“20 Years of ‘Taming Big Tech’ Was a Total Waste of Time” | Cristina Caffarra, EuroStack

Cristina: All of the mergers that Microsoft. ever did used to work for them. I did all of the transaction work for Amazon at the time. I worked for Apple. And I worked against Google and Facebook. So the entire generation, that we spent In the delusion that we were taming big tech, here's the news: was a total waste of time. This is the real issue and the place in which we abjectly failed. 280 billion a year of cloud revenues goes to the US. How about we keep some of it over here and we reinvest it?

Vit Horky: Cristina, thank you so much for joining today. we met earlier this year in Paris on the European Tech Sovereignty Summit organized by my partner Maxime Paradis. we met in the beautiful Grand Palais of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I believe, in Paris. And you have you you chaired a roundtable discussion about European tech sovereignty and Eurostack. And we're gonna talk about Eurostack later today. But I would like to get started by asking, how did you end up fighting the big tech for a living?

Cristina: So originally I'm an antitrust economist, So I've done this for 25 years, I've done all of the cases on digital that you can possibly think of All of the mergers that Microsoft. ever did used to work for them. I did all of the transaction work for Amazon at the time. I worked for Apple. And I worked against Google and Facebook. This is to say that I've been in the tent quite deeply on the antitrust and regulation side. I understand how these companies think. I have great respect for them. Then the profession kind of evolved and it became much more routine. And I started kind of s sort of questioning already around 2012 after the after the financial crisis, both intellectually and emotionally, what are we doing? We're doing? Is this useful? It's a very interesting and lucrative pastime, but what does it do? We were pursuing something ideologically attractive and even emotionally compelling, but the effect on the ground. Was just not there. Because this is in the nature of these antitrust cases. They take forever, then they're appealed forever, and in the 15 years in which that process unfolds, while the lawyers and the economists are getting rich. The complainants are getting smaller and nothing happens. Everything is in suspended animation. Each and every one of these companies was found to be in breach of some competition law. So we found them to be in breach. We introduced some sort of behavioral rule. This is how you should use knife and fork in Europe, but they don't care. They gave we gave them a fine. Which was in the billions, but that's the chocolate biscuit budget. And I remember when I was working again for Apple and Amazon, the mindset was we will manage the European Commission. European Commission, you know. If you've ever entered the room at the European Commission with a team of engineers from Apple or from Amazon, you know the meaning of asymmetric power. Okay?

Vit Horky: Mm.

Cristina: These companies have absolutely totally won, totally won the game with the European Commission. So the whole theater is ultimately performative. These companies are very capable, very well endowed, and they know how to manage a regulator. So the entire generation, that we spent In the delusion that we were taming big tech, here's the news: was a total waste of time. Because nothing was achieved. Nothing. They are not smaller, they are not better behaved, they are not in any way tamed. And you remember there was a time when Margrethe Vestager was posting bicep emojis on X and LinkedIn, and so did Thierry Breton saying, We are taming big tech. People are rolling around laughing in Silicon Valley, saying, Are you taming us? You're cute. You're so cute.

Vit Horky: Alright, let me tell you something. my wife and my my friends keep bugging me about why am I spending so much time producing the United Founders Show during weekends and during nights, and having so few followers and subscribers. I don't have a good answer for them, to be honest, other than I really love it. If you wanna help me though, please do subscribe. It's gonna help me. To actually Show them that I'm doing something worthwhile. So there is a button. I'm sure that you know it underneath the video that you're now watching or underneath in in the podcast console or platform or app that you're using right now for listening to this podcast, please do hit the subscribe button. Thank you so much.

Cristina: these companies themselves, when they were my client, Apple, Amazon, sort of Microsoft, were saying, but Cristina, but you guys in Europe are quite curious because you are coming after us with regulation by all means, your prerogative. But where's your stuff? Where is your stuff?

Vit Horky: And we're gonna discuss that, right? And we're gonna discuss how to make sure that in Europe we have the stuff. But I Cristina, I know hundreds of economists, and none of them ended up in a courtroom. How did it happen that you have actually ended up with economics, you know, w by studying economics in a courtroom. What's the story behind that?

Cristina: because because that's the nature of expert economic economists. as an expert economist you support I mean it is a very elite narrow thing. A very small group of us do it at the very top. You know, there are probably a hundred people who are non economic expert wit witnesses at the top who go and litigate. So The nature of the job is you're a consultant and then you're hired to do essentially a defense of the client. you are in an adversarial situation many times. you are in an adversarial situation with the European Commission or with the UK authority. That process in in Europe tends to be more administrative. but when you litigate, really truly so suppose the Commission is taking is taking a decision and then One of the sides isn't happy, then it sues, it it it appeals, and then you end up before a specialist court or a generalist court. And at that point, you don't just go to a hearing and state your position. You are in a position in which you're being cross-examined by the other side. This is something that happens in in Luxembourg, it's fairly tame, but in the UK courts, for example, before before the UK High Court. It is is it is quite quite an interesting process. I was the witness for visa in the big trial that was brought by the merchants on the interchange fee. And I was in the witness stand, literally being cross-examined, not being able to speak to anyone because you have very serious rules for five days. And the job of the bunch of attorneys on the other side is to kill you. they need to kill you and they need to show that you have no credibility, that your arguments are contradictory, that you've written something in the past that contradicts what you're saying now, they need to break you down. So when people say you're quite aggressive, I say, baby, you haven't seen anything, you haven't seen anything. Because if you're trained by this kind of game in which you know He's there to kill you and you live or die and your client's multi billion case rests on you living or dying, then he focuses them up.

Vit Horky: Politico called you the high priestess of competition. where did that reputation actually come from?

Cristina: Well, I was at the time the the head of one of the biggest consultancies in competition. Again, it's very narrow as a field. You have three or four big economic consultancies. I mean, you if you have a competition problem, you don't go to McKinsey, you don't go to BCG, you don't go to Bain. no, they know nothing about this stuff. You go to the specialist. So there are three or four that do this in a very directed way. I Always perhaps a bit of a maverick because, as well as running, yes, the big pipeline of cases that I had at the time, I was always kind of trying to ask the question: what is the bigger picture? What are we doing in terms of political economy here? So, fairly unusually, I was running an annual conference which was huge in Brussels, as being huge until this year. A thousand people in the room, in which I was actually not trying to market our services, but much more have a conversation on the political economy of it all. And it was very unusual because everybody came and it was a really questioning kind of conversation. I you know, I couldn't care less about marketing. I was I had all the clients I needed. But the issue for me that was pretty existential and is still existential is what are we doing? And I have at this point left the antitrust world because of the frustration that you alluded to, and that I think is very apparent in the way I talk. Antitrust is not very useful. And it is a very stark realization at this point. I think for many of us who had a period in which we thought we are going to make some sort of change, because antitrust, if thought Is something that should in some way contain power, support the growth of small companies, create the conditions for equality in a market. So it has a lofty scope, but it doesn't. It doesn't. But the real issue is that when you come to What was happening to Europe in particular in those years, which is we had a clear sense that, of course, digital giants were occupying the space. But we did not understand, and this is the main failure, we did not understand the nature of the power that was being rolled over us. And this is incredibly consequential for where we are today. We thought that the nature of that power was just bad manners. They don't know how to behave in civilized society. We need to teach them how not to self-preference, how to behave fairly, and that's why we have these legal rules that we have to pursue and get them to abide. The nature of the power that was being rolled over us was control of infrastructure. While we were busy doing these little cases on Apple App Store, on the on the on the Google search. which were very high profile at the time, these companies were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, cute. Yeah, just do that. We we'll we'll show up. Meantime, we'll carpet Europe with data center, connectivity, all of the infrastructure you silly little people are not building, but you know what can I do? So this is what happened. And it is absolutely natural When you think about it, that the people who own the infrastructure, the distribution pipes, will use their power whichever way. So there is a novel in the English language I'm very attached to, which is called Gormen ghast and was written in the 1950s by a writer who wrote this trilogy about this imaginary castle. in in in the in the clouds in the in the mountains. And his lordship is very eccentric. And there is his lordship, ladyship, Lord Gormenghast. And every now and then he goes on to the the the the the this this sort of the turret of the castle and looks down To this mass of peasants that live at the ramparts of the castle. And on from time to time they they want to come into the castle and they knock at the door and they say, Let us in, let us in. And his lordship goes on to the turret and says, You? You wanna come in? Well, maybe just a little bit on the ground floor. So this is Gormenghast. Yes? So his lordship says, You wanna come in? You want a cute little deal? For yeah, you Spotify. You want a cute little deal? Okay, fine. But I own the castle. You'll never own the castle. So, Spotify spent years trying to sue Apple on the the fee. Which by the way, I don't disagree with. If Apple is taking 30% and you think it's too much, have at it. It's a commercial issue of rent rent distribution though, it's not a competition issue. It's just how much of the pie. You appropriate versus Apple and have a commercial discussion. Don't sue them because essentially the case cost Spotify ten years and didn't go anywhere. What did they get? Nothing. And now they're scuttled away. Apple super won. Super won in all of these cases. And so did Amazon. Amazon's super clever. They don't even have a case in which they end up being guilty. They settle everything before it becomes it becomes too noisy. Google has got dozens of decisions against them, but nothing happened. Even in the US, and I was involved in those cases. Google had two major, major defeats in the courts, in which the judge found in the Android case and in search that they were illegal monopolies when it came to doing something about it. The judge said no. So this is a total waste of time. Total waste of time. something which has a fairly a fairly stark realization. And it is also why the entire competition world regards me as the the the wicked witch of the West, because I say it. I say it. Guys, fight me. Come and tell me how Europe won. Show me how Europe won as a result of these exertions. You have zero to show. Come fight me. No, they own the castle. It's our problem that we haven't built any other castle. This is the real issue and the place in which we abjectly failed.

Vit Horky: Why why does it why does it matter to a common European citizen? try to explain to my mom who doesn't care about really all this. She most probably uses Microsoft, Google's products, listen to, you know, Apple Podcasts, etc. Why does it really matter taming the US big tech? Why does it matter to a common European citizen?

Cristina: Well, this is not an easy thing to explain to an easy citiz to a European citizen because as you say the services are very of facially very useful and many of them are free. And if I you know the free model has been extremely tempting and it has turned us into users and so it's difficult to explain indeed why should any citizen on on the But we know that monopolies are extractive and they extract the value. The value isn't left to anyone but them. So if you are a partner, if you are a company that requires distribution, for example, it is not your mom's case, but the people who who who also produce services your mom may use as apps, for example. The terms and condition that these developers have in dealing with distributors with gigantic market power may well be unfair and exploitative. And this is the nature of the beast. This has been the complaint that that many, many brought forward that The the bargaining with these companies on terms and condition, on the conditions in which you're given carriage, for example, are very harsh. They're very one-sided. There is the extraction of all the data and the the the extraction of which is we and and you know when think about content producers, newspapers and and the media, the free model, which essentially reproduced and and and gave and gave visibility to that stuff. On the one hand, yes, was desirable because it gave you visibility, but on the other hand, much of the content ended up being inevitably needing to be produced for free to feed the beast. And so if you were Someone in the media who was trying to make an existence by you know creating quality content, creating journalism, and so on. This became much, much, much more difficult in an age of free, where a lot of slop is available and so on. And the platforms, of course, benefit from the slope. They don't want quality outlet, they want a lot of variety that we can we can all access. So it's difficult to make the case that the individual citizen is directly harmed, which is why these antitrust cases fail.

Vit Horky: Hmm. As a non expert, you know, the way I see it over the past twenty-five years, European antitrust activity was largely around search and ads, apps and marketplaces. But as a VC investor, you know, the real fight that I see today is about AI and compute. have we lost this fight already as well when it comes to AI compute?

Cristina: This is my big, big focus right now, because we are in a very delicate moment in which Europe is exactly at that point in which adoption and diffusion of AI is critical. Yet we do not have an infrastructure which is ours. Ninety percent of our cloud is owned by three hyperscalers in Europe. It used to be 70% is going is been going down. And the reason this matters, they are there. So, in a sense, we can say, well, you know, go and go to AWS, go to Microsoft. They're only too willing to sell your compute, they're willing to build. The reason this is not okay. is because essentially in the current geopolitical reality, the world has changed beyond recognition, we are in a grave predicament of systemic dependency on every layer of the tech stack on players that are non European. And AI is a special use case of the stack. When I talk about the stack, it is everything from chips to hardware to software to connectivity controls, authorization, and architecture. This is the stack. AI is a case of the stack that is cloud, software, and data. So if we don't have any assets in the stack, also, you know, we don't have any assets. for AI, because they're the same thing. So that's why when I wrote a piece for Project Syndicate in May, I was I was saying, you know, let's kind of beware magical thinking, because at the time you could see that the European industrial sort of complex, which is very good and strong, I mean we have problems in car, but Europe is industrially Very strong. We have incredible capability, mechanics and machinery and biotech. let's not forget that. They were sort of saying, well, you know, we are going to do industrial AI application and we'll become an absolute powerhouse. In industrial AI application. And we're like, okay, and we will use our own compute capabilities. Sorry, sorry, sorry. We will use our own domain capabilities and our own data which are specific to the domain to build these industrial applications. And then you said, okay, very nice. But what model and what compute are you going to use to build this industrial application? just hands. No one wanted to discuss that. Because the reality was we are going to go to Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, right? So that's what I called magical thinking. You cannot think as Europe that you can become sovereign in AI applications without considering what's below it. This is the critical point. And there is a tension there between inevitably super fast adoption and sovereignty. Why does it matter though? This is very important. I'm not doing this because I care about democracy and values. I mean, I do, but not the reason I'm doing this. I also don't like the framing of resilience and security because it feels defensive. You know, I need to be resilient. It means somebody's gonna punch me and I have to just take the blow. No. The issue is affirmative as a continent. We absolutely need to capture value. And there is a ton of value in this stack, which at the moment we're shipping out. And that value is essential to growth. So take us back to the Draghi report in 2024, which is the Bible everyone goes by. So Draghi showed that productivity growth in the US and in Europe in the last 20 years has done this. So the US went up and Europe went flat down. Why is that? You go and decompose the reasons for that divergence, and it is mostly to do with IT, diffusion and adoption of technology. So it is obvious that unless Europe really, really kind of makes a quality leap in adopting and diffusing the technology now AI, this trend is not gonna be different. We are not gonna close the gap in any way. So it is super important, but whose Assets, whose infrastructure are we gonna be building on? Because it's like building an extension on somebody else's house. At some point, the owner of the house says, Well, nice extension you got there. Let me get a little bit of a higher rent. At some point, of course, they will extract in the same way as the digital platforms have extracted all the value from. The app developers. There's no app developer apart from Spotify that's thriving in Europe because the value shifts. So today in Europe we are in a situation in which 280 billion a year of cloud revenues goes to the US. How about we keep some of it over here and we reinvest it?

Vit Horky: Haven't we made the fight for ourselves as Europeans too difficult unnecessarily because of the energy prices? Just because having a data centers in Europe is way more costly than having them in the US.

Cristina: But what can we do? That's where we are. I mean, I I I I agree that energy prices are are a very big issue in Europe and make a big difference between but we're not gonna buy compute in the US. So we are gonna have to build it here. And the circumstances are not favorable. But the question is, do we build it or they build it? And you know, I have no anti-American sentiment. As I explained, I spent a lot of my career working with these companies. I know how good they are. I own a ranch in Texas, so I love the American mindset. but the point is we cannot, as a continent which is as capable, as talented, as rich as we are, content ourselves with this position as a middle power. And let me go there because I want to say this as emphatically as I possibly can. We are at a very dangerous moment in which Hyperscalers, of course, they're fighting back against sovereignty, and they are using the usual way of deploying friendly think tanks that they sort of somehow support in the background, etc. You've seen, you what you you're probably aware of the of the report called Europe 2031 that made the rounds earlier in the summer. That is pernicious. We should take it and burn it. And have nothing to do with it. Because what does do that is a report that essentially makes the hyperscaler case for them. It says, aside from the fact that I detest the sort of techno fascist tone of it and the novelette that it is, I I I find it horrifying. But it is it is also the case that the report says we need so much compute. Europe needs so much compute. We need to have it at all costs. We need to absolutely have access to these frontier lab models, and we need in order to have that to allow hyperscalers to build everywhere in Europe, because that's our quid propos. We'll get access to the frontier model in exchange for letting them carpet Europe with data center. And the answer is no no no. We can Compromise totally on this. I'm not saying we are not gonna let hyperscalers build anymore. Of course, they will continue to do that. But we need a bigger share of European assets for us. We need a bigger share of the assets that power our infrastructure on our own continent. I was at an event yesterday in Brussels in which, of course, the obligatory. American lobbyists, I don't know, somebody from the American Embassy said, but why you Europeans are so interested in sovereignty? Why can't we all work together and for the prosperity of Europe? We should be all working together. I said, My friend, imagine the radio tomorrow morning said, in the US, fellow Americans, we have established that ninety percent of our digital infrastructure in the United States is owned by Europeans. Do you think that Americans would say, that's okay? Let's all work together. That's nice. No! You would say, Hell, what's going on here? Where's our stuff? Mr. President, we need an executive order. We need to move. We need to build. Right? No, we say, okay, let's do a bit of regulation here. The big incredible blind spot. For the reasons I've explained, is that we lived for twenty years in the generational mistake that through antitrust and regulation, we were going to somehow create an industry. Now, I would like any economist who isn't just a nerd in a department to explain to me how regulating the incumbents creates An industry. In theory, yes, you create a level playing field, you open up barriers to entry, but everyone knows that at least everyone who had any business experience, in order to create a business, you need an addressable market, a business case, a funding plan, KPIs and USPs. So this is not something regulation gives you. How do you flip from, okay, let's regulate them? To build our stuff. And this is why. Europe is a parter of small companies that haven't scaled up, that are just surviving, not because of lack of talent. I get so frustrated when the competition bubble says what Europe really needs is innovation. Buddy, we have innovation. We have tons of you you know it because you see what the creativity is of the startup. We just don't grow them. We just don't push them. This is the the comment.

Vit Horky: Specifically about Yeah, specifically about this, and you you were talking about European assets. What kind of European assets do we have? In large language models, we have most probably one very serious contender, French Mistral. And European Scale-up Fund, I believe, just invested hundreds of millions of Euros in the latest funding round into Mistral. And if I'm not mistaken, mistr al is now in the process of making multi billion dollar deal, commercial deal with Microsoft. What does it tell you? What what's the what is your reaction?

Cristina: Wait yes, no, no. I think we need to distinguish. I think that so what's happened is Mistral started off in life, as you said, trying to become a European LLM. And then it has realized that of course boiling the ocean, which is what LLMs effectively do, is not gonna happen and it's not gonna effectively have a That is comparable to the three frontier labs in the US. This is, I think, accepted broadly in Europe. We are not in the race for a competitor to anthropic or to open AI. We can do something which is smaller. But also remember, look at what Yann Le Cun keeps saying, look at what others are saying. Things are popping up across Europe that are not quite LLMs of anthropic kind of capability. But it's also the case that for many of the applications that we need, for many of the use cases, you don't need to boil the ocean and have digested the entirety of the corpus of the literature globally invented. You have smaller models, you have models that are more specific. So Europe's use cases are sort of not necessarily requiring only LLMs. In addition to which, what we have seen in the summer huge change has been the bursting out of the Chinese model, the Kimi and all that. Which, yes, we don't know what's in the future. The Chinese may be eventually doing a bait and switch and they may start charging much more for these models. But at the moment, the cost comparison between a Chinese model and and and an LLM frontier is incredibly favorable to Chinese models, which is why in Europe everyone I know is experimenting with Chinese open weights model that are essentially downloaded and played around local. Is not 100%? Is it 97%? Okay. So do we all need the performance of anthropic latest model? Or do many of the applications that we have in Europe and the and the use cases effectively don't require that? So there has been a more a fetishism which is dying down, fortunately, around American frontier LLMs. But in addition to which, what Mistral did, I think, was a very clever play. And I've been praising it because yes, I'm not wild about the fact that Microsoft is an investor. Fine, it's not it's it's the reality of where we are. But what Mistral is doing is essentially pivoting towards being an infrastructure play. So they have announced in July that yeah, they will continue to do something about their own frontier model, but they are distributing Chinese models on their platform. Super importantly, they've done something which I think is very clever and we should absolutely replicate. They essentially went around looking for anchor customers for their investment in data center. This is how you do stuff. Because of course, the European Commission is randomly building these gigafactories that no one cares for and nobody wants, and they're built by Microsoft and NVIDIA. No. What you need to do is exactly what Mike Mistral did. They went around and found through ASML, through others. Commitment to the following proposition. If I build 30 gigawatts of capacity by 2028 or 2030, do you commit to buying from me? And once you have that commitment, you it is bankable. You can go to the bank and say, Lend me the money. Because as everyone knows, once you have a secure customer, the banks will lend you. This is the story that I hear from every data center builder in Europe. We are missing the commitment from the demand side. If we have commitment from the demand side, money is not a problem. The banks will lend to us. We will do it in London and everywhere else. So this is the real quality leap that we need to make. And Mistral has seen it and done it. They created this thing which is called EQ, European Compute Unit, and essentially they've placed them. Now think about our other European successful cloud supplier, Stackit. Stackit is killing it. They are in Germany, they start off as Schwarz, Lidl, the supermarket. What is the implication of that? Schwarz little Stackit has a fantastic anchor customer because they have their thousands of retail stores across the world on which they can essentially roll out innovation and ideas. So that is purchasing much of of their of their data center power. And on that basis they are building more. So demand is essential for anyone who wants to build because you don't build speculatively. I mean, with the size of investments required, you don't say build it and they will come. But if you have industrial customers who are willing to commit their compute going forward, then you can build. This is the missing piece, because that's what unlocks the finance. Right? That is the point.

Vit Horky: You you mentioned a couple of minutes ago Yann LeCun and a disclaimer, I'm an investor into AMI Labs European public sector still runs actually on AWS and Microsoft. I was struck when I found it out. I assumed that this is not happening anymore. You called it a scandal and then I saw you actually co-founding Eurostack, new new NGO initiative. Tell me why did you decide to go to to co-founding new kind of NGO initiative that is trying to solve this kind of problem of a public tenders but maybe also private tenders and

Cristina: So. So the thinking was if you follow the journey that I laid out, the breadcrumbs, so you know, it's clear that we need to build infrastructure. It's clear that I'm a passionate believer that Europe has got what it takes in terms of assets, talent, capability, and also money. There's a discussion to be had on where that money is and why it isn't deployed usefully. Because with you know, you mentioned the European Commission has done a scale-up fund. We serious. The European Commission has put one little paltry billion into a thing which is called a scale-up fund. A bit of money has come from pension fund AVP, Inteza, Santander, who will put a little bit of money. Why do we in Europe need the European Commission to create a This blows my mind with the capabilities we have in finance, in London, in Paris, in Amsterdam. When I talk to my friends in the financial world, I said, do you think you needed a European Commission? And the answer has got to be, God, no. Because all the European Commission will do is lawyer the thing to death. What capability do they have to make? positive yeah they appoint a EQT as their deployment VC but you know the why do you need the European Commission in the middle? Some people say, well, you know, they can de-risk. De-risk what exactly? What exactly is the European Commission going to do? And this is one of my complaints. The private sector, before we get to the public sector, the private sector needs to adult And needs to get agency. The capital allocators need to see that there is an unstoppable drive towards European growth and demand, and need to put their money where their mouth is. So I see it happening. I see that there is interest still not big enough on the part of some family offices, some pension funds, beginning to talk about the investable window is shifting. Beginning to talk about patriotic investment, I heard this expression, which has got exactly the right point. Okay, because this is a moment in which Europe needs to flex its muscle. Not go the stupid direction of this middle power Kretinism. You know, I am very animated about this because I find it incredibly defeatist, demeaning. Look, Canada is great, UK fine. They may well be middle powers. Europe Is absolutely not an economic middle power. And if we think that we are a middle power, we will behave like one. We will sort of puddle in the in the in the in the sideshow. Why? We have 1.4 trillion a year, which is being saved by European consumers against 0.7 in the US. In the US, they spend everything they got, they save nothing. We save a lot. We have 14 trillion euros as assets under management by our institutional funders, pension funds, and insurance company. Where does that money go? Bonds, retirement homes. Are we serious? We have an enormous financial capability. The problem is. That instead of getting ourselves into the driving seat and getting agency as the private sector, there is a very curious phenomenon which has been engendered by these 20 years of looking to Brussels, hoping that Brussels would do something, which is what I call the infantilization of Europe. We have all become a group of people who look at Brussels. To do something like mommy. Mommy must do something. And if mommy doesn't do something, bad mommy isn't doing enough. What are you doing? What are you you doing? Because how does the European Commission, which is made up of bureaucrats and lawyers, there is a self-selection there. If you are dynamic and smart and entrepreneurial, you don't go to Brussels. If you go to Brussels, you are a lawyer or a bureaucrat. So all of a sudden, We expect these people to become smart and entrepreneurial and have brilliant ideas about how to power up European tech. I was at the conference yesterday with all of this great and good from the Commission and so on, and you want to lie on the floor and cry what you hear, or slap them all. Because the the whole thing is, yeah, we need to act. We really need to act. We really need to act faster. And in the meantime, they make their nice salary, they sit in Brussels, they do nothing, or very little that has got any importance. Where is everyone? What is everyone thinking that this kind of class of scribes will be the answer to what we need to do? And similarly, if I may say, because I I dole out my my impatience to everyone, what is our enterprise doing in Europe? Because If you were in the United States, you would be summoned to the White House, you would sit around the table, and the president would say, What you are doing, what are you doing, what are you doing? What are you doing? Okay, 500 billion Stargate. On we go, whether it happens or not. But there is a sense of you know, move. In Europe, we have great companies still, except that I don't see them. They don't. Stand up to be counted. So where is our enterprise? And why are they so feeble? Because they don't want to upset their American customers. That's the reality. If you're Siemens, you sell turbines to the US for data centers. So you don't want to appear to be too patriotic Europeans. But why is this a problem? Because Americans are able to say, I'm a global company and I'm a proud American. Why can't we say I'm a global company, I'm a proud European? It doesn't sort of conflict. It doesn't mean that you're going to discriminate against your customers, but we're too we're too lacking in guts at the end of the day. So I don't see the enterprises standing up. They're against yeah, they're doing this tech creator initiative. What is that? Fine, they'll do some industrial application. Which compute is this gonna run on? Can everybody please ask this question? Because if they're going to have this industrial application on Microsoft, AWS, and Google, we are at the at the back to the beginning. We are not sovereign in any shape or form, not even partially. So, enterprise is a problem. The commission, forget it, forget it. Nothing will ever come from the commission. Look, they had one job: the Cloud and Industrial and AI Act, which they were supposed to produce in after a year and a half. I went to see them multiple times saying it's very important when it comes to public sector that you put in some procurement mandates. Meaning, if you are the public administration, you should be committed to buying 20-30% of your of your needs from European supplies. We're not saying eighty percent, we're not saying a hundred percent, we're not even saying fifty percent. Can we have thirty percent, maybe, of our own stuff paid by taxpayer money? I had a call from one of the people involved inside the commission say Cristina ,it's looking bad. Bad how? we had a visit from the hyperscalers and the American ambassador saying, nice car industry you've got there. Shame anything happened to it. So they removed all of the numbers that suggested a mandate, and they you you have a four hundred page draft law that says the Commission will encourage, favor, and promote the use of European technology. We have an expression in Italian to define that, which is too too explicit to use here. What? So encourage, favor, and promote. Note that that law which came out draft came out in June is just now beginning to go to the parliament. In the parliament, there will be a year of discussion about amendments. We already know that the rapporteurs in the parliament have already just kind of declared their color. They're very favorable to hyperscalers. So forget it. Nothing will happen. And then there is going to be another year of trilogue with the European Council, with the heads of state. So we are looking at a law that might be passed eventually in 2028 and will be completely diluted. Let me give you another example: Europe EU Inc., 28th regime, you know very well. This is something that should be a no-brainer. We need to create a European Delaware Inc. The idea, you know, Andy Klinger, the idea came and was pursued by a bunch of well-meaning people, NGO like like me, because yeah,

Vit Horky: One of the supporters.

Cristina: we we we all do this for love at the end of the day. This thing is sitting in the European Parliament with 1,800 amendments. Being tabled. The rapporteur is a German socialist who has to deal with the unions. The unions hate EU Inc. because they say it's unfair to workers. Welcome to Europe. So, where's this going? And then we already know that the 27 member states are all saying, yeah, we can give stock option. No, stock option, are you kidding me? No, that's not quite what we do over here in Lithuania or whatever it is. So Is Brussels or the Commission or the Parliament going to do anything for us? Either we just find our own agency and move, or we just give up. Because I I think that the notion that we wait for this machine to deliver anything is is ridiculous. In the same way as you keep hearing, we need to deliver the single market. We need to deliver a capital market union. Not in my lifetime. So what are we doing in the meantime?

Vit Horky: So is Eurostack Foundation that you have helped to co found and you lead recently a r a response essentially to this lack of getting to act together by the European enterprises? c can you make a a a simple case to European tech founder or scale up founder, startup founder, why they should care and why they should get involved with Eurotech?

Cristina: Eurostack is an is not a lobby organization, because I'm not a lobbyist, you can you can tell I don't get a lobbyist is someone who gets paid to do something. I'm not a lobbyist because I don't get paid and this is entirely a labor of love. For me, the real motivation which should be common to us all in Europe is We need to grow our continent. We need to continue to pursue economic growth because without that, we are not going to be able to persist with the economic model that is delivered what we have, the lifestyle that we have. We need to absolutely grow and invest. It's telling that not only Mario Draghi, but even Christine Lagarde gave a speech in Vienna just two weeks ago in which she said exactly what I'm saying. She is actually pivoting to saying. We don't really need to be so fixated on American L LM frontier. We have going we're going to have a a ra a range of Focus on building the compute in Europe by Europeans. Thumbs up. So this narrative is gaining traction. I modestly have pushed this very, very narrative for the last two years and it's gaining traction. I'm glad to see it. Why should people get involved? Guys, it's our future. It's our future. It's what we are here to do, what we're leaving to our children. I'm an incredibly proud European. I mean, we are we are we are amazing. You know, when I travel and to give talks from Stockholm to Copenhagen to Prague to Vienna, Amsterdam, Munich, Paris, I'm amazed of the ecosystems that are there. I'm proud of it. So are we are we going to accept this narrative that we're just a middle power and what what? We are a a continent of incredible resources. So I think it is incumbent and imperative on us to do something. Or what's the alternative? We give up, we lie on the floor, we go to the beach. How is that a serious alternative?

Vit Horky: So tell me what kind of piece of content, either video or podcast, have actually changed your mind when it comes to European tech sovereignty lately?

Cristina: It's a it's it's a grassroot movement. I don't have any particular one inspiration. it's a it's it's now effectively a movement which is diffuse. you can't open any sort of social network now without finding sovereignty everywhere. It has caught the imagination, it has lit the fire. So I care more not about Some sort of wise person giving us some wisdom, forget it. Think about what's happening at the grassroots. People are talking, people are engaged. I get in Eurostack literally dozens of emails and direct messages on LinkedIn saying, I'm inspired by what you're saying, by what we're doing. What can I do? What can I do? What can I do to help the mission? I have dozens of engineers, small companies, they love the the width and breadth of Europe. raising their hands and saying we want to do something. So this is the fire we need to absolutely stoke.

Vit Horky: What what is the most overhyped claim in sovereignty talk today?

Cristina: No, I don't think there is an overhyped claim. I think there are false narratives and there is straw men, which we need to debunk. So people who talk about sovereignty without understanding it or with an agenda of their own essentially say things like, well, Europe cannot replace the hyperscalers fully. No shit, as we would say. Obviously, no one is looking to replace them fully. So that's a false, a false narrative. Or European products are all are all lower quality and higher price. False. This is again a propaganda piece. So there are a number of things that are not true. A number of European products are cheaper, particularly when you go to cloud, and they are very equivalent. Yes, European suppliers have work to do. Let me just be saying this very briefly. It's not like I'm saying, you can swap one-on-one and everything is okay. No, no. There are various pieces that they need to put together because they're not integrated, etc. So there's work that the suppliers need to do, hell yeah. But there is also a lot of misunderstanding and false narrative.

Vit Horky: Where would you say by one word where European tax sovereignty is today?

Cristina: I think the mountain is moving. Maybe

Vit Horky: Very good.

Cristina: by a few inches, but the mountain is definitely moving.

Vit Horky: Cristina, it's been a privilege to talk to you today. it's been great to talk

Cristina: It's my friend.

Vit Horky: about the twenty five years in the antitrust in the courtrooms. thank you so much.

Cristina: It's

Vit Horky: Thank you so much for the energy and drive that you have and the fire that we can we can all feel. It's been a privilege to talk to you, Cristina.

Cristina: Thank you so much. It's it's always it's always great talking to you and to have the opportunity to have this extended conversation is a privilege for me. Thank you so much.