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🇪🇺 eu/acc AMA: How can we save Europe?

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👋 Hi Product Hunters!


I'm here today not to launch a product, but in a way for something much more interesting: to talk about 😊


For the last decade, and living in different places all around the world. While the places where I lived abroad, like Asia and America, were getting more ambitious and modern every time I visited them, Europe, and especially Western Europe, started to feel stagnant to me.


Of course, that was one of the reasons why I left Europe in the first place. When I said I wanted to be an entrepreneur after graduating university, I was laughed at even by my university classmates who studied business! It was "safer" to get a job for a big corporation and get experience first. Then you could start a business later.


And when I finally had my own internet business that was making thousands per month, I remember telling people in Amsterdam, and they'd ask me "when are you going to get a real job?".


This was a stark difference from when I was abroad and told people what I did. People were excited, supportive and wanted to learn to do the same thing.


Every year that I came back to Europe the culture felt more stagnant, more pessimistic, and more normie.


Of course there was great things about Europe for me pulling me back: my parents and brothers live here, and when I ended up in Portugal during COVID, I loved the nature, the clean air and the laid-back coastal surf village life and ended up moving here.


And that brought me to an interesting point: seeing where the rest of the world was going, as a European, while seeing Europe slowly getting worse. It became harder and harder to build a startup here. And we started seeing this in losing any lead we had in technology in the last decade. The big tech and AI companies are now all in the US and China, there's very few left in Europe:





The insane regulation that the EU brought upon everyone I think directly caused this:

  • VATMOSS

  • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

  • Digital Services Act (DSA)

  • Digital Markets Act (DMA)

  • ePrivacy Regulation

  • The AI Act

  • ...and many more


Which all had good intentions, but made it very difficult to comply as a small or medium business owner. Sure if you're a billion dollar corporation, you can hire bookkeepers and lawyers to comply. But if you're a one-man or small startup?


Last year around April, the data finally started showing what I felt for over decade, Europe was in fact struggling and for the reasons that I felt in my gut:





I felt we had to at least try do something to change the mindset in Europe. , European Accelerationsim as an offshoot of e/acc, , a similar movement by in the United States. Out with the pessimism about the future, and in with optimism about technology and the future. And in particular in eu/acc's case: draw attention to the problems of Europe and propose practical ways to fix them.





Thousands of people have now crowdsourced tens of thousands of ideas of which the most important ones have now become part of the official eu/acc manifesto on


And it hasn't just stopped there: eu/acc's ideas are part of which was presented to the European Commission in September 2024 and implemented in January 2025 by Ursula von der Leyen as the .


Of course that's just reports. We need actual action and laws changed to make Europe a great place for people and business again. And to guarantee its economic future.


One of the most important components is not regulation, but deregulation: remove regulation that makes it impossible for tech entrepreneurs, startups and companies in Europe to do business and compete with the rest of the world.


Because Europeans are highly skilled, highly educated, they have great ideas, and many are actually ambitious. They're just stifled by regulation and as a consequence a culture that has slowly become so risk-averse that it's been starting to self-sabotage its future.


Europe can be great, so let's make it that again! 😊



Today I'd love to answer your questions, and I'd even more love to hear YOUR ideas on how to save Europe!


-A proud 🇪🇺 European


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I think that the whole business sphere online is a bit too American-centered. Does Europe need reforms? Of course, it is a natural cause of things. Does it need saving? It depends on how we define from what.


We could take a bit different look at the US's state of things with:

  • raging monopolies,

  • scale of insider trading, and lobbying in a form that should be defined as corruption, which is easier due to raging monopolies,

  • social inequalities at a level similar to what historically cause violent revolutions in several countries,

  • overinflated values of businesses, based on market speculations, vibes, and not real value they provide, looking in many cases like a venture capital pyramid scheme,

  • generating value for shareholders has a legal priority, disregarding other stakeholders, which leads to the mentioned overvaluation and lack of protection.

It is also interesting, that many companies are very vocal against the public sector and regulations, at the same time profiting tremendously from government contracts and subsidies.


Of course those problems spread globally, as the US economic model is presented as a global standard. Because of that, the economy is in such state, that for many people entrepreneurship is becoming the only way to have a chance for a decent living. Do we really need to replicate that, or rather should find a new model?


As for general deregulation, we should be very careful, as it can be used by mentioned monopolies to block new competitors, by getting even more leverage. We have to create conditions for new businesses to thrive, which means curbing monopolies. We could also implement programs that will help new businesses with compliance, and make it easier for them.


We also should be careful using only GDP as an indicator of the health of the economy as it can grow from the wrong reasons, and the market value of companies is rather just a vanity metric.

Q1. Generally messaging is a lot about deregulation. Is there anything that you think actually needs increased regulation in order to stimulate growth?


Q2. I understand the desire to reform the EU. If the EU moves too slowly or proves to be too resistent to change, would you wish for member countries (especially Portugal where you now have a home, or the Netherlands perhaps) to consider leaving the EU altogether?

Follow your work on X, your websites are good inspiration for people like me trying to create their own products without going through the VC path. I have a question (not EU related, sorry) and a separate suggestion regarding EU.

Question: As I am newbie indie dev - can you explain the best way to pick an ideal niche/product that has the best chances of being economically viable and ultimately a success - because with the advent of gen AI, I have so many ideas that seem viable but not sure how focus or select on one niche. I have many ideas related to building AI tools in various niches (e.g. tool to help ebook readers, AI agent to optimize credit card points/airline bookings, e-commerce related AI tools, etc.). Should I (similar to your initial approach - 12 startups in 12 months) build the most barebones version of each idea quickly (e.g. 1 month per idea) and see if it gets traction/paying customers?

How did you ultimately narrow down on building PhotoAI/InteriorAI vs the many other AI types of tools you could have built?

Suggestion regarding EU: I feel the biggest change for the EU will happen when the populace elects younger people to political power. Ideally people under 35-40 that actually understand tech and were born during the internet age. I was impressed by that young politician, I think from Cyprus? I believe his name is Fidias, who brought so much transparency as to how the EU works just through his TikTok videos.

Thank you for doing the AMA!

2 questiones:


What do you think of the EU and its structure?


How can you build a thriving internal consumer market?



I think Europe will require some BIG bets on a just a few companies to start. Having 10,000 solopreneurs/indiehackers will not move the needle nearly as much. You need dedicated teams rowing in the same direction. I'd be looking into how you can spin up some good accelerators, incubators, VC firms that specifically want to go for big exits ($10+ billion companies).

 "I'd be looking into how you can spin up some good accelerators, incubators, VC firms that specifically want to go for big exits ($10+ billion companies)."


Nope, this is completely wrong. We've tried for the last 15 years in Europe and it has led to absolutely nothing. Just billions of dollars wasted.


What's stopping Europeans from starting world leading businesses is not themselves. It's that European countries and the EU has made it very difficult to build a run a startup here.

Once you fix that, you don't need to start accelerators, incubators, meetups etc. There will simply be an opportunity to make lots of money and that attracts people to build startups, try stuff, and get rich in the process. This is close to impossible in Europe right now which is why most of the high skilled entrepreneurs either leaves to the US to start a funded startup, or to Asia to bootstrap one as an indie hacker (my way).

  a European DARPA would be a better idea

great post man. I have a few questions for you though.

I totally agree, that Europe has not been growing as US/Asia the last decade or so. This has been mainly due to the fact that when in 2008 they printed 6 trillion after the mortgage crash, US/Asia invested in things (mainly assets), Europe didnt. That is the main reason.


So my question is....when you say remove regulation or make it easier for tech entrepreneurs to kick things off what do u mean exactly?

Are you referring to the fact that integrate Stripe payments you need to set up an entity?

Are you referring to funding?


I build products myself, Im a blockchain and AI solopreneur, this is the main reason why I am asking. For me the main problem is the need for incorporation, tax filing that increases the costs of running the business that annoy me a lot. And i usually turn to crypto. But crypto here is hunted like a serial killer.


Are those the things you are referring to? Or do you have other ideas of things that need to be deregulated?


Thanks

Cheers from Spain & Greece.

The problem is multifaceted. It is cultural first and foremost. Europeans like collectivism much more than the Americans. The Americans fucked off over it and then fought a war over it and it is deeply engrained in them to say: Fuck you! When somebody steps or treads on them. In Europe, people want to be governed harder. They want more rules and they want more regulation. Covid was a excellent example. While Miami was long open for business, Germany was still covering behind segregation rules.

I'm talking about averages here of course and I am grossly oversimplifying. But that culture you can see in many many many parts of life. In the US, business is easy regulation is low and socialism does not really exist outside of their central bank. In Europe, business is harder because regulation is insane and socialism and collectivism are everywhere.

People feel entitled to the income of others. See tax rates as an example. That is why in Europe socialist government win elections all the time and that is why you have more socialist policies there. And that is also why you have socialist outcomes like you are describing. Not much of a surprise that the US outperformed massively just based on tax rates alone without all the other overhead that Europe levies.

To fix all this would require massive reform of the socialist welfare state and tax apparatus which will not be palpable to the masses. Thus, it is hard to see a fix come to pass without a major bankruptcy and debt restructuring of the nation state.


To me, it looks like the ship needs to hit rock bottom like it has an Argentina before common sense deregulation can appear on the scene like it has down there with Javier Milei. But maybe I am too cynical. I hope I am and I hope I am wrong and I hope you can fix this! I wish you all the best.

 The US is a much lower trust society than Europe's. This is what you saw in their managing (mismanagement) of Covid. I was in Germany during Covid and I found that they managed it OK. They could have stopped restrictions earlier but in light of everyone including those making the rules being slightly traumatised I will give them a pass on that. I would rather we collectively work together to save the more vulnerable than to have a hyper-individualist approach like the USA. Same way I wouldn't be happy to be in super strict lockdown in hypercollectivist China (in fact I was in Singapore when news broke of the first Singaporean infection and I had my families flights to Germany booked within 15 minutes of finding out).

Europe sits between east and west and can balance these approaches. We need to enable the individual so that the collective can thrive. This is what EU Inc is about for me. You can't sustain a social safety net if you don't have the GDP for it.

I agree that many adjustments need to be made. High tax rates sustaining inefficient clown show bureaucracy for the purpose of making unemployment figures look good is a major issue. This whole left right false dichotomy really bothers me though. I fully believe that is the language of 20th century politics and it is possible to be both pro business and retain the desirable aspect of social policies.

Completely agree on the need for de-regulation. Europe has become too tight, too comfortable (for now), and too fear-based in its thinking - in my opinion.

I know quite a bunch of very bright entrepreneurs who went elsewhere to start shop and flourish, which I find very unfortunate.

Hey there! This is such a fascinating perspective, and I can definitely relate to a lot of what you're saying.

It's wild how different the entrepreneurial mindsets can be across regions. In Europe, that whole "play it safe, get a corporate job first" mentality is deeply ingrained, and it really does feel like it's holding back a lot of potential. When I was exploring startup ideas a while back, I faced a similar kind of pushback from family and friends. It's like there's this fear of failure that overshadows the excitement of taking risks and innovating.

But it's not all doom and gloom for Europe. Even though the big tech and AI powerhouses are mostly in the US and China right now, there's still so much untapped potential here. Portugal, where you've settled, has a ton of hidden gems. The fact that you love the nature, air, and the laid - back lifestyle there is a huge plus. And those elements can actually be a great draw for building a unique kind of startup. For example, with the rise of remote work, Portugal could become a hub for eco - friendly or lifestyle - focused startups that combine work with a great quality of life.

We also have to consider the unique strengths Europe has. There's a rich history of craftsmanship, design, and research. Maybe instead of trying to compete head - on with the US and China in the same tech arenas, European startups could focus on niches that leverage these existing strengths. Think about luxury tech products with a European design aesthetic, or AI - powered solutions for industries like heritage preservation.

I'm curious, have you seen any signs of a shift in this entrepreneurial mindset in Europe lately? Or are there any specific areas you think European startups could really thrive in, given the current landscape? Let's start a conversation and figure out how we can make Europe a more vibrant startup ecosystem again!

Well-thought-out idea! You’ve accurately explained the problem.


As with any system, over time it becomes entangled, messy, and inefficient. In the private sector, this problem is addressed through market forces and recessive cycles, which remove underperforming companies.


In the public sector, however, this doesn’t happen. The system simply prints more money or takes more from the private sector. This creates the conditions for political polarisation between extreme pragmatists and virtue signallers. As a result, reasonable pragmatism doesn’t succeed; it is simply sabotaged by the virtue-signalling cohort.


This is why, in the West, we see growing domestic conflict between rationalists and idealists. Pessimistic attitudes stem from a form of cynicism that includes aspects of Stoicism. People feel they have no control over their lives, and those who lead often fail them. This drives the cynical attitudes we see today.


As most on here will be developers, you can think of this problem in terms of addition and subtraction. Politicians won’t solve this because they do not subtract anything. Compliance. Red tape and costs are always compounding over time, the only reason the system continues despite this upward curve is that historicity private innovation has been able to mitigate the productivity lag and friction from the public sector.


The solution is to make the government a more nimble entity that applies the forces on itself as it imposes onto others. That means if a public sector body is failing or not being used it should be subject to the same forces in the private sector.


Ultimately the only real solution is for the democratic system to be changed and improved upon. In the west we are electing inexperienced politicians, whose first job is to be an MP. It’s a highly flawed and demotivating way of being governed.


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