Europe Built the Digital World. Then It Let Others Run It.

Salutations, Olio aficionados! 👋

Welcome to the 230th edition of Weekly Olio. We’re thrilled to introduce a fresh new twist to your Sundays: Publisher Parmesan, our hand-picked, thoughtfully crafted edition designed to spark inspiration and insights for the week ahead.

It’s the perfect way to unwind, recharge, and prepare for the week with something truly worth savoring.

If you’re new here and you’re looking for more long-form, crispy writing, click the link to subscribe under this GIF 👇

You're shipping. You're iterating. You're in the weeds managing your team.

But the customers aren't pulling yet, are they?

This playbook shows what actually creates pull - and why building faster isn't it.

Here’s a deceptively simple way to measure who really shapes the digital world: where people spend their time online.

Look at the list of the 20 most visited websites globally. With two exceptions, Russia’s Yandex and South Korea’s Naver, nearly every name on that list is American. Google. YouTube. Meta’s apps. Amazon. TikTok, which may be Chinese-owned, but operates largely through US-facing infrastructure.

Now notice what’s missing. Not a single European consumer tech company.

That absence is striking, because Europe is not some marginal player. You probably rely every day on products built by American or Asian companies. You search on Google. Navigate with Maps. Message on WhatsApp. Scroll Instagram. Track a package from Amazon. Even your phone’s operating system is likely American.

You are living inside a digital ecosystem designed almost entirely outside Europe. And yet, it was not always this way.

Long before Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, Europe led global technology.

Nokia defined mobile phones. Siemens and Ericsson built communications infrastructure. The intellectual foundations of modern computing came from Europeans like Alan Turing, Konrad Zuse, and Tim Berners-Lee.

Europe helped invent the digital age. But when it came time to commercialize it at scale, Europe stepped aside.

On paper, Europe looks like a tech powerhouse waiting to happen.

It has 27 countries, roughly 450 million people, and some of the world’s best universities. Oxford. Cambridge. ETH Zurich. Sorbonne. TU Munich. It spends heavily on research and development, over €380 billion annually. It hosts global science projects like CERN, which literally gave us the World Wide Web.

Its quality of life is high. Healthcare is universal. Infrastructure works. Cities are livable. Democratic institutions are stable. Data privacy standards are the strictest in the world.

If you were designing the ideal environment for innovation, Europe would check almost every box. Yet in consumer tech, it is nearly invisible.

Yes, Europe has successful tech companies.

Spotify changed how the world listens to music. SAP powers global enterprise systems. ASML builds the machines that make advanced chips possible. Without ASML, there is no Apple Silicon, no Nvidia AI boom, no modern data center. But here’s the catch.

Spotify is barely profitable and nowhere near the scale of US tech giants. SAP and ASML are B2B. Most consumers have never interacted with them directly. They are essential, but invisible. Europe builds the plumbing. America builds the platforms.

Compare market value. Seven US tech companies now command a combined market capitalization of roughly $13 trillion. Europe’s top tech firms together barely reach $2.2 trillion. That is less than 17 percent of the US figure.

More astonishingly, those seven American companies are worth roughly as much as the combined GDP of Germany, the UK, France, and Italy.

This is not just a business gap. It is a power gap. And it becomes even more uncomfortable when you look east.

Japan gave the world Sony, Nintendo, Panasonic. South Korea built Samsung and LG. China, in just a few decades, produced Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei, BYD, and ByteDance.

These are not niche players. They are globally dominant consumer-facing brands. Against that backdrop, Europe’s absence becomes glaring. Which raises the uncomfortable question: what went wrong?

Most CX leaders agree AI is the future — fewer agree on what actually changes next.

This guide distills six concrete predictions shaping customer experience in 2026, from agentic AI and AI operations to real-time CX experimentation.

Built for enterprise teams navigating scale, complexity, and accountability — not hype.

Read the Full Guide

One answer is structural.

The European Union is a political and economic union, but it is not a single market in practice. Startups must navigate 27 regulatory regimes, 24 official languages, and a maze of tax, labor, and data laws. In the US, a startup can scale nationally under one legal framework. In Europe, expansion often feels like crossing borders every step of the way.

The early history of Uber in Europe is instructive. Launched in Paris in 2011, it was quickly blocked or restricted across multiple countries. Courts ruled differently. Taxi unions revolted. Cities burned cars. Eventually, the European Court of Justice allowed national bans. For tech companies that rely on rapid scale, this kind of fragmentation is lethal.

There’s a popular saying: America innovates, Europe regulates. That’s unfair, but not entirely wrong.

Europe deserves credit for setting global standards. The GDPR reshaped data privacy worldwide. The EU forced Apple to adopt USB-C. It fined Meta billions for data violations. This is the so-called Brussels Effect: European regulations become global defaults because it’s easier for companies to comply everywhere than fragment their products.

But regulation has a cost. Compliance is expensive. Large incumbents can absorb it. Small startups cannot. The result is an environment where caution dominates and ambition shrinks.

Now add money to the equation.

European venture capital is far more conservative than its US counterpart. Over the last decade, US VC investment averaged about 0.7 percent of GDP. Europe managed roughly 0.2 percent.

American and Canadian startups raised nearly three times more capital than the entire EU in 2024. As companies mature, the funding gap widens further. In Silicon Valley, failure is a credential. In Europe, it’s often a stigma.

The result is predictable. European startups gravitate toward safer sectors like enterprise software, fintech, and health tech. High-risk, consumer-facing moonshots struggle to get backing.

Talent follows opportunity.

Over the past decade, the share of EU science graduates staying abroad rose dramatically. Many of Europe’s best founders simply leave. Some of the most successful “American” tech companies were started by Europeans who crossed the Atlantic.

When funding, scale, and cultural permission to fail all live elsewhere, the migration is rational.

Europe seems to have accepted a hard truth. If it cannot dominate platforms, it can dominate rules.

The European Chips Act aims to rebuild semiconductor capacity. The Digital Markets Act targets gatekeepers. The AI Act sets the world’s first comprehensive framework for artificial intelligence governance.

These are serious interventions. They shape how global companies operate. But here’s the strategic question. Is regulating the future enough if you’re not building it?

Europe has reinvented itself before. It led the industrial revolution. Rebuilt after war. Defined modern welfare states. But the digital age rewards speed, scale, and risk tolerance. Traits Europe has historically treated with suspicion.

Perhaps Europe does not need its own Google or Meta. Perhaps its role is to civilize technology, not dominate it. Or perhaps that is just a comforting story we tell ourselves when we miss a wave.

The world Europe helped invent is now being run by others. The question is whether writing the rules will be enough, or whether Europe will once again decide it wants to build the future, not just referee it.

That decision, more than any regulation, will determine whether Europe remains a digital bystander or reclaims a seat at the table.

Interested in learning more about Asia? Check out our previous coverage here:

When the calendar is full, fast, clear comms matter. Wispr Flow lets founders dictate high-quality investor notes, hiring messages, and daily rundowns and get paste-ready writing instantly. It keeps your voice and the nuance you rely on for strategic messages while removing filler and cleaning punctuation. Save repeated snippets to scale consistent leadership communications. Works across Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Try Wispr Flow for founders.

Try Wispr Flow

That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed this edition, we’d really appreciate if you shared it with a friend, family member or colleague.

We’ll be back in your inbox 2 PM IST next Sunday. Till then, have a productive week!

Peeyush and Mohit

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.