OpenAI’s EMEA startups head Laura Modiano spoke at the Sifted Summit on Wednesday, 8 October.
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In the latest comparison between American and European founders, OpenAI’s startup boss admitted that the Americans are “almost shameless” when it comes to making demands and giving feedback to the AI giant.
Laura Modiano, who heads up OpenAI’s startups division in EMEA, drew a comparison between American and European founders based on her extensive work with founders across both regions and rolling out AI features.
“So feedback is extremely important. We’re moving at lightning speed. It has to represent your voice and I see American founders being extremely good, almost shameless, and coming in and saying: ‘We need this. You need to get better at that. You need to improve that. You need this new feature,'” Modiano said during a fireside chat at the Sifted Summit on Wednesday. “If founders don’t tell us, we don’t always know.”
She called on European founders to be much more vocal — or risk missing out on big opportunities.
“Please, please, please, if you’re using OpenAI … you should always tell us what you think about it, what is working, what isn’t and how we can do better.”
She cited Lovable, valued at $1.8 billion, as an example of a European company good at giving feedback. The Swedish vibe coding startup has a GPT-5-based assistant called Lovable Assistant 5.
“When GPT-5 was launched, they [Lovable] were one of the companies that launched with us, and they were in the alpha, so early access to GPT-5, and they gave us a lot of feedback. Like, I was in their office for a week, and literally every hour, we were having reviews,” she said.
“‘How is something working? What do we need?’ So GPT-5 launching actually had the taste of European developers included in the model that all of you are using today. So unless you’re vocal about it, you’re missing out on a great opportunity.”
Swedish AI-learning platform Sana was another startup praised by Modiano.
“I was in their office a few months ago and they said: ‘We really need this capability on voice, the tone of voice, the speed, this is what we need.’ I got that feedback then we see who else has had similar feedback, and then we prioritize that feature on the roadmap to make sure that we’re servicing what the customer is asking for,” she said.
“I give this advice often. I say every startup, especially every AI startup, should have a chief feedback officer, because we can only ship and include things in our roadmap, different features, different improvements, if we know what customers want,” she added.
European vs. U.S. startups
With her comments, Modiano was fanning the flames of a debate that has seen European entrepreneurs criticized for lacking the same intensity and vigor as their American counterparts.
Earlier this year, some venture capitalists suggested that startup founders in Europe needed to increase their work hours — including working seven days a week — to be more competitive globally.
Harry Stebbings, founder of 20VC, previously told CNBC Make It that Europeans are not as good at marketing themselves when pitching their company to venture capitalists and are often held back by a culture of reservedness.
By contrast, Americans are much better at telling exciting stories to promote their businesses: “I think, often in the U.K., we downsize in ambitions,” he said.
More recently, U.K. Business Secretary Peter Kyle fired shots at British university students, criticizing them for lacking ambition and not having the drive to start their own companies, as opposed to students at American universities.
“In Britain, if you went to a group of undergraduates, how big would that group have to be before you found someone that said their choice of going to university … was because they wanted to become a founder?” Kyle said at an event hosted by AI chipmaker Nvidia in London. “The entrepreneurialism simply isn’t there – the drive, the vigour.”