US ExpansionEuropean FoundersLeadershipTransatlanticExecutive Search
What It Really Takes: My Golden Rules for European Founders Scaling to the US
After five days with European founders in Silicon Valley and 15+ years placing senior leaders across the Atlantic, Franziska shares the rules every European founder needs before crossing the Atlantic.
Last month, I had the privilege of joining a cohort of some of Europe’s most ambitious AI-driven founders for five days in Silicon Valley. Organised through ScaleNL, the programme immersed Dutch and European startups and scale-ups into one of the world’s most competitive tech ecosystems. The pace is fast. The expectations are high. And every conversation — whether with a local VC, a fellow founder, or a potential enterprise buyer — challenges you to think bigger than you arrived.
Throughout the week, founders received candid feedback from Bay Area VCs, explored Google’s campus to understand how a genuine culture of innovation works in practice, and gained practical market intelligence from organisations like SVB, EY, and JP Morgan — all specialists in helping international companies land and scale in the US.
One of the highlights was our Founder Dinner, powered by Key Search — bringing together founders, operators, investors, and ecosystem leaders from across the San Francisco Bay Area. Building meaningful relationships remains one of the most valuable investments you can make when entering a new market. The conversations in the margins, the introductions that happen when the agenda ends — these are often where the real expansion begins.
What I See Again and Again
Over more than 15 years of placing senior leaders at technology companies across Europe and the United States, I have helped dozens of European founders navigate the most consequential decisions of their transatlantic expansion. The founders who struggle are almost never the ones with the weakest products. They are the ones who underestimate how different the American market is — and who fail to prepare their leadership accordingly.
What Silicon Valley week makes vivid for founders is what I try to convey from a talent and leadership perspective every time I meet a European company preparing to cross the Atlantic: going to the US is not a strategy you can execute part-time. It demands a different level of commitment, a different approach to people, and a fundamentally different relationship with risk.
Below are the rules I give every European founder who is serious about building in the US. They are drawn from years of experience, hard-won insight, and watching both successes and failures unfold in real time.
The #1 Golden Rule: Own Your Story
Everything else depends on this. A founder who cannot powerfully pitch their history, vision, and trajectory simply will not survive in the US. US investors and buyers do not just buy your product — they buy the future and the narrative behind it. If you cannot articulate a compelling, high-conviction story, the doors remain closed. Before anything else, invest in your ability to tell that story with absolute clarity and confidence.
Pillar 1: Total Market Immersion — No Tourists Allowed
The US market requires an all-in, physical commitment. You cannot build a meaningful presence by dropping in for conferences. Founders must be willing to relocate, live there, and breathe the culture. US expansion demands brand omnipresence — an aggressive, continuous visibility that can feel uncomfortable to founders from more conservative European business environments. To win trust in the US, you have to adopt local communication styles, networking norms, and operate at American speed. Half-measures fail.
Pillar 2: Laser-Focused Positioning and Trust
The US market is vast and deeply saturated. Generic solutions die quickly. Generalist SaaS platforms struggle. Specialised software — even across verticals like HealthTech or FinTech — needs crystal-clear, sharp positioning to cut through the noise. Equally critical is building foundational relationships with local founders and US investors. Trust is not assumed in the American market; it is earned slowly, through consistent relationships. That work must start before you arrive.
Pillar 3: Hardcore Legal Infrastructure — No Shortcuts
This is where I see European founders make the most expensive mistakes. Relying on temporary compliance workarounds — Employer of Record solutions like Deel or Remote — is not enough for serious scaling. You must set up a true local US legal entity. Not primarily for revenue routing, but because it is strictly required to handle local operations, compliance, and employment properly. And critically: without it, you cannot offer the benefits that attract the talent you actually need.
Pillar 4: Premium US Benefits and Healthcare
In the US, healthcare is not a perk. It is a baseline survival requirement. You cannot recruit high-calibre talent without offering a comprehensive corporate health insurance plan — and to offer the kind of plans that attract serious candidates, you need the legal entity mentioned above. American candidates also heavily prioritise wellness and sports-related benefits. If you are benchmarking your offer against European norms, you are already losing the best people before the conversation has even begun.
Pillar 5: Aggressive Performance and Talent Management
The employment culture in the US is fundamentally different from Europe’s highly protected labour market. Everything is metrics-driven. If people do not hit their numbers, you must act quickly — particularly in sales. Hire with redundancy built in from day one: bring on twice the sales talent you think you need, because statistically not all of it will work out, and in a growth environment you cannot afford to wait six months to find that out.
On the flip side: praise loudly and publicly. American teams thrive on recognition. Build loyalty by celebrating wins visibly, often, and enthusiastically. This is not performative — it is about understanding what drives people in the culture you are operating in and meeting them there.
What This Means for Your Leadership Hire
Behind every one of these pillars is a people decision. The legal entity needs the right CFO or Head of Legal. The brand omnipresence needs a marketing leader who genuinely understands the American buyer. The performance culture needs a VP of Sales who has built and managed US teams before. None of this happens without the right senior leadership on the ground from the start.
That first US leadership hire — whether a General Manager, Country Manager, or VP of Sales — is not just an operational decision. It signals to the market who you are. It carries your credibility in rooms you cannot yet be in every day. It sets the internal culture for everything that follows. Get it right and your expansion accelerates. Get it wrong and you lose not just time, but momentum — and often the window itself.
A huge thank you to our partners who make the ScaleNL programme possible: EY, SVB, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, J.P. Morgan, Rabobank, the Ministerie van Economische Zaken en Klimaat, the Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken, and the Netherlands Consulate in San Francisco — for helping European founders scale internationally.
If you are preparing to make the move to the US, or supporting a portfolio company through it, I would be glad to talk through what that leadership search should look like — and what the market demands of a candidate who can actually lead it. Get in touch.
Key Search
Key Search specializes in expansion hires across Europe, the US, and transatlantic searches. To find out more about our US and North American hiring capability, visit us below.
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