Mistral AI made its first acquisition this week, snapping up Paris-based infrastructure startup Koyeb to accelerate its cloud computing ambitions. The deal brings 13 employees and platform expertise to support Mistral Compute as the company targets €1 billion in revenue by end of 2026.

But this milestone raises a fundamental question about what it actually takes to win the AI race, and whether Mistral is choosing the right strategy for its size and the capital that’s available to it.

What Elon Musk gets right

On John Collison’s Cheeky Pint podcast earlier this month, Elon Musk made perhaps the clearest case yet that the AI race is fundamentally a hardware and energy race, not a model race. His argument is simple: chip output is growing exponentially, but electricity output outside China is flat. You can’t turn chips on without power. The turbine blades needed to generate that power are made by three casting companies globally, all sold out through 2030. Fabs are maxed out. Memory prices are surging.

Musk’s response is total vertical integration. SpaceX launches the satellites and will provide orbital data centers. Tesla makes the solar panels and humanoid robots. xAI builds the models. He’s even talking about manufacturing turbine blades in-house because the supply chain can’t keep up. His prediction: within 30-36 months, space will be the cheapest place to run AI inference.

Whether or not you believe Musk’s timeline, the underlying insight is important. The companies that control their compute infrastructure will have a structural advantage over those that rent it. Google clearly agrees.

The capex giants: Google and Musk

Google is spending $175-185 billion in capex in 2026 alone — more than double the $91 billion it spent in 2025. This isn’t a one-time surge; it’s a utility buildout. Google has built its own TPU chips across seven generations, giving it a vertically integrated stack from silicon to model to distribution. Its cloud backlog has surged to $240 billion. CEO Sundar Pichai says the company remains “supply-constrained” — it is selling AI compute as fast as it can build it.

The Musk approach takes this further by going beyond the data center entirely. By merging xAI with SpaceX, he’s betting that whoever solves the energy constraint wins the AI race. The companies positioned to do this are those with existing physical infrastructure at scale: Google, Meta ($115-135 billion capex in 2026), Microsoft ($37.5 billion in a single quarter), and the Musk conglomerate.

These are trillion-dollar balance sheets making hundred-billion-dollar bets. The common thread: they all concluded that controlling infrastructure is not a distraction from AI but the actual AI race.

The partnership model: Anthropic and OpenAI

Anthropic and OpenAI have taken a different approach. Rather than building infrastructure, they’ve secured access to it through massive multi-cloud partnerships.

Anthropic has committed $30 billion in Azure compute purchases with Microsoft, signed a 1GW+ deal with Google Cloud for TPU access, and has Amazon’s $11 billion Project Rainier cluster built specifically for its workloads. Claude is now the only frontier model available across all three major cloud platforms. Nvidia and Microsoft have invested $10 billion and $5 billion respectively in Anthropic, partly to ensure it keeps buying their chips.

OpenAI has gone even further, committing to an estimated 26 gigawatts of total hardware across Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom (custom chips), and the $500 billion Stargate initiative with SoftBank and Oracle. Notably, OpenAI is also designing its own AI chips with Broadcom — 10 gigawatts of custom accelerators deploying from late 2026 through 2029. This suggests even the partnership-first players are being pulled toward vertical integration as scale demands it.

The logic of this model is compelling: let the hyperscalers fight the power and permitting wars while you focus all R&D resources on the thing that actually differentiates you — model capabilities. Anthropic maintains laser focus on frontier research and safety while Microsoft, Google, and Amazon compete to host its workloads. That’s a good position to be in.

But it comes with dependencies. When you rent your compute, your infrastructure partners are also your competitors. Microsoft hosts Claude on Azure while investing billions in OpenAI. Google provides Anthropic with TPU access while building Gemini. These partnerships work today because frontier model talent is scarce and demand exceeds supply. Whether they survive a world where infrastructure becomes the binding constraint is an open question.

Why Mistral’s bet is the hardest one

This brings us back to Mistral. The company’s €1 billion capex commitment and Koyeb acquisition signal a move toward vertical integration — the same strategic direction as Google and Musk. The rationale for European AI sovereignty makes this appealing: building European-controlled infrastructure reduces dependence on American cloud providers.

But Mistral is attempting this with 500 employees and €2.9 billion in total funding. Its infrastructure commitments now include a €1.2 billion data center investment in Sweden, the Koyeb acquisition, and the broader Mistral Compute platform buildout. It is committing over 40% of its lifetime capital to infrastructure buildout in a single year. Compare that resource base to the players running the same strategy: Google at $175 billion in annual capex, Meta at $115-135 billion, and Musk with SpaceX, Tesla, and xAI as complementary infrastructure pieces.

There is a meaningful difference between vertical integration from a position of strength and vertical integration from a position of resource constraint. Google can build TPUs, data centers, and frontier models simultaneously because it generates $400 billion in annual revenue. Musk can integrate across energy, launch, and compute because each company — SpaceX, Tesla, xAI — was already operating at scale in its vertical before the integration began.

Mistral has neither the revenue base nor the complementary infrastructure. Every engineer assigned to cloud platform integration is an engineer not working on model improvements. Every euro spent on data center buildout is a euro not spent on training runs. In a race where technological leadership shifts on 12-18 month cycles, this resource allocation creates real risk. That said, this may still be the only bet available to Mistral, however hard.

The European dilemma

Mistral’s choice reflects Europe’s broader strategic bind. The partnership model requires trusting American hyperscalers with your compute. For a company positioned as Europe’s AI champion with a €12.6 billion valuation that partly reflects a geopolitical premium, that dependency is uncomfortable.

But the vertical integration model requires capital that European companies simply don’t have at the scale this race demands. Google’s 2026 capex budget alone exceeds the total market capitalization of most European tech companies.

For the moment Europe cannot replicate the American infrastructure buildout. The question is whether it can build enough sovereign capacity to matter while partnering pragmatically for the rest. Mistral may be right that it needs its own infrastructure, but it also needs to stay competitive on models, which is what made it Europe’s most valuable AI company in the first place.

What comes next

Mistral Compute’s pricing will be decisive. If it can’t achieve meaningful premiums over AWS or Google Cloud, the infrastructure strategy becomes a cost center rather than a competitive advantage. Meanwhile, the partnership-first players face their own test: Anthropic and OpenAI are already being pulled toward vertical integration as scale demands it. Whether the multi-cloud model proves durable or merely transitional will shape the next phase of this race.

The AI race is increasingly a capital allocation question. For Europe and for Mistral, the question is whether European customers are willing to pay a sovereignty premium until Mistral can get to a scale where it can compete with the US tech giants.

Technological progress is primarily a political project. We often think of technology as a purely technical matter, but its role as the driver of societal change makes it inherently political.

The most important sectors of our society—healthcare, housing, mobility, food, energy, and education—are heavily regulated. Unlike consumer electronics like flat-screen TVs, which benefit from technological deflation, these essential domains become more expensive each year. This is largely because regulation prevents the kind of technological innovation that would make them more affordable. In effect, technological progress in these areas has been halted by political and legislative processes.

The term “frontier technology” refers to the limits of what’s possible. These limits are no longer determined by the laws of physics alone but are increasingly dictated by legislation. The political process, through laws and regulations, controls what can and cannot be created with new technology in these crucial domains.

Globalization and the end of history didn’t work the way we thought they would.

China’s ascent to an autocratic economic and military superpower shows no sign of slowing down. The United States is threatening to pull back its stabilizing influence from other parts of the world just to be able to compete with China. It’s not at all obvious how it all plays out — The US is resorting to tariffs to frantically reshore it’s lost manufacturing capacity, potentially pushing the global economy into a recession with it.

The world has become a more dangerous place with China on the rise and hot wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza with no end in sight. Russia’s aggression is fueled by a strong China and a chaotic US. North Korea has sent the first foreign troops to Ukraine making the hot war a global one, and Israel has escalated its attacks from Gaza to Lebanon, Syria and Iran. President Trump has reminded the world that national security is an economic issue democracies need to be able to pay for.

European democracies must balance their budgets while making large investments to support aging populations, digitalization, climate transition and the national security. Draghi’s report alone called for raising investments by €800 billion a year. This is not counting the approximately €300 billion a year for Europe to replicate the U.S. military umbrella which shielded Europe but is no longer given — a cumulative investment of three trillion euro over 10 years. The US is not much better off with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 124% that will become unsustainable without strong economic growth.

In 2024, the incumbent party in all 12 developed Western countries that held national elections experienced a loss in vote share, marking the first time this has occurred in nearly 120 years of modern democratic history. U.S. Democrats, the UK’s Conservatives, France’s Ensemble coalition, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The same trend seems to continue in 2025 starting with the governing coalition led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Germany.

People are not happy with the deal they are getting. The model for classical liberal democracy seems to be breaking down.

Downstream of technology

The current geopolitics make painfully clear that for any country to prosper and to lead, it needs strong economic growth, a powerful military and a strong civic culture to uphold our values and institutions. All of these are downstream of technology.

Europe has gradually made winning in technology ever more difficult by aiming to become a regulatory superpower. This is well intentioned, but its proponents are unlikely to fully consider at what cost. Liberal democracy might not survive without technology driven economic growth.

Technology drives economic growth, which pays for the strong military deterrence. A great power won’t be one for long if they miss one or the other. Post WWII Pax Americana has shielded Europe and let us forget this reality. We’re now in for unpleased awakening as the US support is no longer given.

What’s more, as I argued earlier, our democratic institutions stop functioning without economic growth and politics becomes a zero-sum game. Lack of growth combined with low birth rates and mass immigration cripples democratic societies.

Apart from technology driven productivity increases (and pure financial aid like the Marshall Plan), only significant economic growth we’ve seen in the post WWII democratic West has occurred during the Reagan-Thatcher deregulation in the 1980s and the globalization in the 1990s. Both of which were one-off and did’t last.

For all these reason, we should think twice when we prioritize other factors over achieving technology leadership. I understand why many want to hold onto the policies, politics and institutions that have served our democratic experiment since the WWII, but they might not matter going forward if we don’t win in technology. Totalitarian rhetoric starts to look promising as soon as people feel democracy can’t give them a fair deal — an opportunity to make a decent living, to get paid for the work they do, and a freedom to make choices about their own lives. We can see the shadows growing taller in the US and in Europe as I write this. Technology may be the only means of preserving not just the remnants of the welfare state, but also the liberal democracy as we know it.

Only technological progress can create the economic surplus to escape the zero-sum misery.

Europe’s opportunity

There might be a silver lining like there many times are in a crisis. The crisis can help accelerate change to something that better meets the demands of today.

The geopolitical turmoil has presented Europe with an unexpected opportunity to reinvent itself as the leader of the free world by prioritizing technology progress. At the same time, it’s not much of a choice — We might not have an option if we want to keep our freedom. Given the rapid march of Artificial Intelligence, we should not waste time. It’s hard to predict how AI will develop, but it’s guaranteed that it’s coming and will further divide the fortunes for those who lead and those who follow.

It takes courage to embrace the change, but embrace we must. I’m rooting for you, free world!

We don’t want the AI to invest our net worth into a slightly wrong thing, or prescribe meds for something that’s close but not quite what we need. Even if it works 99 times out of 100, we can’t use LLMs in many areas of life where they could be really helpful.

As AI becomes ubiquitous and grows out of harmless domains like generating pictures to areas where mistakes can be very costly, it needs guard rails. Building elegant guardrails is a lot harder than training the actual LLMs, especially if we don’t want to cripple the LLMs just when they are becoming powerful enough to become life-changing.

I’m trying to imagine what these guard rails could look like. Maybe, instead of sandboxes with hard edges that LLMs can’t cross, they are user interface innovations so the models can turn to humans for collaboration when it’s mission critical? We have build technology tools to augment our capabilities since the stone age and despite how smart our tools are becoming, maybe they are always more powerful in collaboration with us than without.

Thinking about the interface to these intelligent machines reminds me of the beautiful lyrics from The Grid by Daft Punk.

The Grid
A digital frontier
I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer
What do they look like?
Ships? Motorcycles?
Were the circuits like freeways?
I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see
And then, one day, I got in

How to finance big ideas about the future? The trick is to do it in stages and reverse engineer the steps from the big vision. Elon Musk gave us his blueprint in 2006 when he published the Tesla Master Plan: 

Almost any new technology initially has high unit cost before it can be optimized and this is no less true for electric cars. The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.

Without giving away too much, I can say that the second model will be a sporty four door family car at roughly half the $89k price point of the Tesla Roadster and the third model will be even more affordable. In keeping with a fast growing technology company, all free cash flow is plowed back into R&D to drive down the costs and bring the follow on products to market as fast as possible. When someone buys the Tesla Roadster sports car, they are actually helping pay for development of the low cost family car.

Looking back, that’s roughly what Tesla did. To build big ideas it’s not enough that you can break your roadmap into clear milestones that each make your company more valuable at each step, but you need to show how the short to medium-term milestones start generating revenue. According to Delian Asparouhov of Founders Fund, even if you’re working on a multi-decade idea you should plan to generate revenue in three to four years given how VC funds work. Venture capital funds need to pay their investors in ten years and if you don’t make any money by the third year it’s unlikely you will be able to return capital back to your investors before the end of the fund’s lifetime. 

For the really big ideas, you need to think of the products on your roadmap as standalone businesses that could by themselves be attractive for the venture investors.

Cradle: A pause button for biology

Cradle is an example of a big multi-decade idea. The company is building a human whole-body reversible cryopreservation to extend consciousness through time and space. A wild idea in a 2024 world. 

Cradle was founded by Laura Deming and Hunter Davis. Laura is a rare original thinker.  

Long before founding Cradle, Laura had an idea to give everyone agency over the number of healthy years they want to live. She has tirelessly worked on the idea since she was very young. Interestingly she never went to a school when she was a kid so she had less societal pressure on learning what’s acceptable or possible. Despite being a serious person, she has kept the sense of curiosity and wonder about the world. Laura had a father who taught her why science is interesting and why you might want to look into society’s blind spots and test your hypothesis instead of blindly take society’s word for it. To build the world she envisioned, she started The Longevity Fund, a VC fund focused on longevity when she was only 18 years old. At that time longevity was not considered something that venture capital could invest in. It’s telling about the society we live in when it requires a teenager to finance the biggest ideas of our time.

A roadmap that’s easy to invest in

Cradle is also a great example of how you can finance a really big idea. 

Laura and Hunter started by trying to disprove the central hypothesis and tackled the hardest question first to see if the problem is solvable to the extent their idea requires: Could they cryopreserve neuronal tissue and then reverse the process by warming it up again so it it comes back to life? This was a very concrete first step that they probably raised their first financing round for. It was a clear and valuable milestone that unlocked the next round of financing. To be clear, I don’t have any inside information on their financings so this is all my speculation, but it’s how I imagine it could’ve progressed.

In February of this year, they announced that Cradle had recovered electrical activity in a cryopreserved and rewarmed slice of rodent neural tissue.

Given the level of ambition of their idea, they needed to break down the problem clearly so an investor could understand what the risks were so she could decide whether to underwrite them. Cradle has laid out their roadmap in great clarity on its website so even a layperson can follow how Laura and Hunter tackle the challenge.

They start out by breaking down their long-term roadmap into discrete and valuable problems they will solve in a particular order. Each of these time-sensitvie areas of medicine comprise a distinct business opportunity and potential to generate revenue. With each milestone they derisk the long-term goal, while developing products that help patients in the near term. 

1. Preclinical Translatability - Due to difficulties in procuring human brain tissue samples, neuroscientists primarily use rodent neural tissue for both basic research and drug development. The short ischemic window after a surgeon resects the tissue is one of the main constraints blocking access to human brain tissue. Banking cryopreserved slices of resected brain tissue would allow neuroscientists to order a human neural tissue sample at any time, accelerating neuroscience research and improving translatability for drug development.

2. Organ Donation - Thousands of organs are rejected every year due to insufficient time for testing and matching during the viability window immediately following the organ’s excision from the donor. Pausing molecular motion in donor organs after excision would remove biologically-imposed time constraints upon testing and matching procedures, improving outcomes by reducing rejection rates amongst recipients. 

3. Medical Hibernation - Despite the ever-increasing frequency of medical breakthroughs, many patients won't live to see a cure to their disease. By reversibly pausing the biological function of a patient, we can extend the critical window of care for those without other treatment options. For example, in the decade between the onset of the AIDs epidemic/pandemic and the widespread availability of combination antiretroviral therapies, more than four million afflicted patients died (source UNAIDS (2023)). In 1950, a patient with cystic fibrosis would have died in infancy, while those born today with the condition have a life expectancy that often extends into middle age. Finally, patients today still regularly die of cancers that could have proven treatable were they afforded the innovations provided by a few more years of rigorous medical research. Medical hibernation technology could help these patients pause their biological time and access cures that are right around the corner.

I asked Perplexity’s Claude 3 Opus about the value of each market. Here’s what I got. The market for Preclinical Translatability in neuroscience research is estimated at $30 billion. The Organ Donation market is currently valued at $17 billion. The Medical Hibernation market does not exist yet. 

Whether those are exact right numbers is irrelevant. The first two solutions on Cradle’s roadmap are clearly very valuable on their way to the third, and Cradle is likely to not only to dominate the markets by bringing unique technology to market but also expand into new use cases. In fact, Cradle will not just expand the market but build a whole new world if it succeeds.  

If you go through the roadmap, you can also see that Cradle needs to build new technology at every part of the stack because they are building something so novel that there are few existing suppliers or tools. Vertically integrating like that is hard, but it’s also very valuable if you can pull it off. Such a company is likely to own the category they are building since anyone trying to follow would need to do be able to do all of it also across the stack. Vertical integration also means healthier margins, system level control and tighter feedback loops, but Cradle is much more than a vertically integrated technology company. Along with engineering and technology risk, they also push the science forward. Taking science is risk is unusual for venture capital to invest in, but since Cradle has so good visibility into their roadmap, they know exactly where they need to take science risk and which parts need to work. 

Right after laying out the high-level areas on their roadmap, Laura and Hunter write how it all ties together with their big idea: 

Each of these objectives presents its own unique challenges, but their solutions share the simple insight that the rate of molecular motion and chemical reactions can be controlled with a single knob — temperature. Cooling to deep hypothermic temperature (20°C ) is a common strategy for protection from ischemic damage during cardiac surgery. For in vitro fertilization (IVF), embryos can be stored for decades before implantation by cooling to cryogenic temperatures (below -130 °C) where the viscosity of water dramatically increases and all molecular motion stops. This phase transition from liquid to glass–in this case referring to any amorphous solid–is known as vitrification. Molecular motion is too slow in this state for water molecules to rearrange into ice crystals, which would otherwise damage tissue. Over one hundred thousand babies are born each year from cryopreserved embryos or eggs stored using this vitrification.

Once a company like Cradle gets going, the big idea gives the organization unifying focus and forward motion that won’t slow down in decades since the vision pulls everyone forward without the apathy that normally sets in when the organization grows older and larger. 

Laura and Hunter list the milestone they need to hit to build out their vision almost like a public todo-list.  

• Recovery of electrical activity from cryopreserved and rewarmed acutely resected rodent neural tissue. (Complete! See whitepaper.)

• Demonstration of maintained synaptic function in a cryopreserved and rewarmed slice.

• Demonstration of maintained long term potentiation (LTP) in a cryopreserved and rewarmed slice.

• Functional preservation of long-range neuronal projections in a small animal model (ex vivo).

• Functional preservation and rewarming of a whole organ isolated from a large animal model.

• Successful human organ cryopreservation clinical trial.

• Reversible whole-body cryopreservation of a small animal model. 

They go on to list the problem domains and their corresponding technical approaches for each milestone so the reader will understand the scientific and technical risks they will tackle.

Given how well Laura and Hunter understand and communicate what they need to do to build out the idea, it is no wonder Cradle was able to raise $48M to extend consciousness through time and space.  

Questions that lead to new big ideas

The most interesting thing about Cradle might be what happens when they succeed. 

• What else will it unlock?

• What is the next big idea that builds on top of Cradle’s technology that preserves continuous selves through time? 

• How differently do we all look at the life choices we are faced with during our life when Cradle is available?

My father died in 2011 because of heart problems, but my mother is thankfully still with us. She turned 80 this year. She is continuously frustrated how her mental abilities are declining and her body giving up. Now learning about Cradle I am thinking how I would look at the world if there would be an option to see my mother one day healthy and full of life again by using Cradle technology until we have figured out how to reverse aging. Just knowing technology like Cradle is within our reach and what it would mean for our loved ones makes me question why we’re not doing a lot more to combat deadly diseases and ultimately reverse aging. 

I notice my thinking moves quickly into what used to be the exclusive domain of science fiction authors, but Cradle shows that by seeing a concrete roadmap for a big idea like extending consciousness through time and space gives me whole new perspective on future. All of sudden a future where we have agency over the time we want to spend in this world with our loved ones does not sound so unachievable, or hard to invest in anymore.

Future is made of new ideas

The most ambitious ideas fall outside of what is currently culturally accepted or thought possible. Curing death, designer babies, inhabiting other planets, synthetic life, human-machine symbiosis, or the universal replicator. These ideas all fall outside of the Overton window. All of them also require new technology to be feasible. When you put the two together, you realize that the only thing that can bring about the future is technology that challenges our notion of what’s acceptable and reasonable. We tend to think technology gives us productivity gains, but technology is much more than that. Technology is the only thing that unlocks the future, but for that to happen we need to want it and invest in it.

The case of Vaire Computing

For the past three years, I have been working with a company that is building ‘reversible computing’ silicon chips that use 50 to 100 times less energy compared to classical architectures used by Nvidia, Intel, and all other chip makers. Vaire builds logic gates that work in both directions so the energy can be kept in the system versus turning it into heat as with the current chip designs.

This is a big and ambitious new idea, and goes against the accepted understanding of how semiconductors should work. At the same time, it’s badly needed as Moore’s Law is grinding to a halt because of the heat problem while at the same time compute loads are growing due to AI build-up. Last time I looked, data centers consume 18% of Ireland’s total metered electricity, and it’s only going up.

Vaire is lead by Rodolfo Rosini, one of the best founders I know of with an idea for a global chip monopoly that makes Nvidia look small. Yet, nobody wanted to fund the company. In fact, nobody has wanted to fund reversible computing technology that was invented back in the 1970s. It was simply not a ‘category’ by venture capital standards. It was too different. I have invested in Vaire on three different occasions over the past three years, and only recently the idea moved within the Overton window for most venture funds. Thankfully the lack of investor appetite didn’t intimidate Rodolfo — he pitched to a lot of investors on both sides of the Atlantic to find the few who were not afraid to back the radical vision of the future that Vaire is building. Only now that Vaire has moved reversible computing within the Overton window for VCs, the rounds are consistently oversubscribed and the company is turning down investors according to Rosini.

We need more shots at goal

Unfortunately Vaire is not alone. There are many founders who can’t raise capital because their ideas don’t fit most venture funds’ rather conservative model. There is a lot of talk about ideas that are too small to fit the venture economics, but we should also talk about ideas that are too ambitious for most venture funds. Most venture capitalists have learned how to invest by looking at how others do it, and when they see something that does not fit the pattern, they don’t know how to think about it. Despite many claiming to make contrarian bets, most venture capital is very uniform. This is a big loss for all of us.

I will attempt to expand the Overton window by writing about these ambitious ideas that can take us to that future. I also will invest in them when they need the validation the most, and work together with the founders to craft a plan that makes them attractive for later-stage capital. Serious founders working on big ideas are rare, but they do exist.

Here are some features that such ideas tend to share, although the most interesting ideas break all the rules.

• These ideas tend to create whole new categories of products when they emerge.

• They bypass the incumbents altogether (vs. trying to sell to them), and are often vertically integrated, or pure software with Internet distribution.

• They take more technology risk than market risk.

• They tend to sound a little crazy before it happens. As Arthur C. Clark advised us, ‘the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible’.

• The idea contains a new definite version of the future that it creates when it succeeds.

• The idea makes a powerful story.

• The idea changes the way we live.

• Importantly for an investment case, when they succeed, the category leading companies these ideas create tend to be valued in multiple billions.

Examples of the type of companies could include most companies Elon Musk has started including Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and OpenAI. Despite his PayPal success, even Musk was not able to raise outside capital to start Tesla or SpaceX but financed the companies himself until he had enough traction to get venture funds interested. Most of Musk’s friends tried to talk him out of starting these companies since they were so far out of the Overton window. Apple was also such a company when it was founded even if today it feels obvious —in 1976 a computer that anyone could use was a wild idea. Bitcoin was also such an idea in 2008. It was a radically new and powerful idea of a particular future — a world with a distributed global currency that runs purely on software with a mathematical instead of a government backing.

Setting up an investment syndicate

I already write angel checks to the extent that I can afford, but I want to do more.

If you would also like to invest in big ambitious ideas, I’m putting together an angel syndicate where you can invest per company basis however much you feel comfortable. If you’d like to join the syndicate, send me an email at ville.vesterinen[at]gmail.com and I’ll add you to the group. I’ll send you interesting deals when they emerge but you don’t have an obligation to invest. I already put together one such SPV for Vaire’s latest round.

Similarly I’d love to help you if you’re working on a really big idea. I won’t pretend to know how to build it, but I might be able to figure out how to finance it.

To answer these questions, let’s look at what makes a trillion-dollar company.

Six out of the seven most valuable companies in the world are technology companies. The only non-technology company is Saudi Aramco. The oil and gas industry dominated the top of the list until 2011-2012. Saudi Aramco is almost twice as old as the oldest technology company in the trillion-dollar club. Technology companies seem to be much younger than companies operating in other industries.

What’s more, all the technology companies worth over a trillion dollars were run by their founder until they became one of the largest companies in the world. Microsoft had Bill Gates, Apple had Steve Jobs, Alphabet (Google) had Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon had Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA is still run by Jensen Huang, and Meta (Facebook) is run by Mark Zuckerberg.

What could we learn from this observation?

Technology

Technology has grown out of the technology sector and has become part of every facet of our lives. During the past 15 years, technology has gone from 5% to 15% of global GDP.

The best technology companies will grow bigger and faster because technology reveals new secrets in the world. I expect the ascent to only get faster. Tesla has barely turned 21 and is already one of the world’s most valuable companies.

The United States

All the current trillion-dollar technology companies in the world have been founded and built in the United States. We would do well to study more about why and how the US has acquired the current monopoly on building valuable companies. A lot has been written about the post-war government R&D spending, the large domestic market, and well-functioning capital markets, but it might be even simpler than that. The US is better at attracting a special type of person and amplifying them once in the country.2 These special people are called founders. 

The founder

The fact that all the trillion-dollar companies were run by their founder until they practically became global monopolies is surprisingly important if we want to understand what makes a trillion-dollar company. 

A founder is a special person. They see a specific future that most others can’t see. The most interesting founders see a world they want to build, not just a business to make money. This matters because you need a definite idea of the future you are building towards if you want to change how the world works. Those only interested in making money can rarely imagine much beyond what they see already existing around them. The best founder-led businesses are valuable for the same reason that the best companies are valued higher than their current revenues: They have ideas about the future that are not yet built out. This vision of the future can’t be delegated to a pool of shareholders, and rarely can it be brought in with a new hire3.

The best founders shape the future to the image of their vision. That’s why nothing is as valuable as a persistent founder with a big vision. Companies without the founder's vision will not know which direction to go. They focus on maximizing short-term profits from their current products because they don’t know what new thing to build. An easy way to spot a company at the beginning of the end is to look at their balance sheet and what they do with their money. If they have a fat balance sheet and mostly use the cash to buy back their shares, they are likely out of ideas about new products to build. They don’t see a future they want to build anymore. A founder is unlikely to sell their business if they have new ideas about what to build, care deeply about them, and have the capital to try. They care more about creating the future they envision than any amount of money they could get by selling the business. A concrete vision is a powerful force in a world where few have any ideas of what the future should look like. The founder is the guardian of that vision.

How to build one?

A founder-led technology company is a good bet if we want to build a trillion-dollar company, but even if it’s a required condition, it’s not sufficient. This is where it gets interesting. 

Unfortunately, we can’t build one of the world’s largest companies by deciding to do so. Trillion-dollar companies are created by those following their curiosity or a vision that has grown out of that curiosity, often against a wall of skeptics. Trillion-dollar companies never look like one initially, but when the founder's interest overlaps with the large technological currents impacting the core arteries of our future, giant companies are born.

You can build quite a large company by just wanting to build one—I have seen this happen. But to create a trillion-dollar company, you can’t only be interested in building a large company. You have to be obsessed with the substance, the problem you’re solving for the world; the company is only the vehicle for your vision and determination.

This is probably also why most MBAs and management consultants don’t succeed as startup founders, even though they can be some of the best employees. They are more focused on succeeding than on the substance of their success. Since the trillion-dollar company never looks like one in the beginning, you need to have the persistence to work on ideas that look strange and risky at the outset. An idea that looks like a trillion-dollar company in the early days will never become one since many people can see the same opportunity, and competition will ensure you don’t have the opportunity to build a monopoly. This is why some investors talk about being contrarian right. If you’re only right, the margin gets competed away since everyone else sees the same large opportunity. The best ideas tend to look different, controversial, or downright foolish for their time.4

It’s also the reason why most accelerators fail. They attract people who want to start a company but are less interested in what the company does. This leads them to come up with an idea that looks like it could be a large business but which they are not interested in because of the idea itself.5 I’m guessing Y Combinator’s success has largely come from attracting and identifying people who are, first and foremost, interested in some specific problem but also ambitious enough to build a company around that idea. Teaching the latter is much easier than the former.6 Y Combinator has successfully focused on attracting technical founders and teaching them the business versus the other way around.

The next Bill Gates won’t build Microsoft, and the next Steve Jobs won’t build Apple. Each trillion-dollar company is unique. For all practical purposes, every trillion-dollar company is a monopoly. They get to become so large because they are unique in their own way and different from anything that came before. You can’t follow a playbook when creating something singular. To do that, you need to be comfortable creating something new, and creating anything new is risky because you don’t know what will happen. Your only guide is your curiosity, which can turn into a definite vision of a whole new world if you have the courage to follow it.

In his talk below, Morris Chang points out that TSMC is competitive partly because of Taiwan’s labor laws and cultural norms, the type of work people are willing to do, and TSMC’s ability to retain them without significant churn. If people don’t stay at a job long enough, they won’t become skilled enough to be able to manufacture semiconductors at the high level that TSMC does. The working conditions that Chang mentions include working long hours and living in dormitories.

If anyone, Morris Chang should know what made TSMC the one fab in the world that everybody looks to for manufacturing their most advanced chips, including Nvidia.

This casts doubt on the recent efforts by the US and Europe to try to recreate TSMC-like manufacturing capability on their soil as Taiwan’s geopolitical situation becomes ever more uncertain. Taiwan sits in major geopolitical crosshairs as Xi Jinping has expressed a desire to see Taiwan reunified with mainland China while, at the same time, China and the US compete for the most advanced technology that powers the future of AI.

Chang says that when Taiwan loses chip manufacturing, it won’t be to the US or to Europe but instead to India, Vietnam, or Indonesia. In so many words, Chang is pointing out that with American and European labor laws and cultural norms, we can’t recreate a world-leading chip manufacturer like TSMC.

Now that a new Cold War is being waged between the US and China, and AI has become one of the most critical battlegrounds, Chang’s point could not have much larger ramifications. If there is any doubt, we can already look at where Apple is moving its manufacturing as it’s leaving China due to geopolitical reasons. It’s not to the US, where they design their hardware, but to India and Taiwan.

A small country like Finland, with some six million people, has a limited pool of skilled workers compared to giants like the United States, China, India, or Germany. On top of this, there's a de-population bomb slowly going off. The whole world is heading toward negative population growth. Here's another take on why that's happening.

In Finland, the fertility rate is 1.46 children per woman. The replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman, so the Finnish population is shrinking along with almost every other country in the world.  

The red graph visualizes Finland's Economic Dependency Ratio (EDR) from 2021 to 2060. The EDR represents the proportion of dependent individuals (both young and elderly) relative to the working-age population.

The graph starts with an EDR of 38% in 2021. The EDR experiences a gradual decrease, reaching its lowest point in the mid-2030s. After reaching the lowest point in the mid-2030s, there's a gradual increase in the EDR over the years, with the ratio reaching around 43% by 2060. This means for every 100 working-age individuals (typically those aged 15 to 64), there are 43 dependents. The dependents could be children, elderly, or others who are not part of the labor force for various reasons.

The blue graph visualizes the proportion of Finland's working-age population (defined as ages 15 to 64) from 2021 to 2060. The graph starts with a working-age population percentage of 62% in 2021. There's a gradual increase in this proportion, peaking in the mid-2030s. After reaching the peak in the mid-2030s, there's a decline in the working-age population percentage, with the percentage reaching around 57% by 2060. This trend indicates that the working-age population proportion will experience growth until the mid-2030s, after which it will decline. 

The two graphs show the changing age structure of Finland's population over the next few decades. The decreasing proportion of the working-age population and the increasing Economic Dependency Ratio suggest we’ll face challenges in labor supply, economic productivity, and the sustainability of our social support systems.

By looking at the two graphs, we're in trouble. We're running out of kids and there's no easy fix to revert the trend. Along with free child care and parental leaves, making everyone wealthier might get people to have more kids.

We could also invest in childcare technologies like artificial wombs, create child-friendly communities, and even whole cities for families wanting more children, but that's for another post. 

In the short to medium term, the demographic trend underlines the importance of skilled immigration. This trend should worry small and big countries alike. For small countries like Finland, which don't have large populations to start with, succeeding in attracting foreign talent is that much more important. 

The latest population projections in the graphs above by Statistics Finland assume that Finland's migration gain from abroad will be around 15,000 people yearly. This is not a lot, especially if a big portion of that should be top talent to start new successful companies and make existing ones successful.

Making it easy to enter and stay in the country (think working permits, passports, opening bank accounts, finding an apartment, schools for kids, etc.) does not win the race; it's table stakes tactics, and a country needs to have a red carpet welcome for the top talent just to compete. Every country that is even remotely aware of what matters for their country's medium and long-term success is competing for the best talent.

Not the best, different

How do you win when everyone wants the best talent? The trick is to refrain from competing entirely. One should not strive to be the best but unique. Just as when starting a company or thinking about how to personally succeed in building a successful career, being singular is more effective than trying to compete to be the best. Helsinki will lose every time trying to be better than London, San Francisco, or New York in what they are great at. We shouldn’t try to become something we see someone already being great at. Instead, we should invent a new definition of success. What singular thing could we be uniquely good at?

For a small European country like Finland, this means doing something others won't or can't. As a country, you can't choose your weather, but you can decide how you regulate companies that operate in your country. Large countries are not as agile, nor can they pass innovative policies as easily as small countries where decision-making is faster, bureaucracy thinner, population more unified, and there’s less money at stake.

Optimize your country for easy adaptation to groundbreaking technology and science, and you'll attract the most ambitious companies pushing on what's possible. If your country is the only place where the most ambitious companies in a given sector can operate, the companies will immigrate along with the most ambitious people in that sector. This sort of talent created the Silicon Valley as we know it. These are the most ambitious and talented people on the planet. If you boldly redesign your regulatory environment, it will send out a strong signal worldwide, and you will be rewarded with economic growth. It's not a mystery which areas of technology can potentially lead to radical leaps in human progress—Biotech, AI, computing, energy, aerospace, transportation, defense, and maybe a few others. All you have to do is choose what you want to deregulate. But isn’t regulation there to protect the consumer, and society is better for it? Turns out regulatory capture is real. In many cases, regulation is a net loss for society and our future prosperity.

All in or nothing

Unlike lowering taxes to attract talent, designing your country's regulatory framework does not cost anything. You just need to make it legal for cutting-edge companies to pilot their products in your country. If they are not allowed to operate in other countries, or the regulatory burden is 10x lighter in your country, the startups will relocate.

But there’s a catch. Marginally better is not enough. Just as when building products, it needs to be ten times better to get people to take action. To make this work for your country, you need to go all in and be bold. Being ‘reasonable’ won't cut it. 

For Finland and the other 26 European Union member states, crafting a unique regulatory environment means working with the EU to make it possible. Currently, the EU wants to harmonize most regulations across member states, but for the sake of the continent's economic future, the EU would be wise to step back and allow member states to design their national regulatory environments. Assuming the EU won’t block it, for a small country like Finland, strategically redesigning its regulatory environment and choosing to deregulate specific sectors is a lot easier than it is for one of the giants like the United States. This would remake Europe into an economic archipelago of specialized high-tech islands of world-leading science and engineering, where each country would lead in a specific mix of industries. In such a future, not only would the individual nations thrive, but humanity would benefit as global progress and scientific advancement accelerate.

For young families, finding a home they can afford near schools, workplaces, and urban infrastructure can be challenging. When they manage to buy one, they will be in serious debt for most of their working lives. The lifelong debt significantly limits the freedom to change careers or how and where to live. Generally, millennials are less well off than members of earlier generations when they were young, with lower earnings, fewer assets, and less wealth.

My mother, born in the mid-1940s, is not much better off than young adults. The future looked brighter for the generation born after WWII when they were starting their families, but now many of them are struggling with a healthcare system that was designed for a different era and a long list of diseases that are killing us: Alzheimer's, cancer, dementia, heart disease, diabetes.

These are mostly my anecdotal observations, but survey data tend to agree. Even though metrics like global poverty have been declining for two centuries and child mortality rates are down, few believe there's an exciting future ahead.

Below, I will discuss why many of us should be more hopeful about the future and what we can do about it. Most of the historical data I use is from the United States because it's the most complete data set available and goes back the furthest. For the purposes of this blog post, I use the United States as a proxy for liberal Western democracies. I try to put together accurate, detailed data to paint a complete picture, but my argument is still more directional. Whether you agree or disagree, I'm grateful if you take the time to read. No less is at stake than our future.

Future that never arrives

We have quietly accepted that being able to afford a house for our family should be hard and that old age comes with crippling diseases is normal. It's deeply troubling how the status quo is accepted without much thinking that things could be different.

Most people I know are hard-working, smart folks who are trying their hardest within the cultural and economic environment they were born into, but they don't see how the world could change radically for the better.

When a plan for change emerges, it's mostly about reorganizing our current resources or making minor, gradual improvements. It's rare to hear an argument about building something new. Yet, the latter is also an option.

Technological innovation drives economic growth

Technology's deeper meaning and promise got lost after 1970. With the rise of the Internet, technology has come to mean something that lives inside a smartphone—most of what we think of as technology would be more accurately called software.

This was not always the case. During the 100 years between 1870 and 1970, with rapid industrialization and technological innovation, we laid much of the groundwork for the modern world. This era is characterized by significant advancements in technology and industry, such as the development of the telephone, light bulb, indoor plumbing, automobile, airplane, plastics, air conditioning, assembly line production methods, antibiotics, television, nuclear fission, and the integrated circuit. The invention of electricity and the combustion engine alone changed daily life during the 100-year period beyond recognition.

The new technological inventions drove the fastest economic growth in the history of the world between 1920 and 1970. On average, Total Factor Productivity (TFP) in the United States grew at close to 3% a year between those years, peaking at 3.5% between 1940 and 1950. TFP represents the portion of output growth that cannot be attributed to changes in inputs such as labor and capital. You can simplify TFP to measure the economy's long-term technological change. If output grows faster than the increase in inputs, TFP has increased, indicating that the economy is getting more output from its resources. For context, the average real GDP growth rate for the United States between 1940 and 1950 was close to 9% a year. Given the technological changes starting in 1870, it took several decades before the new technologies were widespread enough to see the impact on productivity numbers. However, when they arrived, it showed. New technological innovation sped up economic growth significantly. Equally important, we learned the increase is not automatic. TFP growth after 1970 was barely a third of the rate achieved between 1920 and 1970.

In his 2016 book "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," Robert J. Gordon attributed the rapid TFP growth in the United States to several one-off events: Along with record technological change, women joined the labor force, there was a transition from an agrarian to an urban society and an increase in high school and college education rates. Other tailwinds Gordon identifies include investments in public infrastructure (highways and airports), the emergence of strong trade unions in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the creation of social safety nets, and government-funded research and development during and after World War II.

Gordon argues that we haven't seen similar TFP growth since the 1970s because we lack many of the above-outlined tailwinds, and we are faced with headwinds like an aging population, rising inequality, stagnating education, environmental challenges, and the high cost of healthcare and housing.

I agree with Gordon on the tailwinds between 1870 and 1970 and the headwinds we are facing, but I disagree with why we haven't seen much TFP growth after 1970.

Economic historians like Robert J. Gordon are good at piecing together the past but not as good at predicting the future. All the important events will be hard to predict singular one-off events like World War II. We might not get a WWII re-run to drive demand for new technology, but we will get other significant one-time events. A good candidate to drive an economic boom could be the emergence of powerful artificial intelligence or large-scale commercial entrance to space. It's equally hard to predict the emergence of singular individuals like Elon Musk, who has single-handedly changed the course of several industries. Significant events that change the world in a big way tend to be exponential, but most predictions are linear and backward-looking, especially when made by those who are not driving the change. Predictions and visions of the future are useful in inspiring, giving ideas for progress, and guiding our broader culture. For decades, SciFi literature and movies have influenced our imagination of what the future could look like. But the most useful predictions are ones where the singular vision of a different future is made real by the visionary herself. The only sure way to predict the future is by building something new and singular.

We get what we celebrate

Given that we saw the TFP growth fall off a cliff in 1970, there must be a good explanation, even if it's not a structural cul-de-sac like Gordon argues. I believe the answer is culture. That means higher economic growth is not impossible, but at the same time, it's not automatic either. It's up to us. It's not enough that we can do it. We also need to want it.

By culture, I mean our beliefs about the world and about our agency. Do we believe in human rationality and our ability to tame the unpredictability of the natural world, or are we hesitant to push any further, fearing we might permanently change the world around us, or perhaps because we think it's just too hard? Steward Brand famously said, "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." He commented on humanity's place in the world. We have great power over the natural world, similar to the powers attributed to gods in myth and religion. We have a duty to use that power wisely rather than rejecting it out of fear or ignorance. To embrace and responsibly use technology, including genetic engineering and geoengineering, to solve problems and advance humanity. In this spirit, we would do well to revisit ideas from Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Bacon and John Locke. In fact, Economic historian Joel Mokyr argues that we can trace the beginning of modern economic growth to the cultural transformations of this period.

In his 2016 book "A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy," Mokyr explores how cultural transformations during the Enlightenment between 1500 and 1700 played a pivotal role in shaping the modern economy. Mokyr defines culture as a set of shared beliefs, values, norms, practices, and institutions that shape the behavior and mindset of a society. He highlights the significance of cultural factors, emphasizing the impact of ideas and knowledge on economic growth. He argues that societies that valued useful knowledge (which roughly translates to science and technology) and fostered a culture of innovation, entrepreneurship, and risk-taking were more likely to experience sustained economic progress. Mokyr challenges the conventional view that economic incentives alone drive technological change and emphasizes the cultural dynamics that encourage the generation and adoption of new technologies. The book provides a comprehensive analysis of how cultural transformation, alongside intellectual and institutional developments, laid the foundation for the rise of the modern economy, shedding light on the vital role of culture in fostering future economic growth.

I have personally seen how transformational cultural beliefs can be. In 2008, I cofounded the Slush conference to celebrate technology entrepreneurship. When we started, we needed to explain what a startup is when talking about the event. During the past 15 years, Slush has become the world's premiere startup event. During the same 15 years, Finland has transformed wholesale into a nation excited about technology startups. For its cultural significance, the annual Slush conference has become analogous to a World Fair for the country. Starting a technology company has become not just accepted but a celebrated act. Whether the success of Slush is the reason or just an outcome of the development is less relevant. Technology entrepreneurship has become better understood, but even more importantly, it's become a desired career path for the smartest people of a generation and a celebrated choice across Finnish society. At the same time, we have seen investments in Finnish startups rise over 10-fold, and the Slush alums have built multi-billion euro companies. We truly get what we celebrate.

Figure 1: Investments in Finnish Startups 2022

The annual economic growth rate in the Western world from AD 1 to AD 1820 was only 0.06% a year, or 6% per century. For the past 200 years, we have seen first a meteoric rise and, more recently, a decline in economic growth. We can confidently state that we can directly influence the degree of economic growth we see in the world. If we decide a prosperous future is what we want and work hard for it, I am confident we can consistently hit high single-digit economic growth in our lifetime. At that point, we'd have all the houses we need, and there would be a whole lot fewer diseases to worry about.

Housing

With the above in mind, let's explore potential futures to see examples of what life could look like. These futures are far from wild SciFi visions. They are within our reach relatively rapidly if we want to build them out.

Many young families can only secure a home by taking on large debt that lasts a lifetime. Investing in technological progress can change that. In fact, it's the only thing that can change that in the long run. Technology has a double impact. It drives economic growth via TFP growth, increasing incomes across the board. It's also deflationary by nature, making the areas it touches cheaper as the technology matures and enabling an ever larger percentage of the population to afford the produced goods and services. By looking at the chart below, you can see technology's deflationary impact. The areas of the economy where we have not made technological progress have become more expensive, while areas touching information technology has become ever cheaper.

Figure 2: Price Changes for selected US consumer goods and services

We can only accommodate so many housing units in the city center. Politicized permitting procedures hinder the construction of the most desirable neighborhoods with increasingly taller buildings. However, if we can't build more affordable housing in the city, with the right technology, we can shrink the distance it takes to get to the city from afar, where there's more affordable space.

Austin Vernon and Eli Dourado wrote about how cheap energy would change transportation and how we could live in a world where cheap energy would be abundant.

In 1979, transportation engineer Yacov Zahavi proposed that people behave as if they have nearly fixed travel budgets for both money and time. Given a variety of transport modes with different speeds and costs, travelers act as if they “solve” an optimization problem to maximize their spatial and economic opportunities. He found that daily travel times averaged from just above 1 to 1.5 hours per day, with an asymptote around 1.1 hours per day as higher-speed travel options became available. As a result, further increases in transport speed don’t serve to save time; they simply make more spatial and economic opportunities available. This finding was picked up by Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, who used a wide range of anthropological evidence to show that travel time in human societies has always averaged about 1 hour per day. Since then, 1.1 hours has become known as Marchetti’s constant.

[…]

Since energy use typically increases with both speed and distance, energy costs will play a major role in expanding the human transportation network. Lower energy costs increase human range.

Development for vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) aircraft using distributed electric propulsion proceeds rapidly. One of the leading companies, Joby Aviation, has already got clearance for US flight tests. When they arrive, VTOLs could change how we live:

VTOL aircraft require landing space similar to a large helipad. While a dense city can support several helipads, it may not make sense to devote the space for enough of them to make VTOL aircraft a practical means of transport within cities. They could make sense for suburbs, exurbs, and bedroom communities. It could be “land and ride” instead of “park and ride.” Much like how cars gave us the suburbs, VTOL aircraft could bring extensive exurbs that allow cheaper housing without long drives to work or play.

[…]

The speed of a VTOL aircraft allows for a significant improvement in travel times. Given Marchetti’s constant, miles traveled will increase as daily travel times remain stable. The increase in distance could be two to four times, depending on how congested traffic is and on the service route.

Faster travel (via cheap energy) is just one of the technologies that would make housing more affordable. Automation, process innovation, new materials - there's a lot we can do if we want to.

Figure 3: Joby Aviation recently got clearance for flight tests in the US.

Health

Biology, which has long been artisanal, is fast becoming industrial. Health is becoming an engineering challenge, and the pace of progress resembles the rapid advances we've made in computing as the cost of gene sequencing is plummeting. The central idea driving all of the sequencing is miniaturization. Just as miniaturization steadily decreased the price of computer chips, genome sequencing is getting cheaper as working components are made even smaller. Regulation willing, we might see as much progress in healthcare during the next decade as we’ve seen in computing during the previous one.

Figure 4: The exponentially declining price of DNA sequencing vis-a-vis Moore’s Law

Several fields are evolving rapidly and demonstrating the potential to revolutionize how we prevent and cure illnesses.

Cell and Gene Therapies: These approaches aim to treat disease at the cellular and genetic level. Cell therapy involves extracting patients' cells, reprogramming them, and injecting them back into the body, often with the goal of using the immune system to fight diseases like cancer. Gene therapy involves delivering genetic material into patients' bodies with the aim of replacing or correcting faulty DNA.

Closely related to cell and gene therapies, mRNA, or messenger RNA, therapies essentially work by using synthetic mRNA to instruct cells in the body to produce proteins that can either prevent or fight disease or help restore normal function to cells and organs. This technology has been a game changer in modern medicine, with Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna utilizing it to develop their COVID-19 vaccines at an unprecedented speed during the pandemic.

While mRNA technology has been around for several decades, its use in approved therapies was limited before the pandemic. The successful development and deployment of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines have highlighted the potential of mRNA technology for vaccines and therapies for genetic disorders, cancer, and other diseases, leading to renewed interest and investment in this area.

Synthetic Biology: A field of biotechnology that uses engineering principles to create new biological systems. This can be done by designing and assembling new DNA sequences or modifying existing ones. Synthetic biology has the potential to develop new drugs, foods, and materials and to revolutionize the way we treat diseases.

Biotechnology has also benefited from rapid improvements in machine learning (ML) and AI technologies. ML and AI will likely continue to play an increasingly important role in biotechnology, driving further improvements, including drug discovery, personalized medicine, genomic analysis, and clinical trial optimization.

Let's address the long list of diseases we outlined in the beginning.

1. Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia: Biotech companies are leveraging various approaches, such as targeting beta-amyloid plaques and tau tangles, hallmark features of Alzheimer's disease. These approaches include monoclonal antibodies and small molecules. Some companies are also exploring gene therapy and stem cell therapy for treatment. Still, the field has seen many clinical trial failures, and the path to a cure is still uncertain.

2. Cancer: Biotechnology has significantly contributed to cancer treatment. Techniques such as immunotherapy, gene therapy, and CAR-T cell therapy are being used. Immunotherapy leverages the body's immune system to fight cancer, while gene therapy aims to replace or silence the genes responsible for cancer. CAR-T therapy involves engineering patients' immune cells to fight cancer. These treatments have shown promise, but they are also not quite there to be universally effective.

3. Heart Disease: Here biotech is being used to develop therapies for heart disease, including gene therapy, stem cell therapy, and tissue engineering. For instance, gene therapy is used to stimulate the growth of new blood vessels in the heart, while stem cell therapy aims to repair damaged heart tissue. Tissue engineering involves creating artificial heart tissue that can be used to replace damaged areas of the heart. These therapies are still mainly in the experimental stages and have not yet resulted in a definitive cure.

4. Diabetes: Not surprisingly, companies are working hard to fix diabetes. For type 1 diabetes, some companies are working on encapsulated islet cell therapy, which involves transplanting insulin-producing cells into the body. For type 2 diabetes, biotech firms are creating better insulin therapies and drugs that can regulate blood sugar levels. Again, we have more work to do as these treatments are designed to manage the condition rather than cure it.

This is just a small subset of illnesses we want to cure. By looking at the progress we have made, it’s anemic for what we could be doing. There are many reasons one can make for the lack of faster progress, but I’d argue it’s mostly about whether we really want it.

Our culture determines how we regulate technology

Health, housing, and aviation are all regulated domains, so our progress depends on whether we want it and decide to regulate the domains accordingly.

One argument on why we have seen such fast progress in computing is that we forgot to regulate it because we thought the computer was a toy. Conversely, we have heavily regulated many areas of life and subsequently not seen much progress. When looking at Figure 2. above, the regulatory burden is especially heavy for industries that have become the most expensive, including housing and healthcare. In addition to the actual permitting process for new housing, housing costs have risen because of the lack of faster transport and cheap energy. It’s not surprising that nuclear power and aviation are some of the most regulated industries in the world. With healthcare, the case is even more clear-cut. It even has a name, Eroom's law, which is the inverse of Moore's law. It's the observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, not least because of the increasing regulatory burden.

Figure 5: Eroom's law is the observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time.

Do we want our lives to improve?

As we stated in the beginning, we have accepted that being able to afford a house should be challenging and that old age comes with a deadly disease. This is a symptom of something more fundamental. We have silently accepted that the world won’t materially change during our lifetimes.

Peter Thiel noted that if nothing changes in the next 100 years, the future will be at least 100 years away: “What makes the future distinctive and important isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet, but rather that it will be a time when the world looks different from today. In this sense, if nothing changes for the next 100 years, then the future is over 100 years away.” By Thiel’s definition, we have been robbed of our future.

What would it take to get back to the future, afford a house without a lifetime of debt, and cure the illnesses that plague us? Technological innovation is our only hope in the long term. Technological innovation drives economic growth, which directly translates into a higher quality of life, funds further science and innovation, and makes many of the central institutions of our liberal democracy function. Without growth, modern society will grind to a halt. Conversely, economic growth might solve all our problems.

If technology can drive change and solve our problems, why has it not done so already? Just as it's important to understand that change is possible, it's equally important to understand that it's not automatic. We need to believe it’s possible, want it, and work hard for it.

For us in Finland, during the past 15 years, Slush leveled the playing field with bigger technology hubs, brought in international technology investors, and educated us on technology entrepreneurship. But the most interesting thing was how it changed the cultural fabric of the country in a relatively short time. It created a forward-looking atmosphere of hope and excitement at a time when one should’ve expected the opposite. Right when Nokia, the Finnish miracle that accounted for approximately 4% of Finland's GDP at its peak, started to crumble in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Slush got started by a group of kids in their 20s who naively believed in the future since nobody cared enough to inform them how dreary the future would be. Turns out optimism and excitement are contagious. It was a cultural shift that produced the results we now see. Slush showed that a small country like Finland, with 6 million people, can culturally reinvent itself in a decade.

Despite all the excitement in Finland, maybe the cultural remake didn’t go far enough. Sometime after 1970, we forgot that change is possible. Across the liberal democratic world, most still believe the prosperity that technology can deliver is reserved for technology businesses. We haven’t yet realized that it is only the tip of the iceberg. Technology is not just what lives in your smartphone or is reserved for a few large software companies. It can change all our lives for the better beyond recognition. To do that, we need a cultural awakening where we start believing in the future again. How could this happen?

1. Bring back the future by celebrating definite, ambitious futures and people building them

Organize events, parades, and celebrations, write songs and books, and make movies and art. Paint the cultural fabric with the message. For every dark and dystopic Terminator or Oppenheimer movie, make one about how AGI and atomic energy change our lives for the better. Make it normal to talk and plan for ambitious futures. Above all, celebrate individuals with singular definite visions of new and different futures. Those who aspire to build singular new ideas instead of competing to be the best in what already exists. These individuals are the only way to a future that's not captured by the past. We need more of these individuals. This is especially important in a world where the media will publicly crucify anyone for departing too far from the accepted dogma. Rooting for the unreasonable individuals we don't always agree with can feel particularly oxymoronic, but the future depends on it.

2. Opinionated and ambitious capital

We need all the large institutions that manage our capital and wealth excited for the future. Endowments, pension funds, wealthy families and individuals, and sovereign wealth funds. We should celebrate those who finance risky, ambitious new technologies and channel more capital into building a definite future and less capital to index the indefinite status quo. Where we currently search for ideas that fit our financing instruments, we should shape our financing to fit the new ambitious ideas in need of capital. Few have the stomach to fund the most ambitious because they look different. It means there are outsized returns for those who will.

3. Challenge the existing cultural truths

We should have a healthy disrespect towards tradition and what came before. If we believe those who came before had all the correct answers, trying to create anything new seems pointless or insulting. Yet, that's what we need to do if we want ground-breaking scientific discoveries and technological innovations. At the same time, we shouldn’t question everything to the extent that all becomes relativistic. Thinking for ourselves is harder and more important than ever before.

4. A regulatory environment that wants us to prosper

We should also remove obstacles to new ideas, science, and technology. We will not see our lives improving if we punish for mistakes or regulate industries until there are no uncertainties left in life. Taken too far, regulation drives up costs, slows down progress, and pushes innovation elsewhere. After regulation starts to slow down progress, it’s not in the interest of society anymore. If we only introduce new laws and regulations, eventually, everything will be outlawed. This is an opportunity for the smartest countries to attract talent and the most ambitious technology companies by creating strategic regulatory environments. Companies pushing what’s possible in energy, biotech, transportation, space, AI, and many other critical industries will be established in regulatory environments where they can get their technology to market as fast and cheap as possible with the least regulatory uncertainty.

We can do all this. It's not whether we can get affordable housing and cure the illnesses that trouble us but whether we believe it’s possible and want it enough. In the free world, we tend to get what we celebrate. Let's celebrate the future and the change it brings with it.

*All historical Total Factor Productivity (TFP) numbers are from the book The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon

Technology helps us make most of our resources on earth, but we can’t make more land. Real estate is the ultimate zero-sum competition and a proxy for our idea of freedom. Throughout history, it has invoked more violence than any other resource. Space allows us to rethink our lives without the legacy we have built over centuries here on Earth. It offers the same freedom, economic potential, and excitement that once came with exploring new continents. The United States is a success story only because some 250 years ago, we were able to rethink what kind of society we wanted to live in.

Despite the vast economic potential, the biggest opportunity is the change in perspective. To this day, most of our wars are zero-sum territorial battles. Could exploring a new world free us from endless violence and fighting over limited resources? The frontier contains the idea that the future is different and better than the present, liberating us from a zero-sum world. We can’t desire what our neighbor has when we’re busy creating something new and different from everything that came before. Working at the frontier is an embodiment of what it means to have a future.

SpaceX is the modern-day railroad company

The first settlers in the US, such as the Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620, primarily sought religious freedom rather than economic gain. Sailing across the Atlantic was slow, dangerous, and relatively expensive. A trip to Mars is likely all those things when that becomes available. One way trip to Mars takes 4-10 months, and launch windows to Mars only open every 2 years. Mars could offer similar freedom for those who seek it, but that’s not all SpaceX will do for us.

In 1869, the American transcontinental railroad opened the way for the settlement of the West, provided new economic opportunities, and enabled the development of new towns and communities. The infrastructure that railroads created offered almost anyone who made the trip a tangible opportunity for a better future. Eventually, millions of individuals made the journey.

The transcontinental railroad is one of the greatest technological achievements of the 19th century. The railroad connected eastern states to western states. It reduced travel time from 6 months to 6 days. SpaceX is building a logistical infrastructure comparable to the late 19th-century United States transcontinental railroads. Cheap, safe, and frequent transport, first to Low Earth Orbit and then across the solar system. It will be one of the greatest technological achievements of this century and will change life beyond recognition. New technology will unlock the future just as railroads once did.

Once transportation is cheap enough, frequent enough, and reliable enough, we’ll have an incentive to further develop new technologies to make life and commerce viable in space, which will give the first space settlers profitable businesses to start and operate. Space will be a new frontier with an opportunity for unprecedented freedom and prosperity.

Profit motives and cost curves

What is currently holding us back is the cost of accessing space on the one hand and the economic value we can create to cover the cost of operating in space on the other. SpaceX has already pushed down the cost of access, but Starship will change space more than we can imagine.

Before SpaceX's reusable rockets, the cost to launch payloads could reach $10,000 to $20,000 per kilogram or more. Today, with reusable Falcon Heavy rockets, the cost stands at sub-two thousand dollars per kg. The goal for Starship is to push down the marginal cost of launch to as low as $10/kg. That’s an improvement of over two orders of magnitude from what we have today. It will be a massive unlock for what’s possible and will, in one sweep, allow us to start colonizing space. Colonizing Mars is an ambitious vision Elon Musk has set for us, but there’s a lot more we can do in space when the launch cost to orbit hits $10/kg.

Once the tracks are laid, the building starts

Once we see a prosperous future is within everyone’s reach, it will give us a new shared direction to work towards.

Exploring the frontier is hard but inspiring. It forces us to invest in bold new technologies, and there’s work for everyone who can contribute. Companies have the incentive to train people with needed skills. After we have laid the tracks, we need to create a habitable environment for ourselves. It will be a lot of work, just as it was in the late 19th century United States.

The future in space is already being built. Weapon systems are the normal first entrants as they can finance much of the R&D that’s needed. Even Starship might play a dual-use role as a weapon. Satellites are another dual-use technology. By now, we’re used to seeing satellite businesses spearheaded by SpaceX’s own Starlink. Recently, Starlink played a role during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In-space manufacturing companies starting to emerge. Varda recently launched its product, and others are likely to follow. The most ambitious companies are building space stations for human use. Once the International Space Station reaches the end of its life, sometime after 2028, Axiom will be ready to take its place as a commercial space station. These and other pioneers are building the early infrastructure for our expansion into space.

The Starship-enabled 200-fold decrease in the cost of access to space means a whole new future is about to open up. Like any frontier, it points us to work on something new and important instead of fighting over a static zero-sum world.

For a long time, I have wondered whether high enough economic growth would solve all our challenges. Interestingly, it might.

Strong economic growth would not only create well-paying jobs, but it would lift the standards of living for everyone and provide a larger pie to allocate to those in need. A lack of resources and economic hardship have fuelled most wars and given countless dictators arguments to invade another country or initiate aggression toward a specific population segment.

We have learned that only once the standard of living reaches a high enough level can we start thinking of the commons, the climate, and generally the long-term future beyond our immediate needs. It's hard to argue why we should not cut down the last piece of forest or burn dirty coal if that's the only available means to heat our house or cook our food.

Crucially, even liberal democracy grinds to a halt without economic growth. If there's no growth and you want to reallocate resources, you must take them from another important cause. Without economic growth, politics becomes a zero-sum game.

Economic growth allows us to invest in science and arts, cure diseases, and travel to the stars. It's the ultimate enabler. Once you start thinking about growth, Robert Lucas, a Nobel-prize-winning economist, wrote, "It is hard to think about anything else."

The neoclassical growth theory explains economic growth as the interaction of labor, capital, and technology, known as the factors of production. Technology is our only real lever to drive significantly faster economic growth since it's harder to increase capital accumulation or labor force growth. Technology means doing more with less. It creates growth through productivity gains. Economists call this Total Factor Productivity (TFP). TFP is calculated as a residual by taking capital and labor increases out of GDP growth. Economic growth via the advancement of technology is our only means to escape a zero-sum world in the long term.

When evaluating a particular future path for our liberal democratic society, potential GDP growth might be one of the better long-term measures of how good a specific path might be for us. Many other important outcomes we measure are downstream from economic growth. Focusing on economic growth allows us to measure different futures against each other with a common currency.

There's a lot we don't know and can argue about, but it's safe to say economic growth is one of the better things we have going for us.