Too early in Europe, inevitable in the US: Iggy Harmsen on finding the right room for a big idea

For Iggy Harmsen, co-founder of Medal and General Intuition, this is not a hypothetical question. It is a situation he experienced repeatedly while raising capital for Medal in its early days.

During his Upstream Festival keynote, Harmsen shared a personal account of building a company that did not easily fit the expectations of the European investors he initially approached. His message was not that every founder should immediately move to the United States. It was more nuanced.

Some ideas need a different room before other people can see what they might become.

From gaming highlights to a global platform

Medal makes it easy for gamers to capture and share moments from the games they play.

Harmsen compared the idea to the way people take photos and videos while travelling. Experiences in digital worlds can be just as meaningful to the people having them. They want to remember those moments and share them with friends.

Today, Medal is used by more than 15 million gamers each month, with its users creating more than 2.5 billion clips annually.

The platform has also created the foundation for something new.

General Intuition, the AI research company spun out of Medal, is using action-labelled gaming data to build models capable of spatial and temporal reasoning. While many AI systems are trained primarily on language, General Intuition is exploring how machines can learn to perceive, anticipate and respond within dynamic environments.

The leap from gaming clips to AI models may sound substantial.

But Harmsen’s keynote was partly about learning to recognise that kind of possibility before it becomes obvious.

Sometimes where you build matters

“Sometimes what you’re building is as important as where you’re building.”

Harmsen drew a clear distinction between the fundraising cultures he encountered in Europe and the United States.

When Medal approached investors in Europe during its early days, the questions were rational: How large could the market become? Would users pay? How would the business monetise? What did the existing numbers demonstrate?

These are reasonable questions.

But at a very early stage, Harmsen argued, an idea may not yet fit neatly into a spreadsheet. If investors focus entirely on what can already be proven, they risk missing companies that could define a new category.

“In Europe, you have to prove it before you can raise. In the US, you have to sell a dream. You have to sell a vision.”

For founders, this does not mean replacing evidence with hype. It means explaining the future clearly enough that investors can see why the opportunity matters before every part of the model has been validated.

One last meeting

Harmsen illustrated that difference with a story from Medal’s early fundraising journey.

The company was close to running out of money. He travelled to the United States and spent weeks meeting investors. Some were interested, but the team still did not have the lead investor it needed.

Eventually, Harmsen found himself at the airport, preparing to fly home.

He thought the round had failed.

Then an email arrived from another investor who had heard about the company and wanted to meet. Harmsen left the boarding line and took the meeting later that day.

The conversation changed Medal’s trajectory.

The product had not transformed in the hours between the airport and the meeting. The company had not suddenly gained years of additional data. What had changed was the room.

He had found someone willing to look beyond the immediate uncertainty and engage seriously with the future Medal was trying to create.

Sell the future without losing credibility

Harmsen encouraged founders to think carefully about the story they tell investors.

“The number one thing you want to do is explain what the future looks like five or ten years from now.”

A strong pitch does not stop at describing the product. It explains the shift taking place in the market, the opportunity that shift creates and the role the company could play within it.

Investors hear many pitches. They know that most companies will not become the defining player in their category. A founder therefore needs to explain why this company has the potential to be different.

“You have to show them that you are going to be the winner.”

That requires conviction. But it also requires insight.

The strongest founders do not simply claim that a market will become large. They help investors understand something about the future that is not yet widely recognised.

Do not optimise for a small playing field

Harmsen’s advice was not to abandon Europe.

Europe has talent. It has strong technical expertise. It offers opportunities to build highly capable teams without the cost structure of cities such as San Francisco or New York. In the current AI landscape, smaller teams can also move faster than they could in the past.

But founders should consider their international ambitions from the beginning.

“Don’t try to locally optimise your company.”

A company that wants to scale globally should not make early decisions that limit its future options. That can affect its corporate structure, investor network, hiring strategy and access to markets.

The aim is not to relocate for the sake of appearing international.

It is to build a company that can compete wherever the opportunity leads.

Europe needs to back more outliers

During the audience Q&A, Harmsen was asked what Europe could do differently.

His answer focused on risk appetite.

Europe has made progress in early-stage funding. But founders with ideas that are difficult to model can still struggle to find investors willing to support them before the opportunity becomes obvious. Later-stage companies may also find that the pools of capital available locally are not large enough to support their next phase of growth.

Venture capital depends on outliers. A small number of exceptional companies drive a large proportion of returns.

That means investors need to leave space for ideas that do not yet resemble anything familiar.

If promising founders consistently look elsewhere for their earliest funding, Europe does not only lose individual companies. It loses the chance to develop its own networks, experience and confidence around building category-defining businesses.

Too early is not the same as wrong

There is no guarantee that an ambitious idea will work.

Sometimes investors are right to say no. Sometimes a company is too early because the technology is not ready, the market is not there or the business model does not hold up.

But “too early” can also mean that the founder sees a shift before most other people do.

The challenge is to find investors capable of telling the difference.

Harmsen’s closing message captured the tension clearly:

“You can be told you’re too early in Europe, but inevitable in the US.”

For founders, the lesson is not to dismiss difficult feedback. It is to understand what kind of feedback they are receiving.

Is the idea fundamentally flawed?

Or are they simply presenting it in a room that cannot yet imagine where it might go?

Sometimes the next step is not to make the ambition smaller.

It is to find a bigger room.

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