The Greener Grass

There is a pull I cannot ignore. It has been there for years, quiet at first, then louder. The Bay Area. The place where people build things that change how the world works. Every time I read about a company that started in a garage, every time I see a founder talk about shipping something real, every time I think about Steve Jobs walking through Palo Alto — I feel it. A force that says: you could be there.

And then I step outside in Munich, walk to my favorite café, order something excellent, and think: this is also very good.

That is the tension. That is what this essay is about. Not a decision. A reflection. An attempt to put on paper what has been circling in my head, so I can finally see it clearly.

The Pull

What draws me to the Bay Area is not the weather or the lifestyle. It is the culture. There is a place on this planet where building ambitious technology companies is the thing. It is what people talk about at dinner. It is what people respect. It is the shared language.

In Munich, the shared language is different. It is about comfort. About inheritance. About having a relaxed life, doing a bit of sport, and not asking too many questions. Most people I meet here are deeply unambitious. Not in the sense that they lack talent. In the sense that they have decided, consciously or not, that the ceiling is fine where it is.

In the Bay Area, the ceiling does not exist. Or rather, people behave as if it does not exist, and that belief becomes self-fulfilling. You ship something. People use it. You raise money. You hire. You scale. The entire ecosystem is built to accelerate that loop. In Europe, every step of that loop has friction. Regulatory friction. Cultural friction. The friction of people asking why you would want to grow so fast, as if ambition were a character flaw.

And then there is the meritocracy question. In the Bay Area — at least in its best version — it does not matter where you come from, what your parents did, or which school you attended. It matters what you ship. In Munich, I see the opposite. I see people whose primary achievement is being born into the right family. I see wealth that was inherited, not created. I see status that was given, not earned. That bothers me. I believe that a society that rewards creation over inheritance produces better outcomes for everyone.

The Money Question

Let me be concrete about something. European venture capital, with some exceptions, is not good. Most European VCs underperform the MSCI World Index. Let that sink in. You could literally buy a passive index fund and do better than most professional European investors. And yet these people carry enormous status. They sit on panels. They give advice. Founders pitch to them as if they were gatekeepers to some promised land.

In the Bay Area, capital is abundant. Competition among investors is fierce. Founders have leverage. The best VCs know that their job is to serve the founder, not the other way around. That is a fundamentally healthier ecosystem.

This matters to me because I want to build a company. Not a small one. Not a lifestyle business. Something real, something that scales, something that matters. And I believe — perhaps naively, perhaps correctly — that the Bay Area gives me a better chance of doing that.

The Broader Frustration

I need to be honest about something that goes beyond tech. Germany, as I see it, is losing its way. Not because Germans lack talent or intelligence — they clearly do not. But because the country has allowed a certain kind of ideological comfort to take hold. Too many NGOs with too much power. Too much climate activism that prioritizes signaling over outcomes. Too many people who twist arguments and numbers to justify policies that are slowly destroying the country's economic competitiveness.

I am not making a partisan argument here. I am making an observation. When a society stops caring about winning — about being technologically excellent, about competing globally, about building things that work — it declines. Slowly at first, then quickly. Germany feels like it is somewhere in the middle of that curve.

The Bay Area, for all its flaws, has not lost that instinct. People there still want to win. They still believe that technology can solve real problems. They still wake up thinking about how to build something better than what exists. That energy is intoxicating, and I miss it even though I have never fully lived in it.

What Holds Me

And yet. There is my family.

My parents are a two-hour train ride away. I see them at least once a month. I need that. Out of genuine love and the recognition that time with them is finite. One day, they will not be here. And when that day comes, I want to look back and know that I showed up. That I was present. That I did not trade those years for a visa and a WeWork desk in SoMa.

This is not a small thing. This might be the thing. Because everything else — the capital, the culture, the energy — those are professional considerations. Important ones, yes. But my parents are not a professional consideration. They are the people who made me. I owe them more than a FaceTime call every Sunday.

Then there is Europe itself. The food. The design. The cafés. The architecture. The ability to walk through a city that was built over centuries, not decades. There is something about the European lifestyle that feeds creativity in a way I am not sure the Bay Area can. When I sit in a well-designed space, eat something extraordinary, or walk through a beautiful neighborhood, my mind opens. Ideas come. Connections form. That matters for someone who wants to build things. Inspiration is not a luxury — it is infrastructure.

The Practical Path

If I were to do this what would the path look like? I have thought about this more than I probably should.

The most sensible route would be Y Combinator. Because it solves multiple problems at once. It gives me access to the network, to capital, to mentorship. It strengthens my case for an O-1A visa. And most importantly, it preserves optionality. I go there, I build, and after the batch, I decide: stay or come back. I do not have to commit to a decade in California before I know whether it is right for me.

That word — optionality — matters. It is one of my core principles. Build from a position of choice, not desperation. Do not make irreversible decisions before you have to.

The alternative, joining some random startup in the Bay Area just to be there, feels wrong. I would be trading autonomy for geography. That is a bad deal. If I go, I go as a founder, building my own thing.

The Real Dilemma

Here is what I have come to realize: this is not really about San Francisco versus Munich. It is about the kind of company I want to build.

If I want to build a highly specialized B2B tech company — deep domain expertise, strong European customer relationships, methodical growth — then Europe is not just fine, it is arguably better. Companies like Celonis stayed in Munich and built global businesses. The depth of engineering talent here, the proximity to industrial customers, the lower burn rate — all of these are genuine advantages.

But if I want to build something broader — a platform, something consumer-facing, something that needs to scale globally from day one — then the Bay Area is the natural home. The capital for that kind of bet is there.

So the question is not where do I want to live. The question is what do I want to build. And I do not have that answer yet.

The Greener Grass

I am aware that some of what I feel is the greener grass syndrome. The Bay Area looks perfect from Munich the same way Munich looks perfect from the Bay Area. I romanticize the hustle and the ambition while sitting in a city with world-class healthcare, public transport that works, and bread that tastes like bread.

People in San Francisco complain about the cost of living, the homelessness, the tech-bro monoculture, the difficulty of building genuine friendships in a city where everyone is optimizing. They look at Europe and see the lifestyle, the culture, the balance. We look at them and see the energy, the opportunity, the ambition.

Maybe nobody has it right. Maybe the answer is not one place or the other, but a life designed to capture the best of both. A European base with deep American ties. A company that is built globally from the start. Frequent trips. Strategic presence. Not as a cliché, but as an actual operating model.

Or maybe that is just what people tell themselves when they are afraid to commit.

What I Know

I know that I am in my mid-twenties and that this is the time to take risks. I know that I am building toward something and that the environment I choose will shape what that becomes. I know that my family matters more to me than any career milestone. I know that comfort is dangerous and that the best version of my life will not be found in the path of least resistance.

I also know that I do not need to decide today. If the work is good enough, the geography will sort itself out. YC does not care where I apply from. Investors do not care where my passport was issued. Customers do not care what time zone I wake up in.

They care about the work.

So maybe that is the answer. Not San Francisco. Not Munich. The work. Do the work. Make it undeniable. And then, when the moment comes to choose choose from strength, not from longing.

The grass is greenest where you water it. But it helps to know which field is yours.