Enough With the Big Corporate Mergers

European Straits #147

Hi, it’s Nicolas from The Family. Today, I’m reflecting on the love for big corporate mergers between exhausted incumbents—and why I think it’s not the right approach for Europe.

This is the week of the GovTech Summit in Paris! The initiative was launched to complement what our friends at PUBLIC (Daniel Korski and Alex de Carvalho) have been working on since 2017: growing tech startups that have the potential to upgrade public services and transform our government—a vertical that, I think, could become central in European tech in the years ahead.

PUBLIC is headquartered in London and is supporting startups in the UK, France, and Denmark. But the GovTech Summit itself is happening in Paris, which I think is a clever choice. You need participants from all over Europe, and Paris is quite central in many respects. It’s easy to travel there from anywhere. Also, with the UK about to leave the European Union, Paris is now where you can find the drive and willpower to grow ambitious tech compan…