fix the system fast enough to compete in a world dominated by scale.\nEvent: Alpha Summit '25\nSpeaker: Andreas Klinger, Founder and Investor at Prototype \nConnect with the speaker: \nAndreas Klinger- https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreasklinger/\nSubscribe for more on Tech, Scale, and European Innovation