Mario Draghi is wrong, while John Calvin was right

Open letter to European tech and VC ecosystem, 

For years, we have watched your clever wordplay in forums and posts. Your diagnosis is always the same, repeated like a boring mantra: "Europe has a funding gap"

But your solutions are starting to look desperate. What are you proposing lately?

• Stealing from retirees: Making pension funds risk their money on dangerous investments in new startups
• Patriotic pay cuts: Forcing governments to take money from paychecks to put into public investment funds
• Teaching risk: Educational campaigns to convince anyone to switch from traditional fixed-term deposits to venture

My friends, you are looking in the wrong place

No law, tax break or report will fix this. Europe’s problem is not a lack of cash. It’s cultural and religious

To understand why there is no money for big innovations, look at how religion has shaped our minds for centuries. We run very different cultural systems that ruin high-risk investing:

1. The Catholic model (The South). Great for enjoying life, terrible for business. It is a non-stop loop of sin, guilt and forgiveness. If you mess up or break a rule, you just apologize and reset the clock. This creates a culture of shortcuts and showing off. Money is for having fun or looking good, not for risky, long-term investments. People prefer buying property or shopping over the uncertainty of a startup. Here, nobody saves to invest. They spend, and then they apologise

2. The Lutheran model (The North). The Reformation took away the only fun part of Catholicism (sinning and asking for forgiveness) and replaced it with rules and obedience. Follow the rules, be predictable, don't stand out. It is perfect for making trains run on time, but it completely kills the wild entrepreneur spirit. Taking big risks is seen as bad taste. Getting rich is viewed as rude and immodest

3. The Solution: The Puritan model (Anglo-Saxon). The financial power of the US and UK isn't because they have better laws. It is because their culture inherited Anglosaxon Puritanism. Puritans believed you were born already going to heaven or hell. To guess if God chose you, you looked at your financial success and success came from hard work, living simply and investing everything back into your business. For a Puritan, spending money on luxury was a sin. Saving it and risking it to create more value was a spiritual duty. VC is just modern, secular Puritanism

The conclusion then is that if you want to fix Europe's funding problem, you need to push Puritanism across the continent

Apply strict Puritanism to every part of life for the next generations. Create schools where free time is treated with suspicion, saving money is mandatory by law and investing in high-risk startups is seen as the only way to save your soul

Until the average European feels terrified for not putting their money into a VC fund, your proposed solutions will be fruitless

VCs, leave retirees and taxpayers alone and go start religious schools instead