Build Something Hard: Why Europe’s Next Trillion-Euro Company Will Grow at the Edge of Corporate Assets

Executive Summary

• Easy ideas no longer build enduring companies. The next generation of European growth will come from solving hard problems — in energy, mobility, health, and defense — that sit inside regulated, capital-intensive systems.
• Europe’s best opportunities lie within its corporate balance sheets. The assets, infrastructure, and data that can fuel new trillion-euro ventures are already owned by incumbents — but remain underutilized.
• Founders and corporates must learn to build together. Building at the edge of corporate assets requires new structural models — semi-autonomous ventures, capital discipline, and governance designed for learning, not bureaucracy.
• AI-native ventures will define the next era. The future belongs to those who combine industrial scale, technological acceleration, and entrepreneurial speed into new system-defining businesses.

1. The End of Easy

At Slush 2025, the founders of Skype, Wise, and Starship delivered a message that pierced through the usual noise of startup optimism: stop chasing easy problems.
In a decade of apps, platforms, and features, the European innovation ecosystem has been remarkably good at creating convenience — but not resilience.

Now, the pendulum is swinging back. The world’s hardest problems are no longer digital abstractions. They are physical, infrastructural, and systemic.
They involve regulated markets, hardware, logistics, and supply chains — all the unglamorous machinery that keeps societies functioning.

When Tavet Hinrikus (Wise) and Ahti Heinla (Starship) say “go build something hard”, they are describing a frontier that demands the coordination of capital, regulation, and industrial expertise. These are decade-long ventures, not hackathon projects.

And the terrain they describe — energy grids, defense systems, healthcare infrastructure, and industrial supply chains — already belongs to someone: Europe’s corporations.

2. The Hard Problems Are Already Inside Your Industry

The opportunities now shaping Europe’s next growth cycle aren’t emerging from garages.
They’re rooted in the systems that power economies — and the inefficiencies that corporates already know intimately.

• In energy: grid flexibility, industrial decarbonization, and hydrogen infrastructure.

• In mobility: autonomous logistics, multimodal optimization, and vehicle-to-grid systems.

• In healthcare: continuous monitoring, AI diagnostics, and preventative interventions.

• In defense: autonomous systems, space surveillance, and cyber-physical resilience.

What unites them is their hardness: capital intensity, regulatory complexity, ecosystem interdependence.
They demand both the discipline of corporates and the speed of startups — a combination that has rarely coexisted within European companies.

These are the same areas where Europe holds the deepest industrial expertise, most valuable data, and most strategic assets.
But to unlock that value, corporates must stop treating innovation as a side project — and start treating it as a structural investment class.

3. The Assets Are Here. The Playbook Isn’t.

Europe’s corporates are sitting on the ingredients for transformation:

• Factories, fleets, grids, and ports.

• Licenses, certifications, and regulatory trust.

• Customer contracts, data, and physical networks.

Yet, few know how to turn these into new, independent growth engines.

Most innovation programmes — labs, accelerators, or CVC arms — operate like internal tourism.
They explore possibilities, but rarely deliver businesses with P&L accountability or market traction.

Meanwhile, startups on the outside depend on access to the very assets corporates control — and build around them when they can’t.
The result? Value leaks out of Europe’s industrial core into lighter ecosystems elsewhere.

The paradox is clear: the next generation of high-value ventures can’t succeed without corporate assets, but corporates can’t build them with old governance.

4. Why “Innovation” Is Not Enough

For two decades, Europe’s largest companies have built a patchwork of innovation vehicles — labs, CVC funds, accelerators, and partnerships.
These have produced inspiration, learning, and press releases. But few have created enduring value.

The reason is structural.
Innovation functions were designed for discovery, not ownership.
They test ideas but rarely hold P&L responsibility. They pilot but don’t scale. They spend, but don’t invest.

The founders on the Slush stage weren’t talking about labs or demo days.
They were talking about full-stack company building — ventures that own their roadmap, balance sheet, and regulatory license.
That is a fundamentally different game: high risk, high patience, and high potential return.

If corporates want to play at that level, they must evolve from innovation management to venture architecture.

5. Building at the Edge: The New Industrial Frontier

The most promising ventures of the 2030s will grow at the edge of corporate assets — not inside traditional divisions, and not entirely outside.
This “edge zone” combines the credibility, access, and capital of incumbents with the autonomy, speed, and focus of entrepreneurs.

The key is to build focused, semi-autonomous teams with:

• Ownership over their roadmap and P&L

• Access to corporate assets through clear governance interfaces

• The mandate to challenge parts of the core business if necessary

• A capital structure that rewards both corporate and entrepreneurial success

This is how corporations can finally turn their balance sheets into venture platforms.
It’s not about “doing more pilots” — it’s about designing vehicles that can become companies.

6. From “Fail Safe” to “Safe to Scale”

In most corporations, governance kills momentum before markets can.
The instinct is to make every new venture fail-safe: over-controlled, over-reviewed, and underfunded.
But true innovation requires the opposite: safe-to-fail environments — bounded, testable, reversible experiments.

This is not about removing control; it’s about redesigning it.
Regulated companies, in particular, must build systems that can test fast without breaking compliance.
They must learn to scale what works and shut down what doesn’t, using evidence rather than politics.

The shift from “fail safe” to “safe to scale” is more than cultural. It’s structural.
It requires new investment vehicles, new governance protocols, and new metrics for value creation.

7. The Rise of the AI-Native Company

The next wave of ventures will not just use AI; they will be AI-native.
That changes everything — from how prototypes are built to how companies operate.

AI-native ventures:

• Build prototypes in days, not months.

• Automate core functions — marketing, operations, finance — from day one.

• Scale customer interaction through intelligent agents, not headcount.

• Learn faster because data is embedded in every process.

For corporates, this creates a new urgency.
If your innovation logic is still built for manual workflows, quarterly reviews, and human-heavy operations, your ventures will be structurally disadvantaged from day one.

AI-native ventures don’t just move faster; they learn faster.
And in venture building, learning speed is survival.

8. Capital Discipline: Building Like an Investor, Not a Manager

European corporations have plenty of cash but little venture discipline.
They think in terms of budgets, not portfolios.
Innovation spend is booked as OPEX, not invested as CAPEX.
Success is measured by “activity” — workshops, prototypes, partnerships — not by enterprise value created.

To build something hard, corporations must think like investors:
allocate capital in tranches, link funding to evidence, and treat each venture as an asset on a longer-term balance sheet.

This shift from expense to investment reframes innovation as capital allocation.
It also creates the governance muscle needed to handle uncertainty — the same muscle venture capital built decades ago, and corporates are only now rediscovering.

9. The Leadership Mandate: Courage with Structure

Europe’s largest corporations are not short on ambition.
What they lack is structural courage — the willingness to redesign how they invest, govern, and reward innovation.

The leaders who will define Europe’s next decade won’t be the loudest visionaries or the most cautious operators.
They will be system architects: executives who can bridge industrial scale with entrepreneurial speed, and regulation with reinvention.

That requires a different kind of leadership:

• Comfortable with uncertainty but ruthless about structure.

• Willing to trade short-term efficiency for long-term optionality.

• Able to attract the kind of talent that can choose between a startup and a corporation — and prefer the latter.

Courage, in this context, is not recklessness. It’s governed risk-taking at industrial scale.

10. Europe’s Next Trillion-Euro Company

Europe’s next trillion-euro company won’t be another fintech or consumer app.
It will emerge where corporate assets meet founder ambition — at the edge of infrastructure, data, and regulation.

It might rewire energy grids, reinvent logistics, or redefine healthcare delivery.
But it will do so by blending the two capabilities Europe has always had in abundance: engineering depth and institutional scale.

The real question for Europe’s CEOs is not whether they can build such ventures — but whether they can create the structures that allow them to happen.

If founders can do it with nothing, corporates should be able to do it with everything.
They just need to decide: are we managing the past, or building the future?