Max Larsson on the European Ecosystem and What He's Seeing on the Ground

Max Larsson is a Partner at Wave Ventures and a founding team member at Founders House in Stockholm.

Wave backs European founders at the earliest stages. Founders House is a Stockholm-based residency and community for founders building pre-company or right at day zero.

Max has just spent weeks on a tour across European cities, meeting founders, hubs and investors in person and getting a real read on where each ecosystem sits right now.

We sat down to talk about what he saw on the ground and what Europe needs to win globally.

Q&A

1. You just toured Copenhagen, Berlin, Zürich, Munich, Paris and London. What are the key learnings?

All ecosystems are very different from one another. There are key strengths and weaknesses in each and all share similar problems to the ones we see in Stockholm. If I were to summarize our findings, the key insights would be that:

1. Europe does NOT have a talent problem

2. No city has a capital access problem

3. Multiple cities have a startup mindset problem

   
   

2. Can you go deeper into the startup mindset problem?

Stockholm’s biggest advantage is that founders are forced to build and compete globally from day one. Sweden is a small country without a large home market, so the ecosystem filters out local-first thinking early. A pitch that starts with “we will begin by selling to the Swedish market” is usually filtered out already at the angel stage. In many larger European markets, that filtering happens much later, often around seed. Europe has too many founders who spend the first phase of company-building optimizing for their domestic market. The instinct is understandable: great founders should talk to customers early, understand a real problem, and start building quickly. But if the first six months of product development are shaped only by local customers, the result is usually a product designed for the local market, not a global one.

I’ve spent 3 years studying statistics. In statistics, in order to get a statistically significant representation (P < 0.05) of the (global) population, you must have a big and heterogeneous sample size. You won’t get there by only targeting customers within 1km radius from your office. Ecosystems like Munich, Paris, Berlin and to some extent Zürich have a problem with not building globally from day one. And in their defense, their local SME markets are big enough to build a €50m ARR startup only on that, but it won’t be a global native startup (like Meta, Nvidia, Airbnb, etc.). The point is not that founders should spend months researching the global market before building. Speed still matters. Great founders should start solving a real customer problem as fast as possible.

3. Where should founders build in Europe to maximise their chances of success?

It depends, but the base case would be London or Stockholm. London is by far the most well rounded and diverse ecosystem in Europe. In London, there is plenty of venture capital and great talent. In 2025, London produced 9 unicorns vs. Stockholm’s 4 unicorns (meaning Stockholm produced 4.4x more unicorns per capita than London).

However, Munich, Zurich and Paris far exceeded Stockholm, London and Berlin when it comes to engineering and technical talent density. But the question is not only where the best engineers are. It is where the best engineers are most likely to build for the world from day one.

4. So the pattern here is?

That the ecosystems with the best technical talent are thinking too locally, and as a result aren’t building global, generational companies. One of the most important challenges the European tech scene faces is that we must utilize the great talent we have to build global companies that compete and outperform U.S. and Chinese startups.

It is clear to me. Europe is not losing the capital or talent game. It is losing the startup mindset game. And thank god, this problem is easier to solve than not having enough talent or capital.

And I totally agree with Alexander Karp. Germany has historically been the best technology country in the world. France and Germany has probably the highest density of problem solvers and talent globally, so why the f**k aren’t they winning globally?