Johannes Reck is CEO of GetYourGuide, a Berlin-based travel platform valued at more than $2 billion, with 50,000 supply partners, over  200,000 experiences and more than 33 million bookings logged in the past year. Reck has turned down multiple offers to move to Silicon Valley since the site launched in 2009 because Europe has clear advantages. “It’s where most of the international tourists actually go,” he told me recently, noting that the continent also boasts a strong immigration system and deep pool of multilingual talent. “We see a lot more loyalty of staff in Europe versus the U.S. If I look at longevity and turnover costs, it’s much, much lower here …The U.S. is fantastic if you want to scale really fast. But for a business like ours that takes decades to build, Europe has a lot of advantages.”

David Reger, CEO of NEURA Robotics and an EY finalist from Germany, knew the challenges of producing smart robots in Europe when he set up near Stuttgart in 2019. But building a factory in a region that gave birth to brands like Mercedes-Benz and Porsche also gave him access to engineering talent from top schools in a land of universal health care and a strong social safety net. His stint as a social worker with homeless clients in San Francisco in 2009 inspired him to build a business back in Germany. “I want to become the biggest taxpayer in Europe and create a sustainable tech ecosystem here,” he told me. “With AI, governments will not be able to catch up. I think the responsibility of the entrepreneur will rise by like 100x because you’re not just thinking about how to make your business successful but the whole social impact it will bring.”

Top leadership news

An AI-driven productivity boom may be ahead

The U.S. economy might be at the start of a productivity surge akin to the internet age, according to a note published this week by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Back then, the economy saw a lull in productivity growth as a transformative new technology took hold.

Most SpaceX shares are already spoken for

SpaceX could raise $80 billion or more in its upcoming IPO, which would be the largest sum ever raised. But 78% of that money is already accounted for by insiders and vendors.

China and Russia are growing more capable, aggressive in espionage

Anne Keast-Butler, the director of GCHQ, the U.K.'s intelligence and cybersecurity agency, warned in a speech this week that China and Russia are becoming more aggressive and capable in their espionage, which is "increasingly data-driven, AI-enabled, and automated." She warned that the window to stay ahead of both countries is closing.

The markets

S&P 500 futures are down 0.15% this morning. The last session closed up 0.02%. The STOXX Europe 600 was down 0.57% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.73% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 0.47%. South Korea’s KOSPI was down 0.53%. China’s CSI 300 was up 0.12%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was down 1.27%. India’s markets are closed today. Bitcoin was down at $73K.

Around the watercooler

A study finds escaping your income bracket no longer means building wealth. That disconnect may be what’s driving consumer pessimism to record highs by Jake Angelo

Even if every California billionaire left tomorrow, it would take 25 years for the state to lose as much as it stands to gain from proposed wealth tax by Tristan Bove

The unlikely origin of a $2.5 billion hospitality unicorn: a bored teenager working the night shift at his family business by Catherina Gioino

Real estate billionaire was called the ‘worst analyst’ at Goldman Sachs—now he says the criticism was the best thing that ever happened to him by Emma Burleigh

Jamie Dimon said the American Dream was slipping away. JPMorgan just put $40 million on the table to fix it by Nick Lichtenberg

CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.