You can't legislate serendipity

A decade and change ago, I used to tell a story about three startups I was involved with, as a way of explaining why the Bay Area startup ecosystem was special. It went like this:

I founded my first startup in Edinburgh, Scotland. Everyone told me to get a real job and that it would never work. There were no investors.

The second startup I was involved with was founded in Austin. Everyone was super-enthusiastic, but the investors didn’t understand how technology was built, and had mismatched expectations about how their money would be spent.

The third was founded in San Francisco. Everyone was super-enthusiastic and the investors provided a ton of value because they knew the industry better than we did.

It’s Goldilocks and the Three Bears, of course: the San Francisco porridge was just right. But it’s also true — or, at least, it was at the time. Since I founded that first startup in 2004, Edinburgh has developed a small startup scene. The Austin tech scene is significantly more sophisticated than it was. San Francisco, though, is still going strong, and the Bay Area ecosystem continues to dominate the tech industry.

But should it?

This year, the answer is not obviously yes. Major tech companies have made efforts to curry favor with the second Trump administration. Elon Musk held an official government position — and threw a Hitler salute on Inauguration Day — while figures like Larry Ellison have openly celebrated increasingly authoritarian governance models. AI vendors have positioned their services to be surveillance machines at their heart, ingesting huge amounts of sensitive data and training their products on copyrighted work without permission or compensation. 

Silicon Valley’s embrace of authoritarianism is concerning, but for governments and communities outside America's borders, the risk goes beyond ideology: using American software means submitting to American legal jurisdiction. Legislation like the CLOUD Act allows data processed by US companies to be accessed by US law enforcement, even if it is gathered in countries with strong privacy rules. Using American software means importing American values and subjecting yourself to American rules.

It’s no wonder, then, that jurisdictions like the EU have accelerated their efforts to create alternatives. If Silicon Valley’s values are becoming misaligned with democratic societies, it makes sense for those societies to look for alternatives.

The EuroStack might be the most prominent: a 300 Billion Euro plan for instigating a new European technology ecosystem that reduces dependence on US providers while promoting core values like privacy and transparency. The idea is that the initiative will establish standards, invest in technologies that meet those standards, and then encourage EU governments to default to buying those products.

Eurosky, meanwhile, is an effort to create a European alternative to social media, largely on top of Bluesky’s AT Protocol stack. It’s a potential candidate for funding by the EuroStack initiative, although it’s already got support from a range of non-profits. Interestingly, some of those are actually based in the US — most notably New_ Public and Free Our Feeds. That’s because establishing data sovereignty in one jurisdiction benefits users everywhere: the standards, software, and models for collaboration are portable. If European users have genuine alternatives to US platforms, it creates competitive pressure that could improve privacy protections globally; more concretely, open protocols developed under European privacy standards become tools that users anywhere can deploy.

These efforts strike me as being fundamentally top-down. The EuroStack seeks to create a framework of interoperability and support that startups and projects need to compete to be supported by. Eurosky dictates the protocols and methods through which a social media alternative can be built.

Power in tech comes from two things at once: infrastructure and community. Europe is trying to rebuild the first, but it won’t succeed without the second. And I’m not seeing a ton of that in any of these new initiatives.

In San Francisco, I once had coffee with a founder I’d only recently connected with online. By the afternoon, they’d pointed me in the direction of an expert advisor and an angel investor and talked me through their own failed company so I could learn from it. I was speaking with both of those new contacts within a day or two. That kind of generosity is the Valley’s real competitive advantage.

Silicon Valley works because it’s a decentralized ecosystem: participants in the network receive backing from funds that are often powered by founders of previous ventures or other figures from successful tech companies. When they’re successful, they then pay it forward. The biggest defining feature of my own interactions there is that everyone is happy to meet and share their thoughts, advice, and connections. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll find funding, but you’ll certainly find a community of support.

Venture capitalist Brad Feld, studying how Boulder, Colorado built a thriving startup community despite being far from Silicon Valley, identified what he calls the Boulder Thesis: entrepreneurs must lead the community (not government or universities), leaders must commit long-term, the community must be radically inclusive, and there must be continual engagement. At its heart is the idea of offering help without defining what you’ll get in return: once again, a culture of paying it forward.

That's the key. The real opportunity for Europe isn’t just to build an alternative tech stack: it’s to build an alternative tech culture.

It’s far easier to establish a culture at the beginning of something than trying to graft it on to an existing process or community. There are existing tech communities in Europe, of course: lots of open tech in Berlin, e-commerce in Amsterdam, and so on. But these are archipelagos that, while producing interesting projects and successful companies, haven’t yet coalesced into an integrated ecosystem with Silicon Valley’s density and network effects.

But culture is not the same as capital, and Europe keeps trying to buy with money and regulatory frameworks what Silicon Valley built with relationships. You can mandate standards, fund research programs, or require governments to prefer domestic vendors. What you can’t do is legislate serendipity: the hallway conversations, the shared failures, the informal mentorship networks, the introductions made because someone believes in someone else’s wild idea. That’s the real infrastructure of an ecosystem, and it’s still largely missing.

That's not to say EuroStack's approach is wrong: it’s just missing a crucial piece. The funding and procurement frameworks will provide vital support for the right projects. But they’re means, not ends. Without relational infrastructure, they’re like building highways before anyone owns a car.

So how do you establish that infrastructure? I look to what Corey Ford calls intentional serendipity: cultivating a culture of curiosity, embracing uncertainty, acting on unexpected opportunities, failing fast, and understanding that the path to success is fundamentally nonlinear. 

For Europe, intentional serendipity would mean cultivating spaces where openness, privacy, and democratic governance aren’t just compliance requirements but shared values. A place where researchers, policymakers, and startup founders can be in the same room without hierarchy; where civic technologists and commercial technologists cross-pollinate; where people from different nations can build shared norms; where founders are backed for their mindsets, values, and capabilities rather than specific projects. Silicon Valley has social gravity; Europe needs social cohesion. That starts with intentionally connecting the people who want to build a different kind of internet.

It also means not just forgiving failure but understanding that it’s part of the process. Silicon Valley’s culture of rapid iteration emerged because people could take risks without being exiled if things didn’t work out; their peers knew that failure was information. Europe’s emerging ecosystem, burdened by a more risk-averse, less failure-friendly culture, will need to intentionally build that same muscle of iteration. The goal isn’t to mimic the Valley, but to create an environment that encourages principled risk-taking, recognizing that failure is a core part of learning. This means creating a safe-to-fail environment where founders are encouraged to share their setbacks as an essential part of learning and community-building.

To do so, it needs to build those spaces and invest in those communities. Yes, procurement and funding scenarios are important, but they’re scaffolding that help a cultivated community grow in the right direction. What’s most important is the relational infrastructure: non-hierarchical hubs and opportunities for informal mentorship that let relationships form, building trust and allowing ideas to spread at speed. All of these spaces need to be built and supported — ideally in a way that’s accessible to everyone, rather than being the kinds of closed-off members-only spaces that dominate ecosystems like London. These accessible third places form the sort of community infrastructure that government is uniquely positioned to provide.

It’s not all about community. In a world where tech is strongly linked with authoritarianism, the values frameworks those European projects are talking about are vital. In this era of history, we need those values to succeed. My point is not that we should copy the Silicon Valley playbook; it’s that those values and frameworks won’t succeed without the community culture work.

Europe can and should cultivate an ethos of intentional serendipity, but with its own values and identity, supported by the kinds of frameworks, procurement policies, and standards it’s proposing. Instead of importing Silicon Valley’s assumptions, it can build an ecosystem that reflects its political and cultural commitments: openness, privacy, pluralism, and democratic accountability. That would be a fourth kind of story: not Edinburgh’s discouragement, or Austin’s enthusiasm without alignment, or San Francisco’s density of expertise, but something genuinely new. And that, I think, is the one the world needs next.