You nailed it. In our case, EBITDA margins were "pencil on a napkin" at best — only because the CFO is usually the sanest person in the room. At the same time, Elon's moves and Meta's "year of efficiency" were super influential.
A lot of what happens in the boardroom or C-suite is "stick with the crowd" — e.g. template-based "tech modernization." (That's often a new CTO's hedge if the real problems are too hard. Just "go Cloud" or "go AI" for five years — four vests, one to jump off.) You broadcast confidence, you own the narrative. Which means never, ever saying "I don't know."
This is especially common in PE "turnarounds" or post-IPOs after founder exits. And it's especially harmful there because current staff is often seen as a liability, not an asset.
I thought a lot about this after the layoffs, and I think it boils down to how "professional C-levels" see execution as a commodity. They tend to overemphasize leadership (sometimes self-serving, but often genuine) and resource availability. The focus is on "what?" and "how to pay for it?" — with "how?" left to be figured out on the go.
I don't think that's completely wrong. Sometimes execution is a commodity. But not when you're short on time and planning for a rapid sprint.
My Lebanese friends are Armenian Gregorians, so I tend to consider their perspective relatively impartial — though, as you rightly noted, it remains anecdotal.
As for 'Jewish policies', there are, of course, issues around settlers, the West Bank, and Gaza. My own view on Gaza doesn't favour any particular side - it's a deeply complex and painful topic, and I recognise the trauma is still fresh. But I was referring to a different angle. Many of my Israeli friends are deeply frustrated by the influence of the ultra-Orthodox community and the state policies shaped by that influence - whether it's on women's rights, voting rights for Israeli Arabs, or broader social norms.
It's increasingly concerning given the explosive proportional growth of this community, which is on track to represent a third of Israel's population within a few decades.
And yet, the topic of the ultra-Orthodox and their influence is exceedingly rare in the West. I wouldn’t have been aware of it myself if I hadn’t had a personal experience. Years ago, a girl who had run away - literally - from a Hasidic community arrived in the UK, desperately looking for a way to stay. She was applying for jobs, including a position I had open. Meanwhile, she was staying with some soft-hearted Jewish family, working as a nanny for their kids. I still remember her eyes and the dedication — and desperation — in her voice.
My CTO at the time, an Israeli ex-IDF intelligence guy, soft-pushed me to hire her, even though she was absolutely unqualified. He told me, 'These people have enough resolve to become anything.' I didn’t budge. But I’ve never forgotten that experience.
There's definitely a "peacetime" / "wartime" divide. There's also an overreliance on pedigree. But above all, it's the pressure of being a public company (which often means losing the founder).
As a new CEO, you have to impress the board and investors without really knowing the company. You probably get two earnings calls - six months at most - to prove yourself. That's nothing, even for a senior dev, let alone an exec. And if you're being brought in, it means the company isn't in great shape - or is at least perceived that way.
You don't have time to really figure out how things work, and even if you did, it's political suicide. The board didn't hire a "looks fine to me" person. They hired a fixer. So, it turns into narrative games and rapid actions with massive tail risks.
I don't think it's a people problem. It's a system problem. Leadership replanting is hard, but it's one of the very few tools in the board's toolbox.
UK was horrible. No real protection for workers - just layers of mandatory legal mumbo-jumbo with zero actual chances for people to keep their jobs. It was like ripping off the band-aid 1mm at a time for four months.
Spain/France were an employer’s nightmare. Anyone without another job lined up secured a "special deal"—workers have massive leverage, they know it, and they’re actively litigious. People on parental leave had close to a year of guaranteed no-shows. The reaction was, of course, "never again" rippling across American corporate circles.
The rest of Europe was okay-ish.
US was predictably the easiest. We were generous with packages, but it's easy to see how the system can be used to screw people over.
Middle East was the roughest. Visas in UAE/Qatar expire instantly, and the local tech market is almost non-existent. We extended until the end of the school year to help with visa concerns, and some people managed to arrange golden visas. But for many, it was a massive shock — losing both jobs and residency overnight.
I have Israeli friends across the spectrum (except maybe ultra-orthodox, but including Ukrainian/Russian olim). I also have friends from Lebanon (not even Arabs). They all share different stories, many of them very ugly ones, — and not just about Palestinians. And many of them are Jewish and critical of Jewish policies.
I know plenty of Israelis who are genuinely trying, and there are many of liberal-minded people with their conscience absolutely in the right place. I don't want to badmouth any of them.
My point is — if the same level of "trying" happened elsewhere (like in Xinjiang), Americans and Europeans would instantly brand it the worst kind of totalitarianism.
It's astonishing how the same first-rank predators who've been devouring the world for 500 years now posture as moral messiahs. And that's coming from me — one of them.
Had been advocating slower hiring & targeted reductions in a mid-sized tech firm for years after COVID, but it happened much faster under a newly appointed CEO.
Under new leadership, we executed 1/3 layoffs framed as a "culture refresh" and to briefly lift the stock. It wasn't about survival, we had plenty of cash, okayish growth and fantastic ARR - more about a new corp-backed CEO adopting a "do-it-like-Elon" approach.
Being mostly Europe-based but US-led, it turned into a massive and costly process (Americans don't exactly dig EU/UK workers rights - Spain was the biggest shock), stalling most productive activity for half a year. Internal trust and brand perception tanked. Since it began with ousting old execs, it quickly devolved into a blunt-force exercise with no internal knowledge, led by scared managers with percentage targets - many good people were cut. Managers hesitated to shield talent, given the "culture reboot" framing. I ended up personally cutting entire offices.
When the CEO's broader strategy failed (for reasons beyond layoffs), high performers started eyeing the exit. Ironically, many first saw the layoffs positively - COVID overhires had left uneven team dynamics, and some dead weight was on high salaries. But when it became clear there was no coherent plan, people began leaving.
That triggered a chain reaction. Senior hiring pipelines dried up (reputation matters, esp. when your top-talent is on the way out and is loud about it), and panic set in. Eventually, it turned into survival mode. The CEO didn't last long after that.
French land army is 77k total, with maybe 30k actually combat-capable — the rest are admin, logistics, and training. Add 9k Foreign Legion, but only a fraction of that is high-intensity capable.
With rotations, France can probably field about 15k troops on an actual frontline — and after that, it’s draft time.
For comparison:
* Russian armed forces: 1.1 million.
* 500k deployed in Ukraine.
* ~300k on the active frontline right now.
In terms of real land warfare capacity, France is in the same weight class as Belarus or Romania — and about 20 times behind Russia.
Even if you argue technical edge (better equipment per soldier), France has zero industrial mobilization capacity and no modern large-scale combat experience.
Would the investor even outlive the investment though? Imagine building data centers in the UK — only to get Brexit halfway through.
Any long-term, shared investment relies on continuous, guaranteed political and economic unity. Today it’s the US that’s hostile — but how confident can you be that tomorrow it won’t be a PiS-led Poland, or even an AfD-led Germany?
You absolutely could go bare-metal with emerging local platforms and a Chinese stack — that’s the path Russia (and obviously China itself) is heading down. But...
Equinix? US. Digital Realty? US. NTT? Japan. Interxion? US. CyrusOne? US. That’s your top five DC/colo operators in Europe.
Same story with Tier-1 and Tier-1.5 ISPs.
It’s not just software. It’s not even just hardware. It’s the whole stack — down to power grids, land property rights, and regulatory frameworks.
Nationalization? Multidecade supply chain reconfiguration? Trillions in investment to rebuild local capacity — likely still with deep reliance on China for core infra components.
Europe isn’t just "a bit dependent" — it’s completely entangled.
Worth noting that Europe is the only place where someone could have actually been a Nazi, historically speaking. Plenty of other countries managed to avoid both Nazism and sweeping free speech bans.
And let’s not forget — the actual consequences for genocide were delivered by the Americans, Brits, and Russians, not by internal bans or laws.
Wouldn't you implicitly support Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Dell/HP, Snowflake/Databricks, Datadog, etc. with almost every sale though? For many European businesses, infrastructure and platform costs likely exceed their own margins. In that sense, a lot of European businesses are really just "value-added resellers" of US hardware and platforms.
Funnily enough, this is exactly Putin’s own logic — just flipped.
“We had to support those rebel Ukrainian states so Ukrainians fight them, not us.”
“We had to preemptively disarm Ukraine, or we’d be fighting Ukrainians inside Russia within five years.”
As for China — surely they’d be nervous if Taiwan was one-third of their population and shared a land border.
Ukraine isn’t just a border state, it’s alt-Russia, as Taiwan is alt-China (and so was Hong-Kong). A competing civilizational project trying to jump off the imperial train and build a Polish-style normal nation-state — and that makes it an existential threat. Not because Ukraine is strong, but because it offers Russians a dangerous glimpse of an alternative path — a Russian identity without the empire.
Keep Ukraine on life support for a decade, hoping Russia collapses under sanctions?
Cuba’s still standing after 60 years. Iran after 40. The USSR took decades to fall — and none of them had China bankrolling their survival.
Russia’s economy bleeds, but it’s not cut off. China sends tech and machines, India buys the oil, and Europe keeps quietly paying top dollar for gas through backdoors.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s population shrinks, its economy is wrecked, and its army can’t fight without Western money, Western weapons — and soon, Western bodies.
Because if you actually want to push Russia back — not even collapse it, just push it back — that means European and American troops on the front line. Conscription, mobilized economies, the whole package.
Without a sustained meat grinder to chew up Russian forces, Russia just consolidates and digs in — with China keeping the whole thing afloat.
And if the West isn’t ready for that, who exactly do you think will still be standing in 10 years?
The only guaranteed winner? China — with Russia as a client state, Europe as a deindustrialized theme park, and America too exhausted to stop them.
If this is a game of who bleeds out last, Ukraine’s already done, Europe bleeds out first, Russia bleeds to its usual stupid level — and China walks away without a scratch.
Except Putin doesn’t need to outrun America — he just needs to outrun Ukraine.
There’s a finite number of Ukrainians, and an even smaller number of Ukrainian men actually willing — or physically able — to fight.
20% of the population already left, and around 1.5 million of them went to Russia. Another 15% are stuck under occupation.
Ukraine’s demographics were already a disaster after the WW2 wipe-out, the Soviet collapse, and 30 years of economic decline and emigration. Now they’re drafting 18 to 60-year-olds just to keep units filled - at 40%.
So what happens in a year or two, when there’s no one left to draft?
The Poles aren’t volunteering to die en masse, and they’re the only EU country with anything resembling a real army — and even that is one-fifth the size of Russia’s.
So who’s holding the line then?
The US Army? The Marine Corps?
Is anyone actually ready to send Americans to die in the Donbas?
You can’t fully defeat a nuclear power. You can, at best, drive it back — if you’re willing to pay the price.
And that price means Europe will have to absorb a dramatic, sustained drop in quality of life — plus forced mobilisation.
Even the Poles - the most serious player in Europe right now — only have about 200,000 troops.
The British and French combined have maybe 40,000 soldiers actually capable of high-intensity combat. That’s enough for, what - four weeks of real war?
After that, there will be no volunteers. That means a draft.
So the real question is: Are you ready to be drafted to “defeat Russia”?
A lot of what happens in the boardroom or C-suite is "stick with the crowd" — e.g. template-based "tech modernization." (That's often a new CTO's hedge if the real problems are too hard. Just "go Cloud" or "go AI" for five years — four vests, one to jump off.) You broadcast confidence, you own the narrative. Which means never, ever saying "I don't know."
This is especially common in PE "turnarounds" or post-IPOs after founder exits. And it's especially harmful there because current staff is often seen as a liability, not an asset.
I thought a lot about this after the layoffs, and I think it boils down to how "professional C-levels" see execution as a commodity. They tend to overemphasize leadership (sometimes self-serving, but often genuine) and resource availability. The focus is on "what?" and "how to pay for it?" — with "how?" left to be figured out on the go.
I don't think that's completely wrong. Sometimes execution is a commodity. But not when you're short on time and planning for a rapid sprint.