‘Why would you leave the safety of your job to get involved in a startup? Are you crazy?’ 

That’s the conversation that Sietse (and I’m sure many other founders) had to deal with from friends and family early on in his journey. It didn’t stop him, but I’m sure it stops many others. That risk-averseness, that mentality is the problem when it comes to building in Europe, at least according to Sietse. But can we really blame our family and friends when 90% of startups do not make it?

Sit with this for a moment.

If you become a founder, statistically, you will have to fail 9 times to get one success. How does that make you feel? If you’re like a lot of us in Europe, it makes you feel like you’d better just stick with what you have. Growing up in the French culture and school system, failing meant you would get nowhere in life. Failing meant you were a failure. And so you grow up to avoid it at all costs, even if it means trying less things… and not starting that business you’re sure would be a success.

The US on the other hand have totally reframed failing! Failing is learning. 

It sounds a lot better to say you have to learn 9 lessons before you get it right doesn’t it? Or that you have to experiment 9 times before you understand how it works. And we know this when it comes to most things - if you're new at tennis, you're going to suck for a while. Maybe you'll even need lessons. But you get better at it, the more you do it. Or maybe you realise that tennis isn't your thing - also fine.

So why do we treat entrepreneurship differently and make it so hard on people breaking the mold?

Sietse is one of those Europeans who pushed through. 

He started dreaming about entrepreneurship at 8 years old, wanting to own a hotel and provide luxury experiences for his guests. Four years later, he had his first taste of business trying to raise funds to get his terminally ill friend to Disneyland. Talk about a why! He did everything he could from selling pancakes to odds & bobs on a Christmas market. While he managed to get the money, his friend passed away before he could take the trip. He later created a website and tv show to help his nephew. Wetime 1.0 was his attempt to make new friends after moving to a new area. What really struck me during this conversation is that Sietse is not a founder for the sake of founding, he is driven by problems he wants to solve. And if he sees the market is not ready, he just finds the next problem. 

His latest venture CorbenicAI and its first product Merlin, were born out of his frustration with inefficient context with using AI. He noticed that especially when you’re using RAG, a lot of information is duplicated or even triplicated, driving up token usage and thus costs. So he decided he better solve it! And that’s how Merlin was born. Given the current AI climate, Merlin on its own would be a huge asset to enterprises looking to reduce their token costs. 

Of course that deduplication engine really comes into its own when paired with an LLM. So what do you think Sietse did? He built Galahad, a 0.5B model that can go head to head with any 3B model. The kicker, the training cost. DeepSeek made headlines earlier this year for being the cheap alternative — it cost around $6 million to train. Sietse trained Galahad for €500-600. Yes, it's a smaller model. But still.

So what has it been like building in Europe? Short answer - hard! Sietse is doing all his building on the side of a full time assignment. He’s tried getting investment in Europe to be able to spend more time on his ventures but found that the European investors were very hard to find and convince. Ultimately, he decided to incorporate Wetime, and his newest venture, in Delaware to make it easier to raise funds. 

In Sietse’s experience, US investors will fund a founder they believe in with just an idea. European investors want to see traction already (is it that fear of failure that we talked about earlier?). But, it takes a lot of time and effort to get traction, especially if you have a full time job. Sietse truly believes that this makes entrepreneurship impossible for a large part of the population, the 30-50 years old crowd, often with young kids, who can’t afford to quit their jobs for 6 months to build their dream - and also don’t have a lot of time to spend on building (#laundryneverends #bedtimeroutinecrew).

If Sietse could, he would incorporate his ventures in Europe. He believes in the regulatory aspects and being more conscious about how you build. For him the bottleneck truly is being able to find early stage funding, finding it much easier in the US. And he’s not the only one. I met a founder last week who is going to the US over the summer to raise money for his startup estimating he has a much better chance to get funding there. 

There are a lot of regulations coming out of Brussels these days. Some are considered to be incredibly limiting and stifling innovation. Others are seen to be championing Europe and protecting its citizens data. Either way, from this chat with Sietse, what I’m taking away is that regulations are just one part. If we want to be a tech hub to rival San Francisco, we have work to do when it comes to our relationship with entrepreneurship, failure and experimentation. Without that, we’re stuck in a vicious cycle where founders either have to go seek funding elsewhere or grind away mornings/nights and weekends for years. 

Sietse’s advice for building in Europe? 

Lock yourself up until you have the product and make sure you have 100 users before you try to get an investment. Don’t believe in the American dream - that does not work in your neighborhood. 

For the full conversation, check out our Youtube channel.

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If you’re French speaking and you’re looking for a book on failure and its place in French culture, I recommend ‘Les vertus de l’échec’. For me it was a real eye opener on how that fear of failure is baked in to our culture.