@aape
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Co-Founder at Dragon Guild. Positive change, digital, & education activist. Dad. Entrepreneur. Changemaker. Speaker. Coach. Friend. Curious. LiG!
Finland
Joined March 2009
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Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Excited to introduce @Cosign: the curated professional network for the startup community: cosign.co
Our goal is to create the following:
- A comprehensive startup directory of investors, companies, and operators, including what they worked on and who they worked on it with.
- Cosign graph: Who shaped your career? Who were you actually in the trenches with? Who would work with you again? Who thinks you’re someone to watch?
- Durable reputation: Great endorsements happen every day on X and disappear into the feed. Cosign attaches those signals permanently to people and companies.
- Discovery: Who are the best fintech angels? Which AI companies should I watch? Who are the best designers?
- Intent network: Privately signal “I’d invest in them,” “I’d hire them,” “I’d work with them,” or eventually even “I’d acquire this company.” Match people when interest exists on both sides.
Imagine if Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and OG AngelList had a baby. Though Cosign is a community, not a business.
In order to join, you need to be cosigned. Or you can apply directly.
David Booth and I started this idea 7 years ago but didn’t have the firepower to make it work. Now we do.
No one has really touched LinkedIn in 20 years. Excited to take a swing.
cosign.co
Mike Markkula, a former manager at Intel, cosigned Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1977.
Jobs and Wozniak sold a VW bus and a calculator to fund their first computer. Markkula wrote them their first check.
Jobs: "I thought it was unlikely that Mike would ever see that $250,000 again, and I was impressed that he was willing to risk it."
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Peter Thiel just said Europe fears success.
His argument: German founders treat a working company as something to sell, not something to scale into a Musk- or Zuckerberg-sized giant. The result is almost no large new firms built in decades.
Think missing follow-on jobs. No employee millionaires at scale. Rich lists full of heirs instead of builders.
When he compared the 50 wealthiest people in each country, Thiel laid out the numbers:
- Of the 50 richest Americans, 12 are Gen X or younger.
- 9 of those 12 made their own money.
> Of the 50 richest Germans, 20 are Gen X or younger. All 20 inherited it.
> “Not a single person did something new, made some new money, built a large, new scalable company.”
Then he added the cultural twist people usually miss:
“One of the things in Germany that people always talk about in this entrepreneurship context is there’s a fear of failure. A ‘no risk’ culture… Perhaps there’s also a fear of success.”
If something works, “you’re not going to scale it to this extreme degree like an Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. At some point you’ll sell the company or exit.”
It seems that Germany’s (& Europe's) real entrepreneurship problem may not be starting companies.
It’s refusing to let the winners get too big.
These posts by @stewartbrand contain links to an era when man and the machines had real relationships.
Later, man and software had similar relationships. 'Will this compile?'.
Do we have that in the age of AI? Where do we have that?
LiG?
Far the best and most complete online version of my 1972 article titled "Spacewar: Fanatic Life Among the Computer Bums" in Rolling Stone starts on Page 39 of my 1974 book, Two Cybernetic Frontiers:
wholeearth.info/p/ii-cyberne…
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
If you know anyone looking for a good and fairly AI-proof career, watchmaker (= watch repairer) seems a promising one. Every watchmaker seems to have more work than he can handle, mechanical watches are increasingly popular, and it will be a while before AI does this.
Founders have universities, programs like @shipfr8 and @ewor - an entire growth universe. And @a16z just extended it further with the Horowitz Andreessen Academy.
But people who support founders have almost nothing.
That's the gap @DragonGuildLtd exists to close.
Whoever makes compute abundant, cheap, and nationally coordinated will win the next industrial era.
LiG
For months investors have asked me why anyone would build an institution in the age of AI.
Yesterday @a16z answered with $42M.
They build on top of Silicon Valley. Europe has to build the institution and the ecosystem at once.
We started a year ago.
The internet made it possible to know anything. AI makes it possible to do anything. That changes what it means to be educated. And it demands a new kind of institution.
Announcing The Horowitz Andreessen Academy.
In partnership with Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, Stripe, and more.
Incubated by a16z. San Francisco. Fall 2027.
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Follow @DragonGuildLtd to learn how Aape and the team are building a new centre of excellence to support anyone who is helping build the future, from researchers to corporate innovation wizards.
America is worried its eighteen-year-olds are not meeting each other.
Europe should be worried that its labs, its capital and its public buyers are not.
Today, we’re launching an ambitious new school called The Horowitz Andreessen Academy.
Based in San Francisco, The Academy serves the most promising young high school graduates.
We think this can be an elite institution that attracts top tier talent. One that prepares students for the future rather than remaining stuck in the past.
The #1 goal is to help students learn to build, which is the most important skill in the AI era. They'll learn primarily by pursuing their own projects, either individually or in groups. There are classes and guest lectures, too, from some truly amazing people who have built modern-day Silicon Valley.
The Academy is designed as a network, since that’s the reason students go to school in the first place. Core to that network are our 10 Founding Partners: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. The network includes over 50 hiring partners and over 200 speakers and mentors. To join as a hiring partner or faculty member, you can apply on our website.
We raised $42M in funding led by @a16z. I'll be CEO and @pmarca and @eriktorenberg will join me on the board.
Applications are open for our Founding Class Fellowship, which will be one year and tuition-free. Eventually, pending regulatory approval, we plan to offer a two-year program that charges tuition, similar in cost to an elite private university.
We're looking for the most unusually ambitious young builders on the planet. Come join us in San Francisco:
theacademysf.com/
I read the Transformative AI Strategy for Europe.
Now I wait for announcements about new AI companies that:
1. Secure access to frontier AI
2. Build economic strength
3. Ensure safety and security
I read all 206 pages of Europe's new AI strategy. Compute, chips, capital, rules, all covered.
The missing question: who connects research, investors, corporates and government?
AI will answer more of the what and the how. Someone still has to forge the who.
LiG
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
This is an insanely important report about how completely, utterly and totally unprepared Europe is for the arrival of transformative AI.
A single data centre in Malaysia will soon have a third of the AI computing power of *all* of Europe combined. Two data centres in the US will have more than our entire continent.
And that's just page one...
More than 60 of Europe's top minds (including two Nobel laureates) have just published "A Transformative AI Strategy for Europe", an independent report about how dire the situation is. As the world gets darker, we risk being squeezed and trampled by the US and China. On the current path, the report warns, even Europe's richest economies could slide toward middle-income status in a world run from Silicon Valley and Beijing.
Here's where we are right now:
→ The EU hosts just 5% of the world's AI compute. The US: 75%.
→ Not one of the ten most valuable AI companies in the world is European.
→ And this year, Europe got locked out of the world's most powerful AI model, twice, by American export rules. The EU's own cybersecurity agency had to negotiate for weeks to get in, and still doesn't have the latest version.
For years the comfortable story was: America innovates, Europe regulates. Well, that story is dead. You can't regulate what you can't access. And you can't protect 450 million people with second-rate cyberdefence against first-rate attackers.
The good news is that we have some leverage: Europe holds the single biggest chokepoint in the global chip supply chain (ASML). And this report sketches a plan to increase our leverage massively. Here's what we need to do:
1. Build a member state alliance for supply chain security – Netherlands, Germany and France at minimum – founded before the end of 2026.
2. Recruit many more frontier AI experts inside European governments ASAP.
3. Aim for at least 15% of global AI compute on European soil by 2030, built so local communities actually benefit.
4. Make Europe the world leader in AI assurance: hardware that can prove how AI is being used.
5. Prepare for crises and emergencies, such as engineered viruses and highly advanced automated cyberattacks.
It's too late to catch up with the US and China. But it's not too late to build leverage .
Read the full report here --> transformative-ai.eu/part-a#…
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
$1.8 trillion built abroad by European founders.
$1.9 trillion built at home by the same cohort.
Europe is not incapable. It works about half the time.
The half we lost didn't go for money. It went because nobody owned the moment they were needed.
h/t @dealroomco
Two ways for science to change the world: acts of God, or successful commercialization.
We work with @DragonGuildLtd on the second one.
Talked to @DeanDiNardi about why Europe keeps losing what it builds.
LiG
youtu.be/oFeT7xSO1_Y?si=V8dB…
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
I do love it. Europe has pilots. It needs buyers willing to fund messy tech, not policy seminars.
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
And this is why I co-founded DragonGuild with @aape, a veteran Founder, edutech domain expert and all round force of nature.
Some people take your energy - Aape gives it, in spades. I cannot think of a better person to argue the case for the UK and Europe to wake up and focus on the future.
DragonGuild is an innovative program to arm the stakeholders in Europe who can accelerate technological change through policy, financing, or purchasing power, with a deep understanding of which technologies matter, how to think about the future.
It will arm you with the confidence and wisdom to dare to drive for radical change ,against the naysayers and scarcity squirrels who seem to plague our efforts to harness technology to build a better future for all.
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Every navy has good sailors. Europe needs pirates.
Not founders. The investors, corporates, researchers and public builders willing to back what hasn't been proven yet.
Dragon Guild. Currently curating Cohort 0
Why doesn’t #Europe lead the world?
linkedin.com/pulse/technolog…
