E463 | Andreas Klinger, Prototype Capital: EU INC (EUVC Summit 2025 Achievement finalist)

0:00Europe boasts immense talent and ambition. Yet startups often face fragmented regulations across nations. Andreas Klinger, founder of Prototype Capital and former CTO of Product Hunt, is championing the EU Inc. initiative. Because it's very easy to say everybody in Brazil is an idiot and doesn't know what startups need. Yes, but it doesn't really work. A movement to establish a standardized pan-European corporate structure, The EU Inc. initiative has quickly gathered momentum, gaining widespread support from over 13 ,000 tech leaders, venture capitalists and policymakers. Join us as Andreas Klinger outlines the vision for EU Inc.

0:57This is a union of values. Let's start acting. This show is not investment advice, and the hosts of this episode may be invested in the funds and companies featured. Welcome back to the European VC podcast. As always, we're here to connect and champion European venture. And I have someone with us who has truly done that because we're talking to Andreas Klinger from Prototype Capital and, of course, EU Inc. today. Let me just say one thing. Europe is bursting with talent. We all know it. We're seeing innovation ambition everywhere, but we also know that unfortunately, too many founders are being kept back by a fragmented national regulation ecosystem, which is slowing down our startups and of course complicating a bunch of scaling that we would wish would be a lot easier.

1:44Andreas, if anyone has truly committed to trying to solve that with the EU Inc. movement, and we're going to talk a bunch about that, but we're also going to talk a bunch about prototype capital. So, Andreas, let me just say congratulations on being a finalist in the Achievement of the Year Award at the European VC Awards. Thank you very much. It's an honor. So that was my long blurb here. I'll try not to talk too much the rest of this conversation. But before we start, Andreas, let me just ask you, who is Andreas Klinger and Prototype Capital? Yes, I have a very long, very confusing CV. I was founder of multiple companies in Europe.

2:23But I think the more interesting and short version is I was founding team and CTO at Product Hunt. We sold to AngelList. At AngelList, there was VPE in a few teams, among others in the crypto division called CoinList and a few others. And then afterwards, I was CTO with an online accelerator called OnDeck, which was very popular during COVID. and I have been investing on the side for the last four or five years through a so-called micro fund solo GP vehicle, which I'm now getting into the third fund and I'm now like finally doing this full-time, which is a big change for me. But yeah, that's basically, I think the high-level summary.

3:02Like I did startups here in Europe, worked in San Francisco and during COVID, I moved back to Europe. I got to ask you a question. This is a bit of a curveball. I am very split when it comes to doing venture, not full time. Some would say absolutely not doable. Either you're an asset allocator and you take that responsibility serious and you are full time or you're not. But then there's the other very contrasting point with that, which is there's nothing as powerful as someone truly embedded in the ecosystem. someone who is moving around, making waves in their own swim lane, and for that reason, building a network and respect from so many that will then want your capital.

3:43And for that reason, as long as it's a small thing, you can definitely do it on the side. What's your take there? How have you been talking to LPs and others about it? I mean, I'm in a lucky position that my first fund worked really, really well, my second fund too. So I'm not getting as much backlash on this, at least in the past. the my personal pov on this is it depends what your game is and i think this is what most vcs do wrong they think of like vc is like one strategy one game that everybody playing but in reality every good vc usually is a very different game so for example one of the best working matters right now is you being a very successful founder of an series c company that's very known for one space you know and you having a solo gp fund on the side where you just like constantly do angel checks out and that's like in my opinion one of the best matters and like at least based on what we saw back then with angel list so like this alone is already like a big contradiction to this argument you know that being said if your main job is to do very very large follow-on rounds i prefer if you do this like full-time with a whole team and everything You know what I mean?

4:53My personal POV is like, it depends what you do with the other part of your time. If you do the other, like for example, if you do an AI fund and the other part of the time you're running like a big AI community, AI newsletter, or you're working on AI products, that might give you more access and credibility than anything you could do as a VC. and in the end if you think about it we see to some extent is like it's fairly easy to see what good deals are usually the hard part is hearing about them early enough and being able to have access to them like actually getting into the round um at a check says that matters to you and quite frankly anything you can do to push that is like a big advantage the main reason why I do the funds three now full-time is because I have multiple projects I want to do within the umbrella of the fund that pay into the fund you know but i need like i need just more capacity to do this this is like why i do it full-time now and why i also uh i want to hire a few people into the team could you tell me a bit about those um those projects that you want to fit into the fund because that's also what i've been seeing looking in from the outside it's clear that you've got a lot going on with the content that's created it's clear that eo inc has definitely also built a platform for you put you in on the map for a lot of people that i'm sure you can leverage in interesting ways so so for quick context eo inc is a completely community volunteer run project by multiple amazing people from the startup industry in europe i was lucky enough to get the right group of people together people from vc funds leaders of associations people who like did legal and policy work for startups for like decades and plus already it also like for me personally like given that i do more and more investing in europe um and now with fund three primarily focusing it it also helped me with i have to admit it also helped me with the net my network here in europe because quite frankly uh most of my fund one was and fund two as well was like done in the states and this is like where most of my network is so i think ewing helped me definitely here but like the way i approach this is a little bit different personally and also like this is how i approach all of these projects i'm not like thinking like what would be good content marketing or good community branding or whatever you know i'm more thinking okay what is absolutely needed uh in our industry in europe as a continent like what's the big big pillars that are needed to actually um make europe succeed in the next five to ten years and then I worked from there backwards.

7:29Ideally, what I try to do is I try to have like bias to action in the sense of like, it's better to just do something in a bad way than over strategize and then never launch. And number two, if you do it horrible, but you have a good idea, maybe you inspire somebody who's more competent, you know, than they do this, you know. And the way I want to think about this is I don't want to create content. I want to create change. And that's kind of the main things we're trying to do with Prototype 1.3. So working together with good people from the community, figuring out problems, trying to find solutions for it.

8:04The first one was EU Inc. Obviously, before that, I worked like I helped co-initiating like a larger community called EUAC. Currently, I focus a lot on pushing the topic of hyperambition. I haven't like published a lot on this yet, but like this is my next focus I want to do. It's more like button up where EU Inc. is very top down thinking, you know, like big big yeah if you're fixing the network and like the other one is like button up like what do you need to do on like local scale and here is hyper ambition is like a big topic and the first thing i'm doing here is i want to do more media in europe on that topic so i started doing like basically a vlog series where i literally just walk into the office of like very interesting companies and just show the behind the scenes for like the idea is to show that they are extremely ambitious in what they do and they have a clear shot to become number one worldwide not in europe but like worldwide and number two also keep them as authentic and relatable as possible so that any viewer can see this and be like if you put three years the next three five years into your like into this like your heart into this this could be you well this is like the idea of the whole video content i'm also doing lives uh which is like just going live streams which is a little bit easier to set up for me so like i want to do this like in parallel and then the other thing i wanted to like have a few more projects that are coming up but i don't think of them as like content in that sense like my goal is not to have i don't know like a good content funnel or something like this i genuinely believe that we are in a global economic crisis and these kind of crises are moments where the world order gets redefined and we have a now the mandate to actually fix europe and like get over our little bickering in between each other and like all the ah you know but this is not Europe, this is the UK and all this kind of jibber jabber and actually realize that we are more together than we are separated and like fix this network and the systematic problems we have.

10:02That's number one. And number two is we also have to make an explicit choice. And the explicit choice is to say Europe will be the best way, the best place in the world to live and innovate. And that's a choice. That's something we have to deterministically say that we want this and that we want to make this happen and we will make this happen. There's a series of things that needs to be done. For some, I have the network and the skills, so I try to get them done. And for others, I want to inspire hopefully people to push this forward, essentially. It's an interesting point that you just said.

10:34There's so much to unpack. But if we start with the point you just made about Europe, did you want to make it the best way to both live and build? I think that that's an incredibly good point. And it's one that I frame it a bit differently. What I say is that I think that one of the strong competitive edges of Europe is I think that we're building from a more long term sustainable perspective for people, meaning that when I look at the states, I haven't experienced the states myself personally in any meaningful way. However, when I look from the outside in, I'm very afraid of whether a society can last long term if the individuals on an individual level can be in such a performance driven, such a hard pushing society where almost no value comes from being you, but it all comes from what you achieve.

11:30I am very afraid if a society can sustain itself like that. Yeah, I disagree. Yeah, I imagine because it runs contrary to what many think. We underestimate regularly two things. Number one is we think because we grow up with like American media, music, videos that we have, we understand the culture fully and we're like really like the same Western culture. it's not like move to california it's like it's a it's a it's very different especially if you're germanic i basically walked around and told everybody i'm autistic because i was just way too direct and like very confused with all the social nuances that you have to dance for uh that's number one like we think we have the same culture we don't and sometimes it's subtle difference and sometimes it's very big differences the other thing is we underestimate how good they are in marketing and a lot of the american persona of like you have to work hard and like the underdog success and like all of this is like intentionally shaped marketing i had people in the states where they like told me how extremely hard they work and like i've seen you one hour at the coffee shop like what the fuck what are you talking about like the day before you were this thinner like if you are like like people who are actually working hard and who are busy don't have time to tell you how busy they are you know i mean so we need to be meeting them in a context you won't be meeting them in a context where they have yeah exactly exactly and so this is like we need to be a little bit careful how we understand the american culture because we like tend to consume them from a market like pre-marketing angle and we also post-marketing and storage and we are also like a little bit assuming that they have the same cultural norms when they talk about stuff as we do so for example like if you meet a german person who tells you like it's really going well you like holy shit like what the fuck's happening you know so you and do you know what i mean and now with the same branding we go like here the merkel act's doing really well it's great you know like oh it's this must be amazing you know i mean but it's not it's cultural different norms so that's something where i'm a little bit like hesitate like i i very uh like well remember like we're in San Francisco and we had to work out of the WeWork.

13:40I came at eight, I left at like nine. I was the first and the last to come and leave every freaking day. And it was like frustrating as hell, you know what I mean? And I can easily set up like a hard, insane, cracked, hardworking team in like in Vienna, in Munich, in Stockholm, like in London, way easier than I could do this in San Francisco. Most people in San Francisco will leave after a year and jump onto the next opportunity. If you really want to like, like, quite frankly, I could, you could easily set up like a hard working team here than in the States right now, in my personal opinion. Well, so you misunderstood a little bit what I said.

14:16If you thought I said anything about work ethics, because I think you're absolutely right. I have, you know, I, I know that all the people I ever engage with and everyone I know is working their asses off. There's no one that works more in the same hours because, you know, there are no more hours in the work week. It's just not doable. So it's not about how much do we work, how much do they work. I see consistently from any country, everyone bashes on their own country. And then you realize when you have a bit of exposure across the globe that, well, everyone's saying the same thing. They're just only saying it about their own country.

14:57The fact of the matter is we all feel that, well, the average person is not working as hard as I am. We all say that we're ourselves working super hard. So I really honestly think that my point was only what values do we espouse as a culture and as a society and how clearly do we do it? I think that there's a performative side to the U.S. culture that's dangerous. And I see a lot of cracks in the U.S. fabric of society that I think, you know, are starting to show that I think we might be able to avoid here in Europe. I mean, they have like from like we can like let's let's not put European VC fund, not only talk about America, but like my personal take on this is they have two big issues.

15:42issue number one is that they are because they have a first past the vote uh first past the post voting system they are automatically going into like a very bipolar state of like almost like camp fighting between very like big groups of people uh and then every four to eight years they flip almost like like your manic bipolar uncle in you know like a family party like you meet him like every few years when he was young he was like really cool that had like all this like motorcycling now you're just like this dude is intense you know um and kind of like the same for me with the state where it's like every four to eight years it can be like completely flipped and it's getting more and more like this that's with trump especially like every four years uh you have a complete blip on like agendas and like pretty much any important topic and that's just like a very hard way to have a long-term partner like that that's problem number one and problem number two they have is like a lot of debt um which i think it's a completely under-discussed problem.

16:40But yeah, that's a very long, different podcast. Yeah, that's a very long. Tune into the All In podcast if you want to hear a long treatment of that. Andres, before we go into Ewing, tell me a bit more about the investment focus of Prototype Capital, who you're normally co-investing with, maybe a bit about the size of former funds and also the one that you're raising now. Prototype is now going into its third fund. Co-investing with, I don't think that there's any meaningful fund we haven't invested with for before. So what we usually do is, and when I say we, that's like me. But like it sounds more impressive to speak plural.

17:18We do first check, first round. So we're one of the few that are stupid enough to be the first investor. And we are actively trying to do so. So ideally first or second investor usually. Lead ticket sizes? No, no, no. So we do 100, 200, 400K depending on the stage. and what we usually try to do is we try to give them and if you're a first investor what we usually do is we commit try to set up a round for them and like we do 200k a few others are doing like like a few other like i think we get up to like 800k or something and it's enough that they can focus on like building the prototype building the thing getting out there and that's usually the playbook we do very frequently we are also it really depends on what the stage of the founder is what they need so if they're already like at the stage that they can raise one or two million and we introduce them to like tier one funds and if not then we are trying to give them enough money that they can get to the point that we can introduce them to tier one funds we do first check first round usually i have only done like i've done more than 100 investments now i lost count but only 6 % or so is actually beyond seed.

18:27So like very, very few exceptions are actually like quote unquote late stage. Will you do any follow-ons in the fund? So 50 million is not a lot, right? So oftentimes you see... It's not a lot, yeah. It's a size where I can deploy as like the only GP and it's enough where we don't have to water down the quality of investments and we don't have to, for example, I don't have to hire like multiple new GPs and then like the economics break down or like I don't need to increase the check size and then push everybody else out. In my opinion, as a VC, it's very important to understand what is your game and then getting better and better at your own game.

19:07And the game we do is, I would say, closer to Super Angels than it is to like a typical seed series A fund. The first fund had like a multiple, like with our markdowns internally like on paper 5x roughly depends what you exactly how much your markdown and if you only look at the multiples according to the last valuations everything is like close to 7x the second fund is also doing now like really nice what I'm actually proud of is that the first fund is now like fully returned like I said a 1x dpi which to me was like a game changer because for context most of my LPs are very small check founders of startups.

19:50It's more like a community fund, if you want to call it that way. So for me, it was very important now that we like having this economic crisis to actually be able to give the money back already and be like, hey, this is not like gambling. This is actually like, here's your money back. And from now on, it's profit. And that was like a very exciting moment to me. The biggest lesson learned for me with the fund is doing secondaries. I have been in countless, very successful companies, first round. like Hopin is I think the most famous one Clubhouse is very famous a bunch of others and biggest lesson learned, secondaries but I'm lucky enough like I don't know like famous companies in my portfolio is like remote.com I was first round I think they're quite famous Luma Labs is currently extremely famous in the States the good thing is I invest early enough that I don't need to have these big stickers and still have like a significant multiple and yeah like now we're going into fund three which fund three it's like a little bit of a shift like so fund one and two were very heavy us and a little bit india and a little bit europe fund three will flip this so it will be very happy heavy europe and only a little us and a little india main reason is because the most ambitious and most driven obsessed founders are currently talk to our old European based.

21:11And I think we need a better, like a more aggressive, super early stage phase for hard tech, for deep tech in Europe, where people are very willing to invest aggressively early. And I hope to be one of the micro funds that make that happen. Can you tell me Andreas a bit about your own journey, because you are not historically a big big deep tech investor, and now you're doubling down on deep tech and hard tech. Could you tell me a bit about why you're comfortable doing that? Why do you think you'll be able to be successful? And also where you know that, okay, here, there are some dynamics that are different, but that's why I said.

21:54So I think of myself as like a applied fringe tech investor. So I'm looking for the stuff that's hitting the moment where it's much more of how you apply it and not fully research focused anymore so for example robotics is currently in that space like right now you have a moment where in robotics it's um as important what are you using the robot for as just making it work at all you have the same with computer vision now uh extreme uh fast moving things here is happening right now and so on and so on with poor that i did like a lot in infrastructure developer tooling and this kind of things before that there was even more niche before that I focused a lot on like global work and like all these things.

22:37And then COVID came and like showed that this is like a good idea. The way I think of this is deep tech is currently a buzzword that people use. And a lot of the investments that are in deep tech are actually not deep tech anymore. They're just like where VC should actually be. Because if you're doing yet another accounting SaaS startup, that should be maybe already like a PE play and no longer a VC play. The job of VC is to look where is the vector going. It's like thinking of like, what is the fringe? And like, I think of myself as somebody who is very comfortable with research risk, but I do want to invest in things where it's already understandable what will be the end product.

23:20This is like one of the reasons I call it prototype. Like I'm very much product centric. So, for example, I'm very comfortable investing in like right now, manufacturing, robotics and a few other things. Like my last investments are stuff like high performance EV motors, manufacturing networks, high performance browsers for AI agents, robots for supermarkets, energy specific stuff there and there. But like none of that, it's like there's obviously like a research angle to it, you know. And there's obviously a lot of things you have to figure out that it's like, it's not like a done thing, you know, it's not like just about deployment.

24:00but in many cases here it's uh you have like the the the ship is no longer 80 percent research and 20 percent engineering risk it's now much more about the engineering risk so what i usually do is if i'm not an expert in the specific field so i consider myself an expert in developer tooling everything around ai agents is very comfortable video models like this kind of stuff and nerve gorgeous blats like anything from computer vision i'm comfortable but if i'm not enough of an expert I'm trying to get at least one other micro fund or angel who is an expert in this field in as early as possible, you know, and then do it together with them.

24:38You make an important point there because you say you try and get an important expert in as an angel or as a micro fund, not just as some expert advisor. or that's what I have sometimes not liked when I see how deep tech, new deep tech investors or crossover deep tech investors think about investing in this space that they rely a bit too often on good names that advise to the fund but don't have real money at stake or that just advise on the video deal or do dealings level where I'm a bit like, oh yes, but I also have... I lost this very early. I had investments I fully believed in and I asked like experts in this industry and like hey what do you think it was like among my first investment and they were like yeah nice but can easily be done with ABCD has already been done by this and this company whatever and I'm like yeah okay I mean if I ask them to help me with the diligence and then I don't take their advice why do I do the diligence you know and then I didn't invest the company went rocket and they I found out later invested in the next round.

25:48I'm like, what the hell? You know? So my big learning here is it's much more if somebody has like skin in the game, if they actually invest, it's a completely different signal. And I also tell every founder that if you have like a slide that shows a lot of advisors that haven't invested, that's actually a negative signal. You know what I mean? Because everybody's okay with free equity. So yeah, I agree with you on this one. Yeah, or associated, loosely associated with an interesting thing. Yeah, it's very simple. So yeah. Yeah, a random professor who has like 50 students and almost all of them have them in his stack.

26:23Exactly, exactly. That is too often a situation. Andreas, now I want to shift into EU Inc. and ask you a few questions here. Tell us all about EU Inc. Why did you found EU Inc.? Who's the people behind it? What are you driving at? So EU Inc. is like on a very high level. It's the idea of creating a pan-European legal standard, a legal entity standard. So if you're, for example, from Germany or like the GmbH or like the UK, the limited, you know, have like this kind of company, a former like entity type in every country in Europe and standardize enough of corporate law so that you can do centralized online registration in corporation and then very quick investments through standard documents and so on and so on.

27:06If you have anything to do with startups, the way I usually explain it, the easiest is like think delivery meets Stripe Atlas meets YCC. But across Europe in a way that actually works with the member states and keep taxes and authority and like everything here. From our point of view, it's a very good compromise between what the member states want, which is like as much legal and tax authority as possible. and what the startups need, which is standardizing across Europe to be able to quickly move, quickly raise, quickly do stock options and all these kinds of things, which are currently just like really, really complex to do.

27:40And the way we do this is basically we're saying we standardize a part of corporate law, but employment and taxes have to stay local. So you're, for example, still a Danish EU Inc. So you're still employed under Danish law. You still have taxes under Danish tax law and so on and so on. But you can use an EU So you are incorporating online, you can fundraise within minutes and all this kind of stuff. Plus you can do pan-European stock options. The team behind this is a group out of the startup ecosystem. It's, let's say, five to eight people. The people who did not optional. So like the Voychuk of Index Ventures, if you know not optional, which is like an effort to standardize stock options across Europe.

28:20It's a big part of that. very early managing directors of EF, for example, Philippe Herkelmann, Simon Schaefer, who did the factory in Berlin, but also like in Lisbon and who is like also the president of EFS, which is the matter association of startup associations, multiple legal experts who, and a few other people like to keep this short. But basically in reality, if you think about this, it's a WhatsApp group. It's a WhatsApp group of a few people who are very passionate about like actually making something and changing something and the one thing we did is we didn't only want to do like a petition and then be like hey look everybody's for this like paul graham patrick collison like the founders of wise of wold of bold like all the big names are for this like please do and like hand over like a to-do list and like hey brussels now do you know we wanted to go a little bit further because a lot of this is like about the details how you implement this and even if you have the same like priorities even if you just like stack ranked it differently you have a very different outcome in this kind of problem because it's so extremely complex so one thing we did is we went with the best legal teams in europe for startups like auric burden burden a few others and did like a very big deep tie into um what's like how this could actually look front to back like how would be the setup like what is the existing eu law that would support it what would the changes be needed and so on and so on.

29:49And how can we keep the surface area of change as small as possible? It's like 80, 90 pages in total. We open sourced it, got like several hundred contributors to this and handed this over to Brussels. And now we are like in a weekly, maybe bi-weekly process with them of figuring out what's the right implementation of this. Tell me, Andreas, because this process is not a usual process, so to say, for something to get on the map of the union. and the commission. And it's not the way that we've normally seen associations be formed. It tends to go in a very different, more systematized manner. There's not many places where you say, where you describe it as it's basically a WhatsApp group.

30:36And then a movement arose from that. Could you reflect a little bit on, or maybe draw out some learnings for others that, because we all know there are so many issues to come to grabs, grabs with. Could you tell me a bit about the learnings from that and what you would entice other people to do that get inspired by the EU Inc. movement? Pick a good slice. It's kind of like with startups, like niching, kind of like figure something that is like small enough, but creates very high leverage. The associations have a different job. The job of the association is basically to be like a bridge builder.

31:12Like the job of the association is to show all the problems create all the network get to know all the politicians you know and like transport like whole list of things that need to be done the thing you can do with these kind of like topic specific movements i would say is you can pick a very specific problem and try to get like the right people to operate it and like make decisions and then also like be narrowing up that like people are like yes or no if they like it and it's not like the whole catalog of things it's like one specific thing and then the other thing you can do by niching is also being very specific in your implementation like request so not just like hey here's like 80 things that suck in europe please fix you know but like hey here's a very specific problem and this has like a very big impact but if we do a b c and d we could actually like create a huge leverage so niching would be number one uh like and being very intentional about this number two would be to get the right people involved, which is, I think, very, very important.

32:10And then number three is understand that public support is your main currency. We can do like a whole podcast about like learnings about politics itself, you know, a policy itself. But TLDR, it's closer to meme culture that it would be to normal business building. If you think of this, it's much more. It's very, very important that you actually are as a politician. your job is to almost like filter and see where there's enough political will to actually make something happen and then focus on those things where something is actually possible the thing you can do with public buy-in with like public support is to show that there is an actual will and push and momentum to make this happen so that any politicians who like agrees on this and like quite frankly like most of them do can actually see that there's enough currency if you want to actually use afterwards you know so number one niching number two as public supported as possible and like out there and as public as possible number three which i learned a little bit late in the whole process is pick stuff where you can work with ideally only one group on the other side if possible so eu inc is a little bit of a hairy beast in this case because we have to work on eu level with multiple DGs.

33:31So with multiple ministries from like legal to connect basically like the inner market and a few others. But we also have to do the same on national level. So we have to convince all the national politicians as well, as well as the Brussels politicians. And the main reason is because the national politicians actually hold the power. So if anybody feels inspired by this, and I genuinely hope I don't spark a whole generation of policy nerds, but if anybody is inspired, pick something where you have to work only with one group, ideally. And if you can even sidestep politics at all and like find a pure market solution, that's even better.

34:07But there's plenty of a list of like things that can be fixed. I might like kill the scope of this podcast, but there's like a few things, like I'd say like a handful of things. If we fix them, Europe would at least 10x be better. I'd love to ask you about the public part, creating a public movement, because you have, of course, more than 13 ,000 endorsements behind the Ewing movement. Can you tell me a bit about organizing that movement, the importance of it, and the tricks that you used, and maybe also reflect a bit on where this has put you publicly as Andreas Klinger and Prototype Capital?

34:50Because on the one hand, it's great asset, but other people would also say, okay, that's not for us, especially if you're in a larger firm, you might say we don't want to be associated with something that might end up being politically charged, those types of considerations that I think the problem with VC is that many of us manage capital on behalf of very private individuals that are not interested in backing any specific costs. They're just looking to get a good return on their investment. Yeah, yes and no. I don't think that the job of a VC is to only get good return of investment. I mean, ultimately, yeah, great, you know, but to do this very frequently, you have to be known and you also need to fix the macros in that system you're actually working in, the macro and the micro, actually.

35:39So you can't just be like, hey, I just want to invest because if you have absolutely no profile and if you have absolutely no impact in the industry, if you have absolutely no surface area and you have no opinion on your own, how the hell are you going to make the best investments so i don't think that would even be possible that being said uh we i don't think of uh eu inc as like a political thing personally i think of it as more like an administrative thing so there is uh certain complexities we have right now in the legal setup of europe in the policy like how you do business in europe and those need to be simplified and every member state in the european union agrees that the brussels job is to figure out those solutions you know and make business easier and what we did is we were like instead of like hoping that brussels magically has this right solution we were like nope let's get the best people get the associations everybody like contribute and give them a very specific solution that we think is correct and very happy open to feedback if anybody has like critique on it very open bit but so far it seems to be the best solution that people came up with And in that way, for me, it's not really like a political thing.