A milestone worth celebrating!
Five years ago, our Index Ventures team launched #NotOptional alongside more than 500 CEOs and founders to improve stock options and conditions for employee ownership at European startups.
A lot has changed since we started in 2019:
The most celebrated win so far goes to Germany 🇩🇪, one of the biggest economies in the world that used to have one of the worst stock options policy in Europe. Last year, the German Parliament voted to turn their failing policy into one of the best in the world.
10 other countries also updated their stock options legislation: the UK 🇬🇧, Portugal 🇵🇹, France 🇫🇷, Austria 🇦🇹, Czechia 🇨🇿, Spain 🇪🇸, Latvia 🇱🇻, Lithuania 🇱🇹, Greece 🇬🇷, and the Netherlands 🇳🇱.
7 countries now have policies that match or exceed the US: Germany, France, Portugal, the UK, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Only one, Estonia 🇪🇪, already had a policy better than the US in 2019. That includes Europe’s three largest economies and the largest VC hubs.
There’s still a long way to go for some countries. Finland 🇫🇮, Switzerland 🇨🇠and Norway 🇳🇴 have the worst policies, followed by the Netherlands (even with updated legislation already), Belgium 🇧🇪 and Denmark 🇩🇰. These are countries with strong tech credentials where the tech innovation flywheel is being hampered.
With the help of European entrepreneurs everywhere, we will keep pushing until every single European country’s options policy is at least as attractive as the US! There is no reason why they can’t be.
We are also working on taking it to the next level: standardization at the EU level through a single corporate entity. The “EU Inc.” initiative launched earlier this month and builds on the success of #NotOptional at Andreas Klinger European Accelerationism.
Thankfully, the challenges European startups face are more in the spotlight than ever because of Mario Draghi’s report to the European Commission in September, which emphasized that innovative startups should have the opportunity to adopt a new EU-wide legal statute.
Already, the European Commission has established a Stock Options Working Group, the European Securities and Markets Authority has urged the Commission to consider a dedicated EU-wide framework for ESOPs, and commission president Ursula von der Leyen appointed the first-ever commissioner for startups.
Every improvement makes it easier for startups to attract and retain talent and makes it more likely that the next tech giant will come out of Europe.
To everyone involved in this fight, congratulations on five years of progress. Now let’s keep going!
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Publish date : 2024-10-28 07:04:00
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