"America innovates, China replicates, Europe regulates." A snappy phrase or snap judgement? This erroneous (in my opinion) claim ultimately served as the unofficial thesis of Mario Draghi's 2024 report on European competitiveness. While memorable enough for a presentation slide, its appeal lies in holding just enough truth to resonate. Draghi's analysis concludes that Europe genuinely lags behind the United States in frontier technologies due to tangible structural obstacles, such as overly cumbersome and slow regulation, market fragmentation across national borders, and risk-averse financial institutions. 

Yet, despite these clear systemic flaws, the popular slogan mistakenly treats them as a cultural trait, implying that risk aversion is naturally European while boldness is inherently American. But this narrative is evidently flawed. When Draghi launched the Rhine Group this summer to push his reforms forward, his co-founder was Patrick Collison, the Irish co-founder of Stripe, one of the most consequential payment companies to come out of Silicon Valley. Is Stripe an American success or a European one? As someone who works in payments, I don't see a European or an American when I look at Collison. I see a founder who saw friction in how money moves and refused to accept it. 

That has been my experience pretty much everywhere I’ve worked. I've done business on four continents, in the U.S., the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and nationality has never been a reliable indicator of success. The trailblazers I’ve encountered shared far more with one another than with their own fellow citizens. Richard Branson is a good example. He left school at sixteen and launched his first venture from a student magazine, hardly fitting the stereotype of a cautious, rule-bound European. That confidence wasn't necessarily handed to him by his nationality. It came from him. 

In my experience, it almost always comes down to the individual. It's the heart, the passion, the drive, the spine and the appetite for risk a person brings with them, born of whatever they've lived through. Background doesn't decide it either. I've met people who had every advantage and people who started with nothing, and both have gone on to do remarkable things. 

A lot of it comes down to what I call forced ingenuity. Many of the best founders I know didn't innovate because they had no other option. They had an idea, pivoted and pivoted again, making tough calls under pressure because the alternative was failure. My own path went from law to real estate and then, in 2017, into technology, and each move came more from an internal drive to effect change. 

Place plays its part, of course. I grew up in the U.S. and then spent 20 years on a Caribbean island, and the change in pace and attitude was huge. Culture affects how deals get done, how long things take and what people expect from each other. But what’s most important is being willing to adapt, and I found I didn't just adapt, I thrived. That's down to the individual too. If a culture doesn't suit you, find one that does, rather than staying and resenting it.

At ForumPay, moving money across borders means working with people across borders, and the best people on our team come from all over the map. Europe's institutions may well need the reforms Draghi is pushing for, but its people don't need to be told they lack the right mentality. The next great founder is just as likely to come from the Caribbean as they are from Silicon Valley or Berlin, and the sooner we stop judging people by their passport, the sooner we'll find them.