Henrick Johansson is sixty-five years old, lives in a forty-seven-square-metre apartment in Stockholm, and believes Europe has already won the AI century. He would like to explain why.
In fourteen chapters and five appendices, Compliant Capital's founding partner makes the case that the contemporary technology economy has been measuring dynamism on the wrong axis. The Americans measure it in rate of replacement - which Fortune 500 companies died this year, which startups disrupted them. The Europeans measure it in renewal within persistence: the cathedrals that remain, the regulations that compound, the apprenticeships that transmit. By Henrick's calm reading, the continent has been winning for approximately seven centuries.
The book is structured as Henrick's manifesto, threaded with thirty-plus Confessions: the fourteen-page Notre Dame permit he submits before every climb, the leather-bound notebook in which he has transcribed the Bosch dishwasher manual into three volumes, the Vatican suit waiting in his closet for the visit he has been queueing for eleven years, the seventy-two-hour bicycle-distance rule he imposes on every portfolio company's server location.
It is also, on a closer reading, the cleanest argument in print for why the European framework matters precisely because it appears to be losing.
A manifesto in the lineage of Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, Tyler Cowen's Stubborn Attachments, Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, and Adam Tooze's Crashed. From the author of the @compliantvc account.
