The Index Ventures Experience

Every founder eyeing up the US from the outside faces the same question: do we have what it takes? Breaking into such a large and competitive market will probably be one of the most daunting feats you’ll ever face as a founder—but, if you succeed, it will also be one of the most rewarding.

For European founders, the fundamental question is shifting from "How do we expand to the US?" to "How do we build a global company from day one?" Rather than treating US expansion as a bridge to cross at some point, founders are increasingly looking to the horizon and building with transatlantic ambitions from the start.

At Index, we’ve had the privilege of partnering with a number of path breaking European and US companies with a “born transatlantic” mindset, including Figma, Datadog, Wiz, Roblox, Adyen, Revolut and Robinhood. Over the three decades, we've seen 23 of our portfolio companies become decacorns and taken 57 companies to a successful listing. We’ve helped more than 50 European tech companies build global businesses, and the same questions come up from founders again and again. How long should I grow my business in Europe? How do we build our organization to thrive across continents? When and how does the US come into the picture? Does the founder need to move? Where in the US should we set up?

Being involved at every step—from planning through to launch and scaling—has taught us invaluable lessons about the opportunities and pitfalls. We’ve also lived this journey ourselves, being the first and only global venture capital (VC) firm with roots in Europe that’s also made it in the US, opening our first office in San Francisco in 2011. Through this experience and that of the companies we’ve nurtured, we've seen that transatlantic success calls for equal measures of ambition, commitment and trust:

Ambition

This goes beyond just wanting to succeed in the US market. It means having the vision to build a truly global company from the get-go, and the courage to compete in the world's most demanding market. European founders must be willing to think bigger and move faster than they might be comfortable with initially.

Commitment

Building a transatlantic company requires unwavering dedication to the mission. This might mean founders relocating, extensive travel, challenging timezone management, and significant investment in building and maintaining company culture across continents. It means being willing to make hard choices and stick with them through difficult times.

Trust

The foundation of any successful transatlantic organization is trust—between leaders and their teams, between offices, and in the shared mission. This becomes especially critical when operating across timezones and geographies. Building and maintaining this trust requires intentional effort and investment in communication, travel, and team building.

Our research into US expansion is the most comprehensive ever undertaken. We first published this guide in 2020, and are now updating it five years later. We've analyzed over 500 VC-backed startups and surveyed 140 companies about their expansion strategy. We've done deep-dives into 46 European breakthrough companies that have succeeded in the US, as well as interviewed dozens of founders and operators at various stages of expansion. The result is a set of practical frameworks to help you plan and execute the right moves at the right time.

This book will give you insight into these different models and choose the right approach for your company. Whether you're just starting to consider US expansion or already planning your launch, our goal is to help you understand what you need to do, when you need to do it, and how to do it effectively. Most importantly, we want to help you build an organization that can truly thrive on both sides of the Atlantic.

THE ARCHETYPES

Companies born in Europe are now achieving unprecedented scale. While some will remain regional success stories—particularly in regulated sectors like financial services, insurance, property, healthcare and education—the majority of successful European startups will operate globally. For those that become category winners, what are the strategies and factors that enabled success? And how did they design their organizations to maximize their potential?

Most startups born in Europe share similar beginnings. A founding team based in Europe develops a product vision, raises angel or seed funding, and builds their early team locally. They typically find their first users or customers in Europe, though an increasing number are finding early US customers through personal networks, investor connections and remote marketing activities. Through working with these initial users, they achieve product-market fit (PMF). It’s usually after hitting PMF that companies’ paths diverge dramatically, shaped by both their sector and business model.

Through working with hundreds of companies making this journey, Index has identified five distinct archetypes for building transatlantic businesses out of Europe:

• Magnet: companies that begin in Europe but pivot to the US quickly. Most enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) companies fall into this archetype where the US is their largest market and most of their revenue comes from the US. The company builds commercial functions in the US while keeping the core of engineering in Europe. The founder/CEO relocates and the executive team will eventually be in the US.
• Pendulum: companies that balance between the two continents, maintaining multiple centers of gravity. Either the total addressable market (TAM) is more equally weighted across Europe and the US, in which case Pendulum is a natural archetype, or companies have a large US TAM but their US entry is delayed. This might be due to regulatory barriers, need for intense localization, or a direct US competitor. This delay means that you will end up building substantive operations in Europe before entering the US. Pendulums typically have a US President and some US-based functional executives with the founder/CEO navigating between the two continents.
• Anchor: Anchor is focused on Europe with a small proportion of their revenue coming from the US. The TAM is weighted to Europe and the US share of revenue lands somewhere between 15 to 30 percent. The founder/CEO stays in Europe. They’ll typically have a US President, but no other US executives.
• Telescope: a company that is able to serve US customers without building a big US presence. This is a common archetype for companies that rely on bottom-up, self-serve motion. Their US share of TAM and revenue can vary. The founder/CEO remains in Europe and they’ll have a VP of business development in the US.
• Transplant: European founders who move to the US and start their companies there. While this is a valid path to pursue, it will not be the focus of this book.

The right archetype for your company depends primarily on two key questions:

• How large is the US as a percentage of your total addressable market (TAM), and to what extent are you focused on winning this market?
• Do you need boots on the ground to either acquire (sales) or serve (operations) customers?

While other factors influence which archetype fits best, these two factors tend to be the most decisive for both B2B and B2C companies. The classic business tenet of “follow the customer” remains paramount.

These archetypes are road-tested heuristics that offer guidance on critical decisions about timing, team structure and geographic focus. But they’re not static: companies can evolve from one archetype to another as they scale. These changes are usually driven by shifting go-to-market (GTM) strategy: for example, you might move from a Telescope to Magnet as you establish a sales motion to focus on enterprise customers.

To help determine which archetype fits your company, and to visualize what your journey to becoming a transatlantic company might look like, check out our ExpansionPlan web app, available on the Index Ventures website, in the Index Press section.

KEY TRENDS

The European tech ecosystem has evolved dramatically over three waves, each marked by a distinct approach to US expansion:

• First Wave (pre-2010): The Transplant Era. Successful European companies typically transplanted themselves wholesale to America. Success involved relocating entirely to the US and building a US business from the get-go. This was largely driven by dominance of US investors and their preferences.
• Second Wave (2010–2020): The Hybrid Approach. More nuanced approaches emerged, with companies such as Adyen and Spotify taking advantage of Europe’s tech-savvy customers, talent, and capital to grow in Europe first before expanding.
• Third Wave (2020–present): Born Transatlantic. European companies increasingly building for global markets from the get-go, intentionally designing the organization to be able to operate across continents from inception or in the near future.

Europe has witnessed an extraordinary growth in talent density, the rise of transformational technologies for building and scaling companies, and a new ecosystem of knowledge and playbooks driven by increasingly sophisticated operators, investors and policymakers. The region has created 571 unicorns (with 22 additions in 2024 alone), and 37 decacorns.¹ European startups now account for 20 percent of global VC deals, and secure a third of global seed funding.²

The advantages Europe offers as a foundation for building global companies have become increasingly clear:

• Deep technical talent pools, with more affordable salaries and better retention rates
• Smaller domestic markets that force international thinking from day one
• Domain expertise in sectors like finance, luxury, travel, and gaming
• A growing ecosystem of experienced operators, investors, and advisors

Here are some key drivers of recent trends:

• The rise of remote working since the pandemic, leading to increased experimentation with distributed teams from the outset.
• The rise of AI , leading European companies to focus earlier on the US, especially the Bay Area, in order to access AI-productization talent, key platform partners or US investors taking a lead on AI investments.
• A widening economic gulf between the US and Europe. Stronger US macroeconomic growth and a rebound in investing, especially in AI, is pushing European founders to look to the US sooner than they would have during the second wave.

Since the last publication of this book, here are some of the emerging trends:

1 A maturing European ecosystem with a research and development (R&D) advantage:

The European ecosystem now offers distinct talent advantages compared with the US, including world-class technical expertise at significantly lower cost. Engineers in Paris or London typically cost half what equivalent roles command in New York or San Francisco, while offering similar quality and often greater loyalty. This means European companies are confidently maintaining their engineering core in Europe, while strategically adding specialized expertise from the Bay Area or New York. This bifurcated approach across continents is so successful that US companies such as Figma, OpenAI, Scale, and Cohere have looked to Europe as a source of technical innovation and talent.

2 Earlier, bolder entry to the US:

Startups are targeting transatlantic expansion earlier than ever before: 64 percent of companies now expand to the US at pre-seed or seed stage, up from just 33 percent in 2015–2019.

3 An enterprise spending gap:

While much ink has been spilled on the funding gap between the US and Europe, corporate spending is an increasingly significant part of the picture. US enterprises are typically more open and faster in buying from startups and have larger technology budgets. According to Statista, the enterprise software market in the US is projected to reach $195 billion by 2029, more than double Europe's $90 billion³. US corporations see technology as a source of competitive advantage and are willing to bet on innovative solutions—and closing just a few major US enterprise deals can transform a company's trajectory. Being close to customers remains the primary motivation for expansion, with 76 percent of founders surveyed ranking it as their top reason.

4 The resurgence of Silicon Valley:

Despite predictions of Silicon Valley's decline during the pandemic, the Bay Area has reemerged as the epicenter of AI innovation, with unparalleled energy and opportunities. 46 percent of companies that expanded to the US from 2020–2024 are choosing the Bay Area as their hub, up from 28 percent for those who expanded to the US from 2015–2019. The concentration of extraordinary talent, investors and customers creates a flywheel of serendipitous connections that's difficult to replicate elsewhere. Whether at industry events, coffee meetings, or even local gyms and yoga studios, informal networking gives local companies an edge.

At the same time, founders are increasingly deliberate about the location of their US hub, with many choosing New York due to proximity to customers and favorable timezones. Now, companies are increasingly committing to primary tech hubs (Bay Area, New York, Boston, Los Angeles) at the start to maximize their chances of success. While other locations can offer short-term cost advantages, they often create growth ceilings. The trend of establishing an American headquarters (HQ) in lower-cost US cities like Austin or Denver was more common in the period after the pandemic, but is now reversing, with secondary cities launching only after companies scale.

5 Experimentation with team distribution

The normalization of remote work has loosened some of the demands around geographical locations and companies have become increasingly sophisticated about balancing the advantages of in-person versus remote workplace cultures. There’s a growing recognition of the advantages of having multiple centers of gravity within the “10-hour timezone” from San Francisco to Tel Aviv, allowing companies to flex operations according to economic cycles, regulatory shifts or geopolitical tensions. Across all archetypes, companies are keeping their engineering core in Europe while building commercial operations that span both markets. Some specific emerging models include:

• A preference for in-person US hubs: Remote meetings have made it increasingly easy to establish an initial US presence and win customers without committing to a physical office. Companies can hire their first US employees wherever they find the right talent, whether that's in North Carolina or New York. Despite this, we're seeing a preference for in-person cultures in the early days of expansion. Over 70 percent of surveyed founders believed being in an office together was important during the initial US launch.
• Hiring global R&D talent from the outset: Companies falling into Magnet and Telescope archetypes are making early technical hires in the US, particularly for AI talent in the Bay Area. However, there is risk involved when R&D is spread across timezones and the CTO should ideally always be close to core R&D builders.
• Some delayed founder relocation: Some founders are building globally successful businesses without personally relocating to the US, even when the US is their largest market and revenue driver—though it remains to be seen if this holds true through to exit.

6 Companies are growing leaner, better, faster

Successful startups are becoming leaner relative to revenue, driven by rising interest rates, increased focus on productivity and efficiency in the post-pandemic era, and advances in AI. We’ve seen an increase in the average Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) at the point of listing, and a roughly 20 percent cut in headcount throughout the journey. Winners can win even bigger now than before, and can do so with fewer people.

¹ Dealroom, Europe Q3 2024 Report (October 2024)
² Dealroom, Europe Guide
³ Statista, Enterprise Software—United States: Market Revenue

KEY CONTRIBUTORS

Here’s a selection of the companies who contributed insights to this resource.

• Adyen
• Celonis
• Collibra
• Cradle
• Criteo
• Datadog
• DataSnipper
• DeepL
• ElevenLabs
• Flix
• Fireblocks
• GetYourGuide
• Hugging Face
• incident.io
• King
• Miro
• MySQL
• Oura
• Personio
• Pigment
• Remote
• Revolut
• Snyk
• Spotify
• Supercell
• Sword Health
• Trustpilot
• UiPath
• Unity Technologies
• Wayve
• Wise
• Wiz

BREAKTHROUGH COMPANIES

Our research identified 46 European-born tech companies that have gone on to achieve significant success in the US. Success has been defined through a combination of total US revenues, US growth, US percentage of overall revenues, and US category leadership. They span across different industries, business models, and expansion strategies.

Magnet

For companies with a large (over 50 percent) US TAM, as well as the ambition to pursue it, success often requires pivoting the entire organization toward the US as its “true North.” This archetype has evolved significantly in recent years, with companies pursuing US opportunities earlier than ever before.

The Magnet archetype dominates among B2B companies, particularly enterprise SaaS startups, where larger US corporate technology budgets and openness to innovation act as magnetic attractors. In this model, you'll gravitate toward a setup where your engineering and R&D remain primarily in Europe, while your commercial functions focus on the US—effectively "built in Europe, sold in the US." CEOs typically relocate to the US and, over time, most of your executive team will be based there as well.

However, there’s increasing flexibility in this pattern since the pandemic. In particular, the rise of remote working has led to more experimentation with distributed teams from the outset. Magnets that previously kept all technical talent in Europe are making selective technical hires in the US much earlier in their journey—particularly when they need specialized AI expertise not readily available in Europe, as with companies like Wayve and Adaptive ML. Some founders are trying to build Magnet companies without relocating themselves, particularly where they’re willing to commit to lots of travel and are confident in their ability to attract high-caliber US leaders. But while remote work makes it possible for founders to build successful companies without moving, our experience suggests that founder relocation dramatically increases the odds of US success. If US expansion falls short because the founder stays in Europe, it may push the company from a Magnet to a Pendulum model.

Conversely, we’re also seeing founders relocate from Europe to the US very early in the journey—including pre-PMF and even in the minimum viable product (MVP) phase. But to sound a note of caution, building your early product with an R&D team spread across over 9 timezones (San Francisco → Europe) is challenging even with a great remote culture, and you should carefully evaluate the pros and cons of keeping your R&D team in closer proximity. You should be particularly cautious of arrangements where the CTO also moves to the US, separated from the core R&D team in Europe.

Notable examples of Magnets include:

• B2B examples: Collibra, incident.io, UiPath

Magnet: Typical Journey

• Raise seed funding, and build product from Europe, establishing PMF
• Acquire customers from the US and service them remotely
• Raise series A led by transatlantic or US investor
• Refocus efforts on US versus Europe—both for sales, and for product roadmap
• Strengthen product management, so the CEO can step away from day-to-day involvement
• CEO moves to (or spends more time in) the US
• Build a small sales team in US, led by a player/coach
• Raise series B led by US investor
• Scale your GTM team in US—including CMO and CRO
• CEO relocates (if they haven’t already)
• Raise series C
• All non-technical leadership is now in the US—including CFO
• Raise series D
• Hire CTO and/or CPO in the US, as it's hard to find candidates in Europe with proven experience at this scale
• Consider a secondary engineering center in US
• Build customer-oriented product team in US, to complement technically oriented product team in Europe
• Further fundraising, as required for continued expansion
• List in the US

Built out of Europe

Founded in 2008, Collibra began as a research project emerging out of Belgian universities. It launched with the aspiration to become the operating system for the world’s commercial data, at a time when banks and other companies were coming under increased scrutiny and pressure to tighten up their data management practices. The control and governance of data was an entirely new category of enterprise software, which required early-adopter customers. The Collibra team found five early European test customers, including international banks in London, but the founders always knew that the US was the real prize.

Early US traction

From 2012, Collibra began to sell remotely into the US, sponsoring conferences and sending over team members to attend. They added 10–12 new clients this way, servicing them remotely. In 2013, to ramp up US sales, they set up a New York WeWork office, with a team of five. New York was the obvious location, since at the time they were primarily selling into banks.

Co-founders Stijn (COO) and Pieter (Chief Science Officer) relocated, with co-founder Benny (VP Sales) also spending 60 percent of his time there. Felix, CEO, stayed in Belgium, overseeing engineering and product. He was too immersed in day-to-day product decisions to be able to also move to New York.

The first 10 US hires were AEs—individual contributors, rather than managers. With hindsight, it was clear that these were mis-hires. The company lacked the capital, or brand-name investors, to give it credibility to hire the talent that was really needed. Furthermore, they found it challenging to evaluate US candidates—something that other European founders have also admitted.

Commitment and scaling

In 2015, following an Index-led series B, Felix moved to New York. He was already in the US 50 percent of the time, and by this point, he had been able to relinquish his product responsibilities.

Knowing how to hire effectively in the US was a challenge, as was localizing HR policies and practices established in Europe. Hiring a Chief People Officer, Jarlath, in 2016 was extremely valuable. Originally European, he could effectively translate cultural expectations.

Collibra was scaling beyond a level that any of the European leadership had experienced. To prepare for the next growth phase, Felix hired seasoned US global functional executives, including a CFO, CRO, and CMO. All these hires had an international flavor of some kind—having lived in London, run global teams, or worked at European companies.

In 2020, Collibra set up a secondary hub in Atlanta, a much lower-cost location than New York, with strong talent pools across Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), customer success, plus marketing and finance ops.

Product and engineering leadership

By 2018, the product function was still entirely located in Belgium, close to engineering. Felix communicated and translated market requirements to this team. But with a 500-person organization to lead, and a majority of US-based customers, this became unworkable. A Chief Product Officer was hired in the US in 2018. There is now a small but experienced team of customer-facing product managers in the US, to complement the engineering-facing team in Belgium.

Up to 2020, engineering was located in Europe (Belgium, Poland, and the Czech Republic). However, with a team over 200-strong, Collibra had to search in the US for a CTO with the requisite experience, who would open a US engineering center.

Balancing cultures, leveling, and communicating

Making sure that teams across all offices feel valued has been a constant challenge. Poland used to feel secondary to Belgium. Later, with the move of Felix and decision making to New York, morale in Belgium fell.

The leadership has learnt the importance of being thoughtful in its efforts to level the playing field. They pay careful attention to the locations of all-hands meetings, board meetings, offsites, etc.

Collibra introduced core manager training that included cultural awareness content to create a common internal language and approach. Four-day-long global employee summits were held each year, in “neutral locations”—Vancouver, Malta, Lisbon, New Orleans—which promoted bonding and unity.

Collibra’s top tips for winning in the US

• Make sure you have PMF before you move.
• You can achieve a lot through travel.
• Raise a big round before you expand.
• Have investors that understand the US and can help you scale.
• Be prepared to make mistakes, but fix them quickly.

ANCHOR

The Anchor archetype is for companies where Europe represents the larger market opportunity, with the US typically accounting for 15–30 percent of TAM. In this case, the business will likely stay tethered, like an anchor, in Europe. Rather than pivoting the entire organization toward the US market, Anchors build a focused US operation while protecting and growing their European core. This often means keeping all major leadership functions (except the US President role) in Europe, including maintaining founder presence there.

Success in this model relies on building a relatively autonomous US GTM team, with a strong US-dedicated leader. The Anchor archetype is common in situations where US expansion comes later in the journey. At this point, you will have a substantial European business to protect and grow, and a more mature leadership team in place. It will take some time for the US to become as significant a market, so you don’t want to pivot your attention and organization there, at least initially.

The Anchor archetype works especially well for businesses with cross-border value propositions, where Europe's complex national markets actually present more opportunity than the relatively borderless US market. In the Anchor model, you leverage the leadership and expertise built in European markets, in order to launch a localized version and capture market share in the even larger US market.

Notable examples of successful Anchor companies include:

• B2B examples: Adyen, Trustpilot
• B2C examples: Flix, Revolut, Wise

Anchor: Typical Journey

• Raise seed funding, and build product from Europe, establishing PMF
• Focus on domestic customers. If you operate cross-border, localize in English
• Raise series A led by European investor
• Focus on European expansion for now, rather than on US and expand into an additional European market
• Raise series B led by European investor with strong US network
• Expand into further European markets
• Research the US market, with frequent visits, and preparing a launch plan
• Raise large series C, led by transatlantic investor
• Send a landing team to launch the US, and support them on product as you’ll need early US localization to succeed
• Retain your leadership team in Europe. It is likely to include one or two executives relocating from the US
• Raise series D, led by transatlantic or US investor
• Hire US President as traction becomes clear
• Retain all other leadership in Europe, and founders remain in Europe
• Raise series E
• Listing in Europe (maybe in US)

Starting small with a long-term vision

Adyen was founded in Amsterdam in 2006, by a team with deep experience in the payments sector. They built an end-to-end payment platform, optimized for a wide range of international payment methods. The company went into hypergrowth early on, resonating particularly with e-commerce clients.

Adyen opened a small office in Boston in 2008, hiring someone from their network to help with the setup. Although this was very early from a commercial point of view, it was necessary in order to acquire US regulatory licenses.

West Coast expansion

Following their Index-led series A in 2011, Adyen recognized they needed to be closer to key US tech players on the West Coast. A small San Francisco office opened at the end of 2012, staffed by local salespeople with payments experience and supported by the Amsterdam team. Uber became their first major tech account, choosing Adyen to process all non-US payments.

The search for senior US leadership led to hiring Kamran Zaki in 2014, previously the global payments lead at Netflix and PayPal. Roelant (employee #15 and CCO) moved to San Francisco for Kamran's first year, followed by Sam Halse (COO) taking his place in 2015. All executives, including Pieter, made regular US visits.

Path to IPO

Although Adyen had originally planned a New York listing, they found that institutional investors (even from the US) were open to an Amsterdam one. They could see other advantages to listing in Europe—a scarcity of opportunities to invest in tech stocks, and inclusion in the main index, which would not have been the case in New York. It also positioned them next door to their banking regulator. All this shifted their decision towards listing in Amsterdam in 2018, and they haven’t looked back. With a market capitalization in excess of $50 billion, Adyen has set a new bar for the ambitions of European B2B tech companies.

Most leadership in Europe with some key US-based leaders

Most of the leadership team sits in Amsterdam. In the early days, Kamran was the exception, in San Francisco, who in 2020 stepped up from US President to become COO. As the company has scaled, they have hired and relocated experienced leaders into Amsterdam, from the US and elsewhere. As an international hub where almost everybody speaks English, they haven’t felt disadvantaged in attracting the right caliber of people.

In 2023, Davi Strazza, who had eight years of experience at Adyen leading sales in the US and as President LaTam, stepped up to be President, North America. Today, Tom Adams, the CTO, sits between San Francisco and Amsterdam.

Not a “Dutch” company

Adyen prides itself on being a global company, and they never talk about Amsterdam as an HQ. They encourage all employees to travel and move between offices, with an extremely empowering travel policy. Travel and Expense (T&E) is their second-biggest cost item, after salaries.

In recent years, the company is seeing the benefits of this positioning. The media are discovering them as a global company, and they’re being invited to industry events across the US, as well as winning retail deals in the Midwest.

Culture as a competitive advantage

The Adyen culture is a key driver in enabling US growth. They have codified a set of eight principles, known as the Adyen formula:

• We build to benefit all customers (not just one)
• We make good decisions and consider the long-term benefits for our customers, Adyen, and the world at large
• We launch fast and iterate
• Winning is more important than ego; we work as a team—across cultures and timezones
• We don’t hide behind email; instead, we pick up the phone
• We talk straight without being rude
• We seek out different perspectives to sharpen our ideas
• We create our own path to grow toward our full potential

The principle of creating their own path means Adyen tends to avoid replicating playbooks from others. Instead, they think from first principles on topics including:

• building tech in-house versus acquiring it via mergers and acquisitions (M&A)
• customer-led vs. product-led growth
• obtained own licenses vs. using banking partners
• focus on long-term (decades) vs. quarterly optimization

Roles and responsibilities are more fluid than is typical. Working across timezones can create tension and misunderstandings, so Adyen continuously communicates why picking up the phone is so important in avoiding miscommunications. The team has an “office first” approach, believing it’s important for individuals to collaborate in person, where possible, and to be close to customers.

A global P&L to help win globally

Davi credits having a single P&L globally for allowing leaders to operate as a unified company, from how they position themselves on the marketing side to how they talk to customers.

When building the product roadmap, the Adyen team speaks to its largest customers and understands what they need, as opposed to trying to guess the next trend in payments. Product and engineering are a collective responsibility, and decisions and prioritization are made by looking at customer needs across the whole organization.

Hiring in the US

Creating a team that involves a mix of long-term Adyen folk along with new local hires has been crucial for embedding Adyen culture into the US office while adapting to the local market. Strazza spends 10 percent of his week on interviewing, focusing on candidates' motivation and long-term commitment to Adyen.

Adyen strives to create an environment that excites excellent people, based on principles of speed and autonomy that are motivating for top talent. They are not given a prescribed path to success or a list of things they must do. They can push the boundaries in terms of how far they can go. This approach extends to leadership, who are encouraged to spend the majority of their time with top performers rather than trying to improve average or underperformance.

Continued US growth and ambition

Adyen continues to double down on their momentum in North America. In their H1 2024 financial statement, they outline the opportunity:

Adyen’s top tips for winning in the US

• Start early if you have regulatory barriers to overcome.
• Locate yourself close to your key customers.
• Hire local leadership, and make sure they are aligned with your long-term vision.
• Don’t assume that a US listing is the only, or even the best, way to go.

PENDULUM

For companies whose US market size falls somewhere between 30–50 percent of TAM, success often requires maintaining a delicate balance between European and US operations. Like a pendulum swinging between two points, these companies must embrace distributed leadership, ambiguous prioritization, and organizational complexity and duplication. It is still possible to achieve exceptional growth in this scenario. But it requires more discipline in strategic decision making, and in leadership communication. For those reasons, the Pendulum model is perhaps the most demanding of the expansion archetypes.

Pendulums are usually companies that have delayed their launch into the US market. This may reflect an attractive opportunity to consolidate a leadership position across Europe (and potentially other geographies too). Alternatively, US market entry may require a level of funding that isn’t available early in the journey (particularly in B2C), or complex product localization that cannot be tackled earlier. However, delayed US launch can also be the result of poor strategic decision making, or poor execution.

By the time that attention turns to the US, the organization is more mature, with an established leadership structure in Europe. Competitors in the US may have also moved ahead, limiting the land grab opportunity.

As traction builds in the US (often following the Anchor archetype in the early days), and the growth potential is proven, the company needs to divide its attention: retaining focus on its existing and dominant European markets, but needing to prioritize the US opportunity to stand any chance of winning there. Over time, the organization and leadership spread out. Founders may split their time (i.e., their lives) between the US and Europe, and functional heads will be hired in either geography. It’s essential to be prepared for extensive travel, and early morning and late-night calls.

Several factors might push a company that would otherwise be a Magnet into a Pendulum model:

• Founders who, for personal or professional reasons, choose not to relocate to the US
• Products requiring intensive localization for different markets
• Regulatory barriers that necessitate strong local leadership in multiple regions
• Industries where Europe provides strategic advantages for certain functions

In these cases, the typical structure involves a US President and some functional executives based in the US, with the founder/CEO navigating between continents. The technical core often remains in Europe while commercial teams span both markets.

• B2B examples: DataSnipper, Klarna, Miro
• B2C examples: Spotify, Oura

Pendulum: Typical Journey

• Raise seed funding, and build product from Europe, establishing PMF
• Focus on European customers, but establish English as primary language, for product and internally
• Raise series A from a European investor with strong US network
• Focus on European expansion, launching into two additional European markets
• But research US market, with frequent visits and preparing a launch plan
• Raise large series B led by transatlantic investor
• Send a landing team to launch the US, supporting them on product as you’ll need early US localization to succeed
• Strengthen product leadership to free up time for the CEO. Likewise for European commercial leadership
• Founder spends extensive time in the US to oversee the ramp-up
• Raise series C led by US investor
• Founder potentially relocates to the US as traction proven, or splits their time
• Hire leadership, and build functions, based on where you find the best talent (US or Europe)
• Raise series D
• US probably single largest market by now
• If the right CTO/CPO candidates can no longer be found in Europe, relocate execs from US, as it's hard to find candidates in Europe with experience at this scale
• Leadership team now distributed across Europe and US
• Raise series E
• Consider a US engineering center
• List where it makes most sense for your business—US or Europe

Early ambitions thwarted for US launch

Right at the start, Daniel traveled to the US to negotiate with the labels, but he couldn’t afford the financial guarantees they demanded for a global licensing deal. However, the music labels were facing the threat of P2P file-sharing, and were willing to test out a new strategy for survival. The tech-savvy consumer markets of Sweden and the Nordics were ideal. But even to cover this limited market, Spotify had to provide guarantees that were more than they could afford.

Next, Spotify was able to extend into the UK, France and Spain. It was only four years later that they tackled the US.

London calling

London was chosen as the commercial hub—for relationships with record labels (second HQ after New York), advertising agencies, and brands, as well as having Europe’s deepest pool of commercial and marketing talent. Stockholm remained the R&D hub.

Going to the US

Spotify made its first US hire in 2010. At this stage, they had proven the streaming model, and labels could see the value of their proposition. In 2011, they were able to raise $100 million, led by Goldman Sachs, making them one of only 10 tech unicorns at the time. This was the capital they needed to get the major labels onboard, and launch effectively in the US. Spotify needed to uplevel the team with local US hires, and selected New York for its hub—for similar reasons to London previously. In 2012, they launched with a novel distribution mechanic—a Facebook partnership.

Building the US team

Spotify had been investing in influencers, getting to know talent, and hiring people as consultants for the previous few years, so they were confident about building the team. Daniel spent a lot of time in the US, and made the first five hires personally. Two big hires were the Chief Content Officer and the US MD. Daniel was introduced to a lawyer from EMI, who he managed to recruit.

Daniel recognized that to attract top talent, the US operation needed to feel authentic.

When the US office was made up of 12 people, a seven-person landing team moved over from Sweden and the UK. These were top commercial performers, who wanted to spread their wings. Two came over as Head of Sales and Head of Marketing, to run the functions for 6–12 months, with the goal to hire successors thereafter.

Understanding the different dynamics across the US was a huge breakthrough. Originally, the team assumed no one in the US would be sharing mobile devices. However, after a fortunate accident, when they enabled multiple accounts on mobile, this ended up becoming a huge growth driver for them, across the Midwest in particular.

Founder travel and distributed leadership

Daniel travels extensively, ensuring that no locations feel like satellite offices.

The organization relies on decentralized decision making–hiring the best people, and giving them autonomy and accountability, to make the right judgment calls.

This strategy has paid off, as Spotify has been successfully navigating changing trends, from desktop to mobile, as well as the world’s most formidable line-up of competitors, and has expanded to new verticals including podcasts, audiobooks and video.

TELESCOPE

The Telescope archetype represents a unique approach where companies can capture significant US market share while maintaining their primary operations in Europe. Like a telescope that allows observation from a distance, these companies focus on the US market through a lens located back in Europe, enabled by self-serve growth models and digital distribution channels.

Without the need to build out a complex sales or operations organization on-the-ground, the bulk of your leadership and headcount can remain in Europe. The US—and if applicable, Asia—only requires a smaller team, focused on customer support, plus potentially business development.

This is the main archetype for B2C startups when distribution is through app stores or digital marketing channels. However, B2B companies following this model often face an interesting evolution. While they might start with a self-serve GTM model targeting small businesses or individual users within enterprises, success and ambition typically leads them upmarket. As they pursue larger deals with bigger customers, they often need to build more sophisticated sales operations. At Index, we’ve seen this pattern play out firsthand at companies including Zendesk, Dropbox, and Slack. This can result in the Telescope archetype morphing into either a Pendulum or Magnet model.

As with Magnets, we’re observing that Telescopes are frequently supplementing their technical hubs in Europe with some specialist early technical hires out of the US. This is particularly common for companies working in AI, where certain expertise is more concentrated in the US, particularly in the Bay Area.

• B2C examples: Dream Games, King, Supercell

Telescope: Typical Journey

• Raise seed funding, and build product from Europe, establishing PMF
• Acquire customers globally, but localize in particular for US users
• Raise series A from transatlantic or European investor
• Focus on growth metrics across the whole funnel, optimizing in particular for US users
• Make frequent visits to the US to cultivate relationships with strategic distribution partners
• Establish small business development team (likely in the Bay Area) as you’ll probably have major channel or product partners in the US
• Raise series B led by transatlantic investor
• Hire business development or community (e.g., DevRel) lead in US
• Build US-timezone support team in secondary hub, or remote
• Explore ways of moving up the value chain with higher Annual Contract Values (ACVs) and larger organizations, using inside sales (B2B only)
• Raise series C led by US investor
• Scale up inside sales in US secondary hub (B2B only)
• Leadership team mostly in Europe, but likely to include several executives relocating from US (e.g., VP Growth or VP Product)
• Raise series D
• Set up an enterprise sales function, if you continue to move up the value chain (B2B only). If this happens, you’re likely to morph into the Magnet or Pendulum archetype (depending on your US revenue percentage)
• If the right CTO/CPO candidates can no longer be found in Europe, relocate execs from US, as it’s hard to find candidates in Europe with experience at this scale
• Raise series E
• Listing (probably in the US)

Building out of Europe

King was founded in 2003, with product and tech in Sweden, and commercial and marketing based in London. King’s early years were as an online casual gaming portal. They started marketing web based games through distribution partnerships. These would see games embedded with a co-brand in the online properties of their partners. The first partners were in Germany, and in 2005 they signed an exclusive deal for Europe and the US with Yahoo, the largest portal at the time. To manage these distribution partnerships, they first opened an office in Germany, and then in the US. This was in Los Angeles, initially led by a British expat who already knew the King team. By 2006, Yahoo US was their largest distribution partner, and King became their largest partner in games.

In 2009 the business was disrupted by the exponential growth of Facebook; Yahoo games lost 40 percent of their users in one year. They had to go all-in on cracking Facebook. They put half the development team on reinventing how to bring games to market on the Facebook platform. The other half maintained the existing business and revenues to sustain the company. Reinvention also meant bringing in highly-experienced marketing talent in London in 2010 and in 2011, and closing down the marketing-focused office in Germany.

After two and a half years of experimentation they finally landed their first successful game on Facebook in April 2011, Bubble Saga. With a second Facebook game, Bubble Witch Saga, they learned more about how to monetize and market on Facebook. The game climbed up the rankings to become the largest Facebook game in terms of players within a year. In 2012, they launched Candy Crush Saga, first on Facebook web, and later in the year on mobile. As Candy Crush Saga started growing exponentially, they fueled the growth by massively ramping the marketing, up to $100m investment per quarter. Candy Crush Saga became the world’s top grossing mobile game. From the outset, the US accounted for a majority of revenues and they focused a large part of the marketing budget on the US, including working with US ad agencies for TV commercials.

Stephane was introduced to Riccardo in 2010 by investors, Apax, as a seasoned operator who they knew and respected. He joined just ahead of the release of Bubble Saga.

King tried to keep efficiency high by centralizing engineering in Sweden. But as they outgrew the Stockholm talent pool, they opened engineering centres in London and Barcelona in 2013-14. They opened additional gaming studios in Malmo (2011), plus London, Barcelona, and Bucharest (2013-14), and acquired studios in Seattle and Singapore.

US strategy

King’s primary goal for US expansion in 2013 onwards was to become the most influential content partner to their key distribution platforms— Apple, Google, and Facebook. Rather than Los Angeles, they now needed a small but senior team in the Bay Area, who had close relationships with the tech platforms. In 2014, King was able to hire two platform partnership leads, including the highly respected former Head of Platform relations from Zynga, who built out the remainder of the partnership team.

Starting in 2013, the CEO and COO would travel to the US for quarterly platform meetings. It took a while to establish this rhythm, but it enabled them to forge close relationships. The discussions allowed a valuable sharing of thinking about platform product roadmaps, based on a raft of data collated by King’s partnership team.

The rest of the business team remained mostly in London, and this worked well. The greater challenge was scaling and managing the technology and studio teams across multiple locations. The US team increased, including some studio and technical staff, but in total it still remains below 10 percent of global headcount.

The London advantage

King found it very effective to build out of London, particularly due to the availability of world class talent in performance marketing, media and advertising. Collaboration between the marketing and product teams was essential when it came to the mechanics of player reactivation and viral growth. This reinforced the decision to keep marketing centralized in Europe, rather than hiring locally in the US

Most of King’s leadership team was hired from within Europe. The European gaming sector has a strong talent pool, which made this possible. However, as they prepared for an IPO in New York, they found an experienced CFO in the US, who relocated to London.

TRANSPLANT

The fact more companies are being born transatlantic means we’re seeing a concomitant rise in the emergence of Transplants. The founders might have studied in the US or participated in a US-based accelerator program, and effectively they are creating a US company from the outset (though nowadays they may maintain stronger European links via early R&D hires in their European network).

Transplants are more common in B2B, with notable examples including Datadog and Stripe. In B2C, pure Transplants are rarer, as these products need a really intimate and immediate understanding of the cultural nuances affecting the potential audience. It’s harder for a “foreigner” to do this in the US, so the trajectory tends to involve starting in Europe, seeing what works, and then adapting it to the US cultural context, although Duolingo is a notable exception. For founders targeting sectors where the US rep- resents over 50 percent of TAM, transplanting early can offer significant advantages. It allows companies to:

• build US market understanding from day one
• access US investors more effectively
• hire GTM talent with experience scaling category leaders
• signal long-term commitment to US success

The renewed interest in the transplant model reflects several trends—among them: the strong US economy, European founders’ participation in US accelerator programs, the rise of AI refocusing attention on the US, and remote work patterns that allow European founders leverage their talent networks from across the Atlantic.

HOW IMPORTANT IS THE US MARKET?

To choose the right expansion archetype, you must first assess what percentage of your TAM exists in the US.

Primary markets—those essential for achieving category leadership—typically include North America, Europe, Japan, Australia, South Korea, and Singapore. These regions offer the scale, sophistication, and economic conditions needed to build market-leading companies.

Secondary markets like the Middle East, Latin America, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Africa often present smaller, more fragmented opportunities. While these markets may be relevant for your product, expansion should generally wait until you’ve established a strong presence in primary markets, usually after listing. Moving too early into secondary markets risks compromising success in core regions.

Some markets remain largely inaccessible to Western startups. China and Russia, in particular, present significant barriers through geopolitical risk, plus entrenched domestic competitors, complex regulations, and requirements for local joint ventures.

There can of course be exceptions to these general rules. For example, Wise (cross-border B2C payments) is highly relevant to immigrant communities from emerging markets. Even in B2B, core markets vary. DeepL, whose customers range from small businesses to multinational enterprises, expanded to Asia before attempting to enter the US, and iZettle scored major successes in Brazil and Mexico. You therefore need to adjust which countries are core versus secondary, according to the dynamics of your sector.

For most European B2B companies, the US represents more than 50 percent of their TAM, and they will therefore continue to fall into our Magnet or Transplant archetypes, particularly in enterprise SaaS.

Nordic origins

Trustpilot began in Denmark in 2007, when Peter Holten Mühlmann saw the need for an independent platform to help consumers make informed purchasing decisions in what he called the “Wild West” of e-commerce at the time. The initial business model was ad-based, but Peter quickly discovered merchants were willing to pay to showcase their positive reviews, leading to the company’s subscription model.

The early days involved cold-calling Danish businesses—a grueling but necessary task that helped establish PMF. With seed funding of $130,000 from the family, the company began building its initial team, recruiting sales talent from unlikely places, including the local football club.

International expansion

Rather than immediately targeting the US, Trustpilot first expanded into the UK. This decision was driven by several factors: English-language capabilities, the ability to recruit English-speaking salespeople in Denmark, and the UK’s position as a hub for cross-border European e-commerce. Success in the UK created a natural springboard into other European markets, as UK customers with operations in France, Germany, and the Netherlands began requesting Trustpilot’s services in those countries.

US entry

Trustpilot waited until 2012–2013, roughly 5–6 years after founding, before seriously targeting the US market. The company had achieved strong traction in Europe with 50–100 employees and had secured investment from Index Ventures. Their approach was methodical:

• Initial testing: They had UK sales teams work evening shifts to test-sell into the US market remotely for 3–4 months.
• Target selection: Used sophisticated data analysis to identify ideal prospects—not too big (established brands didn’t need trust signals) or too small (weren’t ready for the product).
• Leverage European presence: Used existing European customer reviews of US businesses as proof points.
• Early validation: Achieved strong initial results that justified establishing a physical presence in the US.

Building the US operation

Senior leadership did not immediately relocate to the US. Instead, Trustpilot chose to move two successful UK salespeople to the US and hired a local leader with startup experience. Peter emphasizes the importance of hiring a “builder” rather than a “scaler” for this role— someone who has experience creating something from scratch, rather than just managing large teams.

The company faced several challenges unique to the US market:

• The sheer size and noise level of the market made it harder to get attention.
• Traditional PR strategies that worked in Europe were less effective.
• Sales messages needed to be much sharper and more immediately compelling.
• Network effects took longer to develop due to market size.

Leadership structure

Trustpilot has experimented with different leadership models for the US operation over time. While they initially had a dedicated US President, they’ve evolved to a more integrated global structure with functional leaders based in various locations. The company maintained a strong US presence through senior executives, including the CFO in New York, while the founder/CEO stayed in Copenhagen.

Peter reflects that this was driven by practical considerations—with 95 percent of revenue and most employees in Europe during the early US expansion phase, relocating would have been problematic. However, he advises other founders to consider relocating if possible, noting the importance of having senior management presence in America for an extended period.

Culture and integration

Trustpilot has worked to create a unified global culture while respecting regional differences. Key lessons include:

• the importance of empowering local teams while maintaining global strategic alignment;
• understanding that incentives and job security matter differently in the US versus Europe;
• investing heavily in team development and communication;
• using external coaches to help the leadership team work effectively across geographies;
• guaranteeing bonuses for US employees to provide a similar sense of security European employees get from social safety nets.

THE BENEFITS OF US CUSTOMERS

Four key factors make the US market particularly attractive for enterprise technology:

• Corporate spending. US corporate spending power far exceeds Europe’s. According to Statista, the enterprise software market in the US is projected to reach $195 billion by 2029, more than double Europe’s forecast of $90 billion. This spending gap creates an outsized opportunity for B2B startups.⁴
• Sales cycles. US companies move faster. Their sales cycles are significantly shorter than in Europe, enabling quicker market validation and growth.

• Customer profile. In the US, a company with a large market cap is likely to be a tech company. Tech companies are used to buying tech—it is easy to sell to them compared to more traditional businesses.
• Corporate conservatism. Perhaps most importantly, US corporations tend to embrace innovation more readily. While European companies often view new technology primarily as a cost and prefer established vendors, US enterprises see it as a competitive advantage. As a rule, early adopters are concentrated in the US.

This cultural difference in technology adoption makes the US market even more vital than raw TAM numbers suggest, particularly for enterprise B2B startups. These dynamics are less pronounced for startups focused on small and midsize businesses (SMBs), which may find success following the Pendulum rather than the Magnet archetype, as smaller businesses show more consistent buying behavior across regions.

⁴ Statista, Enterprise Software—United States.

10 STEPS TO QUALIFY THE US FOR EXPANSION

If there’s still uncertainty around the right moment for US expansion, this is evidence of a knowledge gap. The solution is to educate yourself through a more rigorous qualification process.

This needs to be conducted without distracting you from more immediate priorities. The end goal is a “go/no-go” decision on whether to expand into the US. Even if you decide against US expansion, the research will have given you a transatlantic launch roadmap you can pick up later should you choose to, or once you have a stronger product offer, deeper team expertise, and the necessary financial firepower.

Here’s a systematic approach to making the go/no-go decision:

1 Create a research brief

Create a 3–4-month research timetable which will end with a go/no-go decision. It should include:

• value chain comparison
• customer research
• competitor research and positioning
• product localization
• location recommendation
• regulation
• operations (legal, financial, HR, IP, subsidiary, etc.)
• pre- and post-launch timetable
• year one budget, and staffing plan

2 Find a researcher

Identify a freelancer or team member to conduct GTM research. They should bring a blend of analytical and GTM experience, and have US insight. They should be US native (or, even better, a European expat). Embed them in European headquarters for a month to understand your product and team before they begin US research. They need to get to know the product, GTM approach, and team. They can also spend this time conducting initial desk-research.

3 Assess product readiness

Designate a team member to be responsible for the US product. You will need to be very clear about whether the product is US-ready, and what localization will be required. Can you win competitive pitches? Can you deliver an equivalent Net Promoter Score (NPS) to US versus European customers? Can you retain customers, and be ready to land and expand?

4 Create a squad and work in sprints

Create a “US squad” with weekly or biweekly targets and updates. The CEO or another exec can champion the project but should not oversee day-to-day research. The squad should include the lead researcher, plus a representative from each of product, engineering, sales, and marketing.

5 Conduct US research in-market

Have your researcher spend time in the US to gather more insight. They should plan to immerse themselves there for a few months (more effective), or else plan a sequence of week-long trips. The founder or other squad members may join for some of the time. Spending this time with potential customers and partners will allow you to tailor your GTM for the US audience.

Leverage your US network for introductions, particularly for connections to target customers. Ask your co-founders, wider team, advisors, investors, suppliers, and existing customers.

6 Draw up a budget

You need to allocate sufficient cash to finance your US expansion. This needs to satisfy not only your base case, but also sequenced “quadruple-down” (i.e., more aggressive than double-down) milestones in case of early success. In other words, be prepared to land grab in the US, if a window of opportunity opens up.

In enterprise SaaS, where customers often pay upfront for a full year, capital outlay could be lower. But you may choose to follow a beta strategy with early US customers, while building confidence that your product is ready to roll out. With monthly-billed SaaS, it will take much longer to get to positive cash flow. So your cash outlay will tend to be highest in scenarios where you achieve the most success.

7 Go/no-go decision

Once you are ready to make this call, convene the CEO, leadership team and the board. While the CEO’s commitment is the most important, all three must be aligned and supportive.

Define metrics for success. Develop a timeline, with sequenced milestones for decisions to quadruple-down versus withdraw from the US. Milestones should include customer number and revenue goals, at three, six, and 12 months, with a commitment to stick to these. Share them with the board, to ensure alignment, and to keep you honest.

8 Prepare your landing team

Each person you select for your landing team needs to combine having an essential core skill set, plus being a DNA-carrier for your culture. We typically see 2–4 individuals, senior and junior, with a commercial orientation, that might move over a six-month timeframe. If you are pursuing a Magnet archetype, it’s essential that the landing team is led by a founder. For the Pendulum, it’s desirable. For the Anchor, it’s less important. If lots of localization is required, it might be good to have a developer join the squad. Clarify with each member of your team whether this will be a “tour of duty” versus a potential permanent move.

Get the US visa application process in motion swiftly. Plan for six months from the process of application to verdict. The less experienced or specialized your landing team members, the harder it may be to get visas, so get your lawyers involved early on, and have contingency plans in case of delays or rejections (see the section on visas in Chapter 8 for more detail).

9 Create your launch plan

Based on your product, competitive positioning and GTM, you will need to decide on whether to have a big or small launch. If you need minimal localization, you could go for a soft launch, learning and optimizing in iterations. If you need a lot of localization, it could be worth spending dedicated time beta testing, leading up to a big launch. Assess the importance of launch partners you can reference, and prioritize efforts to acquire them accordingly.

While waiting for visas, conduct frequent US visits to prepare for launch. You can use these trips to support beta customers, and for product testing, identifying office space, and developing marketing collateral.

10 Plan for success

Once you have made a clear commitment to go, make sure you are appropriately resourcing the plan, both financially and with the right people. You are not going to succeed by dipping a toe in the market. If there is massive growth, would you, as CEO, be willing and able to move? And if not you, what is the alternative US leadership plan? This is the reverse of disaster planning!

Sizing up the transatlantic opportunity

Flix began in Germany, when co-founders Jochen, André, and Daniel in Munich saw how deregulation of the transport sector created an opportunity to reimagine intercity bus travel. Instead of owning a fleet, they decided to try a revenue-sharing business model, partnering with local companies who would run the services on their behalf.

Flix started by connecting Germany to cities in nearby countries, including Vienna, Paris, Amsterdam, and Prague. However, the real challenge wasn’t international connectivity so much as cracking different domestic markets.

During the second year, they launched their first office in Italy, with a small team in their Munich HQ that was eventually replanted into Milan. This became the model they used for most of the new markets they entered. Their early expansion strategy involved finding two to three entrepreneurially-minded people in the local ecosystem to establish the office and operate the fleet with significant autonomy and support from the headquarters. The company created detailed playbooks for every function, from hiring to marketing and partnerships, offering a launch framework but leaving room for adaptation. This “copy-paste” approach was repeated across Europe.

Building a global expansion machine

At the heart of Flix’s international growth is a dedicated expansion team at headquarters that conducts preliminary research on potential markets and serves as the company’s pathfinding unit. This team systematically evaluates potential markets through a comprehensive scorecard model, considering everything from market size and infrastructure to competitive dynamics, partner availability, cost structure, and regulatory complexity.

Based on the analysis, Flix identifies 2–3 priority countries to add to the pipeline for expansion. For each of these markets, the company conducts market research for about 4–6 months, which involves a lead person on the ground studying the local regulations, assessing the industry dynamics, identifying potential partners, and evaluating the unit economics.

Their approach to staffing new markets follows two main paths:

• Relocating someone from headquarters, who then builds out the wider team.
• Hiring someone locally but ensuring they spend significant time absorbing company culture at headquarters.

Preparing for launch in the US

By 2018, Flix had proven its model across Europe. Consumer behavior with intercity transport was reasonably similar across the Western world: people would buy tickets digitally, the marketing channels were the same, and the metrics were comparable. That made the US the logical next step for Flix. The founders also felt some urgency about it, as the US would likely be the seedbed for any global competitor.

The board, however, was opposed to US expansion, advocating for Flix to focus on white-space opportunities in continental Europe. When the former GM of France, Pierre Gourdain, moved to the US for personal reasons, the founders saw an opportunity. They kept him on the payroll and had him do initial market research in the US. He spent the year conducting exploratory business development, building industry relationships, and preparing for the launch. This quiet preparation period allowed them to gather data and build a compelling case, before formally announcing their US plans.

Regional strategy

Flix viewed the US as a collection of distinct regions, each requiring individual attention. They chose to launch on the West Coast, specifically in Los Angeles, for several reasons:

• The West Coast had fewer incumbents— primarily Greyhound and Megabus—which allowed Flixbus to observe their reactions more clearly without interference from smaller competitors.
• The population seemed open to new mobility options, given the success of services like Uber and Lyft.
• Flix’s brand was tailored to a younger, well-educated and travel-enthusiastic audience, which aligned well with the West Coast demographic.
• Compared to the Bay Area, talent was more easily available and significantly cheaper in Los Angeles.
• Los Angeles was also a massive market on its own and a gateway to other West Coast destinations.

Acquisitions have played an important role in the growth of Flix’s transatlantic business. The company sometimes felt like the cultural differences between the US and Europe worked in their favor in mergers: for example, they found it easier to integrate Greyhound, a major US company they bought in 2021, into Flixbus, than they did a German acquisition. US employees tended to be more pragmatic, and the labor market was more flexible.

This mindset was particularly evident during COVID-19: while European operations could rely on government support schemes, the US required more dramatic restructuring.

Core vs. periphery

As Flix has grown, the company has evolved toward greater centralization of some functions while maintaining local autonomy in others. Core activities like online marketing, technology development, pricing, and network planning are managed centrally, leveraging automation and standardization where possible. Meanwhile, functions that require local knowledge and relationships—such as business development, operational quality control, partner management and (where the market is big enough) PR—are within the wheelhouse of the local territory office.

This balance between centralization and local autonomy can create tension. To manage that dynamic, Flix has developed formal mechanisms for communication and dispute resolution between HQ and satellite operations. These structures help ensure local teams maintain their entrepreneurial spirit while operating within the broader organizational framework.

Keep your eye on the ball

One of Flix’s key lessons has been the critical importance of sustained C-suite attention during expansion phases. The leadership learned this the hard way, burning through cash in the process. The Flix approach now is for a senior executive to take on responsibility for any new country launching, and create a “coaching” relationship with the regional person on the ground through regular one-on-one check-ins. Once the country is up and running, at that point it can go into a more regular cycle of reporting and updates.

The Flix playbook

• Ideally, hire a strong candidate locally who shares the values of the company, and help them navigate the launch with sufficient support from the HQ.
• Be patient enough to explore the market and give yourself time to understand what the market needs.
• Implement a bold but manageable initial launch. For Flix, this means that the size of a fleet is still manageable for the local team.
• Optimize quickly and iterate on the fly.
• Once you make it work on a smaller scale, ensure that unit economics work.
• Then scale it fast.

TIMING BY ARCHETYPE

The optimal timing for US expansion, including first boots on the ground, varies significantly based on your archetype.

Magnet: expand at series A or earlier

The case for going to the US early is compelling. As companies are increasingly intentional about building globally from day one and solidifying their transatlantic presence sooner rather than later, many Magnets expand to the US after their seed/series A round, or choose to launch with an initial presence in the US. A pan-European rollout can be a distraction, but an expansion through London can be helpful. If you’re not based in a major European hub, or if you sell to banks or brands, being in London can help you prove out your enterprise GTM model closer to home.

Telescope: expand at series B

Telescope companies face a different challenge. While they should also focus on US users and customers early, the actual expansion typically happens around series B. The key is ensuring US share of users is at least proportional to US share of your TAM from the start. If you operate a freemium model, you should concentrate on US monetization, which ought to be higher than elsewhere. It’s important that you spend a lot of time in the US to learn about user needs and to build partnerships, but you probably won’t need a permanent team on the ground until post series B.

Anchor and Pendulum: series C

As an Anchor or a Pendulum, you should be more cautious. You don’t want to risk losing leadership in your domestic market. You may need to decide between launching in the US, or rolling out to other major European markets. Even after raising a series B, which gives you more leeway, you may still need to choose between pushing for pan-European dominance, or winning a foothold in the US.

At the same time, you should be thoughtful in building a product and organization that is primed for an eventual US-launch. For example, ensure that your GTM team includes individuals with significant prior US experience, especially when it comes to senior hires. You will need to monitor competitor activity in the US closely. Validate the US opportunity carefully and prepare a launch plan.

If your user base is in a smaller and non-English speaking hub, it can make sense to build more international coverage before going to the US within Europe—for example by winning a second European market. This allows you to get proof of the business and raise further financing ahead of the US expansion.

UK-specific advice

If you’re a UK-based founder, the argument for going directly, and earlier, to the US is more compelling than elsewhere. Launching in continental Europe will usually require more translation and localization.

DELAYING FACTORS

Beyond your archetype, three critical factors will shape your readiness for US expansion: product localization needs, competitive dynamics, and organizational capacity. Understanding these can help determine not just when to expand, but also whether you need to adjust your archetype—perhaps shifting from Magnet to Pendulum, or from Pendulum to Anchor.

Each of these factors requires honest assessment. While it might be tempting to rush US expansion, taking the time to evaluate your readiness across all three dimensions will help you time your entry for maximum impact.

PMF and localization

Your first consideration should be how much you’ll need to adapt your product for US users. Some products require minimal localization beyond translating materials—mobile games and productivity tools are classic examples. If you’re already seeing organic US users or getting inbound US leads, that’s a strong signal of PMF. Our research shows this is common: 60 percent of European founders had the US among their top three markets before formal expansion.

However, many products need deeper localization that goes well beyond translation. This is obvious if you have a physical or service component, but even pure software products often need significant adaptation. The challenge compounds if you’re in a regulated sector, where you’ll need licenses that can take 12–18 months to obtain at federal, state, or local levels—sometimes all three.

Even in unregulated sectors, US customer requirements often differ substantially from European ones. You may need new features, altered functionality, or a completely different GTM approach. This could be as obvious as a brand name which fails to resonate in the US, or something more subtle that reflects differences in the client’s decision-making process.

A European underdog

When Jarek Kutylowski founded DeepL in 2017, the machine translation landscape was dominated by tech giants. Google Translate, launched a decade earlier, had become synonymous with online translation. The idea that a startup from Germany could challenge these incumbents seemed improbable.

Yet DeepL decided to take a different approach. Instead of focusing predominantly on breadth—supporting hundreds of languages and use cases—DeepL zeroed in on quality, accuracy and security. The company combined cutting-edge AI technology with deep linguistic expertise to create translations that captured subtle nuances, variations in register, and industry-specific terminology that had eluded competitors.

While many translation tools cater mainly to casual, everyday users, DeepL identified a significant gap in the market for business and enterprise-grade solutions. This focus on precision and reliability quickly resonated among organizations around the world, leading to the company’s rapid growth—especially in markets with high translation needs, like Germany, Japan and South Korea. Today, DeepL serves over 100,000 companies worldwide, including 80 percent of companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime and nearly 50 percent of the Fortune 500.

Choosing the moment

After successfully proving its technology and business model in Europe and expanding into Asia, in 2023, DeepL shifted its focus more intently to the US market, recognizing the US as a pivotal opportunity for growth, given its extensive network of multinational businesses, reputation for technological innovation, and access to world-renowned tech talent and investors.

To drive its growth in the region, DeepL made its first hire—a sales leader sourced through the personal network of its Chief Revenue Officer—based in Texas. This strategic move laid the groundwork for DeepL to quickly build an impressive customer portfolio in the US, which soon included notable tech brands such as Coursera, TransPerfect, and Zendesk. In early 2024, in response to this quickly expanding customer portfolio, DeepL opened its first US office and commercial hub in Texas. By that time, the market had become DeepL’s third largest.

Just a few months later, recognizing the need for an even stronger regional presence, the company opened an office and technology hub in New York City. This East Coast expansion brought DeepL closer to its rapidly growing customer network and facilitated more effective engagement with the vibrant tech and product innovation occurring in the region. It also kept workable timezones with their European engineering core.

In 2024, DeepL also appointed a US-based CMO, and a CTO with a background in the San Francisco tech scene. These strategic hires aimed to deepen local expertise and industry awareness, further strengthening DeepL’s presence in the region and setting the stage for continued growth and innovation.

A tale of two playbooks

One of the first challenges DeepL encountered was adapting its GTM strategy. While DeepL had successfully relied on organic, bottom-up growth through SMEs, large enterprises, and individual users in its other markets—who use DeepL for translating various internal and external business communications, including emails, documents, and more—this approach proved less effective in the US. Instead, DeepL found that a more effective sales strategy involved top-down sales and marketing, as well as partnerships with enterprises looking to embed translation capabilities into their own products.

As part of this, the company also needed to adjust its messaging, GTM and product offering to get traction among US customers. This included strengthening and accelerating marketing and sales efforts around its Application Programming Interface (API) solution, a product that resonated strongly with US businesses, enabling the seamless integration of DeepL’s Language AI tools into their workflows.

In retrospect, Jarek emphasizes that early recognition of the differences between markets could lead to faster, more effective decision making and traction.

Accessing talent

Establishing DeepL’s two US offices has also been crucial as a way of attracting diverse talent to the company. While it maintains its engineering core in Europe, DeepL is focused on expanding its technical capabilities in New York. This strategic positioning allows it to compete more effectively with some of the larger US tech companies, while maintaining its European DNA.

Jarek’s top tips for winning in the US

• Don’t assume your existing playbook will work in the US and be prepared to run parallel strategies.
• Spend time ahead of launch getting to know your customers deeply, and don’t underestimate the differences in their behaviors.
• Consider splitting commercial and technical operations between different US cities based on talent pools.
• Bring in experienced local leadership, particularly in key roles like sales and technology, to support market penetration.
• The timing of your US expansion should align with company maturity.
• Even a small US presence can provide valuable diversity in talent and perspective.

DELAYING FACTORS (CONT’D)

Competitive landscape

Your competitive position creates both opportunities and constraints for timing. If you have a truly novel product with no direct competitors, you might want to move quickly to the US to capture a land grab opportunity. But if you’re facing established incumbents or well-funded new entrants, you’ll need to carefully consider your differentiation strategy and timing.

The decision becomes especially complex if you have competitors on both sides of the Atlantic. US expansion while fighting European competitors could risk your home market position. Conversely, if US competitors are already growing strongly, you’ll need to decide whether and how to challenge them.

Organizational and financial readiness

Your team’s capacity and financial resources are often the most concrete constraints. A year after series A, you might have 50 people, with one half focused on product development and a small GTM team. If you need significant product localization or face intense competition, this team size rarely supports successful US expansion. Instead, you might need to first:

• Build deeper bench strength in your team
• Optimize your GTM approach
• Prove your unit economics
• Raise series B or C funding specifically for US expansion

Remember: US expansion almost always takes longer and costs more than anticipated. Having the patience to build organizational readiness before expansion can be the difference between success and failure.

Founding and early days

In 2008, Alexander Rinke, Martin Klenk and Bastian Nominacher were students at the Technische Universität München (TUM), one of Europe’s leading universities based in Munich. In order to improve their frugal student lifestyles and add some work experience to their résumés, they joined Academy Consult München e.V., a student-based consultancy firm. In 2010, an interesting project brought them together: the Bavarian broadcast company, Bayerischer Rundfunk, wanted to improve the response times of its IT service team.

Rinke, Klenk and Nominacher soon realized that the traditional optimization methodologies—running interviews, tracking a few samples in the workflow, interpreting key performance indicators (KPIs)—were extremely inefficient and inaccurate, so they tried a new approach. In addition to using traditional optimization methodologies, they convinced the client to give them access to the existing IT system’s entire data logs regarding service issues so they could address the challenge with a unique approach.

Using an academic concept developed by Dutch professor Dr. Wil van der Aalst, recognized as the godfather of process mining, the trio created an algorithm that helped sieve through process data logs and make sense of them in order to provide a more precise view of Bayerischer Rundfunk’s troubleshooting process. With that visibility, it was possible for the team to identify previously undetected bottlenecks and triaging errors. These insights reduced its five-day average throughput time to just one.

The project leader at the Bavarian broadcast company was so impressed with the results that he introduced the trio to Siemens, who became their first major customer. This early success with a global industrial giant would later prove invaluable in establishing credibility with Fortune Global 500 customers.

First steps in the US

In 2012, the founders attended a German accelerator program in the Bay Area for two months. Despite the possibility of establishing US operations then, they decided against it for several reasons. The company was at a stage where it still sold an on-premise software solution. They needed people locally to help customers set up and operate it, so that wasn’t a feasible support model for a small team. And the nine-hour time difference between Munich and the West Coast would have created an operational nightmare. What’s more, they felt the value proposition of their product would resonate better with local German customers, who might be expected to place more emphasis on process efficiency than their US counterparts.

The founders made the strategic decision to focus on capturing the German market first, allowing time for product maturation before attempting US expansion.

Next steps: building the team

After raising their Series A round in 2016, Celonis was ready to tackle the US market, because they had several key factors in place:

• Experienced investors: Their Series A brought on investors including Accel and enterprise software veteran Alex Ott. These high-caliber investors had extensive US experience and networks, and provided valuable guidance and connections.
• Reference customers: By that time, Celonis’ customer list included Bayer, Siemens, ABB, RWE, Schaeffler, and Vodafone. Having such respected customers helped them land major early US deals, including 3M, a materials and goods conglomerate.
• Product maturity: Their software had evolved significantly and was ready for the US market.
• Strategic partnerships: Celonis had established a strong partnership with SAP that could be leveraged to enter the market.

Alex and Bastian split their responsibilities. Alex led the US expansion and worked together with Marc Kinast and Stephan Rossbauer responsible for business development and data science respectively. Co-founder and CTO Martin stayed in Munich with Bastian, where Celonis’ engineering core is still today. Stephan recalls the symbolic moment when US expansion truly began.

A key factor in Celonis’ US success has been its true co-CEO model, with responsibility split between Alex in the US and Bastian in Europe and AsiaPac.

Celonis’ approach to building its US team balanced transplants with local hiring. Alex, Marc and Stephan formed the initial kernel of the US operation, bringing company DNA and maintaining connections to Munich operations. They had some great customers, a great product, and some great people that knew how to handle and sell it. But they treated US expansion almost as its own independent unit.

Nailing GTM

One of Celonis’ key learnings was that the US is not a monolithic market: selling to financial services in the Northeast differs dramatically from selling to utilities in the South or tech companies on the West Coast. The company initially focused on the Northeast, but avoided certain industries like banking and other industries where sales cycles would be significantly longer.

Partnerships were a critical component of Celonis’ US strategy, allowing them to validate the market before making heavy investments. Over time Celonis built relationships with companies like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, McKinsey, and the “Big Four” professional services firms. This allowed Celonis to enter the US market at significantly lower cost than building a full direct sales organization with all the necessary marketing and demand-generation infrastructure at the beginning. Once they saw success through the partnership channel, they began investing more heavily in their own sales capabilities. The team won their first direct customers in their first year, proving enterprises were willing to buy solutions from them as an independent entity.

This pattern continued as Celonis scaled. For implementation capacity, they sometimes put partner staff on their payroll temporarily to rapidly build capabilities. More recent partnerships have focused on AI, with Celonis providing deep process intelligence while collaborating with companies that specialize in AI agent platforms.

Customer advocacy also proved critical in the early days. Celonis found that US customers buy based on what peers in their industry or region are buying. That meant that, for early customers, Celonis typically prioritized making sure their customers were happy instead of maximizing deal size, focusing on making them successful and willing to act as references.

Finally, the team also had to make adjustments to their sales pitch. Germany is an engineer-driven culture, so their pitch was always very technical, focused on explaining the way in which their product worked in practice. In the US, they had to adopt a more top-down approach to sales, starting with the overall value proposition of the product rather than its technical details.

Attracting talent

Competing for talent in the US presented a unique challenge for Celonis as a European company. The team found that their scale-up status created a compelling value proposition for certain candidates.

The company discovered that traditional recruiting methods needed to be adapted for the US market. Early on, they experimented with external headhunting agencies, but found that an excellent, passionate in-house recruiter was a huge unlock in the noisy US talent landscape.

For the first few years, New York was the heart of the US operation, with a few dispersed sales people across the country. Gradually, Celonis opened up to individual markets whenever they found a great local leader able to instil the right culture in the team. This approach of finding a “cultural anchor” in each new location proved more effective than simply hiring individuals scattered across different regions.

Until around 2020, Celonis’ US presence was primarily focused on GTM functions. But as the company scaled, they began building product and engineering teams in the US, particularly targeting experienced product and engineering leaders. These functions are somewhat less developed in Europe compared with the US, and the company needed leaders who had seen scale and built enterprise-grade products.

However, the company remains strategic about which roles to place in high-cost US locations.

Celonis is very intentional about maintaining its culture across locations. The company runs regular global onboarding weeks where new hires from around the world are brought to Munich to learn about all the company’s functions, meet colleagues, and experience the product firsthand. This approach helps ensure that even employees relatively removed from the product, such as HR staff, have hands-on understanding of what the company does.

Celonis’ top tips for winning in the US

• Treat US expansion like a startup: Even if your European business is established, approaching the US with a zero-to-one mindset is crucial.
• Differentiate your talent value proposition: Celonis attracted talent by positioning itself as a successful European company backed by notable investors, offering the chance to be part of a founding team in the US, with an impressive roster of customers.
• Focus geographically and by industry: Don’t spread yourself too thin; make sure you’re operationally ready for expansion and can capture the markets you’re targeting.
• Leverage partnerships strategically: Work closely with partners to build capacity and test new markets, but maintain control of your customer relationships.
• Balance cost and capability in team distribution: Be strategic about which functions need to be in high-cost US locations versus leveraging European talent advantages.

EUROPEAN VS. US INVESTORS

When we last published this book, access to US investors was low on the list of reasons for founders to expand to the US. Since then, it has moved from fourth to second place, becoming a prominent consideration driving US expansion.

Why might that be? The European VC landscape is growing and maturing, with the many new funds focused on both early- and late-stage investing, as well as a growing interest from top US firms. The fundamentals of European tech are strong and the quality of investors in the continent continues to increase. Between 2014 and 2019, VC investment in Europe increased from $13 billion to $44 billion, reaching its peak in 2021 and 2022 when VC investment in the region reached $113 billion and $93 billion respectively.⁵

However, in the current high interest-rate environment, it might be that the edge offered by top US VCs becomes a bigger selling point. They can offer deep pockets, expertise at scale, amazing networks and a positive signal to attract talent, customers and partners. Moreover, there’s still a mindset gap between Europe and the US in terms of the risks an average early-stage investor is willing to take and the bets they are ready to make. This is less true for Tier 1 VCs, but likely to influence the fundraising experience in a more typical case. In line with higher risk-appetite, rounds are often closing faster in the US, which makes a difference for early-stage founders.

The wider US VC landscape is also outpacing other regions. In 2024, US startups raised more investment than the rest of the world combined— the highest share of global VC (57 percent ) in a decade. The Bay Area raised more VC than the next 10 biggest hubs put together, most of which are in the US. London and Paris were the only European hubs that made it to the top 10 list.⁶

It remains a fact that very few European B2B companies have reached unicorn status without a top US VC involved.

⁵ Dealroom, Europe Guide.
⁶ Dealroom, Venture Wrapped: Global Tech Q4 2024.

WHEN TO RAISE FROM US INVESTORS?

As startups are expanding to the US earlier than before, insight from US investors and access to their networks is increasingly important as a way of securing talent and customers. Having a prominent US investor onboard sends a signal which can help with local hires, sales, and partnerships.

This is reflected in how much founders appreciate US investors: 52 percent consider it important or extremely important to have a US investor in order to win the US market, 41 percent consider it to be either useful or slightly useful, and only 6 percent see it as irrelevant.

While it’s no longer necessary to actually be in the US in order to access the top tier US investors—almost all are active internationally—being close to US investors can still be helpful. While many European founders successfully raise funding from US investors from Europe, some continue to highlight the importance of going to the US to fundraise. As of 2024, Entrepreneurs First is taking cohorts of their companies to the US for fundraising, encouraging their companies to raise their seed rounds and start the business there.

US investors usually expect a clear US angle to get interested. This means that US investor involvement only really makes sense once you are executing on US expansion, with the optimal timing for engagement varying by archetype. Magnets will look to pivot to the US early on, so they are more likely to engage successfully with US investors for their early stage rounds (pre-seed to series A). Other archetypes will usually expand to the US later. In these cases, your proposition will only resonate with US investors for later funding rounds and vice versa. US investors are more relevant for you at the time when you target the US market.

However, be sure to work with investors who understand the complexities of building a business out of Europe. This is as much about the individual as the firm. If you go with US investors, they must show a willingness and commitment to spend time with you in Europe, for board meetings and beyond. A good strategy is to work with transatlantic investors (such as Index), who have a strong presence in both Europe and the US.

FIRST BOOTS ON THE GROUND

The type of presence you need in the US is influenced by your business model and GTM strategy. The pandemic has demonstrated that remote teams can effectively perform many functions, challenging long-held assumptions about geographic requirements.

For consumer products distributed through app stores, European companies can often succeed in the US without boots on the ground, boosted by more mature European tech ecosystems, the greater availability of European capital, and the fact platforms like Apple and Google now have strong European offices. Similarly, B2B SaaS companies born in Europe can win early remote customers via bottom-up, self-serve models targeting small and mid-market businesses. Digital-first acquisition, robust online onboarding and virtual customer support have made remote expansion more viable than ever.

However, as companies move upmarket to enterprise sales, physical presence becomes increasingly crucial. Enterprise customers typically want to see commitment when adopting new technology—both for closing strategic deals and ensuring the features they need get put on the product roadmap. This doesn’t necessarily mean founders must relocate, but it does call for a carefully calibrated—and physically present—team to build trust and relationships. This accords with our research that customers are one of the main drivers behind transatlantic expansion.

Founder relocation: necessity or choice?

If your company does need boots on the ground, the question becomes: do they need to belong to a founder? The evidence strongly suggests that having a founder in the US maximizes your chances of success, especially if you’re a Magnet—and the earlier you move, the better. For Pendulums, it can be desirable, but not necessarily as critical, for a founder to move. The move can also be postponed until there’s clear evidence of the US becoming the company’s most important growth-driver. For Anchors and Telescopes, these archetypes can often succeed with founders remaining primarily in Europe while building strong US leadership teams and maintaining a regular presence in the market by travelling regularly. That said, there’s a tendency for Telescopes to morph into Magnets or Pendulums in pursuit of larger clients and deals, in which case the GTM strategy becomes sales-led rather than self-serve. If this happens, a founder move might again become necessary.

The dynamics of transatlantic expansion have evolved significantly since the pandemic. It’s easier than ever before to do things in a remote or distributed way; as a consequence, some Magnet founders are banking on the fact that exceptional execution and strong US leadership can compensate for a founder not being on the ground. The pandemic has also blurred the lines between archetypes, with many companies that would traditionally follow a Magnet model now operating more like Pendulums.

However, it’s still too early to determine whether founders of Magnet companies can seize the full scope of business opportunities through to exit without moving to the US. The truth is that we’re yet to see examples of European-born companies growing through the lifecycle without a founder fully committing to relocation. In particular, B2B companies moving upmarket into enterprise sales tend to face increasing pressure for a founder to be present, as enterprise customers typically want to see founder commitment when adopting new technology. Most European-born companies that have achieved major liquidity events did have founders move to the US at some point in their journey. As companies scale up and approach IPO or acquisition, having key C-Suite leaders in the US creates a natural gravitational pull that often draws founders to spend more time there.

Regardless, seriously growing the transatlantic organization will call for a highly vetted and trusted US leader, who can absorb the DNA of your company and swiftly execute on expansion.

Unless you have a compelling mission and a strong existing network, you might struggle to attract the right caliber of candidate—which means it will have to fall to you or one of your co-founders, who are generally the best culture-carriers for your company and can be trusted to uphold your values and vision. A technical co-founder might continue to drive your engineering efforts in Europe while you move to the US to focus on growth, or you might swap roles with a more business-oriented co-founder.

If you’re not moving yourself, it’s nonetheless crucial to spend a lot of time there. You’ll need to commit to a lot of travel to kick off key relationships and close deals, even if you might be able to rely on others to carry things forward once you’ve created the momentum. And you should prepare for late night calls to overlap with the West Coast, where that’s relevant. Grit and intentionality can do a lot to compensate for geography, but you can’t beat timezones.

Early days of expansion

The company initially sold remotely from Europe, targeting tech companies that were comfortable buying new software solutions. Early customers included Brex and Carta, and these first wins helped create momentum that attracted both additional customers and talent.

Pigment started building out its US presence through local hires, rather than relocating European employees. The initial team of around six people was small but autonomous, consisting mainly of customer success people and solution architects who could sell end-to-end. The initial hires were individual contributors who eventually went on to build out their own teams.

Many of these early hires have grown with the company: Chris Trump, Pigment’s first US sales hire in 2022, is now Head of Corporate Sales in North America, while their first solutions consultant has become SC Regional Lead.

However, building cultural continuity between Europe and the US did prove challenging, particularly in the early days without senior US leadership. The company invested heavily in travel, company offsites and celebration moments, but found that true cultural alignment only came with the addition of senior management.

Today, most of Eléonore’s direct reports are in the US, split between the East and West coasts. All of Pigment’s engineering is in Europe, but their GTM is split equally between Europe and the US, with around 150 people in each location.

The customer flywheel

The US side of the company has grown organically. Eléonore was deliberate about bringing US investors and US angels on from the very early days, who could help with client introductions and talent sourcing. Pigment drove growth by targeting strategic customers that validated their product and could in turn unlock new opportunities. Three deals proved particularly transformative: Figma, one of the largest private tech companies, providing early validation; Coca-Cola, demonstrating Pigment could serve traditional enterprises; and Palo Alto Networks, viewed as a sophisticated software buyer.

To move or not to move

Currently, both Eléonore and Romain are based in Paris with no plans to move to the US in near future—even when the US is already their biggest market. This reflects their view that remote working has loosened the demand for relocation, since fewer people work in physical hubs anyway, where the founders would interact with them face-to-face.

But, it’s also a statement of belief in the fact that new paradigms for growing global businesses are now possible—both in terms of business structure, but also in terms of what it takes to be a successful founder.

Eléonore’s top tips for winning in the US

• Early US investor relationships can be crucial for opening doors to customers and talent.
• Focus on hiring local talent who deeply understand your space and can grow with the company.
• Look for transformative customer wins that can create momentum.
• Don’t underestimate the importance of senior leadership in building cultural alignment.

FIRST BOOTS ON THE GROUND (CONT’D)

Why relocation matters

There are two distinct sets of reasons why founder distribution matters so much:

Signaling

When you first expand, every individual you come into contact with in the US will be sizing you up. They will be assessing the likelihood that you’ll still be around in a year or two; talent, customers, partners, and investors. You might have few, if any, US employees or customers, and an underwhelming office space. Your presence as the CEO is the strongest signal that you can provide to the market of your commitment. It broadcasts a pivot of company attention and resources to the US, internally as well as externally.

Management

As you ramp up your transatlantic organization, you need to ensure that your vision is being realized. The size of the opportunity means that US expansion is a “second launch” for the company itself. You therefore need to be deeply involved in all initial hires and sales, to understand what’s different, and to secure the resources and attention from HQ that will be needed for success. You’ll need to be very intentional about onboarding your first hire—whether by flying them to Europe, and/ or you spending extensive time in the US.

Challenges and considerations

Regardless of your archetype or whether you ultimately need to relocate to the US, the founder must spend significant time there. You will need to get the lay of the land, and develop firsthand experience of what customers, prospects, partners, and investors are looking for. You also need to acquire an understanding of the US talent environment, to inform your future hiring plans.

If founder relocation is required, product dependencies are a major consideration to factor in. In particular, you need to have relinquished day-to-day ownership for the product roadmap and execution. As the founder, this will have been a crucial role that you have played in the success of your company. With scale, it is something that you always need to step away from—maintaining the product vision, but progressively delegating more responsibility for execution, and for quality control (i.e., does this specific release, or feature, meet your standards, and match your vision?). An early pivot to the US, as recommended under the Magnet archetype, will often bring this transition into focus earlier than you might have anticipated. It requires you to strengthen product management, maybe bringing in a more senior leader, who you can trust to “leave at home with your baby,” while you turn your focus to the US opportunity. Given the need for the right chemistry, and the lack of product leadership talent in Europe, it can be a drawn-out process to find and onboard someone who earns your confidence.

A similar dependency on the CEO may exist for driving sales in Europe. This scenario is less common, as founders less often have the skill set of good sales managers, and there is a deeper European talent pool of commercial leaders. However, to clear the path for a US move, you need to have a trusted revenue leader to drive European growth in your absence.

Personal readiness is perhaps the most complex factor. Even if you know that moving is the best choice for your business, relocation is an enormous lifestyle change, particularly if you have a partner or children. But if your ambition is to build a global success where the US market is key, relocation is very likely to be part of that journey. It is best to be honest with yourself and your family about this, so that you can mentally and emotionally prepare for it.

Given the range of issues involved in moving with a family, it may make sense to work with a global mobility company such as Topia, Cartus, or BGRS. These one-stop shops usually work with corporates, who are continuously redeploying employees between countries. The range of issues they cover includes:

• Immigration
• Compensation adjustment
• Tax advice
• Moving services
• On-the-ground support

Given that you will have existing legal and tax advisors, it is often best (and always cheaper) to restrict your use of mobility services to providing on-the-ground support for yourself and your family:

• Finding a home
• Temporary housing
• Schooling
• Childcare
• Social security number
• Bank account
• Driver’s license

A two-headed monster

Snyk was born in 2015 with what, back then, was a radical vision: to make security tooling that developers would actually want to use. Co-founder and CEO Guy Podjarny (“Guypo”) had worked in cybersecurity for the Israeli army, followed by a decade in application security and DevOps. He’d built and sold his first start-up, Blaze, to Akamai, where he worked as CTO in Canada, before transferring to the UK. Over this time, Guypo had noticed that traditional security tools always seemed to be built with auditors in mind, rather than developers who might want to ship secure code. He believed it should be possible to get developers to embrace security, if the product was intuitive and easy to use.

Snyk was incorporated in July 2015, existing as what Guypo calls “a two-headed monster” between London, where Guypo was living, and Tel Aviv, where co-founders Assaf Hefetz and Danny Grander were based. The Snyk team quickly spun up a public beta product, which they launched in October that year at Velocity Amsterdam—a major DevOps conference— where they offered free open-source capabilities. Around the same time they announced their seed round, led by US investor boldstart, whom Guypo knew from his North American network. Guypo was also well connected across both the UK and Israel, though his contacts in London were more developer-oriented, while those in Israel brought cyber expertise and startup know-how.

Unlike many European startups that focus first on their home market, Snyk was built for global scale from the outset. This reflected a clear-eyed view of where the real opportunity lay. The US was not only Snyk’s largest addressable market, but was also more advanced in terms of DevOps adoption.

Growing the US from Europe

Guypo was raising a young family in London, and unlike many founders in his position, had no intention of moving to the US. But cultivating the US developer community from afar entailed a punishing travel schedule. Guypo would typically spend every other week attending conferences and building relationships. Back in London, a typical day would involve working London hours, having dinner with his wife and children, then jumping back online around 9:00 p.m. for calls with the US.

To make the travel sustainable, Guypo developed strict rules. These weren’t just personal choices but strategic ones, as Guypo believed being monomaniacal about the business would make him a worse leader in the long run:

• No trips in successive weeks
• No weekend travel
• Always home for breakfast and dinner with his children when not traveling
• Taking vacations, including at least one two-week trip
• Schedule regular date nights

Turning points

Two crucial things happened within the first year of Snyk’s operations. One, Snyk joined Heavybit, a San Francisco-based incubator for developer tools. As one of the few non-American companies in the program, this gave Snyk exposure to the US networks and wider ecosystem. Guypo also started a podcast—a highly original move at the time—which helped grow the company’s audience, visibility, and credibility among developers.

Secondly, about 18 months after getting started, Snyk made their first US hire in January 2017: Geva Solomonovich, an Israeli based in San Francisco, who joined to establish their US operations. Guypo had known Geva since he was 18, so Geva was a trusted figure. Although his background was in engineering, Geva took on a broad commercial role, helping drive business development and partnerships. It aligned well with Snyk’s developer-first approach: they needed someone who could speak credibly to technical users while representing Snyk’s culture and values.

The team began bringing on a few more US hires—a salesperson in Canada, a sales engineer in New York—but the real inflection point came in January 2018 with the hiring of Ethan Schechter as VP of Sales, who came through an external search. At this point, Snyk was at around $650,000 in ARR, having grown from $100,000 just four months earlier.

Though hiring a remote executive without prior connections felt risky, Guy invested heavily in the relationship through daily conversations to build trust. The strategy paid off spectacularly: under Ethan’s US leadership, Snyk grew to $4.5 million ARR by the end of 2018, and then to $18.8 million the following year.

Ethan was based in Boston, where Snyk ultimately chose to build out their commercial hub. This offered better timezone overlap with Europe than San Francisco, as well as proximity to enterprise customers—particularly big banks that could ultimately convert to key clients.

Rather than trying to be everywhere at once, Guypo focused his energy on establishing critical connections and creating momentum that his team could build upon. He developed an effective pattern where he would travel to the US to kickstart important relationships and initiatives, then have his local leaders and team maintain and develop them.

Leadership evolution

After running the company as CEO for five years, Guypo brought in a new CEO in the US in 2019: Peter McKay, who had led multiple companies through hypergrowth and exit. Unlike some founder transitions driven by pressure, this was more about Guypo seizing an opportunity to put the company on an even stronger growth path.

McKay’s leadership cemented Boston as Snyk’s US center of gravity, with marketing and other commercial functions gravitating there. This evolution highlighted an important reality about building a transatlantic business: as companies scale, leadership often shifts toward the US market, bringing with it American business norms and practices.

This cultural evolution caused some friction among non-US staff. The Snyk team learned to manage it by creating more reasons for US executives to travel to overseas R&D centers, and building stronger international relationships across the company.

Guy’s top tips for winning in the US

• While it’s the norm—and probably easier—for founders to move to the US, relocation isn’t absolutely necessary. However, if you want to stay put, you’ll likely have to compensate for it with extremely strategic senior hires, lots of travel, and late-night calls.
• To succeed in the US, bring in company leaders you’d be happy to involve across the company—not just functional leaders.
• Invest heavily in relationships with remote executives through daily conversations.
• Set clear boundaries around travel and timezones to make the schedule workable.
• Be intentional about preserving culture while adapting to US norms as the company grows.

LANDING TEAMS

The type of presence you need in the US is influenced by your business model and GTM strategy. The pandemic has demonstrated that remote teams can effectively perform many functions, challenging long-held assumptions about geographic requirements.

A landing team is a small group of employees sent from a company’s HQ to a new market or region to initiate and manage the expansion process. They act as “culture carriers and decoders,” transmitting values, processes, and product understanding. With trusted relationships across the European organization, they will also be more persuasive in securing the changes necessary for US success—be these in product, marketing, or operations.

At the same time, the most successful transatlantic companies think beyond classic landing teams to build truly integrated global teams—with a thoughtful distribution of functions across geographies, and clear mechanisms for collaboration and decision making. So you should be thoughtful about which functions would benefit most from being carried out by existing employees, and which functions would be better served by local hires.

Landing teams are usually 2–4 strong, and should include both senior and junior/mid-level members. The ideal functional composition can vary. If you already have a number of strategically important US clients and a land-and-expand GTM model, customer success roles will be important. If you rely on digital marketing for customer acquisition, then generating brand awareness and credibility could be more essential. Otherwise you might do best with a SE (Sales Engineer) and AE (Account Executive), to get selling.

LOCAL LEADERS

Where founders are not relocating, a senior US leader will be crucial. In our experience, successful early hires in the US often have some international flavor to them—whether through dual nationality, having studied abroad, or previous experience with European companies. Such individuals are more likely to be attracted to working with a European company in the first place. They will also be more comfortable with cultural differences, allowing them to translate between US and European approaches.

An interesting pattern emerging from B2B companies such Snyk and ElevenLabs is choosing highly technical first hires who end up taking on commercial roles. This approach seems to work particularly well for technical products in their early days, when you might need to bridge the gap between a self-serve product and enterprise needs with someone who can do flexible implementation. For Snyk, their first US hire was a trusted engineer whom co-founder and CEO Guy Podjarny had known for many years. Despite having primarily engineering leadership experience, he ended up focusing on business development and technical partnerships. Similarly, ElevenLabs’ first US hire was someone with a technical background who ended up doing sales and deployment work.

Many European companies have found that their culture and values can become a differentiator in attracting US talent. For example, DeepL found that their emphasis on engineering excellence and collaborative decision making resonated strongly with senior technical hires. Wise’s mission of financial inclusion and transparency helped them compete for talent against better-funded fintech competitors.

Your US leaders are likely to be focused on sales, or marketing if you’re in B2C. They’ll be most likely to succeed once you have a proven product with clear PMF, strong processes for remote collaboration, and your expansion plans favor deliberate execution over urgent market entry. In some cases, you might focus on getting access to specific talent pools in areas such as product and AI, though you’ll probably need to be well-capitalized to afford these hires.

Here are some of our guidelines for hiring local leaders according to your archetype.

Magnet

If you’re a Magnet and a founder is part of your US landing team, it often makes sense to hire a US sales leader first. You want a player/coach, who has managed at least a small team previously, but who is willing to get out and secure early sales personally for the first six months or so. They also need to be experimenters—optimizing the GTM model, and adjusting the targeting strategy. It’s often sensible to focus early sales efforts on “deer,” as opposed to rabbits or elephants: that is, mid-market prospects, who will help you to build US market credibility, without too long a sales cycle or highly complex implementation requirements.

This type of hiring profile is less about seniority, and more about attitude and motivation. It is unlikely that you’ll find them in mature and large organizations—you need someone who is comfortable with ambiguity, which is more typical of startups. The job title will likely be VP Sales, or VP Sales (US), and they will report to the CEO (or other founder who is on-the-ground in the US). Compensation is likely to be $350,000—$400,000, split 50/50 between base and variable.

Unless you have an experienced and senior sales leader in your landing team, we caution against hiring more junior individuals on day one. They will be unable to hire a local team around them, and are therefore likely to end up isolated, unsupported and unmotivated.

Anchor or Pendulum

For Anchors or Pendulums, it’s less likely that there will be a founder on-the-ground in the US. You might initially rely on a larger landing team covering multiple functions, or you might go straight in with a key senior hire. This will often be a US GM profile, who often carries the job title of President (US/North America). They should be highly experienced and senior, with a strong network and reputation, who can be a magnet for talent, partners and customers. Their core skill set should mirror your strategic priorities for success in the US in the first couple of years: for example, enterprise sales, strategic partnerships, or community-building. You will need to have a strong narrative of past and future growth to appeal to this caliber of hire, and it can take six months to run a search to identify the right person. They typically report directly to the CEO and are a member of the global executive team. It’s critical that this person is thoroughly vetted for values-fit, and then successfully onboarded from a cultural perspective. The ideal is that they spend an extended period of time initially in your European HQ. If this is impractical, then frequent visits to HQ over the first 12 months—along with visits by the founder and senior executives to the US—will be essential.

Building and maintaining trust with your senior US leader requires a delicate balance between oversight and autonomy. Daily one-on-ones in the early stages can help establish shared understanding and build trust, but it’s crucial not to micromanage from afar. The goal should be to create alignment on vision and strategy while empowering local leadership to execute independently. Expect the relationship to evolve too: too much ongoing oversight can stifle local leadership’s ability to move quickly and build their own team culture, while too little communication risks divergence in vision and execution.

Telescope

If you’re a Telescope, you’re most likely looking to build new competencies in the US, especially in terms of business development and strategic partnerships. You’ll want someone who combines deep experience building and enriching existing relationships at your relevant targets—be these the Apple and Android app-store teams, systems integrators for reseller/channel development, major record labels, etc. These will be rare profiles, but made up of individuals who are by nature more used to hustling, and to working autonomously.

BUILDING YOUR US TEAM

There are many benefits to hiring Americans in your early expansion phases. They can help you build trust among US customers. They’re familiar with the business culture, know how the system works, and are likely to have valuable pre-existing connections. If you’re looking to grow your talent network, a great local hire might either bring others along, or open up a new talent pool for you.

Prepare for the fact that making your first US hires will be challenging. For one, assessing US candidates can be difficult for European founders and something you need to learn how to do well. US candidates also tend to be much better at selling themselves than their European counterparts.

You’re also probably unknown in the US, making it difficult to attract top talent. You may struggle with senior candidates’ perception of European companies. As European funding rounds are on average lower than in the US, they may not be impressed with your level of fundraising. Unless your VCs have got a strong US footprint, candidates won’t know who they are either.

Selling a self-serve product to enterprise

ElevenLabs started to see demand from enterprise clients as soon as they released their product, and knew the opportunity would be big. Their first commercial hire was Europe-based, working alongside Mati on enterprise sales. However, as inbound demand grew, they realized they needed a larger team to handle the volume of interest. Especially in the US, physical presence was vital to close deals and ensure customer success and satisfaction.

Rather than hiring traditional sales profiles, ElevenLabs took an unconventional approach with their first US hire—someone with about five years of experience and a technical background. They knew their product wasn’t yet optimized for enterprise customers, and so they needed someone who could feed back to the product team to tweak and optimize features for strategic partners. In the end, ElevenLabs hired an ex-Palantir deployment strategist, who was used to working with clients and with highly technical products. This proved invaluable in helping the company realize they needed things like SOC 2 compliance and sharing across workspaces in order to succeed. The launch coincided with ElevenLabs’ announcement in mid-2023 that they’d closed their series A, led by US VC A16Z.

US and global growth

In the second half of 2023, ElevenLabs opened a New York office, choosing it over San Francisco to create more timezone overlap with Europe. They made additional hires both in the US and EMEA to support the growing enterprise sales motion. By the end of 2023, the company had approximately 20 employees, 5–7 on the enterprise side. New York became the company’s official HQ , but they kept the majority of their operations in London. They now have 40 employees in London, 30 in New York, and 15 in Warsaw, where they opened an office in late 2024.

ElevenLab’s European roots have been an advantage when it comes to hiring technical talent in Europe (and elsewhere in the world). Many of their competitors in the Bay Area compete for the same talent and lack access to the European ecosystem.

However, they are pragmatic about needing to source certain specialized roles from the US.

Mati himself has no intention of moving to the US, but spends much of his time traveling there. This is likely to change in the future, as ElevenLabs is looking to open offices in Asia, particularly in Japan and India. The plan is to be spending time equally across all three continents.

Culture and remote work

Contrary to the common sentiment that engineering works well in person and enterprise sales remotely, ElevenLabs has found it beneficial to keep the GTM teams closer to one another, facilitating in-person work culture for these teams. Their engineering, on the other hand, is primarily remote and fully distributed. This has to do with the pace of the company’s growth. On the engineering front, the team is moving quite slowly and carefully when it comes to hiring and integrating new team members. The opposite is true for the commercial side, where the team is looking to move significantly faster.

ElevenLabs is very intentional about nurturing its culture, built around three key values:

• Ownership: Team members own their projects end-to-end, with authority to make decisions.
• First Principles: The team approaches problems by breaking them down to core components, rather than relying on existing solutions.
• Excellence: There’s an emphasis on maintaining high standards from the start, rather than iterating from rough drafts.

They run frequent offsites as well as an annual company-wide gathering. ElevenLabs also invests heavily in onboarding to help new team members adapt to this high-paced, autonomous environment, including norms about how people should communicate over Slack and email. They work within small, focused teams: “effectively we’re a team of over 100, but really 20 teams of five,” explains Mati. Each team has significant autonomy and decision-making power, which requires team members to actively seek out information rather than waiting for it to be surfaced.

Mati’s top tips for winning in the US

• Think global from the beginning. Very few companies should be focused on a single market; most should be built global.

• Don’t wait for results before ramping hiring, especially in commercial roles. Results on the sales side take a lot longer to actualize than in engineering or product.

• Don’t delegate too fast—even when hiring someone awesome, expect to spend a lot of time with them to set them up for success.

REMOTE VS. IN-PERSON TEAMS

Remote-first or remote-friendly organizational models have been growing steadily more popular, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. At Index, we’re fully supportive of remote teams, having seen them successfully scale firsthand at Elastic, MySQL, and Remote among others. Nonetheless, fully remote companies are in the minority, and the jury is still out about how far the trend can go. It’s unquestionably an emotive topic, worthy of its own dedicated guidebook, but for the purposes of US expansion, there are a couple of specific points to highlight:

Certain functions lend themselves more easily to remote than others. Enterprise sales are by nature geographically dispersed. In fact, you want to pursue a distributed coverage model with reps across the US. Customer support and success also often follow this approach. Inside sales and Sales Development Representative (SDR) functions can be trickier, since these are often more junior hires who need intensive mentoring, and where “buzz on the sales floor” can be highly motivating. And engineering and product teams typically benefit a lot more from an in-person culture that fosters rapid and creative collaboration.

Understanding differences in working styles and making sure there are still team-wide in-person meetings at least a couple of times a year are crucial for making distributed and remote models work. Creating smaller hubs might help in providing opportunities for face-to-face interaction for distributed teams. And especially with those teams that operate almost fully remotely, overcommunication is essential.

Community-building and partnering is about networking and “being there.” If you want to partner with Google or engage with cutting-edge developers, your DevRel team needs to be in the Bay Area. If you need to immerse yourself in the media ecosystem, you need to be in New York. This may dictate the location of certain roles, even if you operate a fully-remote model with no offices.

San Fransisco

As the beating heart of the AI innovation wave and the tech sector as a whole, Silicon Valley would appear to be the obvious destination for any tech company looking to succeed in the US. It offers early-adopting customers (consumers, startups, and corporates), pivotal distribution, and product partners, the most seasoned talent pool when it comes to successful scaling, and a roll call of the most successful VC funds.

However, the Bay Area presents significant challenges. The nine-hour time difference with Europe creates minimal overlap in working hours, straining communication and collaboration. This barrier to effective team communication and collaboration should not be underestimated. The additional three-hour window from the East Coast is very significant. Add to this the increased flight times and jet lag for the West Coast, which will take their toll when you’re making the trip every month or two.

The second issue is talent attraction and retention. It might be that you need specialized skills, particularly in AI and ML, that are concentrated in the Bay Area. But Silicon Valley is hyper competitive when it comes to talent, and as an outsider you might struggle in terms of brand awareness and credibility. It’s even more brutal when it comes to retention: average tenure is under two years and annual turnover rates approach 30 percent, compared to 20 percent elsewhere in the US and 10–15 percent in Europe. Expectations in terms of compensation, benefits, and sustained hypergrowth are high. You need to be realistic about whether you will be able to hire and retain A-players, as an outsider in the world’s most competitive talent ecosystem.

The third factor is customers. Who are you selling to? It might be that most of your customers are not located in the Bay Area, in which case it might make more sense for you to establish your US hub elsewhere in order to be closer to your current and potential customers.

Therefore, in practice, we only recommend San Francisco as your US hub if you are focused on AI/ML innovation, or are selling primarily either to tech companies or developers. For example, infrastructure, data/analytics, and open source software all require a focus on developer relations, have highly technical sales processes, and rely on partnerships or integrations with other software platforms. Alternatively, if you are a consumer app dependent upon distribution through the Apple, Android, or Meta ecosystems, Silicon Valley might also be compelling—although these companies now have sizable partnership teams in Europe, which is changing the dynamic.

If you don’t fall into either of these categories, we advise against choosing San Francisco as your hub. And even if you do, be prepared to establish a secondary hub as you scale, for building more operational rather than strategic teams.

Origins in London’s AI ecosystem

Humanloop emerged as a spin-out from University College London (UCL) in 2020, bringing together an exceptional founding team with deep expertise in ML and AI. CTO Peter Hayes studied pure mathematics before completing a PhD at UCL in probabilistic deep learning, where he met co-founder Raza Habib (CEO). The third co-founder, Jordan Burgess, joined from Amazon Alexa.

Humanloop was tackling the problem of how to help humans train and improve AI models—a process that typically involved huge datasets, and took vast amounts of time and money to be effective. Seeing the coming wave of large language models, Humanloop developed technology to easily evaluate the performance of AI products and agents, letting developers build more reliable products and improve them.

Global ambitions

From its earliest days, the majority of Humanloop’s customers were in the US. Founded in the pandemic, the team had the advantage of being comfortable with remote work from the start. Once COVID-19 restrictions eased, they maintained an office presence in London’s Farringdon district, where the engineering team now works three days a week.

The pull of San Francisco

Towards the end of 2023, the team decided to establish a San Francisco office. In this way, they were positioning themselves to straddle the two centers of global excellence for AI. London offered exceptional research talent thanks to the gravity well of talent created by Google DeepMind. But San Francisco provided unique access to a wider commercial AI ecosystem, with Open AI and Anthropic headquartered there. The West Coast engineering culture had an edge in applied AI, as opposed to the more research-centric approach in the UK.

Humanloop decided to make the most of both talent hubs by embracing different working styles in each location. They straddled the timezone by starting their San Francisco workdays super early, catching the end of the London day. In London they adopted a hybrid remote/in-person approach, optimized for engineering deep work, while at their office in San Francisco’s Mission District, they opted for a fully in-office culture to maximize collaboration and creativity.

Maintaining dual locations has added complexity and cost, including higher salaries and visa expenses in San Francisco. But the team views it as a strategic necessity. The density of brilliant operators, investors and individual contributors in San Francisco increased the number of chance encounters that created opportunities—be that a conversation in a cafe, a coworking space or a casual hike.

Nonetheless, Raza acknowledges that the full impact of the San Francisco investment remains to be seen:

Raza’s top tips for winning in the US

• Consider being in both major AI hubs if you’re building an AI company.
• Leverage accelerators like Y Combinator to build initial US networks.
• Be prepared for significant costs when establishing San Francisco presence.
• Embrace different working cultures across locations.
• Start days early to maximize timezone overlap.

New York

New York benefits from a more manageable five-hour time difference with Europe. Its business culture is also more aligned with European norms and it has a deep talent pool across multiple industries, including financial services, media, healthcare, and fashion. New York has huge appeal as a place to live and work, particularly for younger talent, as well as excellent universities. Its earlier strengths in consumer tech (Tumblr, Etsy, Warby Parker, Glossier, ClassPass,WeWork) are now being balanced out in B2B and SaaS (MongoDB, Datadog, Squarespace, Braze) as well as fintech and health (Ramp, Headway, Nourish).

If you are in a sector reflective of New York’s strengths, it’s the obvious choice for your US hub. For many enterprise SaaS companies, financial services represent their single most important customer sector. On the consumer side too, New York (together with Los Angeles) is the largest, wealthiest, and most influential US city.

It’s now possible to build entire GTM teams in New York, particularly with strong CMOs and marketing talent, given the city’s heritage. However, on the sales side, you need to be open to step-up candidates, given the relative immaturity of this talent pool and high demand.

Do be prepared for the fact that cost of living and operational expenses remain high in New York. What often surprises European founders is the intense pace and expectations of New York business culture—in many ways more demanding than Silicon Valley’s more casual atmosphere. Interestingly, our 2019 research uncovered that startups born in London are particularly likely to choose New York as their US hub (52 percent), compared to startups from elsewhere in Europe (34 percent). This partially reflects sectors, but it also appears to be a cultural choice.

Pivot and growth (2018)

A few years after founding, Hugging Face began to share the app’s underlying code free online, which caught the attention of the AI community of researchers and developers. Now, Hugging Face has become the go-to platform for ready-to-use machine-learning models, allowing users to build, train, and deploy AI models.

The founders’ hunch that European investors would not invest in their initial product held true at the start. The company raised additional funding rounds in the US and closed enterprise contracts with major AI companies like Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft, which now account for a significant proportion of their revenues.

A European edge

A key early advantage was the French tech diaspora in the US. Hugging Face found that their European heritage opened doors; the French tech community in particular has built strong networks in the US, though this pattern holds true for several European nationalities.

Hugging Face also leaned into their mission as a way of attracting and retaining top talent. The founders believe the open-source vision of the company has some links to European values that downplay individualism and emphasize the importance of community and collective flourishing. This ethos has helped Hugging Face find exceptional and loyal employees to fuel their growth.

Distributing talent post-COVID-19

After the pandemic, Hugging Face has evolved toward a distributed model that plays to the strengths of different regions. Many people left New York during COVID-19, which gave the company an opportunity to rethink their talent strategy. They still think boots on the ground in the US is vital to build and maintain relationships in enterprise sales, but now have a large European technical team, which helps control salary costs and improve retention. Of their 250 employees, their biggest office is in Paris, with around 90 people, and another 50 are spread across Europe.

Especially in times of political turmoil, Hugging Face found it helpful to avoid a single center of gravity—allowing them to flex according to wherever is more advantageous and stable. While there’s a lot of uncertainty about visas in the US under the Trump administration, it’s currently quite easy to get visas to bring people to France. That has allowed Hugging Face to build a world-class technical team, while avoiding some of the skyrocketing costs of US engineers’ salaries. The Paris office also benefits from being highly international, with over 20 nationalities represented.

As an open-source community business, the Hugging Face founders now see geographic location as less relevant, and believe it’s possible to build credibility for a globally significant open-source business from just about anywhere. It’s also easier to raise money in Europe than it used to be, and you don’t necessarily need to even incorporate in the US anymore to tackle the market.

Thomas’ top tips for winning in the US

• The diaspora advantage: European founders can leverage their heritage and existing networks as an advantage in US expansion.
• Engineering talent arbitrage: Post-COVID-19, building engineering teams in Europe can offer both cost and retention advantages.
• Mission as differentiator: European values around collective benefit can be a powerful tool for attracting and retaining talent.
• Balanced presence: While many functions can be distributed, maintaining some physical presence remains valuable for enterprise sales.
• Timezone management: Focus on making timezone overlaps work rather than geographic co-location.

Boston

Boston offers a unique combination of deep technical talent, strong enterprise presence, and quality of life. The city’s heritage in enterprise software, combined with its strength in life sciences and academia, creates a fertile environment for B2B companies. The presence of MIT and Harvard provides access to cutting-edge research talent in areas including robotics, biotech, and enterprise software. Notable Boston B2B and SaaS success stories include Hubspot, Mimecast, Akamai, Datarobot, Fuze, Toast, and Salsify. Snyk is a more recent B2B example.

In lifestyle terms too, particularly for families, it compares favorably against New York, with shorter commute times and access to nature. Housing costs and salaries run about 20 percent below New York, while employee retention tends to be significantly better than either San Francisco or New York.

If you go to Boston, you will face a difficult choice between locating yourself downtown in the city where you will find many of the younger startups—or in the Western suburbs, home to more mature tech companies. This situation mirrors, but trails, the evolution of the Bay Area, with the rise of San Francisco as a startup city, in contrast to the campuses of the tech giants along highway 101 to the South.

The call of the US

incident.io was born out of the founders’ experiences at Monzo, where they saw firsthand how critical efficient incident management is for tech companies. Their platform helps teams respond to technical incidents and outages more effectively by automating key workflows, ensuring clear communication channels, and capturing insights that help prevent future problems.

The founding team of three launched incident.io in March 2021, and went full-time in July. They experienced unusual US market demand from the company’s earliest days. Even while still a side project, they saw strong US interest, with around 700 people signing up to hear more. When analyzing their initial customer base, they found that three-quarters were from the US.

This organic US pull stood in stark contrast to Co-founder and CEO Stephen Whitworth’s previous experiences at Hailo, Ravelin and Monzo, where European companies had to push their way into the US market.

Land grab

The team recognized both the opportunities and risks in having a strong US presence. Along with the bulk of their customers, 75 percent of their revenue comes from the US, and 75 percent of that from the West Coast. However, they were concerned that not having boots on the ground could create an opening for competitors, particularly those based in Silicon Valley, New York, and Canada. The team knew being close to customers was critical, particularly given the late-night calls they were already taking with US customers.

As three product and engineering co-founders, they were also attracted by the strength of the US GTM talent pool. When they hit $1 million in recurring revenue, a team of 20–35 people, and were raising a series A, they were prepared to make bigger bets.

Let’s be American

Stephen made the jump to the US in January 2023. They decided to keep Product and Engineering in London, leveraging their strong network and the significantly lower costs—around half that of the US. But Stephen’s move as CEO showed commitment to attracting the best talent.

They chose New York primarily for the timezone advantages, gaining 2–3 times more overlap time with London compared to San Francisco. They also factored in the city’s trajectory: making the decision pre-AI boom, they saw New York as ascendant.

However, with hindsight, Stephen notes some challenges with the New York location:

• While good for hiring AEs, customer success managers (CSMs), Managers and Directors, it was hard to find VP or senior leadership talent. Many were located on the West Coast.
• It’s harder to get people to relocate to New York compared to San Francisco.
• New York feels a bit like a “playground for 20-30-somethings.”

Growing the team

The company learned several key lessons about hiring and team structure:

• Landing team and culture: One early realization was that having a larger landing team, with more individual contributors, could have helped to seed the culture more effectively.
• GTM talent reality check: The team quickly had to adjust their expectations about US GTM talent. Despite the depth of the US talent pool, finding the right fits proved challenging.

• Secondary cities vs. coastal hubs: They initially hired leaders where they could find them: a VP CS in San Francisco, Sales leader in North Carolina, and Marketing leader in Boston. This distributed approach proved challenging, with leaders that did not work out and other candidates unwilling to travel as frequently as Stephen expected.

• The importance of office culture: The team came to appreciate the value of having a physical hub where team members regularly interacted, which proved invaluable for building cohesion and maintaining culture. This happened in London, but was harder to build in New York.

Building brand and GTM

incident.io has found that in-person meetings represent only about 5 percent of their deals now, with most sales happening via Zoom. They’ve successfully built a strong mid-market commercial customer base, with ARR north of $10 million, including enterprise customers like Netflix.

However, they recognize the importance of brand building, particularly in San Francisco, to become “the new default for startups and digital natives.” This has become one of their first strategic priorities. In line with this, towards the end of 2024, Stephen announced the opening of their San Francisco office in early 2025, led by their new San Francisco-based CRO, with other founders relocating to support. This move will position the company closer to its current and prospective customers, most of whom are located in the Bay Area.

The key learning has been about commitment level:

Secondary hubs

As your US footprint grows, it often makes sense to establish a secondary hub in a lower-cost location for your support functions. Typically these might include SDRs, inside sales, customer support, and operations (billing, compliance checking, etc.). This has become part of the playbook for domestic US startups in recent years too, and a large number of secondary cities have emerged as potential destinations.

The decision to establish a secondary hub typically comes into play when support functions reach 50+ people or when 24/7 coverage becomes essential. Popular secondary locations include Denver, Austin, Atlanta, and Tampa, each offering distinct advantages ranging from cost, to talent retention, to time difference with London. Other options might be Phoenix, Raleigh-Durham, Dallas, Columbus, or Nashville. Startups born in Europe will be particularly focused on nationwide office-hours coverage for sales and support functions, so tend to cluster in cities on Central and Mountain Time. Another significant factor specific to European startups is the availability of direct (or at least straightforward) flights to their European base, as well as within the US itself.

Opening a secondary hub can carry more risk the earlier it is done, since it extends multi-office challenges around communication, culture, and management. However, this needs to be offset against the challenge and cost of hiring and, in particular, retaining large, often junior and lower-paid teams. This can be brutal in New York or San Francisco, although somewhat easier in Boston, where cost and talent competition aren’t quite as intense.

The precise trade-off in timing will vary, driven in particular by your team’s functional makeup. If your model is support- and ops-intensive from the start, a secondary hub is likely to make sense sooner. Over time, the secondary hub may well become your largest single US location. While these cities can be strong on junior- and mid-level talent in certain functions, they will be weaker when it comes to marketing or business development, and it is very unlikely that they can provide you with executive-level leadership. So you will have a continued need for a primary hub in one of the four core cities.

Context for US expansion

Kristo and Taavet knew from the outset that the US was the single biggest market for cross-currency payments. Roger Ehrenberg from IA ventures, one of their earliest investors, was also based in New York.

The company had already built coverage across the EU (both Eurozone and non-Eurozone), as well as Norway and Switzerland. However, they knew the US would be different: to meet the scale of the opportunity, they’d need to build a dedicated, full-stack, local team.

Regulation

Allowing customers to send money to a country is the less complex side of the equation in money transfer, and Wise had this live for the US as an MVP by early 2014. Enabling customers to move money out is much harder, and involves navigating a far tougher regulatory environment. In December 2014, following their $25 million series B led by Valar Ventures (New York-based fund), Wise launched this service, leveraging US licensing [JC5] partners to enable speed to market. It worked, but there were challenges, such as when a certain US state’s regulator wasn’t happy with the process used by Wise’s banking partner. They had to move quickly to set up a replacement.

Securing their own licenses took nearly two additional years. Although users would hardly notice the change at first, it was a major back-end logistical challenge. US regulators required locally-based Wise employees, and each state had its own regime.

Launch team

Setting up the US involved a trade-off between local knowledge (US hire) and culture fit (transplant from Europe). The leadership thought hard about it, and decided to send a landing team for culture fit, who could then hire for local knowledge.

Joe Cross, head of marketing, and employee #12 at Wise, led the landing team as GM, and moved to New York in January 2015 together with Henrik, who led the product element of the team. In parallel, the head of customer support moved from Tallinn (Estonia) to Tampa (Florida), to build a local CS team.

US locations: New York and Tampa

New York was the obvious choice as the hub, given the fintech angle, plus timezone. It has a rich and deep immigrant history and is full of international communities, who are Wise’s core demographics. Initially, they focused on expat networks of Brits, Europeans, and Australians. While the LaTam opportunity in the US was bigger, the company wasn’t live there yet.

Tampa proved to be a great choice for support and payment operations, with many universities, and several corporates running ops centers. This provided a large talent pool. The larger portion of the US team is now there. It was also a great location to service LaTam, given the large community of Spanish speakers. The mayor of Tampa was extremely helpful. The Wise office is in an old cigar factory, and they held a launch event just as Donald Trump was coming into office. The Democratic mayor opened the site, exclaiming how happy Cuban factory workers would have been about this immigrant-supporting company.

US tech

Originally there was a product and engineering team in Tallinn focused on US and Americas localization. But over time, it became clear that the US needed its own local tech team. Some engineers relocated to New York, and there have now been many local hires too.

Culture

The US team found it easy to get behind Wise US, but harder to feel allegiance to the global brand.

When Joe returned to the UK in 2016 after two years in New York, a local GM replacement wasn’t hired. Instead, they reintegrated the US teams into global functions. Over this period, Wise had hired and developed a strong slate of functional leaders based in London and Tallinn, including seasoned executives who relocated from the US.

The company holds an annual week-long summer offsite in Estonia, for which some US team members got passports to leave the US for the first time. This worked well for bonding, although some people were jet-lagged and experienced culture-shock. What worked even better was when people from European offices did stints in the US for a week or so, to help with onboarding new US hires.

Florida and Estonia are very far apart from a cultural perspective, but there were things that worked very well. For example, they made sure that CS agents in Tallinn learnt American banking lingo and terminology. On the Florida side, many of the CS agents joined from more traditional corporates. They now found themselves being quizzed by the Estonian engineering team for customer insights to improve the product, and they loved being involved.

Marketing

Ahead of expansion, Wise analyzed census data, to prioritize how to tackle the US. They looked at the percentage of foreign-born residents, as a strong indicator that someone would use their service. New York, California, and Florida came out top.

The US had good word-of-mouth (WoM) growth, but the viral coefficient was not the same as in the UK. The team needed to do paid marketing, as well as a PR drive.

Wise didn’t realize how challenging it would be to stand out in New York, given the numerous homegrown fintech companies competing for consumer attention. They had to cleverly use paid social media to find pockets of customers. They also ran subway ads in New York for a number of years, which was good for brand awareness, as well as for hiring and team morale, and was ROI-neutral in terms of trackable customer acquisition. Podcast sponsorship also became a major marketing channel.

As the US footprint expanded, they analyzed census data in terms of nationalities-by-area, to prioritize which LaTam corridors to open up, and where to focus local US marketing efforts for specific LaTam communities.

For PR, sharing what was happening in European banking was interesting for tech and business reporters at major media brands: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Economist, and Reuters. These were important outlets for credibility and brand. Wise business announcements are now usually covered in the US. However, leveraging the reach of consumer media has proved much harder.

US network-building

You’re best placed to succeed by starting your company in the place where you have the strongest network and support in order to secure critical early hires and investors. It would be a recipe for disaster to move to the US to start your business there, without having first established an initial US network. For founders moving to the US early on in their journey, immigrant networks can prove to be a valuable asset (e.g., Hugging Face). Alternatively, university programs or transfers are a good way to build connections (e.g., Duolingo). US investors or well-connected executive hires can also be the key to building a strong network in the US. Joining a community like “Europeans of New York” run by Index’s Martin Mignot, or GBx (network for successful British entrepreneurs, investors, and senior British tech executives, in the Bay Area) in San Francisco is a good way to get plugged into the local ecosystem.

If you have a strong US network as a founding team, and your TAM is clearly weighted to the US, building the company in the US from either day one or from pre-seed onwards can make a lot of sense for you. In this case, it is better for the entire founding team to move over, following our Transplant archetype.

If your TAM is weighted to the US, but you do not have a pre-existing US network through work experience or university, applying to Y Combinator or one of the other top accelerator programs in the Bay Area, such as AI Grant, South Park Commons, Neo or Pear, is a good route to go.

Several European success stories are Y Combinator alumni:

• Stripe. Stripe was founded by the Collison brothers who are Irish, but the company was built in the US. The latest funding round in 2024 by Sequoia brought Stripe’s valuation to $70 billion.
• Front. A unicorn company out of Paris. Its series D in 2022 was led by Salesforce and Battery Ventures, including participation from Sequoia who led their series B.
• Algolia. San Francisco-based company founded in Paris by French entrepreneurs. Raised series D in 2021 from investors like Accel and Salesforce Ventures.
• Duffel. Founded in London. Raised series B in 2019 led by Index with participation from Benchmark and Blossom Capital.
• GoCardless. Founded in London. Series G in 2022 brought the valuation to $2 billion.
• Bird. Founded and headquartered in Amsterdam. Series C in 2021 from funds like Accel and Spark Capital brought the company’s valuation to $3.8 billion.

More recent examples include Humanloop, Photoroom, Leya, Lightdash, and SolarMente. In addition to helping European founders with refining their product offering, Y Combinator offers its alumni a deep network of advisors, investors, and talent.

Distributed leadership teams

Building a successful transatlantic business implies that the company’s leadership will eventually be distributed across continents for at least some functions or some time period. This presents challenges, even for companies with a fully remote model. The critical factors to ensure success with a distributed leadership team is a willingness to travel and meet frequently, as well as doing some out-of-hours meetings. This is essential for any executive in an organization split between the US and Europe, and the expectation needs to be explicit before making any hire.

At the earlier stages, it’s important that leaders are co-located with their functional team, until there’s sufficient bench strength to cover day-to-day management. We see this most clearly with R&D leadership––engineering and product leadership will remain in Europe for several years, before it is possible to consider upleveling these roles in the US. But the recommendation applies to other functions too, such as marketing, finance, and operations. When a functional team is small, there is a significant advantage to co-location. It is easier to establish systems and processes, and to train up more junior members of staff.

Sales leaders in companies with a field sales model are an exception to the co-location model. Field sales teams, once you start scaling, are likely to be distributed by nature, and also composed of experienced individuals, so it is fairly common for these roles to be remote. That being said, it is still preferable if sales leaders are located with other leaders.

Building from Israel

The best companies born in Israel are global from the outset. With a limited domestic market, and an ecosystem particularly strong in enterprise software, Israeli companies have learnt to build global companies from the beginning. In addition to the European-born breakthroughs, our research identified a further 27 Israeli-born breakthrough companies.

• B2B: Appsflyer, Axonius, Cato Networks, CyberArk, Fireblocks, Gong, Island, Jfrog, Melio, Monday.com, Navan, Rapyd, SentinelOne, SimilarWeb, Synk, Tipalti, Transmit Security, VAST, Wiz, Via.
• B2C: Fiverr, Lemonade, Moon Active, Outbrain, Taboola, Wix, Ironsource.

As an Israeli startup founder, you have the opportunity—perhaps even the duty—to build a global company: your chances of being able to grow a category-defining business that shapes the future are higher than ever before. With over 7,000 active startups, the highest per capita globally, and tech accounting for almost 20 percent of GDP, Israel has established itself as more than a startup nation. It’s attracting high levels of VC funding ($12 billion in 2024), and its ecosystem has diversified beyond its traditional strengths in cybersecurity and infrastructure into fintech, gaming, digital health, and AI.⁷

Today, you have advantages your predecessors didn’t. You can draw from a deep pool of experienced operators who have scaled companies globally. You have access to international capital directly in Israel. And you can learn from the playbooks of companies that have successfully built global businesses from day one. Many of the most successful Israeli companies are led by repeat founders who gained valuable experience inside US tech companies after their first exits: Dealroom estimates that 75 percent of Israeli unicorns are founded by serial entrepreneurs.

Israeli startups should strive to serve global businesses from the get-go—not least because the way Israeli customers think and behave is rarely representative of global businesses. Unlike in France, Germany, or the UK, where local enterprise customers often resemble global organizations, focusing on local customers in Israel can actually divert your product development away from the goal of building a winning global solution.

While this might mean sacrificing the pride and convenience of serving local businesses you can “run across the street” to visit, it dramatically increases your chances of long-term success. As an Israeli founder, it can be important to learn to say “no” to some low-hanging fruit, and to learn to say it early.

On your journey to building a global business, you’ll likely need to establish a strong US presence. For most Israeli founders, New York offers clear advantages over San Francisco. There are exceptions to this rule, particularly if you’re building a developer-focused company, where the San Francisco ecosystem might offer greater advantages.

But for most enterprise-focused Israeli startups, New York provides a more strategically advantageous base, for these reasons:

• Timezone compatibility: The East Coast provides more overlapping working hours with Israel, allowing for real-time collaboration between teams.
• Enterprise customers: The density of Fortune 500 companies and enterprise customers is significantly higher in the New York region.
• Talent pools: New York offers deep pools of commercial talent across sales, marketing, and customer success functions.
• Community support: A well-established Israeli business community in New York provides valuable networks and support systems.

One of the pivotal moments Israeli founders face on their scaling journey is the decision to introduce management layers. While the connection between the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) compulsory military service and the startup ecosystem is well acknowledged, what’s often overlooked is how the non-hierarchical structure of the IDF contributes to a similar culture within Israeli companies.

This flat structure offers significant benefits in early stages—eliminating barriers between founders and contributors, working against internal misalignments, and ensuring team synchronization. But as companies scale, introducing a management layer becomes necessary to accelerate hiring, onboarding, and ultimately growth.

The first step is acknowledging your own potential bias against “bureaucracy.” Figuring out when to bring in managers isn’t about following a specific formula or reaching a magic number of employees; rather, it’s about making a judgment call based on your growth ambitions, ideally with input from experienced business partners who have seen this transition before.

Cultural integration is worth watching out for too. Israeli business culture is notably direct, which can create tension when expanding internationally. One significant pitfall for Israeli founders is accurately assessing US candidates during hiring, as they can struggle to evaluate the substance behind the polished American presentation style.

⁷ Startup Nation Central, 2024 Annual Report.

Professional advisors

The business culture in the US leverages professional service providers much more than in Europe. You should identify experienced advisors familiar with supporting European VC-backed companies. You will need multiple providers in order to set up in the US. One of these advisors, usually your lawyer, will become your point person in case of any questions.

• Lawyer
• Immigration specialist
• Tax accountant
• Outsourced HR and benefits
• Bank
• Insurance provider

Your CFO will usually take responsibility for operational issues around expansion. Alternatively, it could be your COO or Operations Lead.

Your Head of People may handle the HR and benefits setup. Once you have chosen advisors, everything can get completed in roughly 4–5 weeks, with the important exception of immigration, which will be closer to 4–6 months.

Visas

Visa applications for relocating staff—either founders or employees—are the most common bottleneck holding back US expansion. At the time of writing, there’s a lot of uncertainty over whether US visas will be harder to get, given the new US administration’s push-back on immigration. The time to approval is unpredictable, generally 4–6 months, so it’s crucial to plan ahead. Immigration is a highly politicized topic, with constantly shifting rules and restrictions, so you need to explore your options carefully.

In the exploratory phase, when traveling to the US, most companies use the ESTA visa waiver program. Be careful not to violate any conditions: you must be traveling for valid business reasons, which includes office set up.

Once you are ready (or your team member is ready) to relocate, it is time to work with an immigration specialist to assess the best visa route. Where you are incorporated does not matter for immigration. It is your own nationality that determines which visas you are eligible to apply for and how long your visa may be valid.

Your immigration specialist should help you assess the likelihood of getting an acceptance for each proposed member of your landing team. There may be more burden of proof for less experienced hires. You will need to make the case for each employee, drawing on their title, salary, position in your org chart, and uniqueness of their specialized skills, etc.

There are five US work visa routes you may use. But most startups go for E-1, E-2, L-1, or O-1 visas.

Visa applications require extensive documentation. Common to all the routes listed above, you will be asked for:

• Articles of Incorporation
• Documents confirming ownership
• Companies House AR01 Report (if in the UK, else national equivalent)
• A detailed breakdown, or spreadsheet, of all funds invested into the US venture
• Evidence of your investment in the US business including signed leases, evidence of IP, and evidence of spending and payments to set up the business
• Evidence that the business is real and active, including state and federal licenses, evidence of ongoing work, and marketing materials
• Business plan with a five-year P&L forecast for the business, including assumptions and a breakdown of start-up costs necessary for the business to become operational

Applying for a Green Card

None of the visa routes above automatically lead to Green Cards or US permanent residency. If you intend to apply for Green Cards, you will need to explore the options well in advance. Founders on E visas can hit problems at the point of sale of their companies when they have not planned ahead.

Immigration specialists

Given the complexities of the US immigration system, it is advisable to work with a specialist lawyer, rather than the immigration department of your corporate law firm. In the UK, the following are highly regarded US immigration lawyers:

• Clintons
• Samartin & Friends
• Pearl Law Group
• Fragomen

The advisory costs for visa applications are approximately £7,000–£10,000 for the first applicant, plus £5,000 per additional applicant.

Lawyer up

A major difference between US and European business culture is the importance of legal counsel. US companies collaborate closely with lawyers to avoid problems, instead of just solving them. The difference in approach stems from a relatively unique aspect of the US legal system. In the US— unlike in much of the rest of the world—each party to a lawsuit typically pays its own legal bill, irrespective of the outcome. Accordingly, even the threat of a legal claim requires a company to make a judgment call as to whether it would prefer to settle the claim (often without leverage, on unfavorable terms) or fight it out in court at its own cost. US companies are aware that the most cost-effective approach is to take proactive advice to avoid that situation altogether.

You should establish a primary relationship with a full-service law firm. Your corporate lawyer there will be able to pull in specialists from other practice areas: employment, equity, commercial, IP, data, etc. Your lawyers can help Americanize your commercial contracts, apply for trademarks and patents, and evaluate data residency, privacy, and regulatory requirements. If you have worked with a smaller local law firm at seed, it may make sense to uplevel your law firm to one with international reach after series A, or at the point of US expansion.

You should consider a firm which is familiar with the needs of VC-backed tech startups. Ideally, one that operates in both the US and your European home market. These may include:

• Wilson Sonsini
• Cooley
• Goodwin
• Latham & Watkins
• Morrison & Foerster
• Orrick

Initial setup for US operations might cost $10,000. A basic SaaS setup could be as little as $3,000–$5,000:

• Subsidiary set up: $1,000–$2,000
• Employment contracts: $500-$1,000
• Stock option plan: $2,000—$4,000
• Americanize commercial contracts: $1,000–$7,000
• Trademark filing: $1,000–$3,000
• Patent filing: $8,000—$20,000
• Data privacy: variable; a simple SaaS set up could be $1,000, but something bespoke in a regulated sector (e.g., digital health) could go up to $50,000

The Delaware flip

You will need to set up a US company in order to hire your first US employee. (Unless you use an Employer of Record (EOR) which allows you to make a few fast hires without a legal entity in the US. More on the EOR option later on). However, you’ll need to set up a legal entity once you begin to grow the team, and most companies establish a C-Corp in Delaware.

Your C-Corp could be a wholly-owned subsidiary of your European TopCo. Alternatively, you may choose to adopt your US C-Corp as your TopCo. This is commonly referred to as “flipping.” You will need to assess the pros and cons of flipping, and the timing for doing so, with your specialist advisors. Having a US TopCo used to be a requirement of US investors (e.g., Y Combinator), and can be a signal of your ambition, but there are arguments for not rushing to flip immediately.

There is a stronger logic for flipping to a US TopCo if you are a Magnet archetype, since this playbook implies a majority of your customers, employees and leadership will end up being based in the US. It also makes it more likely that you will have US investors and an eventual US exit (listing or M&A). For the Anchor and Telescope archetypes, the advantages of flipping are less obvious.

Explore the tax implications (for example, your qualification for Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) and Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) investment in the UK), and the impact of issuing tax-advantaged options to US employees. In certain countries, notably Germany, flipping is treated as a liquidity event with tax consequences; so if you are going to do it, you should do it before you raise any capital.

Unless you face specific tax or governance issues, or want to attract solely US investors early on, there might not be an advantage to having a US TopCo. It is good to bear in mind that if you are based in Europe, but with a US legal structure, corporate processes like fundraising may be held up due to timezone challenges, and your familiarity with laws and requirements.

Remember that legal and tax rules change from time to time, and there are macro forces at play beyond your control. While planning in advance is always helpful, you cannot engineer this too closely.

Tax structure

After creating your US subsidiary, you’ll need a tax registration Employer Identification Number (EIN). This can take up to four weeks and is required in order to open a US bank account and run US payroll. However, in certain situations, this can be expedited by a local authorized person (e.g., pursuant to a power of attorney granted in favor of a US local accountant).

You’ll need a transfer pricing policy from the outset, although in the early stages this is simply a document justifying your approach. Once you reach material global revenues, you’ll need a more extensive policy-designed memorandum. Intercompany pricing between US and foreign related parties must be based upon arm’s-length terms, with documentation supporting the reasonableness of the transfer price.

Sales taxes are administered on a state-by-state basis. SaaS services are considered by 50 percent of states to be a tangible good, so your company can be liable for sales tax even in states where the company does not have a physical presence. You need to work with tax accountants to understand the thresholds, and your liability, to make sure you bill clients correctly, and don’t become liable for back-taxes later on. Typically, if you have no presence (employees) in a state and under $100,000 in turnover, you will not need to pay. However, after the Wayfair ruling of 2018, there’s precedent for a state to tax a company, even if it does not have a physical presence there.

Once you have employees or an office, you’ll need to register to do business in that state. You will need to file income tax returns in that state and may also be subject to various city and county taxes. In addition, many states have adopted the market-based sourcing approach to state income taxes where services are apportioned based upon the location of the customer. You will need to work with tax accountants to determine how these rules apply to your income.

Do speak with your lawyers and/or accountants regarding any reporting or other obligations that the entity may be subject to given where the company incorporates, which can vary state-by-state.

Founder taxes and compensation

Moving to the US can have major tax ramifications for you as a founder. These will need to be addressed with a specialist advisor in advance. The obvious one is that you will have to file dual tax returns, and look into tax treaties between your home country and the US to see where tax is owed. Most European countries have a dual-tax treaty with the US, making this somewhat simpler. Founders may also be liable for higher taxes in the US on any equity sale due to differences in capital gains treatment.

More challenging, although it is less likely to be an issue for founders before series C, is exploring the tax implications of option grants. We have seen instances where growth shares (often used in the UK, Sweden and elsewhere) are considered to be Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) in the US, and therefore liable for income tax as they vest.

It’s important to uncover any significant tax issues early, so that there can be a sensible conversation with the board if a founder or other employee is going to be adversely impacted by going to the US. Moving is personally challenging, particularly if you have a family. It should be as positive an experience as possible. It may be necessary to increase salary if the founder is relocating, especially to New York or San Francisco, given their high cost of living. If the move is later in the journey (series B+), you could also explore a secondary sale of founder equity to provide capital for a property purchase or to alleviate personal risk more generally.

Banking

When considering your banking partner, you should always pay attention to the networks they have in the geographies relevant to you. To the extent that the US is one of your target markets, it is helpful to go with a banking partner with operations there. This way, when you do expand to the US, you are able to retain a single banking partner with unified online access and reporting.

Compensation and stock options

Prospective US employees will expect to receive stock options and will most likely be more sophisticated in the questions they ask about your plan. We strongly recommend that you set up a US stock option sub-plan, so that you can grant tax-favorable Incentive Stock Options (ISOs). To operate a US sub-plan, you will need to get a 409a valuation every six months, or whenever there is a material event (i.e., anything that could be expected to change the value of the company). This sets the Fair Market Valuation for your option strike price. Depending on your stage of growth and your capital structure, this can typically be 50–80 percent below your last-round valuation, making stock options much more attractive to employees. 409a valuations are fairly straightforward to process, cost $2,000—$5,000, and are offered by many providers, such as Carta.

When moving employees to the US, be aware that your strike price for options may need to be re-calibrated with a US 409A valuation. For example, if they hold UK Enterprise Management Incentive (EMI) options with a more heavily discounted strike price, they will otherwise be liable for additional income tax when it comes to filing their US taxes. It may be necessary to regrant the unvested portion of awards at appropriate 409A strike prices.

For deeper insight into stock options, we refer you to the Index Ventures handbook Rewarding Talent, and to the section on US stock options in particular.

Payroll, HR and benefits

Many startups use an Employer of Record (EOR) or a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) to manage their employee payroll and benefits. Both provide outsourced HR services for employees outside your home region. The key difference is that EORs employ through their own legal entities, while PEOs require you to establish your own legal entity in the country. EORs are specifically designed to facilitate international hiring without the need for local entities, while PEOs focus on domestic operations. If you’re looking to make a few hires in the US fast, EOR can be a good option. However, if you’re expanding in commercial capacity (which you most likely are), you will need to establish a legal entity. In this case using a PEO makes sense if you’re hoping to move fast.

EORs like Remote are recommended when your US headcount is under 10 and you do not have a US legal entity. This is ideal for speedy hiring (can be done in a matter of days) or for standalone satellite hires. EORs employ through their own legal entities in the US and other countries, handling HR activities, payroll, taxes, compliance, and benefits on your behalf. This eliminates the need for hiring your own lawyers, accountants, and payroll providers for US operations. However, if you plan to grant tax-efficient incentive stock options (ISOs) in the US, you should consult legal counsel to determine if a legal entity or a sub-plan is necessary for your equity structure.

PEOs are recommended when you have a registered US entity and plan to hire 5–200 employees (W-2 workers only). This is an ideal solution for an initial beachhead ahead of a full-scale expansion, but often takes longer than an EOR to establish. PEOs operate under a co-employment model, where the PEO handles payroll, benefits, tax administration, HR Information System (HRIS) solutions, and compliance, while your company remains the legal employer. Justworks is a leading PEO in the US, particularly focused on startups and tech companies looking for streamlined HR and benefits solutions.

When your headcount exceeds 200 in a single country, you might want to consider an Administrative Service Only (ASO)— a service similar to a PEO without co-employment and direct insurance benefits—or General Payroll.

US employees tend to pay high attention to health plans. If you’re hiring experienced team members, you’ll be expected to offer a policy covering family members too. The cost of the health insurance depends on the plan (in particular, which hospitals are included and the level of employee-deductible towards any claim), the level of coverage offered, and whether the employee requires insurance for themselves or a family. The cost is roughly $500–$2,000 per employee and employers typically cover 75–85 percent of premiums for single coverage and 67–75 percent for family coverage.

A new alternative is called Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangement (ICHRA), where a company contributes a fixed sum to an employee’s health plan. The employee is free to pick a plan that works best for their specific circumstances, creating more flexibility compared to company-selected health plans that are decided by HR/founders. Companies like Thatch are an alternative to this process and are worth considering.

Pension plans in the US are referred to as 401(k) plans. Employees make contributions which are deducted from payroll pre-tax and the company administers this transfer of funds. Companies can choose to contribute to an employee’s 401(k), which is a way to offer a competitive benefits package and could contribute to a positive employer brand when competing for talent.

Property

You will probably operate from a co-working space when you first land in the US. Not only does this offer flexibility, but you will need a US office address to apply for visas in advance of having anyone on the ground. However, once you have more than five people in the US, it is worth considering leasing your own office space, despite the additional cost and unused space. A permanent space can be fitted out to reflect your culture, and to a spec which matches your European HQ. It signals your commitment to the US, which will be noted by prospective hires, customers, and partners, as well as by employees.

Early US opportunity

Over 2018 and 2019, Yoto was busy fulfilling orders and learning from their early users to improve the product. They unveiled their second-generation player, designed with renowned creative agency Pentagram, in February 2020 just before COVID-19 hit. Even without the ability to travel or hire locally due to the pandemic, they still managed to launch in the US by June 2020. The company focused on establishing operations through partnerships rather than building a local team, leading them to find an excellent fulfillment partner in California, who could take receipt of Yoto’s products and fulfill customer orders.

Despite the challenges it presented, the pandemic turned out to be a critical turning point for Yoto. With lockdown fatigue, social distancing and mounting concerns about how screen time was filling the gap for kids, Yoto achieved $4 million in revenue in 2020, with the majority coming from Q4.

Building the US team

Yoto made their first US hire in late 2020. One of their investors connected them with Sarah Natchez, who has recently left her post as COO for a major soccer program for children throughout the US. Though it would be their most expensive hire to date and the entire interview process had to be conducted over Zoom, the connection was immediate.

Yoto chose New York over San Francisco as their operational HQ in the US. Sarah worked out of Brooklyn, and Ben and the Yoto team wanted to be close to major global publishers and content providers—the majority of whom, with the exception of Disney, were based in New York.

Even so, Yoto did almost everything out of London, including product, tech, engineering, and customer happiness. At the time, the company didn’t have the resources to extensively localize its marketing efforts. They tended to use the same creatives for campaigns in the US as they did in London and Paris, with minor things like spelling changed for different markets. Yoto sold direct to consumer and online, and all the brand and performance marketing was run out of London. Unlike a B2B company with a top-down sales motion, they didn’t need a big local salesforce.

Sarah did recruit a team around her, focused on marketing, content, and ops. They followed a split reporting structure, with Sarah as the overall US manager, but all US employees also belonging to and reporting into other teams based in the UK.

Remote-first and family-friendly work culture

Being “born in the crucible of COVID-19,” as Ben puts it, has shaped Yoto’s approach to culture, which is grounded in a hybrid working model. In the early days, it helped bridge the gap between US and UK operations, since everyone was working remotely initially. The nature of the product meant many team members had young children, so Yoto maintains flexible working arrangements. Ben himself traveled to the US around two to three times a year during the early expansion phase, proving it was possible to build trust and momentum without constant in-person presence.

Once travel restrictions were lifted, Yoto invested heavily in building relationships through regular in-person trips. Along with Ben, the UK-based Head of Content and Head of Marketing made frequent trips to New York, meeting with publishers and strengthening connections with the US team. Sarah also flew over regularly to London. This two-way flow of talent and ideas has helped prevent the US office from feeling like a satellite operation, which was crucial for attracting and motivating staff. Yoto continues to invest heavily into regular team gatherings and offsite events, including an annual multi-day global offsite known as “YotoFest” bringing the entire company together.

Localization, evolution, and distribution

From the initial $4 million in revenue in 2020, Yoto’s sales continued to double YoY, reaching $67 million in 2023—a validation of their strategy of maintaining lean operations while focusing on product excellence and customer experience. The company’s headcount is currently 180, and expected to grow by over 25 percent by the end of the year.

One of Yoto’s key learnings from their transatlantic journey has been to understand which content would resonate across markets in terms of stories, narration, and accents.

While Yoto initially focused on direct-to-consumer sales through their website and Amazon, they’ve recently begun expanding into retail. In October 2024, they launched in 1,900 Target stores, marking their first major retail partnership. However, retail remains their smallest channel, allowing them to maintain better margins and cash flow management.

Ben’s top tips for winning in the US

• Get (and pay for) good lawyers: Plan for significantly higher legal costs than what you’re used to at home.

• Talent management: Be thorough with background checks and referencing.

• Growth strategy: Consider starting with direct-to-consumer before moving into retail.

Leadership talent

The landscape for startup talent in Europe has transformed over the past decade. There’s now a deep pool of talent in Europe across all functions required by startups: technical, commercial and operational. It’s growing all the time, and extends well beyond London to Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, and elsewhere. However, when it comes to scaling experience—the knowledge that comes from taking a company through to hundreds of millions in revenue—the US remains dominant. There’s still only a handful of outlier tech successes built in Europe, and there are far more operators and executives who have experienced hypergrowth in the US.

On the journey from startup to listed company (or equivalent scale), we typically see two or three iterations of executive leadership, reflecting the evolution of capabilities that are required at different stages of growth. This isn’t a hard rule, and there might be one or two executives who stay and grow with the business through different stages. But on average, each function will see three successive leaders. We can characterize these stages as early, middle, and late.

The sequencing for these stages differs by business model. Below is a typical journey for a SaaS company, together with estimates for the number and location of experienced leadership candidates at each stage.

While the most ambitious European companies often seek experienced US talent, particularly at later stages, it’s worth noting that prior scale experience isn’t everything. It can make sense to recruit leaders who lack direct experience of scale but still demonstrate the potential and drive to grow into expanded roles. The key is finding the right balance between proven experience and growth potential, while ensuring cultural fit across both European and US contexts.

Sometimes you’ll find the perfect candidate, but they’re not in the perfect location—which might mean convincing them to move. It’s a common misconception that relocation is much easier within the US than in Europe. While this may be true for junior- or mid-level talent, it’s rare for executives, and particularly challenging to relocate executives from the West Coast. Since COVID-19, people are more protective of their lifestyle, and tend to look at wellbeing more holistically beyond just their career.

On the other hand, commuting is more common for executives in the US than in Europe and offers a way to broaden the talent pool. This doesn’t work between the East and West Coast as the distances are too long to be viable over a longer period of time. However, there are many examples of execs who commute weekly along the East Coast, particularly between New York and Boston, or West Coast between Los Angeles, Seattle, and the Bay Area, for instance.

For deeper insight and thorough guidance around scaling your leadership team, check out chapter 6 of Index’s Scaling through Chaos handbook.

Finding PMF in Europe

DataSnipper was founded in 2017 in Amsterdam by Jonas Ruyter, Maarten Alblas, and Kai Bakker, who noticed how burdensome accounting tasks were for auditors. They created a tool that embedded directly into Excel and automated repetitive parts of auditors’ workflows—letting auditors “snip” numbers from any file and automatically reconcile them against transactions, creating airtight audit trails with a click.

From the beginning, the founders grasped that they were building a product with the potential to appeal across geographies and industries.

The company bootstrapped for its first four years, growing primarily through remote sales. By the time they established their first US office in New York in 2022, approximately 40 percent of DataSnipper’s revenue was already coming from US customers, with Europe accounting for another 40 percent and the remainder spread across Asia and Africa. This success validated their approach of building and selling the product remotely before establishing physical presence. It also reflected the company’s focus on external auditors, a ubiquitous feature of every market—meaning Datasnipper’s TAM is globally distributed, rather than being skewed toward the US.

The sales operations were run remotely across the US from New York. Having US salespeople on board helped build trust with local clients.

Leadership location

While the US represented their largest market opportunity, the founders were reluctant to relocate there themselves. This created a leadership gap in their expansion efforts. Their first attempt—sending existing employees—proved challenging. In the end, Jonas took a hybrid approach, spending several three-month stints in the US to establish foundation and culture.

Eventually, they hired a VP of Sales from Ireland who had been living in the US for the past decade. She spent two months in Amsterdam onboarding before heading back to the US. She turned out to be an ideal compromise as someone who could bridge both cultures effectively. Jonas noted a particular cultural difference around direct communication:

Pricing strategy

DataSnipper’s US expansion significantly influenced their pricing strategy. They charge approximately 60 percent more for their software in the US compared to other markets, reflecting both higher willingness to pay and higher operational costs. Over a year ago, the company hired an external consultant to help them refine their approach— though they note it’s important for executives to make the final decisions themselves.

The US sales operation presented unique challenges around growth and hiring. With low base salaries and performance-based packages being the norm, compensation structures could also incentivize aggressive hiring to reach targets. Jonas often found himself fighting against the tendency to rapidly expand the sales team.

Looking forward: new verticals

Today, DataSnipper has 60–70 employees in the US across Marketing, Sales and Customer Success, while maintaining their engineering hub in Europe alongside a 60-person sales team in Amsterdam targeting the European market. They’ve also established smaller sales teams globally in locations including Tokyo, Sydney, and Mexico.

While their core market is currently external audit, DataSnipper is pushing aggressively into new verticals including internal audit and financial control teams, with the US as their primary focus market.

Given the strong focus on the US market, DataSnipper has made their second US-based executive hire: a CRO to lead US operations, who spent one and a half months in Amsterdam for onboarding. Until that point, the entire executive team had been in Amsterdam. In 2023, DataSnipper also brought in Vidya Peters, former COO at card-issuing and payment solutions company Marqueta, as their new CEO.

Distributed leadership teams

Building a successful transatlantic business implies that the company’s leadership will eventually be distributed across continents for at least some functions or some time period. This presents challenges, even for companies with a fully remote model. The critical factors to ensure success with a distributed leadership team is a willingness to travel and meet frequently, as well as doing some out-of-hours meetings. This is essential for any executive in an organization split between the US and Europe, and the expectation needs to be explicit before making any hire.

At the earlier stages, it’s important that leaders are co-located with their functional team, until there’s sufficient bench strength to cover day-to-day management. We see this most clearly with R&D leadership––engineering and product leadership will remain in Europe for several years, before it is possible to consider upleveling these roles in the US. But the recommendation applies to other functions too, such as marketing, finance, and operations. When a functional team is small, there is a significant advantage to co-location. It is easier to establish systems and processes, and to train up more junior members of staff.

Sales leaders in companies with a field sales model are an exception to the co-location model. Field sales teams, once you start scaling, are likely to be distributed by nature, and also composed of experienced individuals, so it is fairly common for these roles to be remote. That being said, it is still preferable if sales leaders are located with other leaders.

Engineering stays in europe

Building a truly transatlantic company requires thoughtful decisions about where to locate different functions. While sales, marketing and other commercial operations often gravitate to the US, successful European companies have discovered that keeping their engineering core in Europe offers unique advantages—even as they build global category leaders. Once you’ve built an engineering team that has in turn built your product, it’s risky to move or replace it. Additionally, European engineering teams offer a powerful combination of deep technical talent, stronger retention, and significantly lower costs. These benefits are amplified by timezone proximity between European tech hubs, enabling the kind of real-time collaboration that engineering teams thrive on.

However, we’re seeing an evolution in this pattern of building in Europe and selling in the US. While core R&D remains anchored in Europe, companies are establishing US engineering presence earlier in their journey than before. Our research shows that early-stage companies (pre-seed to series A) now typically have around 10 percent of their engineering headcount in the US—a significant shift from five years ago when this was rare. This shows up as a spike in the series A R&D headcount when we look at weighted averages between 2019 and 2024 research in the graph.

Even so, most companies only begin to properly build secondary engineering hubs in the US later on in the scaling journey, typically triggered by the hiring of a US-based CTO.

While engineering in Europe, commercial in the US remains a popular playbook for European founders, some founders split their teams according to talent availability. You might need to look at the US for more specialized engineering talent and engineering talent that has seen true scale. Moreover, having engineering in several different locations can be an advantage, since you’ll have technical support available round the clock with the teams split across different timezones.

Bringing in talent

The company’s transatlantic expansion was driven primarily by talent needs. After raising their series A in 2019, when Wayve had approximately 30 employees, they began looking to strategically build their US presence. While the UK provided exceptional AI talent, Silicon Valley offered complementary strengths in product, engineering, systems architecture, and embedded software.

On entering the US, Wayve decided to lean into being “different.” The company has focused on building an end-to-end AI solution for autonomous driving that can run on lean hardware, making it affordable, scalable, and adaptable. This contrasts with traditional autonomous driving systems that rely on expensive sensors and handcoded rules. So rather than compete head-to-head with better funded incumbents, Wayve instead embraced this outlier approach, which has helped to attract talent and engage partners.

They made their first hires in 2020 and 2021, with Vijay Badrinarayanan as VP of Autonomy (ultimately VP of AI), and Dan McCloskey as VP of Hardware. Initially, the US team worked remotely before the opening of the first US office. The two hires exemplified different approaches to talent acquisition: while Vijay came through Kendall’s personal network, Dan was identified through referrals and active sourcing.

Both hires reflected Wayve’s approach to identifying outlier talent: individuals who are contrarian, willing to take a risk and looking for an adventure. This has allowed them to build a strong US team in the red-hot talent market of the Bay Area. Crucially, Wayve never outsourced any of its hiring. They believed it was important to make A-grade “anchor” hires, who could then build the rest of the team around.

An initial misstep, though, was to have Vijay lead a team of 40 engineers based in the UK from where he sat in Silicon Valley. It ended up being super challenging to manage the timezones, and Wayve now tries to ensure there’s more overlap between the physical location of leaders and where their teams work.

Commercial validation

After clinching the crucial initial hires, Wayve pivoted to commercial expansion about six to nine months after raising their series B in early 2022. This shift required a more deliberate approach to pursuing partnerships and customers in the US market. A first key lesson was the importance of having a local demo facility to showcase Wayve’s technology in person.

The demo facility evolved into a substantial office presence, Alex visiting every month or two—helping to ensure that the US operation feels like a centerpiece of Wayve’s operations, not an outpost.

As Alex had deliberately modelled Wayve on successful US startups, it wasn’t too much of a struggle to adapt to the culture of the Valley.

Building a distributed organization

Growing through the pandemic, Wayve has developed a strong distributed and hybrid working culture. It has avoided having a center of gravity on one side of the Atlantic or a split of functions across geographies. Instead, Wayve has intentionally built a distributed organization where functions sit across their main hubs in London and Silicon Valley.

This approach enables effective collaboration across timezones, with UK hours between 3:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. becoming intense periods of overlap, while other hours provide space for focused work. One of the advantages is that there is always someone you can consult on any subject matter no matter where you are.

US investors and strategic partnerships

Wayve was always very deliberate about its fundraising, and brought in US investors already during its seed and series A funding rounds. Some of their investors are also key partners: Microsoft has provided cloud computing support for Wayve’s AI development, while NVIDIA collaborates on chip technology for autonomous driving systems. Alongside a collaboration with Uber, these partnerships were instrumental in establishing Wayve’s credibility in the US market.

While the competition is fierce in autonomous vehicles in the US, transatlantic expansion provided Wayve with valuable insights on the direction that their product development needs to take in order for the company to become a leader in the field. If you go where the market is big and the competition is fierce, you force yourself to build the best product out there.

Alex’s top tips for winning in the US

• Don’t use recruiting firms at the start—do it yourself. Finding and attracting key talent should be a core competency, not something to outsource.
• Build a team top-down: get anchor talent first, and then build the team around the anchor talent.
• There are benefits to not having one center of gravity, but be mindful of how leaders are distributed.
• Do things deliberately and with a clear business purpose. Don’t expand to the US for the sake of expansion, but only if there’s a clear business reason for doing so. Go where the biggest market is and where the competition is fierce. This forces you to build the best out there.

Marketing and branding

Magnets usually pivot their entire GTM focus to the US. The other archetypes need to make more deliberate choices. These are often trickiest when it comes to the marketing function, particularly in B2C, where marketing rather than sales drives customer acquisition.

The factors which influence the location of marketing teams include:

• Co-location. The benefits to co-locating marketing teams across sub-functions like paid digital, social, CRM, content, brand, and comms
• Talent. The availability of marketing talent in HQ locations. For example, world-class talent is much rarer in Helsinki than in London.
• Proximity to the product team. Strong collaboration is required between marketing and product, especially for acquisition, funnel-optimization, growth mechanics, and viral loops.
• Evolution of comms. As the comms aspect of marketing becomes more strategic with scale (encompassing internal comms, investor comms, and public policy), staying close to the CEO is important.
• Localization. Certain marketing subfunctions need localization, such as offline campaigns (TV/radio, outdoors, sponsorship), events, and content.

For archetypes other than Magnet, the marketing function is often distributed across regions with more emphasis on regional teams and/or proximity to the CEO in Europe.

Inherently international

When GetYourGuide was founded, the co-founders understood that a travel business is inherently global. Their business model required building a platform that could connect travelers worldwide with experiences in destinations across the globe—including tours, attractions, workshops, and activities.

The founders’ international background helped lower psychological barriers to entering the US market. Both Tao and co-founder Johannes attended American boarding school together for a year during a high school exchange program, which made the US feel like a natural expansion target.

Phase one: early presence and partnerships

GetYourGuide’s initial US expansion came earlier than most European startups would attempt. In 2012–2013, just a few years after founding, they established their first US presence in Las Vegas through a strategic partnership with TripAdvisor.

This partnership, which began between their seed and series A rounds, provided both immediate customer flow and valuable insights into the US market. The Las Vegas office focused primarily on customer service and sales support, with a small team managing supplier relationships.

The early US push was influenced not only by business necessity but also by American business culture, particularly Tony Hsieh’s approach to customer service at Zappos. This Las Vegas-based office peaked at around 11 people before the company would need to recalibrate its US strategy.

Phase two: rebuilding

In 2014, TripAdvisor acquired Viator—a GetYourGuide competitor. The result was that the partnership with TripAdvisor had to wind down, forcing GetYourGuide to rebuild its US presence from the ground up. But rather than retreating, the team doubled down on the US market.

In this second phase the company established new operations in San Francisco and New York, focusing on building direct relationships with major attractions and key suppliers in tourism hubs. They built a supply team with a stronger emphasis on sales and account management capabilities, creating lasting partnerships with prominent US attractions like the Empire State Building, Alcatraz in San Francisco, and the Grand Canyon Skywalk.

During this period, GetYourGuide learned important lessons about which functions should be localized versus centralized:

The team also discovered significant differences between hiring in Europe and the US, particularly at the leadership level.

Phase three: brand-building and leadership

By 2022, GetYourGuide had established strong supplier relationships across the US, but recognized the need to invest more heavily in brand awareness and marketing to American consumers. This third stage of expansion saw the company adding a significant marketing component to their US operations.

To ensure the success of this expanded effort, Tao relocated to the US for a year, serving as a bridge between European HQ and the US team. This move reflected one of GetYourGuide’s key learnings about international expansion: there’s no substitute for a founder or trusted executive spending serious time stateside.

During this phase, the company hired leaders with broader enterprise understanding and experience in scaling operations. They formed partnerships with Lonely Planet and TimeOut, American Express, Expedia, and Apple Maps to expand their distribution channels. They also secured exclusive experiences with iconic attractions such as One World Observatory in New York, allowing them to differentiate their offerings in a competitive market. The challenge was to create an authentically American operation while maintaining GetYourGuide’s core cultural identity.

The US market presented different and unique challenges in this third chapter for GetYourGuide. The team discovered that the US functions more like a continent than a single country, with diverse regional behaviors. Brand-building proved particularly challenging due to the crowded and expensive US advertising landscape, requiring highly targeted approaches across different regions.

Funding journey and US investors

GetYourGuide’s funding journey naturally brought them into contact with US investors early on, though this wasn’t necessarily by design. In the early 2010s, European VC was still developing, particularly for consumer businesses. In their first round of venture funding, all the German investors passed—it was only the American investors who understood the potential, and had the risk appetite and perspective on the market. US investors saw GetYourGuide as a long-term opportunity with high-payoff potential, while German investors were more narrowly focused on the path to profitability.

The company’s early rounds included investments from British firm PROfounders Capital, followed by US-based Spark Capital. This early exposure to US capital markets and investor expectations helped prepare the company for its later expansion stages.

Tao’s top tips for winning in the US

Tao has two key pieces of wisdom:

Scaling Magnets

Magnets are characterized by a pivot of the whole organization to address the US market. If the founder has moved and US commercial traction is established, this has a ripple-effect on all other functional teams and on the leadership. At the point of IPO or listing, the entire leadership team will be in the US, along with about 50 percent of the overall team.

Product

In the early stages, your product team needs to be close to engineering to allow for close collaboration. However, following a transatlantic build-out, the requirements of US customers will drive your product roadmap. It’s essential that your product team is sensitive to the needs of the US customers, hearing from them firsthand, or directly from US-based sales and customer success teams.

This can be achieved while keeping your product team co-located with engineering, but you need to put in place rigorous processes to foster communication and collaboration with the US GTM teams.

However, what we usually find is the creation of a dual product team. The majority (maybe 70 percent) of product managers with a technical orientation will remain in Europe alongside the engineering team. A smaller team of (usually more experienced) product managers with an explicit customer-orientation will be hired in the US.

At later stages when the product organization grows in complexity, there’s increased pressure to hire an experienced leader––someone with the authority to counterbalance demands from the sales team with product integrity and the ability to maintain a consistent and integrated product roadmap. The talent pool of proven Chief Product Officers is very heavily weighted to the US, which results in a further push towards the continent. This individual will often oversee engineering through a direct report from Europe-based VP of Engineering.

GTM

Sales and marketing organization and leadership will rapidly pivot to the US, reflecting the growth opportunity, growth focus, and the availability of talent. This naturally creates tensions during the transition, particularly if early GTM leadership is already in place in Europe.

Over time, you will probably appoint a VP of Sales in Europe, responsible for sales activity across the whole region, who reports into a US-based CRO. If European R&D is in a secondary hub, the European GTM hub may well be in a different location, London or Amsterdam being the most likely.

G&A

As the commercial focus shifts to the US, functions such as finance and legal will tend to follow, albeit at a slower pace. The “2.0” G&A leadership hires are likely to include a US-based CFO, General Counsel, and Chief People Officer.

History

Daniel Dines and Marius Turca founded DeskOver in Romania in 2005. It was a lifestyle business, making $300,000 a year providing automation libraries and a Software Development Kit (SDK). Developers discovered the software through SEO and Adwords, and their users included teams at IBM and Microsoft.

Daniel’s eyes were opened to the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) opportunity when a customer told him that they were using DeskOver for task automation.

The shift to RPA

In 2012, with a team of 10, they built a basic RPA product aimed at SMBs. At the time, they were bootstrapping the company through consulting revenues, which was a distraction.

With hindsight, the team felt that they went in the wrong direction for a few years.

The turning point came in 2014 when they were contacted by a major Indian Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) who was pioneering RPA, and who wanted to work with DeskOver. Daniel sent a team of three to India for three months, to get immersed in the problem and implementation.

From DeskOver to UiPath

Between 2014 and 2015 the team grew from 10 to 100. They grew their enterprise customers from 100 to 700, and in 2015 changed their name to UiPath.

Customer leads were still almost all inbound, through a free-trial offer. But deepening relationships with systems integrators (Cap Gemini, Cognizant, and others) created a strong channel to enterprises. EY Romania was a key strategic partner, and they got UiPath in front of global corporations.

In 2015, UiPath raised a $1.6 million seed round, and flipped to a US TopCo.

The path to scale

In 2016, they reached $5 million ARR through an inside sales team in Romania, who sold remotely into the US.

Enterprise products were rolled out, and offices opened in London and Bangalore.

Shift to the US

2017 proved to be a huge year for UiPath on multiple fronts. In January, they hired a US Sales leader following a search process. He was solid, experienced, and ran the US until recently, building inside and field sales teams. A top Romanian sales rep moved over to support him. Pre-sales was covered through a lot of travel by the Romanian team.

Daniel started spending four or five months per year in New York, often with his wife and baby.

In February, Forrester ranked UiPath as a leader in RPA, which made a material difference.

In April, a large series A provided fuel for expansion. By this point they were servicing 200 enterprises (40 percent Europe, 30 percent US, 30 percent Asia).

By the end of 2017, they had also built a field sales team of 40 across Europe, the US, and Japan. They achieved $45 million in ARR, and doubled their direct sales contribution. Overall, headcount grew from 250 to 500, across 10 offices.

Over the next two years, hypergrowth continued, to $150 million ARR in 2018, and $300 million in 2019. In parallel, Daniel raised three huge rounds, taking the company to a latest series E valuation of $10.2 billion.

Engineering and product

Securing engineering talent in Romania was initially tough, because employees were not willing to take the risk of joining an unproven startup. But there was some success, including a 2016 developer hire who now runs the Romanian engineering team.

In 2018, UiPath opened an additional engineering center in Bangalore. They saw AI/ML integration as key to product innovation, so they hired a CPO in Seattle from Microsoft. This led to building a 100-strong engineering and product team there, focused on innovation. However, the core engineering is still mostly carried out in Bucharest.

Scaling Anchors

In the Anchor archetype, building out a transatlantic organization involves the creation of a condensed mirror-organization across GTM and General and Administrative (G&A) functions in the US, and hiring a US President. Expansion tends to happen later in the journey, by which point “2.0” European functional leaders are likely to be in place. The US is not expected to become the dominant market in terms of revenue share, although it may become the highest-revenue single country (20–30 percent of total). At the point of IPO or listing, the leadership team will remain entirely or mostly in Europe, along with over 70 percent of the overall team.

Matrix management in the Anchor model can be tricky. With most functional leadership sitting in Europe, it’s usually best to give significant autonomy to the US, so that they can optimize for US market needs. In practice, this means dual-reporting lines for US functional heads, but with the stronger line into the US President for sales, marketing, and customer success functions. Ideally, the US President will be responsible for the full US P&L, although this depends upon your business model.

Unlike in the case of a Magnet, the product function usually stays in Europe alongside engineering, although you may scale to having one or two US-based product managers focused on ongoing localization.

Building a global super-app from day one

Revolut was founded in London 2015 by Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko with the mission of making everything to do with money simpler, faster, cheaper, and more transparent. Storonsky, who had previously worked as a trader at Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers, knew how frustrating it was for consumers to endure fees and bad exchange rates while traveling. He partnered with Yatsenko, who brought deep technical expertise from his background as a software developer at Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse.

The founders’ combined depth of knowledge about finance and engineering proved crucial in building what would become a global financial super-app. Starting with a prepaid debit card and app focused on currency exchange, they rapidly expanded to include multiple financial products and services. By focusing on cross-border foreign exchange (FX) and payments at the outset, the more fragmented landscape of Europe was a better starting point for Revolut than the US, which is a single currency. The company developed its own core banking platform to service all jurisdictions and products—a technical achievement that had previously eluded both traditional banks and startup banks. They maintained a single app that recognized users’ locations and personalized their experience accordingly, allowing for efficient scaling across markets.

Using European success to build a global foundation

By 2018, Revolut had become a licensed bank in Lithuania, allowing it to offer deposit and lending services across the European Union. This regulatory foundation, combined with their technical infrastructure, positioned them for global expansion. The company now has 40 million users globally, operates in over 35 countries, and allows fee-free spending in more than 140 currencies. Yet its ambition is even bigger. Speaking to Index Partner, Martin Mignot at Slush, founder Nik said:

Early US strategy: taking a patient approach

Revolut launched its business product in the UK in 2017, and began preparing for US expansion the following year. It launched its retail product in the US in 2020 with a US-based team. James Gibson, who leads Revolut Business, moved to the US in 2021 to drive product growth and build out the local team.

In 2022, Revolut appointed Sid Jadoja as US CEO, based in San Francisco. Jadoja had joined as Chief Banking Officer in 2021, bringing valuable local market expertise. Revolut has country leaders reporting directly to Nik, the founder.

Experimenting with products: let performance guide decision making

Revolut took an execution-focused approach to the US market, letting product performance guide their strategy.

This iterative approach helped reveal clear market differences. In the US, they found particular traction with international payments and FX services, while seeing less demand for spend management features due to strong local competition. They also spotted a big opening in remittances.

Team structure and culture: balancing global ambitions with local execution

Revolut maintains a highly distributed team structure in the US, with personnel across operations, risk, compliance, finance, and product. Rather than concentrating entire functions in specific locations, teams are decentralized.

However, Revolut is also very intentional about maintaining its culture by moving people around where necessary. The company often sends European team members to work from the US office, because they carry the company’s culture with them. Gibson doesn’t advise being remote or distributed at the start.

When it comes to scaling engineering teams, Revolut has tried to balance investing in the core product versus market-specific customization. While it’s tempting to create separate engineering teams for each market, this often leads to fragmentation.

Revolut’s top tips for winning in the US

• Build culture through people: Rather than trying to transplant culture through policies or documents, move actual people. Gibson’s rule of thumb is that, where possible, over 30 percent of new office staff should come from existing locations.
• Experiment fast, scale slowly: Launch products quickly, but scale investment only when you see traction. Don’t overinvest before finding PMF, but be ready to double-down when you see success.
• Maintain technical unity: Resist the temptation to create separate engineering teams for each market. Focus on building a strong core product that is configurable across markets, rather than creating a completely separate product per market that can lead to fragmentation and create a lot of technical debt.
• Treat it like a startup: Approach US expansion as if you’re building a new company, not just extending an existing one. Be prepared to adapt your product and approach based on local market feedback while maintaining alignment with global operations.

Scaling Pendulums

The Pendulum archetype poses the toughest leadership and management challenges in a transatlantic organization. Distributed leadership works best when functional teams are built on a distributed basis from early on. In fully remote teams, this approach is part of the DNA of the company. But if your initial engineering team is centralized, a deliberate “remote-first” decision needs to be taken when hiring later for functions such as marketing and finance.

Early days: PLG across the world

In the early days, Miro was driving organic growth across all markets. They found the product was most relevant in developed markets that were well versed in design thinking and visual collaboration. The team optimized search for these markets and achieved $600,000—$700,000 ARR with product-led growth (PLG) and organic marketing channels.

US testing to a repeatable playbook

By analyzing their subscriptions data, Andrey and his team saw that there were a number of users from big companies in the US. This spurred them to go to the US and try to take these initial few user subscriptions and start upselling to corporates. Andrey spent some time in the US in 2015, hiring a part-time leader and few junior sales folks in the Bay Area.

At the time, Miro was growing slowly and profitably and didn’t have huge amounts of money to spend on doubling down on the US. They chose to hire a Head of Sales who worked part-time, for a few hours a day. Miro discovered that, typically, the larger US companies had experimental budgets of up to $20,000 to test new software tools. The team priced their product and licenses at $15,000 for 50 users and by 2017 had grown to $1 million in enterprise sales and a few million in self-serve.

Building US network: seeking excellence

Andrey spent a lot of time in the US, meeting SaaS leaders, to calibrate what top talent looks like.

He looked for candidates on AngelList, thinking that this would be a hub for entrepreneurially minded people. By filtering for people with experience in other startups with a PLG approach, he reached out to lots of people and had positive conversations, which ultimately led to his first Head of Sales and Head of Marketing hires.

He also used LinkedIn, asking his network for introductions and then asking new people he met for further introductions. Attending conferences in the US also proved a good way to meet people. Hearing from leaders on stage, he was able to identify who resonated with him, spending time with them after their talks and emailing them with follow-ups. This allowed him to meet Elena Verna, who advised the team on growth and ultimately became Interim Head of Marketing.

Ready to scale: investment in the US

In 2018, Miro raised a $26 million series A from Accel and was ready to scale faster. From 2018 to 2019, Andrey spent significant time in the US hiring the team and figuring out a scalable GTM motion.

Andrey worked his way up to recruiting more and more experienced talent, believing that the leadership team is crucial in building out the company. He found that it is very challenging to make decisions based on interviews alone, as there were many candidates that both he and his leadership team were impressed by. It was through detailed referencing that they filtered out the candidates who would not be a fit.

Andrey hired Miro’s first CRO, Zhenya Loginov, who was previously at Segment and Dropbox, when the company hit $12 million in ARR (30 percent coming from enterprise).

Org design with most tech in Europe

The US team is mainly GTM hires in the Bay Area and Austin. Europe had both GTM hires and tech hires with the main tech hubs in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Yerevan. Over time, via acquisitions, Miro has acquired tech talent in the US.

Up until 2022, Andrey was intentional about optimizing for hubs when hiring executives. Nowadays, he is more focused on hiring the best leadership talent globally. They now have their Chief People Officer and CRO in Amsterdam, their Head of Design in Paris and their Chief Technology and People Officer (CTPO) in Boston.

Competing globally

In 2024, Andrey spent significant time in the US, traveling there seven times. His focus has been on connecting with customers and strategic partners for the launch of their new product.

Miro’s biggest competitors are all West Coast- based companies. So, for talent that wants to work on a global level scale with tens of millions of users in the productivity/collaboration space, while staying in Europe, there are no other major companies. That’s a huge advantage for Miro when it comes to hiring high-caliber people.

Going head-to-head with top US companies means that Miro has to attract top talent in the US as well.

Miro’s former CRO, Bay Area-based Sangeeta Chakraborty, shares some of her reflections on what attracted her to the company.

Miro’s top tips for winning in the US

• Spend time with your US customers.
• Build a network in the US and calibrate your bar for excellence.
• Continue to uplevel your executive team to match the needs of every stage of the company growth.

Scaling Telescopes

Telescopes are able to build a customer base in the US with little US headcount. The core customer acquisition channel is usually self-serve growth, which is run by teams back in Europe. Instead, US hiring tends to center around two functions:

• Business Development and Partnerships, as key distribution and technology partners are in the US.
• Customer Support, proportional to the size of your US customer base.

As you scale, you will probably hire a VP Business Development based in the US, to run this function, although it will never become a large team. In terms of headcount, the US support team is likely to become larger, depending on the relative percent of your US customer base. If the majority of your support team ends up being in the US, it might make sense to have your global team leader there too—i.e., VP Customer Support. Most other functional leaders are likely to remain in Europe, even if they are individuals relocated from the US.

An important caveat is that in B2B, Telescopes have a tendency to evolve into Magnets. This happens when a software product, based on a freemium or bottom-up growth model, starts to get traction with larger enterprises. In this case, the GTM model shifts towards sales, which requires people on the ground. Zendesk, Dropbox, and Slack all evolved in this way. When this happens, the gravitational forces described in the Magnet model kick in, drawing the founder/ CEO and the leadership team towards the US.

Large-scale structural changes in ways of work can also produce shifts in archetype and expansion strategies. For example, Typeform started off with a strategy more aligned with the Telescope archetype, keeping most of the team and executives in Europe, and shifted towards a Magnet archetype prompted by the pandemic and the rise of remote work.

Ilkka founded Supercell in 2010 with five friends who shared a vision of letting game developers, not executives, set the tone and direction of the business. Over the preceding decade, Ilkka had already founded, run and sold gaming companies, but this was his most ambitious and experimental venture to date. The bet paid off: Ilkka led Supercell to become Europe’s first tech startup to surpass a $10 billion valuation at the time Tencent bought the majority of the company in 2016.

Early US strategy

In the early 2010s, building a truly global gaming company meant having a significant US presence for three key reasons:

• Market size: The US was still the world’s largest gaming market.
• Strategic partnerships: All major platform partners (Google, Apple, Facebook) were headquartered on the West Coast of the US.
• Talent access: The US had unmatched depth in consumer marketing expertise.

After raising their series A from Accel in 2011, Ilkka took an unconventional approach to US expansion. The plan was to keep the creative and technical talent in Europe while building out the marketing and some of the community functions in the US. But instead of rushing to build a large team, he focused on making one exceptional hire who could act as a true partner in building Supercell’s US presence. Working from Accel’s offices in Palo Alto, Paananen used a headhunter and personally interviewed close to 20 senior executives for a US GM role, including exceptional candidates from Zynga, EA, and Activision.

This search led them to Greg Harper, an experienced serial entrepreneur about 10 years Paananen’s senior, with extensive industry networks. Despite his title as a GM, he was an extremely close partner to Ilkka, almost like a co-CEO. Greg then went on to build the early US team, with around 80 percent of the initial hires in marketing and the rest in community management. Supercell was incredibly intentional about hiring throughout this process, only bringing five or six people onboard in the first year. They had a preference for hiring exceptional people at a slower pace, instead of going fast and making suboptimal hires.

Breakthrough moments

A pivotal moment in Supercell’s US journey came in 2013 when its still-tiny team created a viral Super Bowl TV ad featuring Liam Neeson as “Angry Neeson.” The ad became one of the most viewed ads in Super Bowl history and brought Supercell widespread attention in the US.

Having boots on the ground catalyzed other serendipitous connections. Through their US network, the Supercell team connected with the original writers of The Simpsons, who turned out to be hardcore Clash of Clans fans. This led to a series of short films called Clashorama that garnered over half a billion views on YouTube.

Culture

Supercell’s core philosophy puts developers at the center of everything—all other functions, including marketing, and even the office of the CEO, exist to support the game teams. Their creative freedom is protected above almost anything else. This reflected Paananen’s belief in empowering creative talent, but some US hires struggled to internalize this approach.

Supercell’s culture also reflected its Finnish origins, where there’s a strong emphasis on egalitarianism, humility, and getting things done—values the team learned they needed to bring into the onboarding process.

Running small, non-hierarchical, and dynamic teams that are empowered to execute can be an unfair advantage in tackling the US. Yet to make it work, you need to trust your team—a core pillar of Ilkka’s leadership philosophy. Trust proved particularly valuable in aligning the team between Europe and the US: by treating Greg almost as a co-founder, with significant equity and real autonomy, Supercell avoided many of the control issues that often plague international expansion.

Evolution: opening a US studio

A decade after founding, Supercell took another bold step by opening their first North American game development studio. This move was driven by Paananen’s recognition that while Europe led in mobile gaming talent—with the likes of Supercell in Finland, King in the UK, and Dream Games in Turkey—the US had superior expertise in PC gaming. As Supercell explored expanding beyond mobile, it made sense to try building out a creative team in the US.

True to Supercell’s philosophy of autonomy, the North American studio operates independently with full creative freedom. It also works differently from an operational perspective too, starting with a remote-first work structure—a strong contrast with Helsinki’s strong in-person culture.

Ilkka’s top tips for winning in the US

• Talent is everything.
• Hire people who are more senior than what you think you need.
• Be mentally prepared that this is going to be very expensive and you will need to give out a lot of equity. But think about it in terms of growing the pie, not on shielding your share.
• Once you have the right people, trust them 100 percent and let them execute.
• If it doesn’t work out, make changes to the team and start over.
• Invest in cultural integration, not just business integration.

Internal Communication

Cultures are unique, but there is a common scaffolding of practices and processes that will support and shape your culture. While these are important for all organizations as they scale, some of them are particularly relevant to US expansion:

All-hands

All-hands need to be inclusive of both your Europe and US teams, and they need to be high impact and high production. Planning, agenda-setting, and speaking should involve individuals from both continents.

Global and team offsites

Holding regular, at least annual, global team offsites can really help with alignment. At scale, they require a huge effort, and a large budget, to organize. But they are a unique touch-point to strengthen team bonding and trust. Annual offsites are usually three-day events, ideally held in a neutral, non-HQ geography, with sufficient travel time, and a generous time allocation for social activities built in.

In addition to global offsites, it may make sense for distributed functions to also hold periodic offsites. The more distributed the team, the more frequent these offsites should be.

Documentation

A major learning from fully remote organizations is the importance of scrupulous documentation of meetings, decisions, and processes. Tools such as Notion, Slack, and GSuite make this easier to organize and share. For example, where a function (e.g., sales, or marketing) holds a weekly global meeting, maintain a single rolling record of what is discussed and agreed. This avoids confusion, and also makes it faster for new team members to onboard.

AI notetakers such as Granola and Fireflies have emerged as powerful allies for distributed teams. They can transcribe, summarize, and extract action items from meetings automatically, providing comprehensive documentation for team members who couldn’t attend live sessions.

Staffing project teams across offices

Set up projects with multi-geo staffing, to promote close collaboration. This is particularly important for internal projects concerning HR or business systems. It will slow down execution, but improve buy-in, which is more important for projects that directly impact culture.

Weekly executive meetings

Once you have a leadership team that is distributed across geographies, you need to formalize the rhythm of exec meetings. There should be a weekly all-execs call, and the CEO should do one-on-ones with each of their direct reports weekly or fortnightly.

Hiring an EA or a chief of staff

A great Executive Assistant can be a game- changer for enabling smoother communication in the leadership team, and for enforcing necessary formal processes. They will often prepare the agenda for executive meetings, as well as tracking follow-through on decisions taken and actions committed to. An alternative approach is to have a Chief of Staff to the CEO who takes on this responsibility.

Engagement surveys

Once you operate across multiple geographies, team sentiment will diverge. Smaller US offices will probably feel ignored to some extent. The original HQ office can also feel downbeat if there is a sense that influence is shifting towards the US. Although the broad outline of these dynamics is predictable, it is helpful to track sentiment through employee engagement surveys or pulse - tracking tools. Once you are at a headcount of over 400, with significant geographical spread, you should have a dedicated internal comms manager, who can also coordinate actions to address employee concerns.

Employee onboarding is a key period for reinforcing values and shaping culture. The ideal is a global onboarding process, which brings together all new hires for a shared program of induction and learning. In reality, however, global onboarding can be prohibitively expensive, and is instead run on a regional basis, maybe with some functional grouping.

Working across borders

When you are running an organization across continents, you should be explicit with candidates about the impact this has on your culture, and what it may require from them. For example, you will benefit from having night-owls in Europe, and early-birds in the US, for roles which require extensive collaboration.

At Index, we have implemented a “study abroad” program that allows new investor and strategist hires to spend time in other offices with a standard agenda under a buddy system. This helps facilitate collaboration across offices.

Communication Infrastructure

The pandemic forced everyone, even in traditional corporates, to rely on tools like Zoom and Slack to stay in touch and work together. With US expansion, investing in these tools becomes even more important. When it comes to video conferencing, there is a lot you can do to ensure that you’re optimizing how well people collaborate.

How to make the most of video calls

Norms about video calls have accelerated rapidly in recent years. With the normalization of remote meetings and the likelihood of less flying in our future, it’s essential to use video calls to improve how distributed teams work and communicate.

In a VC firm, the difference between success or failure can be boiled down to a small number of critical investment pitches by entrepreneurs, and votes by the partnership. Smooth and trusted communication is therefore an existential issue.

Here are 10 best practices that we have established over the years:

• All offices should be equipped with equally good video conferencing tech. Don’t provide a higher standard for HQ versus local offices.
• eep cameras and screens as close to eye-level as possible—not mounted higher up on a wall or corner.
• Be aware of room furnishings. Too much glass and no soft furnishings will result in poor audio quality.
• Be aware of room size, and participants’ distance from the microphone(s).
• Include a wired option for connection. Don’t rely solely on wireless, just in case of problems.
• Either everybody in a call should be using video, or no one should. Having one or two people dialing in to a video conference or meeting rarely works. Unable to read body language, they might remain silent, or else continue talking way longer than appropriate.
• When across more than three locations, it is often better to have each individual join a video call from their desk, rather than room-to-room groups.
• Opt for transparency over sound quality. Avoid one room (location) going on mute. This creates a bad dynamic where a side-conversation in the silent room, perhaps with gesturing and chuckles, can provoke irritation and even paranoia in the other location, unable to hear what is being said.
• Take care to read body language. Pick up on potential frustrations, air them, and adjust meeting dynamics to ensure things run smoothly.
• Have a “no post-mortems” policy. When the video has switched off, the meeting has ended. Avoid sub-groups “meeting after the meeting.” It can impact later interpretation of what was decided.

Travel and Mobility

A recurring theme when talking to founders about transatlantic operations is the need for extensive travel to and from Europe. This applies to the founders themselves, to the rest of the leadership, and also to the broader team.

Enabling this cadence of travel requires a large budget, as well as a culture and policies that signal to your team that it’s something to be encouraged. At Adyen, travel is the biggest line item in the budget, after salaries. They allow employees lots of flexibility to move between offices as they wish, covering travel and alternative-accommodation costs, for weeks or even months. This facilitates team members getting to know each other across different offices, and is also part of their employer branding.

Renting a company apartment in the US can be a cost-effective and creative way to encourage mobility. It also has the side benefit of promoting team bonding.

Blending US and European Business Culture

Throughout this book, we’ve touched on differences in business culture between the US and Europe. These pop up everywhere, but require intentional education and adaptation, to avoid a sense of “them and us.”

To summarize some common sticking points and differences that need to be addressed:

• Hiring processes: US candidates are generally more confident and better at selling themselves.
• Compensation: US candidates get paid more, and are more aware of their market value.
• Psychological contract: US employment laws are looser than in Europe, and so is the general employer-company bond, which tends to be more transactional.
• International outlook: Europeans think internationally by nature, while much of the US is domestically oriented.
• Etiquette and protocols: There is more sensitivity around physical privacy in the US, and around data privacy in Europe.

Geneva to London

Index Ventures was founded on the belief that exceptional entrepreneurs could come from anywhere and be anyone. There was no good reason for investors to focus only on those companies coming out of the West Coast of the US. Instead, the firm’s thesis was that the world was going to become more and more like Silicon Valley—and Index could both accelerate and benefit from that transformation. While Index’s three co-founders lived in Geneva, Switzerland, they’d all studied and worked in the US, which gave them a global perspective from the start.

Sourcing pan-European investments required significant travel, as no single hub dominated. Geneva is centrally located on the continent, so Neil Rimer and his co-founders optimized for personal network and support base. Their early successes came from underserved areas such as the Nordics and the Baltics, which validated their pioneering global approach to investment.

Five years later, Danny Rimer (Neil’s brother) joined Index after having spent years immersed in the US tech ecosystem. Danny’s arrival was the catalyst for opening a London office. Being in London positioned Index in Europe’s emerging tech hub, with the deepest ties to transiting US entrepreneurs and investors.

Decision to expand to San Francisco

Nine years later, Index had established a leading position in European VC, and the offices in Geneva and London were in balance. The firm set its sights on building a permanent presence in the Valley, even though this was not part of the original vision.

Index was already making 30 percent of its investments in the US, and Danny was spending one week a month on the West Coast. Expansion would broaden investment opportunities, and allow the team to better serve their internationalizing entrepreneurs.

Mike Volpi, who had joined Index in 2009, expressed an interest in returning to the US. Between Mike and Danny, there was a pairing which could transmit both the formal business processes, and the informal cultural DNA needed to make the leap.

Deep US commitment

Index planned with a ten-year horizon in the US, to bring it to the same level of competitiveness as in Europe. Ensuring that the European team appreciated the level of investment for US success required constant attention.

Nine years in, the San Francisco office headcount matches London, and the Index portfolio is evenly balanced between the US and Europe.

Brand position

Adapting from market leadership in Europe, to challenger brand status in the US, required localization of both strategy and messaging.

Much of the communication had to be “translated,” including media relationships and marketing hires.

The US team did not initially have access to enough quality series A deals, so focused on series B. Achieving a marquee investment by leading Dropbox’s series B (October 2011) gave them the initial credibility they needed.

They located the office near Dropbox in San Francisco, rather than on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, which was an immediate differentiation from other VCs. They invested in taking out a lease and hiring an architect, to build a space that truly communicated Index’s culture and design aesthetic.

The need to present a professional face led to hiring two highly experienced EAs from the outset, who were able to maximize Danny and Mike’s efficiency.

Leveraging their newcomer status created co-investment opportunities with local US VCs, who found Index less challenging to their brand than other competitors.

Success metrics included association with household brand names, such as Dropbox, and what caliber of talent was saying “yes” to joining. Only later did the metrics converge with Europe: how many top series A opportunities were being seen, and being won, relative to competitors.

Nine years on, and with a stronger brand position in the US, Index has come full circle, with a more unified story in both continents.

Communication

Despite internationalization, Index was determined to remain “one team” (which remains a core Index value), avoiding any sense of HQ, or hierarchy between offices.

Even though the US team was smaller to begin with, Index invested in quality experiences, on par with Europe. There was a lot of communication to ensure that those in Europe understood the need for this investment.

The team had to begin formalizing processes for internal comms. They moved Monday partner meetings and company pitches to later in the European afternoon to balance the pain with the San Francisco team, and stepped up responsiveness to calls and emails. They avoided disuniting language such as ‘West Coast (or Europe) are thinking this.’

Over years, detailed best practice emerged around video conferencing (see earlier breakout box for details). But relationships are built face-to-face, so the full partnership also meets in person five times a year, shifting locations each time.

New York office

In 2022, Index Ventures opened its New York office. The idea was to create a “bridge” between Europe and the US, allowing the Index team to span 10 timezones and capture 14 of the world’s top 20 startup ecosystems. The launch solidified Index’s position as a truly global VC firm, but the ambitions were higher. Index didn’t want New York just to be an outpost, but hoped to make the firm a key player in the New York ecosystem, if not the number one investor.

Index appointed two partners to lead the effort: one from London (Martin Mignot) and one from San Francisco (Shardul Shah). This dual leadership ensured a balance of European and American perspectives. The initial team was carefully curated to include experienced investors from every one of Index’s offices, creating a diverse group with varied networks and expertise across multiple ecosystems. They adopted a mantra of “Team—Bridge—Win,” and structured their objectives and key results (OKRs) each quarter around each of those three buckets. It became a bit of a running joke, but it was hugely effective in driving high performance in the team.

Index also implemented several initiatives to maintain a cohesive culture across offices. These included a “study abroad” program for new hires, as well as concrete deliverables that required colleagues to collaborate across offices.

As with the San Francisco opening, the location and nature of the physical office was a crucial decision, as a way to signal the firm’s values to founders. While competitors were set up in Soho or Union Square, Index eventually chose the Meatpacking District—somewhere with a lot of character, a lot of history, that’s both convenient and off the beaten path. The fact it was highly walkable resonated with Index’s European roots, while its industrial past and recent revitalization offered a rare blend of vibrancy and quiet. The office itself was designed to be a place that people wanted to come to.

Not everything went smoothly. An early initiative to engage in charitable activities as a way to embed in the local community proved challenging, as it was difficult to find a unified cause that resonated with everyone. The team pivoted to a more individualized approach, allowing team members to share causes they were personally passionate about. When you’re just fighting to exist and make something happen, it might be too early to give back, when you don’t really have anything to “give” yet.

Several years in, Index’s success in New York can be measured in their coverage ratio (the percentage of deals in their target market that they’ve seen and interacted with)—which improved from an initial 30–35 percent to 70–75 percent. Similarly, their win rate in closing desired deals has been 100 percent in recent quarters. The Index journey highlights that success in a new market comes from bringing a unique perspective while fully committing to integrating into the local ecosystem.

Conclusion

Over the course of this book, we’ve tried to offer a structured but flexible framework for founders trying to build global businesses out of Europe and Israel. We’ve outlined archetypes that can guide your journey to the US, explored lessons from successful outlier companies, and provided practical advice on everything from hiring to location strategy. This guidebook represents the collective wisdom of hundreds of founders who have navigated this path before you.

Yet the path to building a category-defining company is neither straight nor readily mapped. It’s a deeply personal road that you must walk (or run) on for yourself. The archetypes we’ve outlined are heuristic devices to help you navigate the inevitable challenges, but the reality is that exceptional companies defy simple categorization, and rarely follow neat trajectories.

The most successful founders don’t follow other people’s playbooks. Instead, they understand principles, absorb patterns, and adapt them to their own unique vision and circumstances. Likewise, the best advisors and investors function more like coaches than instructors. Rather than telling you what to do, they help guide you towards your own answers by challenging your assumptions and expanding your thinking. They’re in your corner, but they know how to give you the space to do what you do best.

As we look to the future, no doubt many of the patterns and paradigms laid out in this book will shift. Founders are increasingly focused on building companies for global markets from day one—an ambition that now feels more attainable than ever before. The distinctions between European companies expanding to the US and truly global companies born without geographic constraints are beginning to blur.

As you chart your own course across the Atlantic and beyond, remember that the best global companies of the future won’t be defined by where they started—but will be remembered for their vision, execution, and ability to adapt as they grow.

⁸ Following the drafting of this section, Google announced its intent to acquire Wiz for $32 billion, subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.

Glossary of acronyms

Thank you

We would like to extend a special thanks to Wilson Sonsini, Dealroom, Remote, Daversa Partners, and GBx Global for sharing expertise, content, and data.