When I talk to founders, and European founders in particular, I keep running into the same contrast between the mindset in Silicon Valley and the mindset in Europe. I think it comes down to one thing.
In Silicon Valley, we are aiming to build the best product, and we let the best product win. There's a foundational belief that if you build something your users want, or here in 2026, something the agents want, you're going to win. Everyone is customer-obsessed and hyper-focused on building the best product in the world.
When I talk to European founders, I hear a different narrative. I hear sovereignty. I hear compliance. I hear about local market specifics, and whether one more certification is going to unlock this or that slice of the market.
I think this is fundamentally the problem with European tech. It's a mindset problem.
No one gives a shit that you're building a crappy German copy of Gmail hosted in a bunker in Hamburg and calling it your sovereign AI play. What the world cares about is whether you're building the best email client in the world.
Sovereignty, privacy, compliance. These are important aspects of how you build a company in a globalized world — or what is increasingly a Balkanized one. But they have to be second-order priorities. Not the main one.
The way you win is that you build the best product in the world. You lead with that, and then you happen to have a European hosting option. You happen to be compliant with the regulation in Indonesia. You happen to tick all the boxes. All of it stems from the core goal of building the best product.
Yet I keep seeing founders trying to carve out a corner of the market for themselves. "We are the only European, SOC-compliant version of this product, and therefore we have a right to exist." I don't think that's how you win. Regulation is real in this day and age, and it shapes markets, but it does not set you up to win.
So please. If you're building a company in 2026, your vision and your goal has to build the best possible product and win on the merit of it. Then you find ways to bring that product to local markets. That means hosting, data, privacy, and compliance, and all of it matters. But it cannot be what you lead with.
Just build the damn best product.
/k