Pia
@piammichel
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Thinking about 🧬🏭👾🌿⚙️🐝🪐 @PrimaMateria_ & writing about the future of Europe at https://t.co/SOphsmeVAe
Switzerland
Joined September 2019
I'm starting a new Grand Tour of Europe: each month, I will visit one European country to learn about its history and key industries, and to meet some of its most ambitious founders, builders and business leaders.
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Who's building the future in Europe? . An ongoing list of companies that I hope will succeed in transforming our physical world 🤞.
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Some personal news - I am joining @eldsjal @shak and @brettbivens as Head of Science Translation at @PrimaMateria_!. Excited to partner with the most ambitious scientists and institutions across Europe to translate research into breakthrough companies.
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All you're saying when you ask 'why don't people build cathedrals anymore' is that you don't realise we've moved on from assembling rocks to worship mystical figures to assembling the building blocks of the universe to understand and shape the world ourselves
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One of the bigger misunderstandings of Europe is to call it the Old World. Yes we have history — but modern Europe is the youngest major economy in the world. What you’re seeing is the beginning of a New Europe ✨. 🇺🇸 The US was established 249 years ago in 1776 and the American.
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Science people, I just found a small publisher from Spain who create beautiful versions of Nikola Tesla's Patents, Apollo 13 Activation Checklist, Turing's Treatise on the Enigma, Marie Curie's thesis, Newton's 1660s notebook. Do you know more like this?
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Thousands of people protest AGAINST the closure of the Almaraz nuclear plant in Spain that generates 7% of the country’s energy 🇪🇸 . If only Germany had this kind of environmental activism.
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Every day more people decide against stagnation. Vibes are indeed shifting 🇪🇺.
1/ With 500m+ ppl in Europe, the continuous bottle cap meme was going to provoke a reaction. We've gone from a place of not admitting we had a (big) growth problem, to some incredible analysis as to what the problem is, to proper action the past 12m in order to get back to growth
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I hope other European countries are watching — we need more tech leaders like @matthewclifford involved in shaping our national strategies in areas like AI 👏.
1/ Today the Prime Minister published my AI Opportunities Action Plan for the UK and committed to implement all its recommendations. A quick thread on why this is important, what we need to do now - and how you can help
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What is the right context & funding model for an (independent) inventor today? Is there a modern equivalent to Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison's early laboratories?
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In the coming weeks, we'll start off the Tour with my long-overdue first visit to Norway 🇳🇴. To prepare, I teamed up with @jmaxsamuel to learn about the country's history and industrial context. You can read the full article here:
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New Year, New Mood. As 2025 is beginning, here's what I'm leaving behind: all of the complainers and your tweets about over-regulation. As we are coming to terms with a changing world order, we have every reason to focus on building a better and stronger Europe. Complaining
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I'm starting to think Norwegians can build anything, anywhere. Henningsvær Stadium.Atlantic Ocean Road.Under restaurant.Lysevegen
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🇳🇴 What will Norwegians build in the coming decade?. Learning about Norway's industrial history, the most impressive thing for me has been the incredible density of technical talent and engineering experience in a country of just 5.5m people. While much of Europe and the US have
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The Exploration Company, Germany.Launching reusable and in-orbit refillable space capsules
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Finally we can go full circle and build faster horses.
A Waymo-like app where you summon a Unitree robo-horse, hop on it, and have it gallop to your destination in the bike lane could reignite the 20th century spirit of invention we so dearly miss.
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As we’re celebrating the return of commercial supersonic aircraft today thanks to @boomaero, here’s a great story about the pioneering Concorde developed in the UK and France by @adastrashow.
Concorde was one of the most technically challenging projects of the 20th century: A commercial jet cruising at 2x the speed of sound. Nothing remotely close has flown since. A symbol of what Europe can achieve when it dreams big and builds. The story of Concorde on @adastrashow
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Most of the startups on my list are in Western Europe. Who are the most ambitious founders and companies building the future everywhere else? 👀
Who's building the future in Europe? . An ongoing list of companies that I hope will succeed in transforming our physical world 🤞.
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The response to Neko’s launch in London has been even better than we could have hoped for — not just the 60,000 people waitlist, but the feedback from those who’ve had their first scan has been overwhelmingly positive. I’ve had my first scan last year in Stockholm and recently.
Over 60,000 Signups in Just Twelve Weeks!. It's been nearly three months since we launched @NekoHealth in London, and the response has been nothing short of incredible. Over 60,000 people have signed up for a scan, which reflects a growing shift toward preventive healthcare and
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I need your help - I'm looking for an amazing video producer to join me on the Tour to visit hardware companies, factories and R&D labs. Have any of you worked with great freelancers, ideally in London?.
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A few months ago I decided to make my Twitter weirder and got rid of most VC, productivity and web3 stuff in favor of dinosaurs, deep sea exploration, medieval paintings and animal memes and it makes me happy to know your feed got weirder too. you’re welcome @Jonah_A_Kaplan
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Very exciting to see new research organizations with long term funding for individual researchers to pursue ambitious projects free from grant funding constraints.
I am incredibly excited to announce after nearly two years in the making. @arcinstitute is a new, nonprofit research institute launched in collaboration with @Stanford, @UCSF, and @UCBerkeley that will focus on complex diseases.
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Europe has so much stunning research infrastructure -- here are some of my favourites, starting with the @ESO European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile that looks like Mars . It's one of the world's most advanced optical telescopes and
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🇵🇱 Poland is leading NATO with its investment in defence — ramping it up further to 5% of GDP in 2025 — and as the Polish presidency of the EU Council has just begun, they will push for more investment in Europe’s security.
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@wolfejosh One day this will come back with a vengeance — you’ll be 80 y/o, forget stuff all the time and your daughter will make you go through trashcans all over NYC.
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🇪🇸 Spain is growing its economy four times faster than the rest of the Eurozone at close to +3% GDP in 2024 and has done the impossible — building large transport infrastructure on time and on budget. We need to know what they are doing right.
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Who are your favourite female podcast hosts on science & tech? Looking at my feed right now and it is >90% men. They are fantastic but I want to know what everyone else is doing. #womenintech #WomenInScience.
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You can read the first part here and sign up for all updates along the Tour
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Can’t wait to see this 🚀 Congrats @jasonjoyride.
I'm beyond excited to share the trailer for "New Space" our first Frontier Film. It's almost 90 minutes, has 20+ interviews, and chronicles the story of space today. Out this Friday.
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I spend too much time online so it's time to share what I find. Here are five favourites from last week:.
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amazing project, curious to see how this will change education & interdisciplinary collaboration. are there any European institutions that explored this idea?.
By partnering with Emerald Cloud Lab, we are bringing the world’s first university owned cloud lab to life. The CMU Cloud Lab will democratize and automate science. AI-driven technology allows scientists to design experiments from anywhere.
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@sarah_cone Sounds like you’re a dog person but consider smart pet octopus
Octopuses are surprisingly intelligent, and reproduce at 1 year old. If we'd started a breeding program 50 years ago, we probably could've gotten them smarter than dolphins by now. A disappointing failure of the long-term mad science ecosystem.
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History still has a lot to teach us, but to get a sense of where we’re heading, we need to meet the people behind the companies, research infrastructures and mega-projects that will change our paths into the future. I can promise you that contrary to the meme, Europe is full of
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You can only understand Europe as a traveller, so to get to know the people and companies building the future here, it’s time to bring the Grand Tour back:. The Grand Tour was a European cultural institution in the 17th to 19th century – a rite of passage for the young and
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@alexjeser it is happening — community and culture doesn’t come from politicians but from people. we don’t need 100% alignment between nation states we need interaction between people who have shared ideas, values and goals and that’s just getting started.
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🇳🇴 Norway is Europe’s only petrostate and will continue to play a key role in our future energy security, either as a producer of fossil fuels or by leveraging its enormous wealth and industrial experience for low carbon alternatives.
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I'm fascinated by how a few places and moments in time become outliers in creativity, intelligence and genius – like Renaissance Florence or Silicon Valley, and also fin de siècle Budapest
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🥳.
BREAKING: White House issues new policy that will require, by 2026, all federally-funded research results to be freely available to public without delay, ending longstanding ability of journals to paywall results for up to 1 year. Coverage coming on @ScienceInsider.
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I know I’ve only seen a fraction of what is happening across Europe so far, so I greatly appreciate your suggestions. I hope some of you will join me either by meeting me wherever you are or by sharing what you’re discovering on your own travels.
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Welcome to London @NekoHealth!🇬🇧 Getting my second scan here was a magical experience - walking into a new clinic and feeling like the team has known you for years is what healthcare should feel like.
Big news! We have officially launched in the UK. Today we are opening the doors to our newest Neko Health Centre, the first one of it's kind outside of Sweden. Here we go London! Booking is now open
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Congratulations @TobiasAHuber and @ByrneHobart on your beautiful book — looking forward to reading it soon! 🫧.
“Optimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.”. In Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, @ByrneHobart and @TobiasAHuber show how bubbles contributed to some of the biggest breakthroughs of the past 100 years—from the Apollo program to Bitcoin. Preorder:
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@matthewclifford @SGRodriques @arbesman @AdamMarblestone @velvetatom @Ben_Reinhardt @ilangur you might like these too.
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Do any of you have experience with the EIC Accelerator? Or knows why they appointed a PE / real estate fund manager to decide on investments in deep tech startups?.
This is the full story on how the delays in payments have left many startups short of cash and tarnished the reputation of the European Innovation Council (EIC), the EU body responsible for the scheme.
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4. Ocean Technologies. Norway's maritime heritage and subsea expertise developed through its oil and gas industry are being applied to develop autonomous underwater vehicles and ocean monitoring systems. These technologies support industries from aquaculture to seabed mining.
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SF friends — any recommendations for good places to work in the financial district? 🙏 + come say hi if you’re around.
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1. Energy Technology and Clean Tech. With 95% of its electricity coming from hydropower, Norway has experience in renewable energy systems and grid management. The country's offshore expertise translates seamlessly into floating wind farms, hydrogen production, and carbon capture
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Together with locals, I will publish deep dives on each country to provide context on its history and key industries, followed by a series of interviews and articles about the most interesting discoveries I make. I will start with Norway, Poland and Spain — three countries I.
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High school history classes will become so much fun when you can visualise historical events on demand like this and play out alternative scenarios. Is anyone working on this?.
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Amazing — can’t wait to see it!.
Launching Ad Astra (@adastrashow) to tell the stories of the most ambitious tech made in Europe. Ad Astra, Per Aspera. e01 on air soon
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So many 💎 💎 in Richard Hamming’s talk in ‘86 at Bellcore on prioritizing time to think: “Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime” 🧵.
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For a moment the world thought Americans really settled on not expecting presidents to articulate coherent sentences anymore, then the assassination attempt, now this. The spectacle of US elections has no equal.
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Love this — now I can collect any interesting quotes and ideas straight into my knowledge graph 🧠🤖💭.
The browser extension for Chrome and Brave is live.
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I just learned about the world's largest underground particle physics lab, the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso under 1400 m of rock at Gran Sasso mountain in Italy. It hosts Borexino, a deep underground particle experiment to study low energy neutrinos -- similar to Japan's
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2. Robotics and Industrial Automation. High labor costs and engineering talent have driven Norway's innovation in robotics and automation. Companies like AutoStore, a global leader in automated storage systems, and @1x_tech, building humanoid robots, demonstrate the country's
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Wishing this baby all the best for its final days 15 billion miles from earth
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3. Space Technology and Defense. Leveraging offshore and remote operations expertise (and access to polar orbit), Norway is positioned to play a significant role in the growing commercial space industry. Norway is a member of the European Space Agency and hosts key launch
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Having all interesting ideas I come across automatically connected to each other and exploring them later feels like magic 🪄 ✨ so proud of @davidfelsmann and @fabianwittel for building the best thinking tool out there 🙌.
Napkin for iOS is coming. We’re building the first app for mindful reflection on ideas. More and more pioneers are invited to the private beta every week. Get early access and change the way you think. 👉
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@simaolobo_ well these are the ones I know — I would to learn about companies in other parts of europe.
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@brescriptivist Does dinosaur Twitter do this for every new paper, or is this everyone’s favorite dinosaur?.
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@maddiehalla @USDA @BigPurpleTomato How many of these tomatoes do you have to eat every day for meaningful effects on cardiovascular risk?.
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Of course, the Large Hadron Collider at @CERN, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way
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Great ideas are connected ✨ — I’ve used @napkin_ideas for years to collect my favorite ideas and see them evolve. Nice to see them featured in @TechCrunch.
Napkin is a note-taking app that is not about making you more productive
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@NekoHealth coming to a city near you soon 💛 Congratulations @HNilsonne and @eldsjal — over 10,000 scans and 100,000 waitlist prove what an exceptional product you’ve built.
Feels like it was only yesterday that @eldsjal and I teamed up to try to come up with a masterplan for shifting healthcare from reactive to proactive. Here we are, six years later, excited to announce that @NekoHealth has just raised a $260 million series B, led by
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@shak has the best reading habit I know: giving copies of his favorite books to people who otherwise might not come across or be able to afford them. who are the future founders who should read this book by the amazing @Alicebentinck and @matthewclifford ?.
We’re giving away copies of ‘How to be a Founder’, courtesy of our friend @shak @PrimaMateria_. Tell us who is graduating soon that should be a founder using #HTBAFGiveaway. The first 100 entries across all platforms will each win 2 copies. See link to full T&Cs in the thread.
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5. Leveraging the “Oil Fund”. Norway's $1.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund offers a unique opportunity to fuel innovation. Like every previous management of the fund, CEO Nicolai Tangen has requested government permission to invest in private markets. So far, the government has
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But so far, Norway isn't realising this amazing potential: . Norway depends heavily on (partially state-owned) incumbents, rather than a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem. One of the reasons is Norway's cultural "Janteloven" ethos, which emphasizes collective achievement over.
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