Historian Yuri Slezkine observed that traditional societies typically had two crucial roles: Apollonians named after Apollo, the god of agriculture, order, and law, and Mercurians, named after Mercury, the god of trade, travel, and mediation. Apollonians produced food, maintained rituals, and controlled land and warfare. Mercurians performed services that were mistrusted by Apollonians, such as trading, moneylending, and interpreting texts.

Mercurians had to remain outsiders to preserve trustworthiness as mediators between otherwise closed Apollonian societies. Their internal cohesion and deliberate strangeness came from strong in-group norms, like shared rituals and meals with each other, but not with their hosts, and they were often minorities. A famous example is that Armenians controlled the Silk Road exchange. Following Leo Strauss’s reading of Aristotle’s Politics, it is unsurprising that Mercurians became great philosophers, and arguably great technologists as well.

For most of pre-industrial history, Apollonian elites owned assets like land that were relatively easy to underwrite and value increases came largely from the work of peasants and Mercurians. In that world, Apollonian power was predominantly determined through lineage and almost no one had enough leverage to create meaningful wealth. Modernity reversed this balance. Symbolic manipulation, science, and trade became central to wealth creation. And in turn, Mercurians acquired unprecedented levels of power.

Why were Mercurian traits valued much less for most of history? The value of Mercurian skills increased with higher technological progress, as it enabled economic activity at larger scales. In the Renaissance, the technologies of the time constrained the maximum scale of economic activity to regional scales and necessitated regional fragmentation and specialization. The most successful city-states, like Venice, Florence, and Genoa, were mostly autonomous and used this advantage to react quickly to changes in the markets. Their autonomy gave them agility, and their smaller scale made them porous. In a fragmented world, it was better to move fast than to be large.

Today, Mercurians do not exploit regional arbitrages like those between Vienna and Florence anymore. Our technologies now support economic activity at a global scale. The most economically valuable activities are those that can scale, coordinate, and concentrate resources with minimal friction. Technologists are the modern Mercurians.

When Mercurians Cluster

Mercurian talent matters most when it clusters. Unsurprisingly, the most vibrant, literate, and innovative places of the last 200 years have been those that agglomerated Mercurians.

Within three years of the 1849 Gold Rush, San Francisco's Chinese population grew from virtually zero to over 25,000. The Chinese Mercurians were excluded from the existing financial system and created a self-governing enclave with its own banks and legal system in just a few years. Early 20th-century Vienna attracted outsider talent like Sigmund Freud from Moravia and Gustav Mahler from Bohemia; from 1880 to 1910, Vienna’s Jewish population surged and comprised less than 9% of the city but over 60% of its lawyers and doctors. 1920s Berlin similarly drew in outsiders like Bertolt Brecht from Augsburg and Vladimir Nabokov from Russia, as hyperinflation eroded traditional hierarchies. More recently, late 20th-century New York launched the careers of Andy Warhol from Pittsburgh and Paul Tudor Jones from Tennessee.

If technologists are today’s Mercurians, then the clearest successor to these Mercurian cities is San Francisco. San Francisco is a city of strangers who happen to build technology companies together in remarkably productive ways. In 2024, nearly half of U.S. venture capital – about $65 billion – was invested in Silicon Valley startups. The mythology of Silicon Valley often credits Stanford, sunshine, or garages. But what matters most is that talented technologists in San Francisco developed an implicit system over time that enables outsiders to gain leverage quickly and developed cultural practices that reinforce in-group cohesion.

It is not true that there are no great European founders, as it is often claimed, but many of Europe’s best founders now live on the West Coast. This raises a larger question: Why hasn’t Europe produced a comparable place to SF despite its wealth and Mercurian technical talent?

Many think that Europe’s most katechonic factor is regulation. But the deeper issue is that Europeans still aspire to be Apollonian. European identity was shaped many centuries ago, when social cohesion was enforced by Apollonian elites to defend themselves against external threats. Today, Europe's elites still insist that innovation has to align primarily with local traditions and community harmony; Europe’s founders are not yet seen as Gods.

If Europe wants to play a more active role in startups and technology, then European elites need to make space for talented and ambitious people to cluster and to move fast and break things in order to get a few businesses of large scale. Peter Thiel is right when he highlights that Germany’s biggest fear might not be a fear of failure, but a fear of success.

Europe Needs One Place

On the individual level, this Apollonian preference shows up as social calibration. Founders are expected to earn trust through attending the right school, having the right passport, and exhibiting the right mannerisms. Remember: In an Apollonian world, ambition had to be justified, and was not tolerated by default. European institutions today still default to skepticism, especially toward people who move fast or come from the margins of society. Many Germans think of Germany as an open and tolerant society, but it is rather nationalist, closed, and meticulously enforces rules through village-style surveillance.

On a structural level, modern Europe still functions more like a network of old city-states. While the EU established a common market on paper, it never fully dissolved the cultural and financial boundaries inherited from the Renaissance. Capital, talent, and trust remain fragmented across borders (often even within) and no single place in Europe compounds all three. A French engineer may no longer need a visa to work in Berlin, but they will still face bureaucratic friction, language barriers, and nationalist sentiment. A promising Estonian hedge fund may struggle to raise from British pension funds who face up to 70% domestic mandates. These mandates are not just policy choices but reflect the Apollonian impulse to privilege local control over optimal allocation. Do European elites not care enough about money and economic growth?

Nowhere is Europe’s structural mismatch more evident and consequential than in AI. Foundation models are the technological frontier most likely to define the coming decade. If scaling laws hold, frontier AI capabilities will be immensely costly and likely even more centralizing than the generational internet-era companies that Europe largely missed. Europe’s largest software company, SAP, is worth just a fraction of any of the Magnificent Seven.

In 2024, US-based AI startups raised nearly $97 billion in venture capital. Europe barely crossed $8 billion. The US holds 60% the world’s datacenter capacity already and will likely widen the gap in the next few years. While AI labs and their Magnificent 7 patrons are buying up entire power plants, European AI labs are still negotiating their Series B.

Europe’s inertia can be overcome. European identity need not conflict with technological progress and resource concentration. Young founders must prove that centralizing talent and capital is possible and necessary for a sovereign European future. Still, the same Apollonian dynamics that create inertia against startups also create resistance to meaningful concentration, even within borders. Germany alone has “Silicon Allee” in Berlin, “Silicon Saxony” in Dresden, and “Isar Valley” in Munich. But the something of somewhere is just the nothing of nowhere; none of these Silicon Valley knockoffs have reached critical mass. Hundreds of subscale bets don’t form a “mosaic of ambition”; they produce a diverse array of failures.

Besides talent, company creation in Europe would greatly benefit from a deliberate reallocation of capital towards young, ambitious technologists. Younger founders are more mobile, more willing to take risks, and have more time to compound the resources allocated to them. These factors matter, especially in frontier fields, where breakthroughs take time and early bets have asymmetric upside.

But you do not need policy reforms to move to one place with all your talented friends, whichever place European founders choose. You can just do things.

Many of the European founders and investors that I talked to about these forces agree in principle that centralization is important. Still, most only pay lip service to it and reject moving to one place for building their startup. To a French founder, Munich feels too German. To a German founder, Paris feels too French. So no one moves.

We are left in a stalemate where no startup benefits from agglomeration but everyone is trapped by the cultural comfort of “building for their home country”. If we agree that we need to centralize startup creation, then either younger Europeans have to pick centralization over national identities. Or we need to get behind a neutral ground that is English-speaking, pro-foreigners, and a fusion of German, French, and English cultures.

I am not anti-European. I want Europe to matter. But in a decade where geopolitical pressure is rising, endless meetings are not a substitute for foundational technologies and centralization. What’s truly anti-European is the fantasy that prosperity can be evenly distributed without scale. If Europe’s Mercurians don’t centralize in Europe, they will book one-way tickets to San Francisco to build someone else’s future there.

Thanks to Sam Huang for editing.

Manufacturing in the Ashes

The dominant Western European economic order of the last few decades is breaking down and the global order is changing radically. Countries like Germany have been unable to react adequately, its companies have been stagnant for decades, and its startup outcomes have been mixed at best.1 While there is still room for founders to step in, European startups often fall for the delusions of EU orthodoxy and we thus need to first face the harsh reality: Europe, and in particular Germany, are deindustrialising at a rapid pace.

A recent study found that “two thirds of component manufacturing companies have already relocated parts of their value creation [out of Germany]”2. Volkswagen recently announced that they would cut 15,000 employees for the first time in its 87-year-history and in 2022, the overall chemical production decreased by 12% in one year.

It’s not only Germany. In the UK, the industrial energy price tripled between 2004 and 2021 in nominal terms. Mario Draghi’s recent report acknowledges that the EU has “failings in innovation and productivity” and that there is a need “to restore its manufacturing potential.”3

The two backbones of German manufacturing used to be millions of dynamic companies of the Mittelstand4 and large manufacturing businesses with scale and distribution (think Volkswagen, Siemens, Bosch).

These historical foundations of German manufacturing are cracking and the subsidies that used to hold up German manufacturing mainly served incumbents and made innovation for startups much harder.

How did we get here? 

The Mittelstand rose from the ashes of the second World War on strong tailwinds: cheap energy, an existing skilled workforce and supply of talented workers through apprenticeship programs, and large markets to tap into. The generations-old companies had to be refounded and good founders could take decisive action to make their companies competitive. Around the 1950 and 1960s, many companies of the Mittelstand were back at producing world-class products and could suddenly sell to much larger markets than ever before on the backs of global markets requiring standardized products of consistently high-quality5.

Corporations like Volkswagen benefitted from similar tailwinds and the Mittelstand could grow a few percent every year by supplying them.

Today’s Mittelstand is paralyzed in the face of strong headwinds. These companies are now in their succeeding second and third generations of leadership. Whereas founders used to be able to act fast and decisively, there are now either no successors at all, fragmented families that cannot agree on any decisive action, a professional managerial class drop-in, or PE roll ups taking charge that will not make the Mittelstand companies last more than a generation at best.

The decentralization of the Mittelstand was not what caused its success, but many German elites still believe that decentralizing talent is important to produce wealth in all regions – even if new technologies require scale and concentrated talent. Most important AI work is happening just in the SF Bay Area, other than Deepmind. It takes a shift in perspective to see that German conventional wisdom is destroying startups at scale.

Moreover, European manufacturing incumbents are not in great shape. The Dieselgate scandal cost Volkswagen more than $30 billion, making it the largest scandal in auto industry history6. In 2022, Volkswagen's software division, Cariad, reported a loss of €2.1 billion, and the integration of Android Auto in Volkswagen vehicles was delayed from 2024 to 2027. In 2022, BASF announced plans to “permanently” downsize in Europe and it sold a Dutch production site in 2023, among other measures to avoid extremely high European energy prices.

In an attempt to save its dying industrial base, Europe turned to governmental levers and industrial policy. In typical EU fashion, it used its tools of subsidies, protectionism, and regulation. Instead of producing a robust, dynamic, and competitive manufacturing sector, they ossified incumbents and made them complacent. In turn, these incumbents locked out startups and innovations. As Reagan said, the most terrifying nine words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.

Between 2022 and 2024, European governments were paralyzed by the breakdown of its decades-long dependency on Russian gas and exploding energy prices. Without the cheap energy of the 20th and early 21st century, the German manufacturing sector will continue bleeding out. Subsidizing industrial energy prices will not save these companies in the long-term.

Is now the right moment to turn things around? Maybe—it’s definitely one of the toughest questions to answer. But when even the EU, through Mario Draghi, recognizes that Europe is falling behind and that AI might offer an opportunity to turn things around, the time might just be ripe.

Can Founders Rebuild European Manufacturing?

The naive response to established manufacturing companies failing to innovate, and being kept alive by government interventions, would be to imitate them. One could hire a bunch of lobbyists and former EU bureaucrats, build a portfolio of products that are just acceptable, and try to sell them to the EU. However, it’s probably fair to say that founders looking to seize this opportunity cannot aim to become the next Siemens.

Instead, the way to win is to be 10x better and/or 10x cheaper, and to start with small markets that a company can quickly dominate. From there, it can expand to other markets and develop new products over time. This isn’t to say that lobbyists don’t matter, but that it’s both hard and undesirable to try and beat Siemens at the game of regulatory capture. Thankfully, technology enables modern manufacturing businesses to be better and cheaper without resorting to politics.

Today, if someone wanted to build a great manufacturing business in Europe, it might be tempting to set up shop in one of these deindustrializing towns, where tens of thousands of technicians and machinists are readily available and many input factors for mass-scale manufacturing are already in place. I would caution against this and remind the reader that Tesla wasn’t built in Detroit.

The tailwinds and global conditions that once supported them no longer exist. Thus, a founder tackling this problem would need to create a rupture, a departure from the old paradigms of manufacturing and company building. It’s unlikely that a technician who spent the last three decades assembling cars for Volkswagen will suddenly be able to produce entirely different vehicles or work in radically different ways. The forces that led to the downfall of established manufacturing companies are still present and strong. To survive, you need to start with the strongest foundations possible. The first offices and production plants probably shouldn’t be in Wolfsburg.

The question of where to start building a generational manufacturing company in Europe is very important and takes thoughtful consideration. Germany might not be a great initial market because it has more powerful manufacturing incumbents and it is advisable to go up against them with the necessary strength and scale.7 At the same time, a consequence of this complacency and aging demographics is a shift from Germany to Poland, from West to East.

That being said, if a founder decided to try building up manufacturing capacity in countries like Germany again, the ways they could go about this are by providing cheaper energy, improving European coordination and energy markets, or shifting to less energy intensive manufacturing. My suspicion is that if someone could build a manufacturing business that requires 10x less energy for the same output, there might be an opening in Europe. Improving energy efficiency is an incremental way of similar tactics, but will not reach the necessary scale.

Most commentators praise Germany’s apprenticeships. It is true that Germany has more manufacturing talent than most countries: Germany alone has around 560,000 CNC machinists while the US has around 350,000. But these apprenticeship programs are too rigid and overly focus on teaching the workflows of the past. Modern manufacturing will be much more dynamic, small scale, and there will be more change in the daily workflows for factory workers. The age where DIN norms alone would win you business are over.

That being said, having a strong base of manufacturing talent and at least some new supply of young people hoping to join an apprenticeship program, the right founders could probably put this talent to good use, if they hire wisely and figure out ways to teach novel workflows well.

And remember, manufacturing workers can always be relocated, and it may be cheaper to pay them a premium and avoid the illusions of a deindustrializing area than to pay lower wages and make no progress at all. Piech Automotive is based in Switzerland.

There is another word of caution due. Rebuilding industrial capacity can be motivated by non-economic reasons alone (like sovereignty), but companies only survive if they can make the economics work.

This constraint reduces the scope of the opportunity for reshoring – European national defense might have sufficient demand to sustain a great company but “Jeans Made in Germany” probably not.

Navigating these obstacles will be very hard, but if a founder was to succeed, their payoffs could be very large. Siemens alone had $83bn revenue in 2023. Much more might be up for grabs, but only if European founders step up and governments get out of the way.

European manufacturing once rose from the ashes of WWII to become the export champions of the world. Now, it must rise once more from the ashes of decades of mismanagement by the managerial class to become the champions of a new era in manufacturing.

Europe's manufacturing revival depends not on nostalgia, but on founders willing to confront hard truths, abandon comforting delusions, and rethink every step with precision and foresight.

If any of this resonates, I’d love to hear from you.

I would like to thank Sam Huang for feedback on this essay.

What weapons will that money buy? If you look at the modern defense industry the answer is American ones. Among the ten largest defense companies in the world, only one is European (BAE Systems, UK). Lockheed Martin, America’s largest defense company, has 2.5 times more revenue than BAE Systems, five times more than Airbus Defense (the largest EU defense company), and ten times the revenue of Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest defense company.1

The Attempt at European Sovereignty

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the world looked quite different: In 1961, France introduced the Mirage III, one of the first operational delta-wing fighter aircraft capable of reaching Mach 2.2. In 1969, the British Hawker Siddeley Harrier entered service, the first operational vertical/short takeoff and landing (V/STOL) jet fighter. The dynamic British and French defense industries thrived.2

It was a major concern for the British and the French to assert their sovereignty through building up their own nuclear deterrence and strengthening their national defense industry. The British built their own nuclear strike force of V Bombers, designed and produced by three British companies: Vickers-Armstrongs, Avro, and Handley Page.

The French and British insisted on developing their own nukes despite initial opposition from the Kennedy administration3 and in 1966, President Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO’s integrated military command structure to preserve French sovereignty over its military decisions. President de Gaulle wanted to build a strong and independent France and Europe, emancipated from US influence as a third power in the Cold War.4

Europe’s Defense Disaster

Europe's defense strategy has proven ineffective. Decades of defense budget cuts, an over-dependence on American military resources, and mostly failed efforts at coordinated European defense have left the continent's defense capabilities in a precarious state.5

The British Navy is a shadow of its former self in terms of numbers and class of ships. Around 1947-50, the UK navy had 10 aircraft carriers, 3 cruisers, 49 destroyers, 150 frigates, and 77 submarines.6 Today, it has 2 aircraft carriers, 6 destroyers, 12 frigates, and 10 submarines.7

Germany is struggling to produce combat-ready equipment. The Polish Ministry of Defense bought South Korean tanks, howitzers, and fighter jets in 2022 over German counterparts because the SK equipment integrated better with existing equipment and was more reliable.8 In the Ukraine war, eight Leopard 2 tanks were destroyed in a single day of fighting. Spare parts were missing to keep the tanks operational, only a "very small number" of German-delivered Leopard tanks were still operational in 2024, and German tanks failed for similar reasons in previous wars.

In 2012, reports surfaced that the assault rifle of the German armed forces (Bundeswehr), the Heckler & Koch (H&K) G36, became unreliable in prolonged firefights.9 Efforts to replace the G36 began in 2017. Germany canceled an initial contract for the Haenel MK 556 in 2020 due to patent infringement concerns and selected the H&K G95A1 in 2021. Deployment was planned to start in 2024. However, Der Spiegel obtained a classified report claiming that the new rifle was found to be “inaccurate” for battle if loaded with combat munition.10 Germany will not have a functioning assault rifle 12 years after it became clear that its soldiers are risking their lives with unreliable equipment.1112

If it is true that “building an independent European defense force would take 10–15 years (if we would start now and go all in) and would cost a hell of a lot of money (more than the famous 2%)”13, then the best way forward is not some sort of coordinated action. The urgency that Europe faces to get its act together doesn’t allow the luxury of 10-15 years. The preferred path of protracted negotiation and European parliamentary discussions is not going to cut it.

Domestic Production Exceptionalism

It’s worth considering the exceptions to the status quo before thinking about building Europe’s New Defense. The only European countries that stayed vigilant on defense were either former Soviet states or countries outside of NATO. In 2023, the three EU countries with highest relative spending on defense are Poland at 3.8%, Greece at 3.2%, and Finland at 2.4% of their respective GDP.14 Sweden’s SAAB is only 25% smaller than Rheinmetall but from a country with a population of only a little over 10 million people.

We will look at the examples of Sweden and Israel, two countries that pursued a national defense strategy. 

Consider the example of the Gripen Fighter Plane. During the Cold War, Sweden faced the constant threat of a Russian invasion due to their proximity. However, with the vastness of Swedish territory, Russia could have launched an attack from multiple points, making a single airbase for fighter jets insufficient. In response, Sweden developed the Gripen, a fighter jet that could be operated from a snow-covered landing strip of only 500m (1,600ft) such that it could be deployed from various points within the country. In case of attack, they would not have been able to dispatch a team of technicians and ground staff in time, so they designed the Gripen to be able to be prepared and rearmed for takeoff within 10-20 minutes by just five technicians and conscripts and with very little maintenance over the years.15

In the case of Israel, we will consider the Merkava tanks. During the 1982 Lebanon War, Israel faced an estimated 30,000 Syrian fighters, anti-tank missiles batteries, and 400 tanks, mainly T-62s, and an additional 18,000 fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organization. Despite Israel’s overwhelming force – 60,000 troops and 800 tanks (¼ were Merkava tanks), heavily supported by aircraft, attack helicopters, artillery, and missile boats – it faced difficult terrain, Guerilla tactics, and resistance in Palestinian refugee camps. Yet, the IDF advanced quickly: By June 7 (one day after the invasion), they were north of Sidon. Two days later, they reached the southern approaches of Beirut.16 The key feature of the Merkava tanks was its design to minimize crew loss in the event of a hit. Its front armor was impervious to the anti-tank weapons of the time, a vital feature for Israel, whose relatively small military required reducing crew casualties to preserve its fighting strength.

These differentiated national defense strategies would have made it much harder to conquer the continent in one stroke. Differentiated national defense strategies hedge against collective delusions and weaknesses in defense strategies.17

However, national defense strategies require adapted weapons systems, which European nation-states cannot simply procure off the shelf from American defense companies.

New Defense for Europe

If European nation-states cannot buy weapons adapted to their local needs from American defense companies, and European defense primes were straightjacketed into European joint ventures18, the only option for nation states to procure these weapons is from small nimble startups selling to individual nation-states initially.

The advantages for nation-states and founders alike would be that nimble startups can start with a small market, understand their customer better than anyone else, and can build and deliver weapons much faster.

Competing on a European level for a small startup is almost an immediate death sentence, as they would likely drown in EU bureaucracy. Even the best European defense companies might want to start by taking over a small national market before expanding across the rest of the continent. To have a chance of survival, startups need to lean into national defense, as they must take over a small market quickly. Nation-states can move much  faster than EU bodies, making national markets better for business.

Unfortunately, a word of caution for founders is due: EU countries are likely too skewed in their procurement towards established incumbents despite their massive shortcomings. If a founder of such a nimble startup wants to have a shot at surviving, they need to be 10x better and/or 10x cheaper in areas where incumbents cannot compete in order to overcome this bias and resistance.

Thankfully, this is a high but not insurmountable barrier because of technology. The drop in cost of new defense hardware is the biggest change that enables new defense startups to start small and have a real chance at winning bids. But it takes a shift in mentality to understand that this is the case.

And founders need to build with the conviction that the market will be there.

If we get our act together, New Defense for Europe will be built by small nimble startups that are much more attune to the needs of their local markets. They will use technology to offer products that were impossible in the old paradigm.

Europe’s defense will look less like a monolithic army of Mordor and more like the free peoples of Middle-earth—sovereign nations with differentiated strategies and weapons, tailored to their own needs, ready to defend and, when necessary, unite against common threats.

If any of the above speaks to you, drop me a line.

I would like to thank John Strider, Sam Huang, and Armin Sommer for their feedback on versions of this essay.

That being said, I feel sad because I am pretty certain that I had to leave Germany out of necessity.

In this brief2 blog post, I want to offer a few passing thoughts on why I decided to leave Germany and how my argument fits into the broader question of what ambitious people choose to do with their lives, and where. Most of this essay will be purely descriptive and I suspect that similar observations apply broadly to other European countries, though the specifics will differ.

I shall caveat my argument by stating that I still love Germany3 and care deeply about it improving. But over time I have come to believe that Germany is in a state of disrepair and that there is no window of opportunity to turn things around, at this point in time.

I. The landscape for ambitious people, as I see it

It might be tempting for the modern reader to dismiss my case – that many ambitious people have to leave their home country to pursue their ambitions, elsewhere – by stating that almost every Western country has made it difficult for ambitious people to pursue ambitious projects, each for its own unique problems, rooted deeply in their culture, society, or political system. Beyond the argument's intellectual laziness – for how could one ever disprove such a claim? – lies an uncomfortable kernel of truth.

Most Western countries have stagnated. Almost every single young and ambitious friend I know considers leaving their home country, mostly to the US, because they have the impression that it is too difficult, if not outright impossible, for them to pursue ambitious projects at home.

There are many aspects of this seemingly universal problem which we could discuss; I will limit myself to just stressing two.

Firstly, many – usually unintentionally – exaggerate just how uniquely hard it is for talented young people to pursue ambitious projects. In the spirit of the French philosopher Rene Girard, we shall quote Sayre’s law4: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake. (...) That is why academic politics are so bitter." We could speculate that maybe most modern countries make it very hard for ambitious people to do anything ambitious and that is why there is so fierce debate about which country makes it the hardest.

Secondly, we could ask why there are so many universal problems across so many different countries despite seemingly divergent cultures – think about how different Japan's and Germany's cultures are and yet, how similar many of their problems are. If unique cultural and societal forces of each country were the root cause for their stagnation, why would almost all countries face the same problems today? Why do many ambitious individuals feel similarly limited in what projects they can pursue? And why do we seem to be stuck in this seemingly stable equilibrium?

We need to look closely at the notable exception. Why do young ambitious individuals decide to move from a relatively wealthy country like Germany to the United States?

It is probably wrong to think of the US as a refuge or an oasis for young and ambitious people and it is even wrong to think of the entirety of the US as an exception to the rule that most places in the world make it very hard for ambitious people to pursue ambitious projects. There are only a few places in the US – think SF, LA, or NY – that have attracted sufficiently many ambitious individuals and found some mechanism through which they can actually put their ambitions and talents into practice – startups in SF, movies and music in LA, or fashion and finance in New York.5

Another way of saying this is that you always need both the right talents and the right opportunity in order to build something of significance.

The preliminary answer to why young ambitious people move from a wealthy country like Germany to the marginally wealthier United States is that the US is the only place in the world where ambitious individuals can pursue their ambitions to a sufficient extent.6

II. Modern Commercial Republics

I think the two questions – Why are so many countries in the West facing similar problems? And why do talented young people decide to move to the United States over all other countries? – are more similar than they seem at first sight.

A core argument is that we started to divert young and ambitious people from politics into the pursuit of commercial estates. If the acquisitiveness of human nature used to be channeled into acquiring new territories and fighting wars, it is now largely funneled into building great companies and personal fortunes. But that leaves politics to be stagnant.7

At the same time, American exceptionalism historically consisted, in part, of pioneering the ground rules for what we might call today Modern Commercial Republics.

Ambitious people and society

I will now analyze the decline of Germany by looking at the implicit agreement, some might want to call it social contract8, between ambitious young people and the society they find themselves in. In the modern West, this implicit social agreement between ambitious individuals and their society can be described in broad strokes as a society granting ambitious individuals the permission to build commercial estates that contribute to society through productivity growth and jobs, while the founders in turn do not interfere with politics too much and don’t break the laws.9

Germany has not witnessed the founding of great commercial estates in recent times. Despite this indicting fact, there are no other pathways10 for ambitious people without previous wealth to build great estates, outside of commercial estates, and thus we will focus only on those, even in the context of Germany.

It is almost correct to say that Germany has outlawed ambition. There is obviously no single law that reads “Germans shall not be ambitious, punishable by jail.” Yet, if you outlaw almost every single thing that an ambitious person might need to do for building a great commercial estate and enforce an altered social contract that punishes ambitious people through social relations11, then you have in practice outlawed ambition.

Outlawing ambitions is a political project and thus I will briefly deviate from my focus on commercial republics and make one exception12. The idea of power13 and power concentration is troubling for the modern reader, maybe because power is inherently unequal or because there is always the risk of abuses of power. However, power is a necessary component of government. Powerful elites still exist in countries like Germany – even if you choose to call them by different names – because we haven’t yet found a way to govern a country without them.141516 That is not to say that power in itself is good or bad; controlling the ambitious and powerful is as important today as ever before. For instance, we shall consider the fact that the United States started a tradition of checking power through power and by splitting up power into three branches in the context of a modern republic. Another approach that other countries have taken, either intentionally or by accident, is closer to the idea of trying to reduce concentration of power, and thus, preventing ambitious individuals from acquiring too much power, whereas the question of how much is too much is obviously the important question.17 Germany tries to limit the maximal amount of (political) power someone could possibly acquire more than most countries.1819

Outlawing and limiting commercial ambitions

Outlawing ambitions thus requires regulating commercial ambitions and practices as well, so the theory goes, because there is some link between commercial fortunes and political power.

It is becoming increasingly hard to deny that Germany, and the EU, outlawed commercial practices that might have been necessary historically for building great commercial estates. If the reader has any doubt that this is the case, they should seriously consider the EU’s approach to AI regulation20 or Germany’s Network Enforcement Act21. The obvious way to regulate commercial ambitions is to restrict or outlaw technologies that could lead to too powerful companies.

A less obvious way to limit commercial ambitions is to not help ambitious founders with the necessary knowledge. For instance, many Germans with similar criticism would call for “following the American example” more as the US has clearly found ways for ambitious individuals to build commercial fortunes. I think this call is misguided.

Germany imitates the US already to a striking extent, accelerated by eroding language and cultural barriers and defense dependence. At the same time, Germany is reluctant to admit the lack of originality and thus claims to give things a “German spin,” which makes matters worse because the spin almost never works.

Moreover, one might wonder how serious Germany takes giving things a spin in the first place, when one considers that it is a commonplace argument that many things happening now in Germany happened ten years ago in the US.

We should not concern ourselves with more than one complication of imitating the US extensively; namely imitating startup playbooks from the US. Unfortunately for Germany, the reality in Germany looks quite different to that in the US and you would need to adapt your thinking to that different reality. But as I just claimed, Germany is bad at this “German spin.”

Just consider how expensive business expansion to neighboring countries in Europe is, compared with much lower costs of expanding from CA to TX.

Germany is currently either unwilling to face this truth or accepts the truth but is unable or unwilling to reduce its dependence on the US. Thus, many conceptualize startup success in Germany in an almost absurd way. Ideas travel easily, but context doesn't.

III. What happens with ambitious Germans?

Outlawing ambitions, either through laws or social-cultural practices does not remove ambitious people from the face of the earth, of course.

Unable to pursue their ambitions in their own country, they either risk pursuing them despite restrictions and potentially getting into trouble, leave the country to pursue them elsewhere, or engage in even more destabilizing pursuits aimed at legalizing their ambitions.

There is one path that I omitted that I find very painful to watch, which is not thinking about these questions at all, and blindly trying to build a great company in Germany, hoping that things will magically fix themselves.

There might very well be an opportunity to build a generational company in Germany at some point, but muddling-through (durchwursteln), lying to yourself, or even worse, being willfully blind about the nature of Germany, won’t get you there.

Some might object that most Americans don’t think about questions like these either. This essay has never been concerned with most and from my experience, the very best American founders do think about the important questions. Moreover, there are quite useful norms and social dynamics in the right circles of ambitious American founders that will be utilized by the right founders, even in the absence of deep thought.

Until Germany figures out a more productive way to deal with ambitious people, it is a strange but true reality that the United States is the only place in the world where you can build great commercial estates as an ambitious person. It is truly the greatest country in the world, in this sense.22

Thanks to Sam Huang and Jack Gross-Whitaker for helping to edit this essay.

Non-Fiction

1. Yoram Hazony: Conservatism: A Rediscovery. It’s relatively unsurprising that Peter Thiel’s review on the back of the book states that “the more intellectually forceful challenge to libertarianism comes not from progressives but from conservatives.” Many books written to criticize modernity, or usually a small aspect of modernity, think of Christopher Lasch, make correct observations, but fall short in attempting to provide solutions because they are way too narrow. Hazony offers a good introductory read for how different groups of conservatives think about the crisis of modernity and how they think about solutions, though I suspect that reading Burke would be a better foundation for the more intellectually-curious readers.

2. Yoram Hazony: The Virtue of Nationalism. Same author and similar arguments as above. This book precedes Conservatism, and makes an interesting argument for why we are not thinking about nationalism properly. Again, I think it is a good introductory read, but I would like to ask a lot of follow-up questions, pushback on some arguments, and stress others more strongly.

3. Roger Scruton: How To Be A Conservative. Similar class of book as the above two, though slightly more British.

4. Herbert Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man. Frankfurt School professor Herbert Marcuse explains his thesis that the modern, advanced society subordinates everything human to economic growth and exploitation, including human reason, leading to a totalitarian system with rights, like free speech, never used by choice of its members. Reading Marcuse is always a little bit painful, yet the thinking that Marcuse shares has been undeniably influential to the formation of the New Left. Many of his observations point towards deeper truths about human nature and the modern condition. Yet, I wish they were more substantiated and grounded in political philosophy and that the prescriptions would be deviating more from Marx and were more considerate across the board. The following passage shall be sufficient to demonstrate the spirit of his arguments: “The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation—liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable—while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefaction; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.”

5. Edmund Burke: Reflections on The French Revolution, Part I. It is not unreasonable to say that Edmund Burke is the founder of Conservatism, as we understand it today. Obvious recommendation.

6. William F. Buckley, Jr.: God and Man at Yale. This classic work, published in 1951, significantly influenced modern conservatism. A young Buckley critiques Yale University for what he perceives as its abandonment of religious and traditional values, arguing that the university has become secular and hostile to Christianity. He claims that while American society was historically rooted in Christian principles, Yale's faculty have shifted toward secularism and collectivism, often undermining these values. Buckley controversially asserts that universities have a responsibility to their alumni, who he argues are generally more religious and conservative, and should therefore refrain from teaching doctrines like socialism, which he believes have been discredited. He also expresses concern that conservative and religious viewpoints are increasingly marginalized in academic discourse, leaving little room for debate or the inclusion of traditional perspectives.

7. Michael Gibson: Paper Belt On Fire. The book contains several good and timeless anecdotes about the Thiel Fellowship.

8. Philip Zelikow: The Road Less Traveled. Fascinating history book about the forgotten opportunity to call a conference for peace during the Winter of 1916/17 to end WWI. It teaches the attentive reader about the war aims of the British and there are several questions On War that I started looking into after reading the book.

9. Christopher Hitchens: Letters to a Young Contrarian. Massively overrated.

10. Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov: War, Progress, and the End of History. Recommended by Peter Thiel; I found it highly insightful. Solovyov is one of the Great Russian philosophers and Christian thinkers of the late 19th century that has been almost forgotten. I might read about it another time, but go read it in the meantime.

11. Tony Reinke: God, Technology, and The Christian Life.

12. Wendell Willkie: One World. Another recommendation by Peter Thiel; I enjoyed reading it. Former Republican presidential candidate Willkie worked with FDR. He traveled around the world and wrote about his observations of other countries and outlined his vision of a one-world government that seems quite dystopian to me.

13. Helmuth Plessner: Die Verspätete Nation (engl. The Belated Nation). Alex Karp analyzed parts of this book in his doctoral dissertation “Aggression in der Lebenswelt” (an English translation can be found here). The book paints a devastating picture on how Germany's intellectual, cultural, and historical background led to the ideology of the Third Reich. Personally, I think Germany was a belated nation because it was still a monarchy in 1900 and never became a proper nation state before the wars.

14. Carl Schmitt: Gespräche über die Macht und den Zugang zum Machthaber (engl. Conversations about power and access to those in power).

15. Carl Schmitt: Die Tyrannei der Werte (engl. The Tyranny of Values). Written in 1960, this book offers a rarely heard but overly legalistic critique of the modern German constitution, arguing for a neutral legal order that – at least pretends – to tolerate diverging viewpoints instead of imposing “values” on its citizens. I’d caution against trusting Schmitt’s judgment in this specific work blindly, given his history of misjudgments, partially by being too legalistic, combined with the fact that Schmitt’s more famous writings criticized similar “neutral fictions” of the Weimarer Republik. The format of these short reviews is insufficient to trace the development of his political thought and speculate on the reasons for why he makes this turnaround in his stated thought, but such an inquiry seems beneficial.

16. Immanuel Kant: Zum Ewigen Frieden (engl. Perpetual Peace). I have studied Immanuel Kant reasonably deeply around six years ago; what is always most striking about reading Kant is how much trust he places in human reasoning and how his Copernian turn places free and sovereign individuals at the center of inquiry, trying to break away from imposing too many arbitrary restrictions from nature on them. This specific brief treatise must be understood in that light; he outlines how perpetual peace between sovereign individuals could be achieved and outlines what an international order and an enlightened international law needs to look like. It is fascinating how powerful this brief treatise has been; maybe one could even say that Kant was the intellectual founder of the UN. As mentioned previously, I am skeptical that a Kantian world order is achievable, as long as we don’t discover ways to alter human nature substantially, and as long as that is the case, there is quite a lot of danger in trying to implement it. And even if we could alter human nature, I am unsure whether that would be desirable, if the end goal is Kant’s vision of Perpetual Peace.

17. Ernst Jünger: Der Waldgang (engl. The Forest Passage). Jünger wrestles with the question of human nature in extreme situations, such as emergencies and catastrophes. As a conservative who opposed the Weimarer Republik but never joined the NSDAP, one can read the book as Jünger moving away from the political, narrowly understood, and as a part of his post-war reflection on individual resistance and inner emigration. Content aside, the prose is quite beautiful and can be considered a revival of forest mysticism in the mid-20th century.

18. Byung-Chul Han: Vom Verschwinden der Rituale (engl. The Disappearance of Rituals). Han is one of the more thought-provoking contemporary German philosophers, though I shall say that the bar for being thought-provoking in Germany is fairly low. His core argument – as I understand it – that rituals are a crucial aspect of the human experience and that a breakdown of rituals in modernity is causing human suffering and disorientation at large scale – seems certainly not too far-fetched to at least take seriously.

19. Byung-Chul Han: Psychopolitik (engl. Psychopolitics). 

Fiction

1. Richard Brautigan: In Watermelon Sugar. Maybe a little too post-modern and surreal for my taste.

2. John Williams. Stoner. I enjoyed this re-issued novel that is rightly considered to be one of the great American novels. It follows the quiet life of William Stoner, an English professor in Missouri, and does a great job of capturing the essence of an ordinary life. A good reminder that academic life is way too fierce, given the stakes involved, and how petty rivalries form.

3. Amin Maalouf: Samarkand. Great novel, especially if you haven’t thought about the Arab world in the early second millennium BC much.

4. Michel Houellebecq: Submission. I have had this controversial novel on my reading list for quite a while. I don’t think the narrative is fully descriptive or coherent, but I think it outlines what a potential muslim future for Europe could look like.

5. Kazuo Ishiguro: A Pale View of Hills. 

6. Dan Brown: Origin. That one is quite cliche, but this is one of my favorite Dan Brown novels that I re-read recently.

I also re-read this speech that Tony Blair gave on globalization in 2005. Some of the essays I have been reading can be found on my bookshelf.

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In this piece, I will argue:

1. Tacit knowledge is critical for traditional manufacturing success,

2. Outsourcing delays the destruction of manufacturing,

3. Traditional interventions to preserve manufacturing are often counterproductive, and

4. Automation is the only way to preserve tacit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is critical for traditional manufacturing success

It is a well-established empirical observation that manufacturing prices drop with increasing manufacturing experience. In 1936, T. P. Wright introduced the concept of “experience curve effects” to describe human capital effects in the manufacturing process. Simply speaking, he assumed that the cost of production decreases by a constant percentage point every time the output produced doubles – this is mainly because learning effects from the repetition of a task. The so-called learning percent is calculated by 1-improvement per doubling and the higher the learning percent, the lower the gains from additional experience.

High-precision manufacturing in industries such as airplane manufacturing or defense technology has higher experience payoffs. For instance, airplane manufacturing costs roughly drop by 15% for every doubling in output, while the manufacturing of raw materials has only a drop in costs of 3-7%. For illustration, TSMC relies heavily on the experience of Taiwanese workers in building a new factory in Arizona to ensure a “fast ramp up”.

In traditional cost estimates, higher shares of machining assembly (lower shares of hand assembly) lead to weaker experience effects. However, modern machinery has rendered most “hand assembly” unnecessary, but large and expensive machines now require more skilled workers to run the machines and set up the production process.

In industries such as semiconductor manufacturing, there are only a few machines of one kind (think ASML EUV lithography systems) with incredibly high upfront capital needs, which implies that (1) there are only few highly-skilled workers that can operate these machines and (2) these machines only break even with low to no downtime. These factors are amplified by monopolies – there are certain machines only operated by ASML.

There are headwinds that American manufacturing has to fight against: outsourcing pressure because of cheaper labor in Asia and retiring machinists. Outsourcing might lower costs in the short term but at the cost of the West losing tacit knowledge. 

Moreover, this loss of tacit knowledge is permanent. The permanence is due to two reasons: First, as one outsources manufacturing, there is little demand for more manufacturing workers, which leads to few young people entering the field. Second, the workers that used to have manufacturing knowledge are retiring now and mostly leave without passing on their tacit knowledge to apprentices because there are none.

Contrast manufacturing knowledge to formal software or academic knowledge. Academia is well-respected and legible which ensures a growing inflow of young, talented students. Moreover, the knowledge itself is captured in universities and code bases (e.g. Github or internal documentation) and there is a robust process of senior faculty members passing on tacit knowledge to young scholars.

Manufacturing knowledge is arguably more important, but predominantly captured in the minds of retiring machinists. The knowledge required to operate these modern machines is tacit because many modern machines have so little quantities that the costs of formalizing knowledge would be high and we did not respect machinists enough to consider their knowledge as important enough to justify the cost. Moreover, there are supporting developments such as: Modern manufacturing systems are much more sensitive to minor mistakes, factories are often built with older and newer machines that are incompatible with each other, high fragmentation of the manufacturing markets require good working relationships with other factories, and better maintenance of machines drive profits because of longer depreciation periods.

Finally, Taylor’s scientific management arguably failed for high-precision manufacturing – the knowledge required to produce these components is not procedural but in the machinists’ heads. My conjecture for why it failed is that labor got so cheap that we did not invest enough in procedural manufacturing advances.

A future research question would explore whether reshoring advanced manufacturing with lower experience curve effects has lower payoffs given that the loss in tacit knowledge is less severe. However, my intuition is that reshoring the production of certain raw materials and rare earth minerals does have strategic payoffs.

Outsourcing delays the destruction of manufacturing

In a world where US companies would not have outsourced manufacturing in tech-heavy industries to Asia, I suspect we would have seen more technological innovation for manufacturing. Instead of reducing prices by hiring cheap labor in Asia, American manufacturing companies would have been forced to develop best practices, find ways to create more automation processes than previously possible, and engage in freer and more transfer of knowledge. If American labor costs are much higher, they can only win on prices if the labor productivity is higher.

To illustrate the argument, we can look to Japan or Germany – two major developed economies that found ways to build an economy based on manufacturing excellence. While both countries are protectionist, they made manufacturing in Western countries feasible by using social and technological inventions such as Germany’s apprenticeship program or Japan’s Lean Manufacturing System.

If manufacturing would have been more attended to by software engineers in Silicon Valley, there would have been more and earlier software automation. However, Silicon Valley is growing up and many software engineers are realizing that building the next SaaS company is unlikely to be important or profitable, but bringing back manufacturing and building hardtech is. In a better world, manufacturing startups like Hadrian could have existed decades ago.

Instead, Western companies focused on cutting costs as much as possible in the short-term without investing in technological innovation. What we got is critical manufacturing outside of the Western sphere of influence where China can lock up IP easily. A telling example is the Arm China IP Theft.

If companies agree to cut costs by outsourcing manufacturing from America to Asia once, they will do it again – once the labor costs in the original country are too high. I think this is one cause for a phenomenon which Dani Rodrik called “premature deindustrialisation,” where deindustrialisation in developing economies happens earlier than economically optimal for the country.

An example for premature deindustrialisation would be redirecting outsourcing from China to Vietnam or Bangladesh, as Chinese labor became more than 8x more expensive than the 2000 price level.

Traditional Western interventions are counterproductive

Historically, keeping manufacturing in one location led to the creation of interest groups that tend to focus on achieving a local maxima of success. Labor unions exercised power through social instruments such as codetermination, strikes, or protectionism. For instance, labor unions often limit automation potential or try to maximize the number of jobs filled by local workers, over foreign workers with more specialized knowledge that could help with knowledge transfer.

In 2022, the CHIPS Act was launched to revive semiconductor manufacturing in the US. Under the CHIPS Act, TSMC decided to construct a semiconductor factory in Phoenix, AZ. The company planned to bring in Taiwanese workers to assist in setting up the complex and costly machinery, but labor unions attempted to block the move, citing concerns over foreign workers undercutting domestic wages. They contended that Intel workers in the US possessed sufficient tacit knowledge. TSMC and labor unions reached a high-level agreement eventually, but TSMC had to postpone the launch due to a shortage of skilled workers.

A social motivation for labor unions exercising their power is ideology. Preserving the local maxima of labor-intensive manufacturing in a country often defaults to anti-tech sentiments. This creates cultural forces and memes that are harmful for keeping price-competitive manufacturing in the country in the long-term.

Germany is emblematic of these developments. Consider the EU’s degrowth ideology and a tendency towards natural fallacies on “organically” produced products and anti-nuclear sentiment.

As soon as a manufacturing-heavy economy stops investing in the automation of manufacturing, incumbents and conglomerates tend to build strong competitive advantages over more dynamic, but smaller firms.

Take Airbus versus Boeing as an example. Boeing tried to position their core competency as “an assembler” of aircraft components, rather than a producer of critical core components. However, Boeing’s engineers stated that engineering knowledge on the components is required to successfully assemble planes. An early example of outsourcing destroying tacit manufacturing knowledge in the Western world.

Automation is the only way to preserves tacit knowledge

If we accept the premise that manufacturing knowledge is crucial for Western Dynamism, we need to find ways to manufacture price-competitive in the US without losing tacit knowledge. If we also accept the premise that traditional manufacturing interventions are counterproductive, we face a need for new innovation to solve the critical issue of reviving Western Manufacturing.

The problem that is being ignored is the one all companies like Hadrian face: they are working against the ticking time bomb of mass retirement of a generation of machinists whose latent knowledge and processes will retire with them. Governments can capture the lost jobs with subsidies and protectionism but startups must capture the lost knowledge with technology.

Hadrian uses technology as an opportunity to lower the burden of the talent shortage by automating as many tasks as possible and making the skill acquisition for the remaining tasks as simple as possible.

In order to achieve the necessary levels of efficiency, Hadrian pairs a software engineer from an inhouse team with a machinist to develop software to automate the high-precision manufacturing process as much as possible. Chris Power, Founder of Hadrian, estimates that Hadrian’s internal tooling can automate around 60 to 80% of tasks. For the remaining tasks, Hadrian builds process-driven software to enable rapid training within 30 to 90 days for every hire – even ones with no prior manufacturing experience.

Manufacturing is pretty fast in adopting innovation

Technology innovation in manufacturing needs to be accompanied by adequate social innovation. For instance, automation fears among blue-collar labor can be addressed by changing their incentive structure.

For instance, Hadrian issues equity to all manufacturing workers to ensure that machinists benefit from sharing their knowledge. Moreover, some machinists report that their jobs become more interesting after the most repetitive components are automated away.

The rapid iteration in the manufacturing industry to enhance productivity is not new. Manufacturing productivity increases historically happened faster than innovation in a broader economic context.

For illustration, consider the invention of the steam engine or “scientific management” in manufacturing. Both innovations replaced old processes and had an immediate impact on manufacturing productivity, lowering costs. Furthermore, manufacturing has historically faced low burdens of adoption, such as regulation, leading to more rapid adoption as a result.

Moreover, manufacturing advances can happen without major technological breakthroughs, while “Deep Tech” needs actual technological progress. In a world where technological progress is scarce, innovation happens through process- and business model-innovation. Lean Manufacturing was developed from the 1940s onwards and got its name in the 1980s.

The fact that startups can feasibly change incentive structures, combined with the industry’s historical quick adaptation to technological changes, makes me optimistic about the feasibility of reviving American manufacturing.

Thanks to Zi C. (Sam) Huang for extensive collaboration and editing.

This post was originally published on my website, subscribe here.

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“The American way is to make money by creating wealth, not by suing people.” –Paul Graham

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In my day-to-day life as an investor, I meet many (highly) gifted and talented individuals and many are curious about this part of my life as well. As a researcher, I have done some light research on gifted education and talent search.

Taking university courses early was one of the best decisions I made. I think there are many more students out there that would benefit from it, but there are constraints that hinder it. In writing this, I hope my experience can illuminate a path for others hoping to take university courses early.

Please have a very low bar to reaching out to me at janniklschilling (at) gmail.com. I would be particularly interested in hearing from you, if your experience was fundamentally different or you have thoughts on gifted education in other regions or with different institutions.

What happened at age thirteen?

I learned how to code when I was around nine years old. I got into it because I was curious about computers and had done some basic hardware experiments with an Arduino. So, I asked my dad to buy me a book to learn how to code. He got me an introductory book to learn Python.

Over the next two years, I became decent at doing small-ish projects in Python. I learned more programming languages for other applications, like Java for some OOP.

Over time, I came across much more interesting problems. But I realized they were beyond my mathematical ability at the time. So, I started learning advanced math when I was around 12 years old. I think I completed the entire high school math curriculum around six months later.

At this time, I was not aware of the possibility yet that I could take advanced math courses at a local university, the University of Hamburg. One has to go through a somewhat lengthy process, so instead, I watched online lectures on topics that I was interested in.

I had also skipped a grade when I was around that age. In hindsight, this was a crucial experience for me as I finally had an opportunity to prove to myself that I could learn very fast on my own, even outside of formal structures. I think I have always been an autodidact, so these things came fairly natural to me.

Why not earlier? In primary school, I had realized that I finished every task much faster than everyone around me, but I still lacked the meta-cognitive abilities to draw the right conclusion and start looking for the right things to learn online. At the time, I was quite reluctant to learn content that was broadly ahead of the age-appropriate content because I knew I would be even more bored three months or one year later.

However, I was doing some other fun math things with my dad. In second grade – I must have been around eight or nine years old –, I asked my parents to give me a graphical calculator (the Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus C Silver Edition) for my birthday. We wrote some programs on it to calculate the volume of various bodies in our house. For that, we derived the formulas together and afterwards confirmed that they were correct in a formula collection (“The Bronstein Handbook of Mathematics”). Through that, I saw lots of other formulas and got interested in other areas of Maths. For instance, when I was in third grade, I found the “TAN” button on my calculator and asked my dad to explain what that was.

Why not later? I was impatient and had the feeling that I lacked something to take my studies to the next level. I was also quite bored with normal courses in my school. And I knew that I could do much more demanding studies.

Would there be benefits from starting later? Not really. Maybe I would have spent more time socializing with students, but I don’t really feel as if I was missing out.

In hindsight, the biggest benefit of taking university courses so early was not what I learnt itself, but the information it provided me about myself. Most people who learn about my past are surprised that I did not end up as an academic. And I think that is reasonable, as becoming an academic clearly seems to be the default path for most child prodigies. When I was 14, I worked with a research group on Star Formation and Galaxy Simulations. While the work was certainly intellectually interesting, I realized pretty fast that I was not the type for the kind of meticulous work on small projects within a highly specialized area that might never lead to new discoveries. Additionally, the kind of theoretical physics I was most interested in (a subset of General Relativity Theory) was not taught or researched at the University, partly because there is not that much research interest these days.

How did I decide early studies was for me?

I just knew it was right for me. It is not that I was not worried about this decision, but I knew this was basically my only chance to make the next five years in school bearable.

There is a distinct memory that I can point to about when it became clear to me that I could not just sit in school and nod-along with the curriculum. Right after I skipped a grade, I was really into math and wanted to learn more. So I asked my teacher about the things I was interested in – how to solve easy integrals, etc. – and they said that I should not be interested in these questions because I would be bored four years later. That day, I started watching lots of explanatory math videos.

What were my other options and why did I eliminate them?

Looking back, here are some of the options I considered and my thinking about them.

Why do most people decide not to do early studies?

For a suitable student, someone with the ability and aptitude, there are three common reasons for why students do not end up taking university courses early:

1. Not knowing about early studies,

2. Administrative and logistical constraints,

3. Permission constraints and social dynamics (parents, teachers, peers).

The biggest constraint seems to be the first – that too few people know about this. If you know someone who would benefit from knowing about early studies, please feel free to share my email and/or this blog. Just one more teacher, parent, or student who counterfactually knows and can experience the same enrichment I did makes this post worth it.

The second and third constraints seem rarer to me, but are more annoying. In the following, I will share what the application process looked like and some general ideas on how to navigate the school system.

When I applied for early studies in 2018, the process I took looked something like this (stylised for brevity):

1. Get my parent’s approval,

2. Get my headmaster’s written approval and recommendation,

3. Get a teacher to write a recommendation letter,

4. Submit an online application,

5. Get an appointment with a student advisor for an interview. She asked me questions around physics, how I would handle the workload, what my motivations were etc. I suspect that my interview was particularly long because I was so young. For context: most students that end up doing early studies are around 17 years old.

6. Approval by the faculty and enrollment in courses.

I think the process itself is generally quite straightforward. Unfortunately, some high schools make it unnecessarily hard and I have heard from one case where the headmaster vetoed this. Building a good relationship with my headmaster through engagement with the school has been helpful for me. For most schools, there is no precedent and this process can feel quite tedious. 

For the interview, I think the best advice is having good grades, a clear plan for how to navigate the school system, and good subject understanding (someone got rejected from doing early studies in Philosophy because they had never read a Kant before).

Logistics

Most of my early studies experience was in 2018 and 2019. I attended University around 2-3 times a week to attend lectures and tutorials. I attended an information seminar in November 2017, applied in January 2018, and started studying in March 2018.

1. Transport: I took the train from my school to the City of Hamburg which takes around 1hr.

2. Safety: Germany is quite safe. I rarely felt in any kind of danger. I was mostly taking the same train rides every single time and soon knew what to avoid.

3. Parental involvement: My parents accompanied me to an information session in the beginning. They made sure that I knew the way and had all the things I needed in the beginning (enough money, my ID card, etc.), but overall they were willing to give me a lot of responsibility.

4. Failing classes: It does not seem to be super common to fail lots of classes when doing early studies based on my friends’ experiences (n=5).

5. Balancing high school and early studies: In order to do early studies, my school (including the headmaster and all my teachers) ultimately had to agree to me doing this. After I had the approval from my headmaster, it was much easier to convince my teachers. I was going to school regularly for around two days a week, where I just attended the normal lessons (although I took the 11th grade math lessons when I was in 7th grade). Because I was quite well read, I found school to be really low effort and spent hardly any time on homework each week. For the 3-ish days that I was missing, I had my friends send me the material and looked at what they did. For most subjects, this was sufficient as long as I got a great grade at the exams that I had to attend. Often, I had to do a project as make-up work and to substitute my oral participation. This took a few hours, but thankfully happened only twice a year. As I took advanced courses in the natural sciences, I never had to do any work for any natural science, cs, or math because I knew the material inside-out. With some of my teachers, I also had a gentleman’s agreement that I did not have to participate in their lessons (i.e., just sit in the back and do PSets), unless there was a hard problem that only I could solve.

As a note of caution, these arrangements only worked because I was still getting perfect grades in basically every subject. I would have gotten a lot of pushback if I would have started to get substantially worse grades.

How was the early studies experience different from that of regular university students?

I was a non-degree seeking student. That means that I was not eligible for discounted meals, any scholarships, or even most of the student discounts that regular students can use.

On the flipside, one could fail exams as often as needed (whereas regular students get exmatriculated after a failed third attempt for any given one exam) and could retake exams as a regular student, if one wishes to do so. Obviously, one does not have to take them again if one is satisfied with the results.

Considering the social aspects, there was clearly a difference in interests and life stage between me and most of the other students. However, I think this is more a feature of the German university sorting system and this would not have been substantially different five years later. I socialized with a very limited set of students who were mostly academically successful. Personally, I did not feel that I was missing out on a lot, but I never had a strong desire for parties or similar activities.

In terms of soft skills, I learned a fair amount – like giving academic presentations, some mild teaching, and research – but I suspect I would have learned marginally more as a regular student. I could not be a paid TA/RA because of child labor protection regulation, for instance.

What were the constraints for making this much more effective?

If your benchmark for this is another gifted student in Germany, my school experience was superb. If your benchmark is the best case for child prodigies that is sometimes achieved in other countries, there are lots of low-hanging fruits to make early studies much more effective. If you face any of these constraints, please let me know and I might be able to help.

1. Financial constraints: As a child, you have limited pocket money that is most likely not sufficient for self-funding this. You kind of need your parents to pay for arising expenses. Textbooks are quite expensive –  I think my parents spend around $1k for various textbooks. Because I was a non degree-seeking student, I was not eligible for any scholarships.

2. Lack of tacit knowledge: For early studies students, there are more obstacles that regular students do not face. There is also much less explicit support and I had to figure out most things on my own. I would have benefited a lot from knowing someone with a lot of tacit knowledge. This knowledge is mainly tacit because there are so few people that are confronted with these problems.

3. Specific problems that arise here: How much prerequisite knowledge should you know before starting studies? How do you acquire knowledge when you are missing lots of the regular university lectures? How can you convince professors to make exceptions for you because of your constraints? – i.e., not turning up to hand in PSets but sending them via email, etc.

4. Lack of a community of similarly-minded people: Although I participated in most (?) of the gifted education offerings in Germany, I don’t think I met anyone who had similar levels of talent to me until I was around 17 or 18 years old and went to a fellowship program in the United States. There was a lack of connection between other students that did early studies and most were much older and less talented – because they used the program to test what they would study six months later and not because they were deeply curious and prodigious. In turn, transfer of tacit knowledge, strategizing on how to deal with administrative and bureaucratic constraints, etc. are limited and concentrated on a grade 12 student testing for fit instead of a 13 year old pushing their limits.

Next steps

In closing, I want to emphasize how important and trajectory-changing early studies can be. They were for me. They not only showed me how beautiful theoretical physics is and taught me an awful lot of math. But early studies also helped me figure out that I don’t want to become a theoretical physicist and helped me prove my academic potential to myself.

Acknowledging all of the barriers outlines earlier, and that I was an anomaly, here are some things that I would like to do in the future:

First, I would love to help more young students figure out how they can push their aptitudes and aspirations – both in Germany and elsewhere. If there is anything I could be helpful with, please reach out to me. I know many students that were prodigious and have advice and guidance on how to navigate different education systems and self-study different subjects. I also know some funding opportunities and organizations that support gifted children.

Second, I think it would be valuable to compile more resources on what areas of science prodigies can look at, where they can find great textbooks and lectures, how they can navigate the university system in different countries, etc. This piece is hopefully the first step in this.

Third, I would like to learn more from the experiences of others and build support systems for them – especially those in contexts like Germany where the systems are idiosyncratic. If you’re interested in this too, please reach out.

Thanks to Zi C. (Sam) Huang for helpful contributions and editing.

This post was originally published on my website, subscribe here.

Growing up in Germany, I dismissed Silicon Valley when I was around age 14. Having never left Europe, I found its allure to many smart people quite puzzling. The aesthetics seemed off, the discourse overly simplistic, and the underlying ideology a bit strange. I was sceptical of Silicon Valley’s reputation for agglomerating exceptional talent.

Around the same time, I was extensively searching for exceptional peers within Germany. The results were disappointing, in part because I confined my search to talent clusters that seemed legible to me then. This limitation hindered my ability to find the kind of talent I was looking for.

I remember taking the notion seriously that Silicon Valley was a key driver of progress. However, I considered the unique dynamics surrounding it to be mere coincidences, rather than essential elements to its success.

It turns out that they are not coincidences and I was wrong. In fact, I believe that this was one of my substantial intellectual mistakes so far, as I risked not being embedded in what I now view as the world’s best place for weird people interested in starting technology companies. Many of my talented friends today live in the Bay Area.

What did I miss? It now seems true that the most important peer groups of their time often appear strange in their own unique ways to outsiders. Because of that fact, there’s immense power in a group of talented individuals sharing a set of ideas, norms, and values that seems self-evident internally but weird externally. I think that very notion is quite hard for most Germans to understand, until they have experienced it.

This matters, as Germany does not naturally guide its talented towards important peer groups.

I hope that this blog is helpful for some young, talented people in Germany to understand the dynamics they are embedded within, and hopefully helps them notice the real potential of their talents.

Reading about these ideas never felt sufficient, so I thought about ways to help young talent in Germany get started on a journey similar to mine. I am hosting a get together in Germany to discuss these ideas and share experiences. If you are reading this and want to join, please send me a short email at janniklschilling@gmail.com.

Thanks to Arnaud Schenk and Matt Clifford for insightful conversations and edits.