This slide should keep EU policy-makers up at night.

Here's what the data says, and how to fix it:

Dealroom just dropped a great report on this, claiming:

→ Both produce ~900 AI startups/year. But the US converts 4.8% to unicorns vs Europe at 1.5%. Same input but with a 3x worse output.

→ At late stage it's 12x worse: $141B in the US vs $12B in Europe. 58% of that European capital comes from American investors.

→ Europe has 2x more LLM users than the US, 325K AI talent (same as the US), and 75% of AI funding going to vertical apps. The raw materials are all there but the system is (largely) broken.

But the report focuses on what's wrong.

Here's what I think needs to happen.

Sweden (10M people, 20+ unicorns, top 3 globally in VC as % of GDP) already runs parts of this flywheel well. Europe needs to copy and add to it:

1/ Culture first: normalize risk, celebrate builders, stop stigmatizing failure. Let founder exits mint the next generation of angels and mentors. Sweden's pay-it-forward loop is real. Most of Europe doesn't have one.

2/ Fix the policy stack: ESOPs that actually work so employees join startups over corporates. EU-Inc as a single corporate wrapper across all hubs including UK and Switzerland. One regulatory rulebook and not 10 overlapping frameworks.

3/ Make equity ownership frictionless: Sweden's tax-free investment accounts let citizens buy stocks with zero capital gains paperwork. 20% of households own equity directly. In Southern Europe it's under 5% and the fix is removing every barrier between citizens and ownership, or at least encouraging some level of exposure (UK does this well too).

4/ Unlock patient domestic capital: move European pension fund allocation from 0.12% to 3% and that's €100B overnight. Grow local VC so startups stop depending on American tourist capital (sometimes, not always!) that optimizes for US fund cycles, not European ecosystems.

5/ Build Europe's Nasdaq: a unified pan-European tech exchange with lower listing thresholds ($100-300M, not $1B+), mandated market makers, and retail flow powered by those tax-free accounts. Right now founders are stuck between Series B and a premature exit. Give them a bridge.

6/ Let the loop close: IPOs create retail wealth. Citizens who own equity get culturally invested. Founder liquidity recycles into angel checks. Talent starts flowing back from the US.

Europe doesn't need more incubators, it needs belief / culture, liquidity, and better policy, probably in that order to get that flywheel moving.

What would you add to it?