Passing Thoughts on Leaving Germany

Or why many ambitious people have to leave their home country to pursue their ambitions elsewhere.

I have lived in Germany for most of my life and thought about leaving for a long time. The day has finally come, today is my first day living in the United States. I could not be more excited to begin this new chapter and I feel grateful for everyone who supported me along the way.¹

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.

1. While it's impossible to thank everyone who has supported me on this journey, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my parents, my friends in Germany and the US, Arnaud, and Bridget. Your support and encouragement have been invaluable. To all those unnamed but equally important individuals who have played a part in my journey: your contributions are deeply appreciated and not forgotten.

2. There would be value in a more exhaustive description of the problems that Germany faces today, but that would be a much bigger project than what could ever be done in a blog post like this.

3. To only name a few aspects of Germany that I like: The German language lends itself particularly well to deep thought and poetry; Germany has produced some of the world’s best philosophers, poets, and producers of industrial goods.

4. Taken from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law.

5. Obviously, there are also startups in NYC and I know a handful of artists in the Bay Area, though that seems to be a surprisingly rare sight given the out-of-control rents. The argument is that there are dominant ways of expressing ambitions in these places that don’t exist elsewhere.

6. Again, it is wrong to think of the US as an oasis for ambitious people. That does not mean the US could not take more steps towards that ideal though, as it probably has a sufficiently large consumer market, existing and potentially new cities, and most importantly, ambitious (potential) founders willing to move to the US. How you achieve this in practice is a question to discuss another time.

7. At some point, stagnant politics will get in the way and substantially limit the establishment of great companies and personal fortunes, at which point things suddenly become interesting. Some observers argue that we live in such times.

8. The term social contract is meant in a very broad and loose sense, not in the Rousseauian sense.

9. Like usual, the edge cases are interesting to look at. Since Elon Musk started becoming a more political figure, it is obvious that he receives much more scrutiny and that many treat his businesses with suspicions that weren’t prevalent before.

10. That is because Germany has outlawed most ways for ambitious founders to pursue their ambitions outside of commercial enterprises.

11. It is hard to overstate how often ambitious people are confronted with phrases like “Be less ambitious!”, “You should think about work-life balance!”, “Why do you work so hard?”, ad nauseam. This social influence either succeeds and makes people less ambitious, or good people are exhausted by this exaltation and decide to leave.

12. This is to hint at the fact that Germany’s conception of power makes change much harder and might put Germany in a more dangerous position.

13. Power acquisition should be understood very loosely to include, for instance, successful startup founders.

14. But choosing to believe that individual power is bad and you should avoid power concentration at all costs has strong implications for how elites are selected and how they present themselves. The obvious exceptions to “limit too much concentration of wealth in one person” are elites of old wealth.

15. Although this claim may seem contradictory, it is grounded in the stability and lack of momentum of old wealth. It is far more challenging to control the power of someone with a rapidly growing $200bn fortune that has doubled in the last ten years, compared to a $5bn fortune that has been managed by the same families for generations. The latter is often split among an ever-growing number of family members who are too preoccupied with maintaining internal cohesion to become a truly powerful force in society.

16. Historically, Germany was subject to stronger forces than the Anglo-Saxon world in establishing its formalized and specialized professional classes. Unsurprisingly, there is an established political class today that resembles administrators much more than statesmen. German politics is still an endless quest for power, but that fact is somewhat hidden. Cf. Helmuth Plessner, Die Verspätete Nation (The Belated Nation).

17. It shall remain an open question whether this approach actually works and how such a system shall protect itself against potential tyrants.

18. A stronger version of this could be the following thesis. Modern Germany has followed the latter approach and has taken the project of outlawing ambitions much further than most other countries; modern Germany is built around limiting the maximum amount of (political) power that a single person can typically acquire. You can see this is practice by analyzing how hard it is in Germany to acquire what would be called just a modest fortune in Silicon Valley.

19. There are all sorts of interesting questions that would be interesting to discuss: How does Germany achieve this suppression of ambition at this scale?  How much of that was intentional versus emergent? And why has there been relatively little opposition despite strong incentives for ambitious people to attempt to change these rules?

20. You might want to read this interview with Mark Zuckerberg: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2024/08/21/mark-zuckerberg-and-daniel-ek-on-why-europe-should-embrace-open-source-ai.

21. Here are the basics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act.

22. I suspect that I will be thinking about these kinds of problems much more in the next few years and decades. These will not be the last words that I will put into writing on the stagnation and decline of Germany and Europe. If this is only the beginning of my wrestling with these kinds of questions, I suspect that there will be a lot more interesting questions and answers that need to be discussed.