Bjorn Tremmerie

Bjorn Tremmerie's central argument, repeated across both appearances, is that Europe already has the raw material for venture success and the real deficit is one of capital allocation and confidence rather than talent. At the European Investment Fund he has spent over two decades building the European VC market as a fund-of-funds investor rather than a direct backer of startups ², and from that vantage point he insists the missing ingredient was never brains. "We hebben altijd de brains gehad. Ja, we hadden misschien 25 jaar geleden niet genoeg de rolmodellen," he says, framing the last generation's problem as a lack of visible founders who proved the path was viable ². He points to the fact that "Ondernemer worden in technologie was aanzien als een kamikaziemissie" in an earlier era, a perception he argues is now broken by a cohort of successful European tech founders in every country ².

That confidence shows up as a genuine growth bet: Tremmerie is explicit that he expects Europe's ecosystem to grow faster than the US, "not talking about the size absolute in comparison with the US" but about rate of growth ¹. He backs this with a striking reframing of how people count success, comparing it to an Olympic medal table where "if you were to put the European flag on there, Europe would actually have the most medals" ¹, and with a hard statistic that "one euro out of four invested globally in the early stages is landing in Europe" ¹. He is also willing to cite specific bright spots that complicate the usual US-centric narrative, noting UiPath from Romania as one of EIF's strongest exits and that "Estonia is punching way above its weights in terms of unicorns per capita," alongside his broader claim that Southern and Eastern Europe have shown the fastest growth in startup ecosystem value over the last decade or more ¹.

Where his tone turns sharp is on institutional capital, particularly European pension funds and insurers. He does not mince words: "I think they're not doing their duty," he says, asking pointedly "why are they still neglecting at scale the opportunity of investing in European venture as well" ¹. His diagnosis is that these allocators have done nothing wrong only in the narrow sense that they've done nothing at all, held back by backward-looking statistics and scar tissue from the dot-com era, and he argues the risk-free entry point they're waiting for will never arrive without them taking the leap ¹. He pairs this criticism with a concrete offer rather than just a complaint, saying EIF has the capacity to "build products, 500 to billion programs, that you can invest in a pool of European managers where you're going to get 15% net IR as an institutional" ¹, effectively telling allocators the infrastructure exists and the excuse of insufficient deal flow no longer holds.

He is equally clear-eyed about the scale gap that still separates Europe from the US, particularly at the top end of fund size. "The US has 100 plus funds with a size of more than 1 billion in Euro. In Europe we have less than 10," he says, and connects this directly to control: without billion-euro European funds, European champions end up dependent on non-European capital and Europe loses board seats needed to steer its own companies ¹. This is where he locates Europe's real weak point in the funding lifecycle: not at the early stage, where the one-in-four-euro figure shows strength, but at growth-stage scale-up rounds over €100M, where only about 10% of global money lands in Europe, a gap he calls out as an area where Europe is "really not good enough" ¹.

Geopolitics runs through both conversations as an accelerant rather than a side note. In the Dutch-language interview he describes recent events plainly: "Wij hebben een wakeup call gekregen afgelopen weken," pointing to shifts around the new US administration as a trigger for European initiatives to fund and support its own tech ecosystem ². In the later podcast he generalizes this into a broader claim about mood: "Whatever is happening geopolitically is a big wakeup call and I think people are not asleep anymore" ¹. Tied to this is a genuine step change in ambition that he frames almost as a market signal in itself, citing new European fund managers whose explicit goal is backing "the first trillion dollar company coming out of Europe" ², and describing this not as fantasy but as a stated near-term target: "It's not a dream, it's an ambition that in five or 10 years time they will say here we are, where can we invest?" ¹. He also pushes back directly on chronic pessimism about European company size, noting that "Europa kan geen 100 miljard bedrijven creëren" is contradicted by Spotify's own market cap, concluding flatly "Dus we kunnen het wel" ².

On practical structure, Tremmerie is careful to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy uses of public money. Regional vehicles like the Baltic Innovation Fund work, in his account, by matching government money with EIF money to unlock initiatives a pan-European mandate couldn't otherwise focus on, but he draws a firm line against programs that edge toward subsidization because that distorts the market ¹. He extends this into a broader warning about fragmentation: tying unlocked national money strictly to domestic investment makes funds uninvestable, and in his view Europe cannot be built if every country insists on "my country first" under a European label, since capital has to flow across borders to work ¹. On governance, he offers a somewhat defensive but pointed observation about EIF's own model, arguing that because fund investment decisions naturally take 9 to 18 months even for private LPs, the slower pace of a public institution doesn't actually cost competitiveness the way it would in direct startup investing ¹.

Finally, he applies a consistent, low-drama philosophy to risk and founder decisions. On failure he is unsentimental: "Failure is not bad if it's by trying to do something new" ¹. On the pressure many founders feel to reincorporate in the US, he counsels resistance where possible, arguing that expanding into the US market does not require moving incorporation and headquarters to a Delaware Inc., while conceding it's understandable if that's genuinely the only path to funding ¹. Taken together, his positions form a coherent worldview: Europe already produces the talent and the early-stage capital, the shortfall is concentrated at growth-stage scale and among sidelined institutional allocators, and the current geopolitical moment together with a new generation of visible founders and ambitious fund managers gives Europe a real, near-term shot at closing that gap on its own terms.