A tangential observation: the video on the linked page wasn't what I expected. I thought Mistral was a european AI company, so I didnt expect the video to be filmed in San Francisco featuring three people who don't seem to be european.
I'm not against them being a global organization, that's wonderful. I was just surprised. I expected a parisian office and european accents.
Unfortunately Europeans are terrible customers for making money. They ask a lot of questions and they're very stingy with their wallets. Americans on the other hand ...
This is absolutely not why there are no leading AI, other important silicon tech, or relevant space companies in Europe. To some degree they exist but are all B-Tier in comparison to US/China. You'd be surprised just how lose money can sit in Europe, I guess. Just not the way it needs to be for this.
The financial structure of the EU is nowhere close to enabling these capital devouring endeavors based on lofty future bets. Operating at a loss for years and years is simply unacceptable in European markets and the EU is not authoritarian enough to randomly divert capital based on political orders like China because the EU doesn't try to be a superpower controlling a hemisphere.
Have you raised venture capital? I have. It’s fine.
You don’t get US-level (or even Israel/China/Singapore) seeds, but often you get a matching public investment. Germany has better matching funds, but we did alright in Belgium, and previously Portugal.
Let’s stop pretending the EU can ‘fix’ this. It’s cultural, we’re simply not risk takers (on average) because a “normal” job comes with great benefits. Most of us don’t struggle to survive and have to “pull ourselves by the bootstraps”. The social security safety net protects you.
That’s all fine. We’re fine. No, we won’t lead on AI productisation, but we have AMAZING fundamental research going on at unis. I hired 2 such people in PhD+job setups, that part is also working fine.
Funny you should bring up Germany, since it's an a place where a monopoly class of Notary's gets to suck you dry every time you add a new investor to your business in a reading session where the only value he brings to the table is to read the whole thing for you.
Same as elsewhere. The notary fees in Belgium are why we deferred changing the cap table every time it needed doing, ultimately making some of the partners… not have any actual shares because it was too late. Notaries are like this everywhere, AFAIK.
Have realized most people are idiots and are willing to give away their and resources for a piece of paper if it has George Washington's face on it. So they've kept putting it on every piece of paper they could find.
Serious people keep pointing out that this is unsustainable, and will lead to the collapse of American society in weeks/months/years, but they've been saying that for decades and so far that hasn't happened yet.
> Anthropic generated $4.8 billion in sales in the first quarter. Its quarterly revenue is now growing faster than Zoom did during the pandemic, and Google and Facebook in the run-up to their initial public offerings. It is set to turn an operating profit of $559 million in the June quarter.
~Any borderline-large European tech company will have an office on the US west coast, for sales if nothing else. And probably sales engineering. The timezone difference is eight to ten hours; there is really no way around it.
(I did work for one which had an office in Vancouver, instead; same tz.)
Another company like this is Blackmagic Design. Despite being overwhelmingly based in Australia, you'd think it was an American company based on office listing ordering on https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/company/offices and /company page.
...I had no idea Blackmagic was australian! Thats wild, but maybe explains why their tech is so prevalent here haha. Well that and its all pretty excellent and great value (at least in the indie scene I was a part of)
To the best of my knowledge, most of the founding team started their careers in the US ( meta,etc..) and their primary investors are US VCs. In that regard, they smartly benefit on both side : US funding and European brains
I'm not against them being a global organization, that's wonderful. I was just surprised. I expected a parisian office and european accents.