I take the Milan-San Francisco flight about once a month. It's eleven hours. Enough time to notice that you're not just changing time zones — you're changing operating systems.

I work for a company based in Menlo Park. My clients are in Milan, Zurich, London. I went to business school in Paris. I've worked in Doha and Riyadh. My phone switches languages three times a day.

This isn't a flex. It's context. Because the thing I think about most is how these two worlds — Silicon Valley and Europe — look at the same technology and see completely different things.

Speed vs. rigor

In Palo Alto, a startup will ship a product, get feedback, break something, fix it, and ship again — all in a week. The mentality is: if you're not embarrassed by v1, you launched too late.

In Milan, a bank will schedule a meeting to discuss whether to schedule a pilot. The mentality is: if something goes wrong, someone's career is over.

Both are rational. Both make sense in their context. But the mismatch creates a massive gap.

When I sit in a room in Silicon Valley and talk about European banking timelines, people literally don't believe me. "You mean it takes 18 months to go from demo to contract?" Yes. Sometimes longer.

When I sit in a room in Milan and talk about how fast AI is moving in the US, the reaction is usually a polite version of "that's nice, but we have regulators."

What Europe gets right

I'm not here to say Silicon Valley is better. It's not. It's faster, yes. But it's also reckless in ways that would be catastrophic in financial services.

Europe has something that Silicon Valley consistently undervalues: institutional trust. When a European bank deploys something, it works. It's compliant. It doesn't blow up in six months because someone skipped the security review.

The EU AI Act is a perfect example. Silicon Valley sees it as a burden. I see it as a competitive advantage for European companies that build compliance into the product from day one. If you're already compliant, you have a moat that no Silicon Valley startup can cross without spending a year and a fortune on lawyers.

What Europe gets wrong

The problem isn't caution. The problem is that caution becomes an excuse for inaction.

I've lost count of how many times I've heard "we need to study this more" from banks that have been "studying" AI for three years without deploying anything. It's the pilot trap in its purest form. At some point, studying becomes procrastinating with a PowerPoint budget.

The other thing Europe gets wrong is thinking locally. The AI race is global. The bank in Milan isn't just competing with the bank in Rome — it's competing with neobanks, big tech, and financial infrastructure companies that don't care about national borders. The bank of 2030 will serve 10x the clients with half the people — the ones who don't adapt will be left behind.

Where the magic happens

The most interesting things I see are happening at the intersection. European companies with Silicon Valley DNA. Or Silicon Valley companies that take European regulation seriously.

That's where I operate, and frankly, it's a pretty empty space. Most people pick a side. Most companies are either "move fast and break things" or "move slow and write a report about it." Understanding what Silicon Valley knows about failure is part of bridging that gap.

The opportunity is in being both. Fast enough to matter. Rigorous enough to be trusted.

It's uncomfortable. You're always too slow for one room and too fast for the other. But I think it's where the future is being built.

And from what I can see from seat 14A on the MXP-SFO flight, it's a future worth writing about.