You already moved around your balances and this is the best interest rates you can get.

The main comparison is here. Like a rich person don't take up just one type of job, he/she is involve in different resourceful jobs or more than one job to be rich, doing just one job you may be comfortable although but is better to do more jobs. So the country that want to be rich will have to produce more products and not to rely only on one limited product or few source of revenue. A country need to produce variety of goods to increase GDP and standard of living and have excess to export and have good external reserve. With the countries of the world now, we know the richest countries are those having more resourceful means of income and they have use it to build their economy. The list is endless from those rich in technological export, oil export, health, agricultural products etc with good management of the resources.

If a country rely on just printing of money that will lead to inflation and hyperinflation which Zimbabwe is one country as example of such inflation. Printing of money will increase money circulation and price will increase at the mention of printing of it (money). Being rich is to increase your source of income and countries can increase what they produce or services provided and that is how to be rich.

Bitcoin futures: What are they and how do they work?

The world of bitcoin – and by extension, the world of cryptocurrency – has been given a lift by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently giving its seal of approval to allow a new bitcoin futures contract exchange-traded fund (ETF) to start trading.

But what are bitcoin futures contracts, and how will this affect the price of bitcoin? Let us explain.

Bitcoin futures contracts explained

A futures contract is an agreement to carry out a transaction at some point in the future at a price that is agreed today.

In other words, if the value of something goes up before the sale is completed, then the person buying the item – whether it a fiat currency, stocks, commodities or, in this case, a cryptocurrency – gets a good deal. If the price goes down, however, then the person selling the item gets the better end of the bargain.

https://currency.com/bitcoin-futures

Russian institute plans to build 7nm-capable scanner that beats ASML's analogue in several years.

A Russian institute is developing its own lithography scanner that could produce chips using 7nm-class fabrication technologies. The machine is under development, with the plan to build it by 2028. When it is ready, it should be more efficient than ASML's Twinscan NXT:2000i tool, whose development took over a decade.

After Russia unleashed its bloody war against Ukraine on February 24, Taiwan was quick to ban shipments of advanced chips to the nation. The U.S., the U.K., and the E.U. then followed up with sanctions that effectively prohibit virtually all contract chipmakers with advanced fabs from working with Russian entities. In addition, companies like Arm cannot license their technologies to Russia-based chip designers. As a result, the Russian government rolled out a national program to develop the country's own 28nm-class fabrication technology by 2030, reverse engineer as many foreign chips as possible, and educate local talent to work on domestic chips.

However, there is a problem with a 28nm-class production node by 2030. Russia's most advanced fab can produce chips using a 65nm fabrication technology. Meanwhile, American and European makers of fab tools cannot supply their equipment to Russia due to sanctions, so the country has to design and build domestic wafer production equipment if it wants to adopt a 28nm node. Essentially, what has taken companies like ASML and Applied Materials decades to develop and iterate has to be done in about eight years. 

Apparently, the Russian Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences intends to beat all expectations and produce a 7nm-capable lithography scanner by 2028, according to its plans published on Nizhy Novgorod Strategy Development website (via CNews).

A modern lithography scanner capable of processing wafers using a 7nm-class process technology is a highly complex apparatus that involves a high-performance light source, sophisticated optics, and precise metrology, just to name a few critical parts. However, as a leading applied physics university in Russia, IAP believes that it can develop such a tool in a relatively short amount of time. 

The tool will be somewhat different from scanners produced by companies like ASML or Nikon. For example, IAP plans to use a >600W light source (total power, not intermediate focus power) with an 11.3nm exposure wavelength (EUV wavelength is 13.5nm), which will require considerably more sophisticated optics than exists today. Because the light source of the device will be relatively low power, it will make the tool more compact and easier to build. Yet, it also means that its production of the scanner will be considerably lower than that of modern deep ultraviolet (DUV) tools. That might not be a problem, according to IAP.

When it comes to timing, IAP may be slightly too optimistic. For everything below 32nm, chipmakers use the so-called immersion lithography (which is essentially a booster to DUV tools). ASML introduced its first immersion lithography system — the Twinscan XT:1250i —  in late 2003 with a plan to deliver one in Q3 2004 to produce 65nm logic chips and 70nm half-pitch DRAMs. It took the company about five years and another generation of tools to announce its 32nm-capable Twinscan NXT:1950i in late 2008, with customer deliveries starting in 2009.

Then, it took the market leader some nine years to deliver its 7nm and 5nm-capable Twinscan NXT:2000i DUV tool in 2018. TSMC used less advanced tools with multi-patterning for its first-generation N7 fabrication technology, but the timing of ASML’s introductions demonstrate how hard it is to transition from 65nm to 7nm. It took ASML 14 years to go from 65nm to 7nm. Now, IAP, which does not have any experience in chip production or ties with chipmakers, intends to build a 7nm-capable machine for volume production from scratch in about six years. While the plan does not sound feasible, it looks like IAP is full of enthusiasm.

"ASML, the global lithography leader, has been developing its EUV lithography system for almost 20 years and the technology has turned out to be incredibly complex," said Nikolai Chkhalo, Deputy Director of the Institute of Physics of Microstructures of the Russian Academy of Sciences for scientific and technological development. "The main objective of ASML in this case was to maintain the extremely high productivity that is needed only at the world's largest factories. In Russia, no one needs such high productivity. In our work, we start from the needs and tasks faced by domestic microelectronics — and this is not so much about quantity, but about quality. First of all, we need to transit to our own fabrication processes, develop our own design standards, our own tools, engineering, materials, so our own path is inevitable here. In fact, we need to balance between simplicity and performance."

IAP plans to build a fully functional alpha scanner by 2024. This one will not have to offer high productivity or maximum resolution but will have to work and be attractive to potential investors. IAP intends to build a beta version of the scanner with higher productivity and resolution by 2026. This machine should be mass production ready, but its productivity is not expected to be at its maximum. The final iteration of the litho scanner is said to emerge in 2028. It should get a high-performance light source (hence better productivity), better metrology and overall capabilities. There is no word how many of such machines IAP and/or its production partners will be able to produce by 2028.

It should be noted that fab equipment is not limited to lithography scanners. There are other types of machines performing etching, deposition, resist removal, metrology, and inspection operations that are not made in Russia. Furthermore, there is somewhat less advanced machinery like ultrapure air and water generators which also are not produced in Russia. Even if IAP RAS manages to build a lithography tool, Russia will still be a few hundred tools short of building a modern fab. Also, fabs need ultrapure raw materials produced in countries that will not supply to Russia.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/lithograhy-tool-russia-7nm-2028

Chinese leader Xi Jinping appeared to revise his long-term economic outlook when he opened a major political event over the weekend, hinting at modest growth that may see China fail to surpass the U.S.

Beijing's two-step plan to build what it calls a "great modern socialist country in all respects" by 2049, the centennial of the People's Republic of China, involves first raising levels of public wealth and doubling the national economy by 2035.

To achieve that, economists believed China would need to maintain annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth of at least 5 percent, a once-realistic trajectory that might have seen it overtake the U.S. economy in GDP terms—valued at $23 trillion versus China's $17.73 trillion in 2021, per World Bank figures.

This first milestone, known as the "basic realization of socialist modernization," was declared in 2020 and had been expected to take 15 years. But on Sunday, as Xi opened the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) twice-a-decade national congress, the target appeared less ambitious.

China Abandons GDP Target

Two years ago, Xi said it was "entirely possible" to double national GDP and GDP per capita by 2035. His latest pronouncement, however, omitted the former.

"By 2035, our overall development goal is to significantly increase economic strength, scientific and technological capabilities, and comprehensive national power; substantially grow GDP per capita to reach that of a mid-level developed country," he said.

Chicago-based economic analyst Houze Song observed Beijing was "quietly abandoning its ambition to become the world's largest economy" in Xi's work report at the CCP's 20th National Congress.

The original 2035 target included both measurements. "In contrast, the 20th work report only mentions new milestone for per capita income, not [GDP]," he said.

Song noted the 2035 goal was drafted before China's 2020 census was released in spring 2021. He told Newsweek: "I believe there are two main reasons behind abandoning the 2035 GDP target. First, Beijing realized that its population will decline more rapidly than anticipated, which makes it more difficult to achieve high growth."

"Moreover, the GDP target has become less binding in recent years. It was abandoned in 2020, and this year, it seems Beijing doesn't care much about missing the 5.5 percent growth target," said Song, who is a research fellow at the Paulson Institute think tank and author of the MacroPolo Econ Substack.



Image link:  https://i.ibb.co/khQtNtk/china-not-catching-up.jpg

China's Economy Loses Its Engine

China's once-a-decade census revealed a declining birth rate and a shrinking workforce. It led to renewed urgency to beat the so-called "middle income trap" of growing old before growing rich.

Births among China's 1.4 billion people—the most in the world—were expected to fall to new lows in 2022, potentially dipping below 2021's 10.6 million babies, the fewest on record according to official data since the 1950s.

Its working-age population, which peaked in 2014, would decline by some 35 million people by the middle of the present decade, official demographers said. The looming demographic crisis directly concerns the country's medium- to long-term productivity.

Xi addressed the issue over the weekend, telling party delegates that the government would "optimize our population development strategy by establishing a policy system to support birth rates and reduce the costs of childbirth, parenting and education."

Beijing imposed a restrictive one-child policy between 1980 and 2015, before allowing two children, a shift that lasted six years before it expanded to a three-child policy in May 2021.

By July, however, all restrictions were scraped. In their place, officials introduced incentives including tax deductions, housing subsidies and financial rewards for having more children.

China's Zero-COVID Struggles

Many point to Xi's heavily centralized approach to domestic governance, including his economic policy of propping up state-owned firms, as stifling private sector growth. In recent years, his decision to double down on "dynamic zero COVID"—his signature public health strategy—has hit productivity, driven small- and medium-sized businesses to closure and raised youth unemployment.

Despite the political pageantry surrounding the party congress, some 200 million people across China were experiencing some form of restricted movement last week—citywide or neighborhood-specific lockdowns, as well as a continuation of the country's mandatory quarantine policy for domestic and international travelers.

There was brief expectation that the rest of China would follow Hong Kong's loosening of COVID regulations in September, given the city's previous tendency to stick to the central government's rhythm.

However, it quickly became clear that zero COVID's strong ideological links to Xi's personal achievements meant the zero-tolerance approach could be framed as nothing but a total success and would need to remain in place going forward—China's president said as much in his speech.

On Monday, China's National Bureau of Statistics abruptly delayed the release of third-quarter GDP figures and other fiscal data without providing a reason, in a move that would've surprised economists and probably unnerved investors who will look at transparency and regularity as major indicators of confidence in the world's second-largest economy.

China watchers following Xi's two-hour speech on Sunday noted that he referenced the "economy" 22 times, versus 102 times at the 18th party congress in 2012, when he became CCP general secretary. "Market" was said three times compared to 24 a decade ago, while "security" rose from 36 to 50 mentions.

Previous annual growth rates in China underpinned the economic forecast that justified the original 2035 target, but Beijing also faces more immediate policy decisions ahead, said Philip Hsu, a visiting fellow at the Brooking Institution think tank's Center for East Asia Policy Studies.

"Apparently China's economy is not in good shape and is likely to remain so perhaps at least until the second half next year. I think this is among the main reasons why the target of doubled national GDP by 2035 is no longer mentioned in the work report this time," he told Newsweek.

"The delay in releasing the Q3 data which can be expected to look mediocre at best is probably an attempt to avert disgracing the Party Congress.

"My guess is that both Xi and [Chinese Premier] Li Keqiang understand that as far as the most crucial problem of economic slowdown—structural pathology of the property sector—remains unresolved sufficiently, it'll be difficult to return to the growth rate years ago," said Hsu, who is also director of the Center for China Studies at National Taiwan University.

"The policy of zero COVID adds to, but is not the leading factor of, the slowdown. Rapidly declining consumption and investment that result chiefly from the zero-COVID policy are relatively easy to bounce back from once the policy is relaxed to a certain extent," he said.

"But of course Xi's assertion in the Party Congress that the zero-COVID policy is to be continued cannot be trivialized. Whereas local governments have attempted various measures to inject credit into the property sector, confidence and price have not improved much, and it is questionable for how long the injection can be sustained given the rapidly growing local debts almost everywhere in China," Hsu noted.

China's Semiconductor Uncertainty

Separately, Beijing is also yet to formally respond to the Commerce Department's October 7 announcement of semiconductor export restrictions to China, a blacklist that cuts off Chinese firms from high-end American chip technology.

Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, said the restrictions were "premised on straightforward national security concerns."

"These technologies are used to develop and field advanced military systems including weapons of mass destruction, hypersonic missiles, autonomous systems and mass surveillance," he said.

It was still unclear whether the Chinese statistics bureau's decision to delay its quarterly report was related to the new U.S. measures, which were announced on the eve of the national congress.

While the full ramifications of the sanctions won't emerge for some time—exporters have been allowed a grace period to get their affairs in order—there already were early signs of disruption.

Unique to the latest round of export controls was its impact not only on hardware, but on human capital, too. U.S. citizens or green card holders must apply for a Commerce Department license in order to work for Chinese chip plants, or face prosecution by the Justice Department.

The restrictions are expected to cause an exodus of U.S. talent from an industry key to China's long-term ambitions to lead in science and technology. Beijing warned high-tech decoupling was likely to hit American businesses just as hard.


https://www.newsweek.com/china-xi-jinping-economy-goal-growth-gdp-2035-us-1752707

Hi,

I am interested in doing research related to the idea of developing a Decentralized autonomous global government, that is a coded open source entity that would set the rules to how countries, institutions, people and businesses, crypto included, interact with eachother. Well, a global government but without the corruption and inefficiency sides.

Does anyone know about serious articles, posts, research on this subject? Thought and ideas welcome too.

The U.S. military has grown increasingly weaker over the years and is considered at risk of not being able to respond to threats to the country’s national interests, according to new rankings of the military’s strength.

The Heritage Foundation’s 2023 Index of U.S. Military Strength found that the military is “weak” and “at growing risk of not being able to meet the demands of defending America’s vital national interests” — marking the first time in the index’s nine-year history that the country has been rated so low.

“It is rated as weak relative to the force needed to defend national interests on a global stage against actual challenges in the world as it is rather than as we wish it were,” the index said. “This is the logical consequence of years of sustained use, underfunding, poorly defined priorities, wildly shifting security policies, exceedingly poor discipline in program execution, and a profound lack of seriousness across the national security establishment even as threats to U.S. interests have surged.”

The Heritage Foundation measured the military’s overall ability to secure victories in two major conflicts at once in different areas of the world. However, it concluded the military force is at risk of being unable to “meet the demands of a single major regional conflict” and would be “ill-equipped to handle two nearly simultaneous” conflicts.

The Heritage Foundation listed each of the military branches for individual rankings based on capability, capacity, and readiness, according to the report. The Marine Corps fared the best, receiving an overall “strong” rating — an improvement from its “marginal” rating in 2021.

The Air Force fell to the bottom of the list, receiving an overall “very weak” rating due to struggles with pilot production and retention, leaving “little doubt that it would struggle in war with a peer competitor.” The Navy and Space Force were rated as “weak,” and the Army was considered “marginal.”

The report also analyzed the country’s nuclear capabilities compared to other countries, rating U.S. nuclear weapons as “strong” but trending toward “marginal” or even “weak.”

“No matter how much America desires that the world be a simpler, less threatening place that is more inclined to beneficial economic interactions than violence-laden friction, the patterns of history show that competing powers consistently emerge and that the U.S. must be able to defend its interests in more than one region at a time," the report said.



https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/heritage-foundation-ranks-us-military-as-weak-for-first-time/ar-AA136fH3

If You Don’t Already Live in a Sponge City, You Will Soon

Less pavement and more green spaces help absorb water instead of funneling it all away—a win-win for people and urban ecosystems.

OCT 17, 2022

Like anything else, water is great in moderation urbanites need it to survive, but downpours can flood streets and homes. And as you might have noticed, climate change isnt good at moderation. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, supercharging storms to dump more water quicker, which can overwhelm municipal sewer systems built for the climate of long ago. Thus you get the biblical flooding thats been drowning cities around the world, from Zhengzhou, China, to Seoul, South Korea, to Cologne, Germany, to New York City.

In response, urban planners are increasingly thinking of cities less as rain jackets designed to whisk water away as fast as possible before it has a chance to accumulate and more as sponges. By deploying thirsty green spaces and digging huge dirt bowls where water can gather and percolate into underlying aquifers, sponge cities are making rain an asset to be exploited instead of expelled.

Where once there were forests and fields and wetlands that would soak up the rain, these have been paved over and replaced with surfaces that do not absorb rain, says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. Those are hard materials like concrete sidewalks, asphalt roads, and roofs, which funnel runoff into gutters, storm drains, and sewers.

The denser cities are developed, the more impervious surfaces are used, the worse the impacts of climate change are becoming, Kiparsky continues. Once the capacity of these structures is exceeded, then water starts backing up, and its problems are exacerbated because of the lack of the natural absorbency of large areas of soil and vegetation.

Any good city planner knows the value of green spaces, but traditionally these have been used mainly for public enjoyment. Sponge city designers also use them as a tool for managing increasingly furious rainstorms. An inch of rain dumped over the course of an hour is more likely to overwhelm stormwater infrastructure than the same inch of water falling over 24 hours a problem for places like in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where storms have gotten significantly wetter over the past half century. The long and short of it is: more intense and more frequent, says Tony Igwe, senior group manager of stormwater at the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, which is sponge-ifying the city. Theres a lot of work going on not just in Pittsburgh, but especially in the mid-Atlantic, to really look at those numbers in the next few years.

https://www.wired.com/story/if-you-dont-already-live-in-a-sponge-city-you-will-soon/

No one is called a cheater or a rule breaker when they are losing. There are no TOS infringements, either.

But if you start winning and win big, you soon become the center of attention. All of a sudden, it becomes important who you are, where you are from, the origin of your coins, and whether you have any ulterior motives for being here.

DANA WHITE
I WAS BANNED FROM GAMBLING AT VEGAS CASINO
... After $2 Mil Victory!!!

Dana White says he's gambler non grata at the Palms Casino in Vegas -- after the UFC boss kicked the casino's ass during a $2 million run just a few weeks ago.

White says the Palms gave him his "walking papers -- after crushing blackjack while playing $25k per hand.

White told the Las Vegas Review Journal's Norm Clarke the casino told White his limit was being cut all the way down to $5k per hand.

"I beat them for [nearly $2 million], and they asked me not to play anymore," White told Clarke.

"A lot of people are going to think I’m a card counter after that Ben Affleck thing at the Hard Rock. I’m the farthest thing from card counter."

It's the SECOND time White's been pushed out of the casino -- back in 2012, he broke ties with The Palms after the honchos cut his credit line in half. White boycotted the place for 22 months and says the only reason he went back is because he was wooed back with a case of expensive wine.

https://www.tmz.com/2014/06/02/dana-white-banned-gambling-palms-vegas-casino-2-million-victory-blackjack/

WIRED spoke with Skype cofounder Niklas Zennström about why the burgeoning European startup scene is poised to lead the technological revolution.

SKYPE WAS ARGUABLY the first breakout European tech company. Nearly two decades after its creation, cofounder Niklas Zennström reflects on the growth of the European ecosystem, posits that combining profit and purpose is critical—and explains why Europe is set to beat Silicon Valley at its own game.

Niklas Zennström is so calm when describing moments of intense upheaval that you suspect the “Zen” in his surname is there for a reason. WIRED met the founder of venture capital firm Atomico in the company’s new HQ in Fitzrovia—offices Zennström designed himself. They are the first in the UK to achieve net-zero certification; the boardroom is climate-controlled, with temperatures designed around the individual needs of the company’s workforce. With solid oak floors, Moroccan tiles, vintage furniture, and carefully placed wool rugs, it’s a space designed to soothe and inspire.

Zennström recalls a morning in 2003 when he and his wife, Catherine, left their London apartment and six people showed up on their doorstep, one on a motorcycle. They were lawyers from the music industry pursuing him for lawsuits against his peer-to-peer file-sharing startup, Kazaa. “I tried to run,” he says mildly, as if describing catching a bus, “but sadly was not in the same shape I am now, so they served me.”

He shares similar adventures with a wry smile and slight shrug of his shoulders—like when his parents sheltered US soldiers fleeing the Vietnam draft during his childhood or when he had a back door built into his office to escape unwanted visitors while at Skype, the pioneering VOIP startup he founded with Janus Friis in 2003.

Atomico’s new London HQ is in The Gaslight, a 15,000-square-foot Art Deco building that was refitted and modernized by Bluebottle Architecture and Design.

During our conversation, it becomes clear that one topic particularly irks him: people who ought to know better wildly underestimating the European startup scene.

He’s still annoyed about an extract from a book by journalist Sebastian Mallaby that was published in the Financial Times in February 2022. The article said Europe “has been slow to develop tech unicorns. Can Silicon Valley’s creativity and cash spark a winning streak?” It cited a San Francisco-based VC making “an especially contrarian wager” in 2019 when he bet that Europe, “the perpetual continent of yesterday, was on the verge of a technology take-off.”

“It’s like they think we’re a weird, primitive people,” he sighs, frustrated. “When we look at the early-stage funding rounds last year, the US had 35 percent of the global share and Europe had 33 percent,” he says. “There was a time when there were accelerators in Europe just copying US companies, but that’s long gone. There’s real innovation all over the continent.”

And he’s got the data to back his argument. According to Atomico’s annual State of European Tech report in 2021, Europe recorded a record $100 billion in capital invested and 98 new unicorns (privately held startups with a valuation over $1 billion), bringing their total to 321. At the end of 2020, Europe had 115 VC-backed unicorns. Less than one year later, that number grew to 202. As of March 31, 2022, PitchBook records 607 active unicorns in the US—with the growth rate roughly equal.

Zennström, one of the original European-founder-turned-investor figures, is responsible—directly and indirectly—for a significant chunk of this growth. In fact, that’s precisely why he founded Atomico. He hopes to rally the continent to fund and support founders who can lead the new era of tech and return to the old internet dream of making the world a better place.

“Where Europe is leading compared to the US is in ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) and climate strategy,” he explains. “Young talent today wants to make money but also wants to have a purpose. Europe has a competitive advantage here because the ecosystem is younger, and the whole ecosystem is fundable. The US ecosystem has so many entrenched players and so much capital it is harder for them to reinvent themselves. Sixteen percent of capital invested in European tech in 2021 went to purpose-driven companies, compared to around 10 percent in North America. I believe European founders are uniquely positioned to lead this technological revolution.”

It’s tempting to see Zennström’s success and open-minded attitude as rooted in his Swedish DNA. The country still boasts the highest tech investment per capita in Europe, and Stockholm, Zennström’s hometown, has the most unicorns per capita of any European city.

“Sweden punches above its weight for a few reasons, but social mobility is a really, really important one,” he says. “Companies are started by founders, individuals who have talent, drive, and ambition. The environment either helps them to be successful or pushes them down. When I was going to school, everyone went to the same schools, the state schools, so we all mixed and knew each other, regardless of wealth. There were no private schools. It has changed, but the private schools are limited as to how much they can charge, so they are still accessible. University education is free, so people who are talented and coming from different social backgrounds can all go. If you’re ambitious and are hungry you can do it.”

His own family were almost hippies—his grandfather was a successful industrialist, while his father was a painter who ended up as an art teacher and his mom taught in the textiles department at the University of Uppsala. Some of Zennström’s earliest memories were of political demonstrations. His parents wanted him and his sister to do well, but he found his friends’ parents in their suits, ties, and Volvos too well groomed. “I felt I was different,” he smiles. “So I always wanted to beat the system and show them I was better—but on my own terms and in a different way.”

He did that—but almost by accident. Zennström worked his way through university, where he fell in love with computers. After graduating, he started working for Swedish telecoms pioneer Tele2, where he set up dial-up internet services in Denmark and the Netherlands. By then, the dotcom boom was making millionaires left, right, and center, and he felt trapped. He began to worry he’d missed his chance.

“At the end of ’99 I decided to fly with Janus Friis, who was much younger and more daring,” he says carefully. “We were excited by what Napster was doing—because it was decentralized—so we thought we’d focus on people sharing digital media. We started to raise money in Amsterdam, but it wasn’t successful. Although there were a few angel investors, the venture capital environment was not developed.”

This was the first time, but not the last, that Europe’s weak funding structure would slow his plans. He and Friis, backed by their own money and supported by Catherine—to whom, Zennström notes regularly, he owes much of his career—recruited a bunch of Estonian programmers they struggled to pay. Finally, in the late summer of 2000, they launched Kazaa, insisting users not deploy it to exchange music while they negotiated with record labels to operate legally. Discussions in Europe started positively, but then they headed to the US and hit trouble fast.

In 2001, the company lawyers had arranged a meeting with RIAA and MPAA—big teams of lawyers flying in from the East Coast to meet in their lawyers’ office in Beverly Hills on a Friday. On that Wednesday, they found an internal memo leaked from the organizations they were supposed to meet that called them “Public Enemy No 1 operating offshore.” The memo said “it was imperative to make an example of us,” he recalls with a slight smile.

“Instead of going to the meeting, we were driving around and around while the lawyers were doing their thing. Later in the evening, when we went to our lawyers’ office, we switched clothes with two lawyers on their team to avoid being served. After that, we moved from one shady motel to another, night by night, paying in cash until we bought tickets at the airport an hour before we departed, as we were sure they were tracking our credit cards.”

Zennström and Friis sold Kazaa for a loan note of €600,000 at the end of 2001 (about $600,000 by today’s exchange rates). Then, in 2003, using Kazaa’s P2P backend, they founded Skype, an app that allowed users to make a call by directly connecting with each other. But the early days of Skype seemed to reveal something unexpected—that European VCs were not interested in innovation.

“We got turned down by everyone,” he says simply. “We wanted to disrupt the global telephone network with this peer-to-peer technology, and that’s a big ask. A lot of them had been burnt by the dotcom crash. The model they preferred was to take something that worked in the US and do it in a local market.” He pauses and smiles. “Of course, we were also involved in a massive, billion-dollar litigation …”

Nevertheless, Skype would soon become one of the first European startups to challenge the hegemony of American internet giants in the early 2000s. Zennström faced a crucial decision when, in 2004, one of the big Sandhill Road VCs offered to fund the company, but only if it moved to the US. “At that point, we had already built up a world-class team in Tallinn, London, and Stockholm, and I did not want to leave my team,” he explains. “We knew then that we were committed to building Skype as a globally successful technology company based out of Europe.” He declined the offer.

One year later, Skype went on to become a unicorn—eight years before venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term—after being sold to eBay for $2.6 billion. It was the world’s largest tech M&A since the dotcom crash and dwarfed eBay’s $1.5 billion acquisition of PayPal in 2002.

All of this led to Zennström’s next move—to disrupt venture capital with the launch of Atomico in 2006. European VCs weren’t taking risks. Founders were coming to him and asking for advice. VC funds were inviting him onto their boards to make themselves look good. “Meanwhile, the only place in the world that had a functioning tech ecosystem was Silicon Valley—and I like being contrary and breaking monopolies, so we set out to break the US VC tech monopoly with Atomico,” he says.

For a time, no one was interested in investing in funds raised by European VCs “because they all thought if you are in venture, you need to be in the US.” But his attitude was underpinned by a famous quote from Albert Einstein: “Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act, and in that action are the seeds of new knowledge.”

Once again, Zennström was right. Today, Atomico has invested in 23 European unicorns, including Klarna, MessageBird, Supercell, and Lilium. “Atomico works more in line with the US way of VCs offering a lot of operational support, not just checks,” explains Robert Vis, founder and CEO of MessageBird. “They helped with PR, with hiring—there were times when they were in my office three times a week when we were scaling. Niklas brought that philosophy to Europe, and it had a remarkable impact for me as founder. He’s focused on driving the business forward, staying independent, and is a supportive investor in that sense. He’s been through it, so even though he’s not on our board, I still consult him on founder-type stuff.”

Daniel Wiegand, a cofounder of unicorn eVTOL jet company Lilium, recalls the initial pitch, where Zennström asked expert witnesses from companies like Tesla to join the meeting, followed by a weekend away where the two got to know each other and their respective companies in greater depth. Atomico was the company’s second investor in 2016 and has reinvested in every round, while Zennström remained on the board after the firm achieved unicorn status in 2020 and went public in September 2021.

“He wants to be sure the companies are aligned,” explains Wiegand. “He focuses a lot on diversity, ESG, and company culture in general. He’s not loud, he watches and analyzes—but once he speaks, he’s always spot on. His founding of Atomico was an incredible moment for the European scene. We would not be where we are without him.”

Interestingly, many from Zennström’s former team at Skype have followed similar paths: Friis and Ahti Heinla are now behind robot firm Starship Technologies; Taavet Hinrikus, Skype’s first employee and founder of TransferWise (now Wise), has just launched a new fund for tech founders called Plural; Eileen Burbidge, Skype’s former director of product, launched early-stage London VC firm Passion Capital; and Saul Klein founded early-stage and seed VC fund LocalGlobe.

Zennström’s former team has proved so influential that in 2019 Forbes dubbed them the Skype Mafia. In a head-to-head with the PayPal Mafia of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Max Levchin, Ken Howery, and Co., Forbes said the Skype Mafia was “interested in building a thriving European tech ecosystem,” while the PayPal Mafia was “merely interested in making each other rich in a small, exclusive club.”

Zennström enjoys this comparison and sums up his approach: “I’m from Europe. This is where I live, and we can do better than this.”

The materials, finishes, and furnishings added to the building were all selected for their high circular economy value.

According to Zennström, the history of European technology can be broken down into three themed decades—foundation, monetization, and the forthcoming mobilization.

“Skype showed what was possible for Europe, and the continent had its first globally successful entrepreneurial role models, paving the way for more in the future, as success breeds success,” he explains. “Between 2003 and 2013, 153 European unicorn companies were founded, creating thousands of jobs.”

The monetization decade that followed “saw VCs, once the fuel for funding breakthrough innovations, become focused on supporting software companies, some of which has made our lives vastly cheaper and easier. In the process, we also built some problematic tech with a much less positive impact on the world, like Big Tech and social media.”

Globally, VCs and technology companies became addicted to wealth creation, he believes, at the expense of innovation and purpose. “More VC money, more technology companies, more well-paid jobs, and more experienced operators—but governments, finance, and corporations have failed to solve the problems that really matter,” he says.

This heralds, if Atomico has anything to do with it, Europe’s forthcoming mobilization decade—where technology should be a positive force and play a role in fixing the problems of climate, inequality, food production, health, energy, transportation, and sustainable manufacturing through innovation. “Venture capital was founded on funding breakthrough innovations that moved humanity forward from semiconductors to vaccination,” Zennström explains. “In the next decade, we will be facing bigger challenges than ever before. In Europe, there is hope. Governments are too slow. Technology has to regain its central role in improving society. We can’t afford to waste time.”

When it comes to his personal belief that “profit and purpose are mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive,” he thinks Europe, rather than the US, is where the vanguard of the mobilization decade is to be found. He’s already backed Vay and Lilium in the clean transportation sector, Infarm and Upside Foods in sustainable food production, and PsiQuantum in quantum computing, and he is searching out a new generation of companies looking at health, microreactors, and hydrogen fusion.

“Sectors like transportation, aviation, food production, and construction materials are starting to be transformed by technology,” he says. “But equally important is that to take advantage of this, you need more and more talent from more diverse backgrounds.”

Atomico’s approach to diversity—from the company’s hiring strategy to baking diversity into term sheets—didn’t arrive overnight. “We had such a blind spot to that for many years,” he admits. “We had pictures with our founders, and my wife pointed out that most of them were white men. So, we set some objectives both for our own team and our portfolio to invest in diverse founders.”

Carolina Brochado, a partner at private equity firm EQT, worked at Atomico in 2012 and says that although the company didn’t offer maternity leave until she had to take it herself, she sensed a huge shift as that happened. Reshma Sohoni—a managing partner at Seedcamp—also credits Zennström with housing her and Seedcamp when they had no money and no office. “I was an Indian American woman starting a fund, and in the US I would have been met with a clubby tech-bro culture, but Niklas—and to be fair, the UK—has always been more cosmopolitan.”

Today, Atomico’s investment team and partners are split in a 45/55 female-to-male ratio. For the past four years, Atomico has run an angels program, recruiting 12 individuals, mainly founders, from eight countries in the first year, and giving them $100,000 each to write early-stage checks. By 2022, these angels—a mix of new recruits and old hands, were 50 percent female and 50 percent non-white.

Laura Connell, the company’s newest partner, joined from Marcho Partners because of this new approach. “Atomico is putting its money where its mouth is,” she explains. “Attracting and keeping better people makes them more appealing to the best founders who come from anywhere. Companies that have greater diversity do better—there’s cognitive diversity, not just physical. We are in the midst of a basic generational transition—younger people do fundamentally care about diversity and being mission-driven.”

“If you want proof of the value of diversity, think how many startups were founded by first- or second-generation immigrants,” Zennström says. “It’s important that we have a lot of female investors because it happens more organically that female investors find female founders, and female founders are more comfortable speaking to female investors. It’s really hard when a company gets bigger—over 200 people—to fix the diversity problem. If the first 50 people are men, it’s intimidating for the first female engineer. We need to front-load this much earlier.”

European tech’s future, he argues, lies in tracking down the outliers, encouraging new role models from diverse backgrounds to prosper, reinvesting in Europe, and inspiring the next generation—and the next, and the next after that.

“Unicorn companies are coming from all over Europe, rather than having US-style tech capitals,” he says. “You want to have diverse locations, diverse people, and make sure that the value is coming back to the European economy. We need to encourage entrepreneurs from the north of England who don’t think they stand a chance. That’s how you build companies with purpose, not just profit—we need to ensure the two are mutually reinforcing.”

“We need founders who want to solve the problems that matter, VCs to fund things that matter, and LPs to challenge those laggard VCs to step up,” he says. “VCs should dedicate a portion of our funds to breakthrough innovations solving world problems at scale and remember that we are funding the creation of the jobs your children and grandchildren will do. I have never been as hopeful as I am now about the potential of technology, and I have never been as motivated by the urgency we all face to find and fund it.”


https://www.wired.com/story/europe-beat-silicon-valley-startups/