On Talent and Topology

Europe Needs One Place

The world’s most important talent is Mercurian.

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.