Why the Best Founders Are Neither American nor European
There’s no shortage of AI founders eager to tell you about their ARR, and very little underneath when you push on retention or margins. Emmanuel De Maistre is different. Not only because he’s French holding a US passport. Not because his last company blitz-scaled into oblivion. But because Scenario, the AI content platform used by the likes of Scopely, Tripledot, Voodoo, Ubisoft, InnoGames, and countless other top studios, runs on sound fundamentals. Fewer than 20 people, near-zero customer churn, profitable before a Series A. In an industry allergic to fundamentals, that makes the company an outlier.
I didn’t find Scenario through a pitch. I kept hearing the name from world-class studios and sought-after investors, and I wanted to figure out what the fuss is all about. What I learned is that the answer has less to do with the models and more to do with the founder. Which makes Emmanuel the right person to answer a question I have wanted to ask a European founder who has built in Silicon Valley for years…
The Invincible Formula
There is a pattern with European founders. You move to the US and adopt American startup culture, because there is an implicit message that European ambition is somehow insufficient. Emmanuel is French, raised money from American investors, and sells to (also) American studios.
So I asked him directly: do you feel expected to perform a version of yourself that fits what Silicon Valley expects? And has there been a moment where the performance cost more than the access was worth? Emmanuel answered with “yes, and”.
You perform a version of yourself in Silicon Valley. But almost nobody there is a native, so nearly everyone is performing. Finding the version that works takes years of living inside the ecosystem, not a trade-show visit or a week-long trip.
Emmanuel lived in the Bay Area for years. And the performance has not cost him more than the access is worth, because the access is the whole point: American investors funded a plan Europe would never have touched. “You don’t find that in Europe.”
How wide is the cultural gap? Pre-COVID, Emmanuel was preparing to pitch one of the top Sand Hill Road investors. An experienced French-American founder looked at his deck and gave one note: add a zero to every number. In the Uber between a Palo Alto Starbucks and Sand Hill, he multiplied his financials by ten. The investor’s reaction: “sounds like a good plan”.
“Americans know your numbers are inflated. What they are testing is whether you aim for the moon, because reasonable plans produce reasonable outcomes, and reasonable outcomes do not return venture funds.”
This is why “European founders lack ambition” is a lazy take. Ambition is environmental, not genetic. Grow up in the US and you learn sky is the limit. Grow up in Europe and you learn to build a reasonable plan for a fragmented market where a jungle of regulations sets the limit. The same applies to failure. In the US, failure is celebrated if you can show what you learned. In Europe, it is a stigma you carry.
The work culture gap is just as real: 80-hour weeks are the Valley norm, AI founders are not an exception, and Emmanuel trades Sundays for an empty Monday inbox. Through a European lens, that is a failure state. Through an American one, success.
“When you have that ambition and forward-looking mindset that is very much US, but you know how to be grounded sometimes, which I feel Europeans are better at, I think you’re invincible.”
The Gaming Industry’s AI Adoption Problem
You’d assume that adopting AI at a company making an AI product goes without question. Scenario had the same adoption challenges. The company’s engineers, many of whom are European, treat code as craft. Because of that, the team initially refused to put Claude or Codex into the loop. It took months before the engineers of an AI company agreed to use AI to write code. Quality obsession is Europe’s strength and its handicap in a single anecdote.
Both numbers above are credible. The gap between adoption and results is the entire story. Most studios put 80% of their AI budget into tool licenses spread across the org, 20% into some vague innovation function, and zero into rewiring how work actually gets done. Enterprise software adoption in gaming does not behave the way most B2B SaaS playbooks describe. Source: Unity 2026 Game Development Report, MIT study
CFO and the CEO are incentivized to look for efficiency. AI tools promise more, better, faster, and cheaper. They buy the tools but often don’t see the financial returns because a mandate or access to a tool doesn’t equal adoption. The person who has to actually use the tool in a production pipeline is the one you need to win over. If they do not believe it works for their specific workflow, nothing else matters.
“Selling to an expert audience requires an intimate knowledge of their workflows. We do not sell a wrapper with access to multiple models. We sell specific knowledge of use cases. What to prompt, how to chain prompts, what to expect from each model, and where human intervention is required. As a result, we see real adoption within studios as the seats go from the initial few to tens and more.”
Studios that say “it doesn’t work” tested one model on one use case on one day and moved on. Studios that built the AI muscle took weeks to understand the workflow, figured out which models to use for which tasks, and are now producing in days what used to take weeks or months.
The gap between these groups is widening. And the scary part is that it is the incumbents (top-grossing studios) who are leading the adoption wave, pulling further away from the challengers. That’s counter-narrative because the big companies don’t speak. They just do.
What AI Actually Does to Creative Headcount
The standard industry answer is “we empower creators to do more.” Emmanuel gives you that answer first, then qualifies it in ways most AI executives would not say out loud.
“None of Scenario’s large studio clients have reduced headcount after adopting our tools. They have upskilled existing teams and used AI to do more with the same crew. Some studios have even used AI to keep declining games alive with a smaller team and better unit economics.”
Personally, I’m not bullish on the “AI expands the creator class” argument either. The Roblox comparison is useful: democratized creation tools, and 95%+ of users are still consumers. More tools do not automatically produce more creators. The limiting factor has always been taste and intent, not access to software or ease of use.
Scenario enables studios to build on their art by automating and scaling production. For example, using Scenario, a team can turn character descriptions into a lipsynced video reel. Just enter character descriptions and dialogue lines and the pipeline generates portraits, clones each voice, animates lipsynced avatars, and assembles them into a single ready-to-use video reel. More use cases by top studios here.
Emmanuel’s actual thesis on creative AI: the talent that survives is not the person who knows which buttons to press in Blender or Photoshop. It is the person who knows what tone, expression, motion, and color actually serve the game’s vision.
That judgment, the art direction layer, is not something current models have. They produce technically competent outputs. Whether those outputs are shippable, whether they serve a consistent creative vision across a product, is still a human call.
He does not think this will change in five years. He might be wrong.
Philosophical Musing
The dominant emotion in gaming’s AI moment is fear. Some studios read the headlines and conclude that not engaging with the tools will somehow protect them. Others read the same news and fear that by not engaging with the tool, their competitor will pass them by. This is happening because the biggest AI founders have chosen to use fear to drive adoption.
I do not entirely blame the founders on the other side of the table either. A venture backed company has no real option besides growing, and then growing faster. The fund math demands outliers, the board demands the fund math, and the founder inherits a mandate: scale or become irrelevant to your own cap table.
In AI, the mandate is turbocharged because growth itself is subsidized. Cheap tokens, funded by venture and public money, make every growth curve look steeper than the underlying economics. When token prices normalize, and Emmanuel bets they will, a lot of companies will learn their unit economics that drove the scale are the same ones that will drive them into the ground.
Scaling fast leaves scar tissue. A founder who has scaled past what the business could sustain learns to read the difference between speed and recklessness, and earns the confidence to slow down when everyone on the cap table is screaming to accelerate. In other words, you learn how to avoid wiping out.
Emmanuel has wiped out before, scaled past what a business could carry by investors in a hurry. He does not dwell on it, and neither will I. But it is exactly why Scenario grows at a pace its own economics can sustain. Which is the answer to the title. The best founders are neither American nor European, because each culture alone optimizes for half the job. America teaches you to aim for the moon. Europe teaches you to survive the trip.
Ambition without grounding wipes out. Grounding without ambition never catches the wave. The founders who compound are the ones who learned both, usually the hard way, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Emmanuel said it best: “Have the American ambition, keep the European grounding, and you are invincible.”
Listen to the full conversation on Deconstructor of Fun
