The transatlantic divide in capital markets has rarely felt more pronounced. If you are building a venture-backed company in Europe today, you could be forgiven for feeling that some of the traditional exit doors are not so much locked as guarded by a thoroughly disinterested doorman.

Look across the pond and the contrast is stark. American public markets are currently running what can only be described as a full-blown IPO bonanza, listing companies at a pace that creates genuine exit optionality for venture-backed businesses, real liquidity for investors, and that three-letter metric every LP whispers about in their sleep: DPI. The US public market is not merely a destination; it is a wealth-creation machine running at full tilt. Europe, by contrast, is enduring what can charitably be described as a dry spell. Domestic listings are sparse, and a growing number of the continent’s most ambitious publicly listed companies are actively choosing to migrate to US exchanges. It is not a great look when your crown jewels prefer someone else’s display case.

The underlying problem is as much cultural as it is structural. Entrepreneurs across the continent increasingly do not view a European IPO as a credible, let alone desirable, option. The reasons are well-rehearsed: fragmented markets, shallow liquidity, anaemic analyst coverage, a regulatory environment that can generously be described as thorough, and an investment culture that leans towards prudence over ambition. In Europe, we celebrate profitability. In the US, they celebrate world domination (preferably before lunch).

This creates a compounding asymmetry. The US enjoys a deep, liquid, risk-tolerant capital market that rewards scale and vision in a way European markets simply do not. European companies, meanwhile, are too often deprived of robust liquidity pathways, which dampens incentives across the entire venture ecosystem. Without reliable exit routes, capital recycles more slowly. Without recycled capital, fewer bold bets get placed. Without bold bets, ecosystems stagnate. It’s not that Europe lacks talent or innovation, it lacks the mechanisms and, frankly, the collective conviction to translate those inputs into outsized outcomes.

None of this is unfixable. But it does require us to stop admiring the problem and start dismantling it, before the next generation of European founders quite reasonably concludes that the only door worth walking through is the one marked: Departures, JFK.

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