Breaking Europe's Perfectionism Addiction

Tesla ships cars with panel gaps you could fit a finger through. BMW ships perfection. Tesla is worth $800 billion. BMW? $70 billion.

SpaceX blows up rockets in public and learns from every explosion. Boeing takes years to certify a single plane.

Skunk Works made the SR-71, the fastest plane ever to fly, in 600 days, something most governments would have taken a decade to attempt.

The way they executed was the opposite of everything I had learned about engineering in Europe, and it worked. It taught me a blunt truth: in engineering, speed beats perfection every time.

At KAIKAKU, we shipped a 7,000+ component robot with just three engineers. In under two years, our tiny team filed three patents and 25 design rights, and shipped a full restaurant operating system complete with a real-time computer-vision dashboard.

Meanwhile, Europe doubles down on institutional perfectionism. For example, just last week, the UK government announced it's scrapping the independence of the UK Space Agency.

How Universities Train Us to Move Like Molasses#

The rot starts in our universities. A comparative study of engineering education revealed: European programs emphasise "theoretical foundations first" while Americans dive into "tens of mini projects".

We teach students to get it right the first time. Americans teach them to get it done, then make it right.

My engineering team studied at one of Europe's top engineering schools: Imperial College London. Every exam was do-or-die. One shot. No retakes. Meanwhile, MIT students were failing fast through continuous assessments, normalising iteration from day one. Research confirms Europeans demonstrate "higher uncertainty avoidance and lower risk tolerance" (Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions, IMF 2012).

We're not born this way. We're trained this way.

The difference shows in our accreditation systems. Europe's EUR-ACE focuses on "input-focused criteria and curriculum content requirements." America's ABET? Student learning outcomes and continuous improvement (Taylor & Francis, 2013). One system optimises for compliance. The other for adaptation.

My Cofounder and CTO wrote about this extensively in his own blog: What the Education System is Getting Wrong about Engineering

Jolla: A €50 Million Cautionary Tale#

A group of ex-Nokia engineers raised €50 million to build a phone running their revolutionary Sailfish OS. By 2024 the company was dead, sunk by European perfectionism. While others were shipping phones with quad-core processors and 1080p screens, they released one with a dual-core CPU and a 540x960 display. It was late because they spent years perfecting a gesture-based interface nobody had asked for (Wikipedia, 2024), one TechCrunch described as "plodding" with "interface lag" (TechCrunch, 2014).

Europeans fall foul of "what if" thinking: what if somebody does x? We'll add a button for that, even though x never happens.

Europeans Must Break Rules#

European companies succeed when they act nothing like it.

Spotify launched with 256kbps audio and a patchy back catalogue, learnt what its customers wanted by watching how they used the service, and now commands 31% of global music streaming.

Supercell in Helsinki prototypes mobile games in as little as two weeks, then kills 99% of them. The survivors launch in a decidedly "unfinished" state, with bare-bones gameplay and artwork, and have together grossed $2.3 billion.

Revolut launched offering only currency exchange on a prepaid card, with no lending, savings or business accounts, and was worth $33 billion seven years and 100+ releases later. TransferWise (now Wise) started with a basic website and manual bank transfers, sidestepped regulatory hurdles, and learnt what to build from over 10,000 customer conversations rather than from bankers and regulators.

German biotech BioNTech designed a COVID vaccine in two days, against the European norm of a decade, and had it in trials within months.

The 12-Month Handicap#

We Europeans fear risk and uncertainty. On Hofstede's "uncertainty avoidance" measure, Germany scores 65, Belgium 94 and America 46 (IMF, 2012).

In practice, we overvalidate: 4.2 validation cycles before a European launch, 2.8 in America (PDMA, 2021). Our cycles also last longer, 4-6 weeks as opposed to 2-3. Development takes 35% longer and the outcome is no better.

It takes European startups 9 months to get first customer feedback; their American competitors take 3 (Taylor & Francis, 2023). When a startup in Munich is just about to ask its first customer for feedback, its competitor in Silicon Valley has already pivoted twice.

European hardware startups take 12 months longer to go from seed to Series A and are 30% less likely to succeed (McKinsey, 2024). During those 12 months, a competitor in Silicon Valley can iterate on its product three times, ask customers for feedback three times and so has three chances to pivot, before we release version one.

Then there's our fragmented market. To match the US home market, a European startup needs to win in 28 countries, each with its own regulations, language and culture. Our US competitors can launch their far-from-perfect product once, in one language and one currency, to 330 million people.

MVP: The Concept Europe Needs to Grasp#

Customer Development came from Steve Blank, an American entrepreneur and educator at Stanford. The MVP was popularised by another American, Eric Ries.

In Europe we misunderstand what an MVP is. We believe it's a "barely functional prototype" when really an MVP is the "smallest thing that validates the biggest assumption." Airbnb wasn't a complex booking system; it was a web page and an air mattress. Dropbox wasn't a complex cloud architecture; it was a 3-minute video. On Kickstarter, American entrepreneurs get backing for a basic prototype to validate demand, while Europeans launch with near-complete products to secure pre-orders (Crowdfunding.io, 2024).

The Quality Paradox#

All this doesn't even lead to better products: European product recalls hit a record 14,484 in 2024, with consumer product recalls up 32.9% (Sedgwick, 2024). Meanwhile we're falling further and further behind technologically. Europe invests 2.16% of GDP ($1,060 per capita) in R&D, compared with America's 3.46% ($2,400 per capita) (NSF, 2024). American companies account for 42.3% of R&D worldwide, European companies 18.7%, and Americans invest disproportionately in high-margin industries while Europeans invest in dying ones, like car manufacturing.

What Actually Works#

Kelly Johnson's 14 rules for running the Skunk Works would likely shock a European engineer. They include small teams (10-25% the size of other aerospace programs), limited management (one cost report per month and nothing else), trusting engineers rather than inspecting them, rewarding good performers and firing poor ones, and telling people only what they absolutely "must know". The XP-80 jet fighter was designed and built in 143 days. The same approach led to the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117 Nighthawk, each described as "impossible" (Lockheed Martin). Across over 500 aircraft programmes, they cut costs by 30% and delivered 50% faster than conventional approaches. It wasn't anything clever. They just removed the layers between the engineers and the product.

SpaceX: The Algorithm That Breaks Every European Rule#

Elon Musk's five-step algorithm is ordered with a specific intent to avoid the common European problem of over-engineering (Valispace, 2024):

1. Make requirements less dumb - "The requirements are definitely dumb; it's particularly dangerous if an intelligent person gave them to you."
2. Delete the part or process - If you're not adding things back 10% of the time, you're not deleting enough.
3. Simplify or optimize - But only after deleting. "The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that shouldn't exist."
4. Accelerate cycle time - But not until you've simplified.
5. Automate - The last step, not the first.

SpaceX will learn more from crashing its Starship prototypes than Boeing will learn in 10 years of simulations. It took Boeing over 10 years and $4.2bn before flying humans on its Starliner. SpaceX was flying missions to the International Space Station within 10 years of its founding. It has carried out over 400 launches and lands its boosters on barges. Boeing is struggling to win new contracts.

Tesla: 27 Changes Per Day While Germans Plan#

Tesla makes 27 changes a day, hardware and software, to its Model S, or 5,400 a year (Valispace, 2024). Some are physical changes to the cars coming off the end of the line.

BMW's 9,000-strong Research and Innovation Centre obsesses over quality, with five-year product cycles to get every detail right: materials, tolerances, fit.

German car bosses call the panel gaps on Teslas "unacceptable." Yet in 2023 Porsche, the profit-margin king, delivered 320,000 vehicles to Tesla's 1.81 million. Customers value constant improvement over perfectly fitting panels.

The Path Forward#

At KAIKAKU we went the American way out of necessity: perfectionism is not an option with three engineers. Our first robot was held together by zip ties and delusion. Version 547 serves thousands of meals every month. Every version in between embarrassed us, taught us something and took us a step closer to product-market fit.

So, European founders: will you embarrass yourselves by shipping imperfect products, or watch American and Chinese startups take your market while you perfect your specs? American startups are 30% more successful and get to market 40-60% faster. They raise bigger rounds, grow faster and dominate global markets.

Want to win? Here's the playbook:

Kill the validation stage, or at least shorten it. Ship at 70% and let your users tell you what the other 30% should be.

Ignore your professors. They are there to write papers, not build products.

Hire misfits. The engineer who got fired for shipping too fast. The kid who broke every appliance in the house.

Do now, think later. Anything worthwhile involves discomfort.

No future-proofing. Planning your way to success is a great way to go bust and leave the field open to others.

Only 1 in every €10 of global advanced manufacturing investment goes to European firms (European Commission, 2024). Changing that will take a cultural revolution, and revolutions are messy. They go against everything European engineers have been taught.

Which is exactly why they work.

The Uncomfortable Truth#

There's world-class engineering talent in Europe shackled by third-rate systems. Our best engineers in London, Berlin and Munich are building PowerPoint decks, not world-beating tech, optimising around problems that don't exist while others solve the ones that do. In garages. In Palo Alto.

Markets are Darwinian. Users don't read your documentation. Investors don't fund potential. What ships gets rewarded.

Perfect is the enemy of good. In hardware, perfect is the enemy of everything.

No future-proofing.

Braindump by Josef Chen