Intro

What happens when Europe stops apologizing for its ambition and starts executing at full speed?

Some founders still believe Europe’s biggest constraint is confidence. This conversation challenges that idea head on.

Follow the Gradient sits down with Laura Modiano, Head of Startups EMEA at OpenAI, who works daily with founders across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. She brings a rare vantage point from inside OpenAI and from years of supporting companies from first prototype to real scale.

This episode is less about hype cycles and more about how ambition, technical depth, and feedback driven execution actually compound over time. Laura reflects on what changes when speed collapses, tools feel like coworkers, and founders are forced to rethink how they learn, unlearn, and decide under uncertainty.

We talk about:

• Why European founders systematically underestimate how fast they can go with today’s AI tooling

• How collapsing build cycles shift the real bottleneck from ideas to decision quality

• The execution gap that appears after early traction and why “building small” becomes a hidden ceiling

• Why technical literacy is no longer optional even for application layer founders

• How Europe’s fragmented markets quietly train founders to think global from day one

• What great execution looks like when models evolve faster than product roadmaps

Rather than offering a playbook, this episode zooms out on how founders make choices when the ground keeps moving. It’s about taste, timing, and knowing when to ship, when to pause, and when to discard assumptions that once worked but no longer fit.

Our biggest takeaways, including Laura’s view on what founders consistently misjudge about speed and scale:

https://followthegradient.io/p/laura-modiano-podcast 

—

Where to find Laura Modiano:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-modiano/ 

Reach out at: startups@openai.com 

—

🎙 Follow the Gradient: conversations about building a business from Europe while staying sane.

Follow us: 

Melanie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melaniexgabriel/ 

Christian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-woese/ 

Subscribe to our channels:

Newsletter: https://www.followthegradient.io 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@followthegradient

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/followthegradient/ 

X: https://x.com/followgradient 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/followthegradient/

—

00:00 Introduction

02:03 Why Europe Produces Globally Competitive Founders

06:07 What Founders Miss About AI Acceleration

08:52 Building Real Companies Beyond Demo Culture

12:09 Why Technical Depth Wins In AI Startups

15:42 What Switzerland Gets Right About Ecosystems

20:01 Deciding Where To Build In Europe

23:01 What Strong Execution Looks Like Today

26:10 Discovering AI Use Cases Beyond Cost Cutting

28:55 Why Unlearning Becomes A Scaling Advantage

31:26 Maintaining Founder Intensity Without Burnout

41:40 Making High Stakes Decisions With Incomplete Data

44:57 Where Startups Should Focus As Models Advance

46:41 False Beliefs Holding European Founders Back