“The real question is how many opportunities you miss by not investing”

Europe builds outstanding technology companies, but it lacks the capital, and the willingness to take risks, needed to help those companies scale at home. That is the view of venture fund manager and investor Kinga Stanisławska, founder of European Women in VC. Pension funds, she argues, can play a critical role in changing this. But doing so requires both courage and a different perspective on diversity.

"It would have been easier if one of you had been a man." That's what Polish investor Kinga Stanisławska was told when she and a female partner set out to launch a venture capital fund. The fund was launched anyway. And that comment remains a driving force behind her mission to increase the number of women in venture capital.

Stanisławska co-architected the €3.5 billion equity arm of the European Innovation Council (EIC Fund) and, as its first Investment Committee member, reviewed more than 150 investment cases. She spent years at the EBRD investing into and alongside private equity and growth funds. She later founded European Women in VC and has become one of Europe's most influential voices on venture capital, institutional capital, and diversity. Her mission is to help major investors recognize the enormous potential of venture capital in Europe, before overseas investors walk away with the next unicorn.

In many of your presentations, you emphasize that technology knows no borders. At the same time, you argue that European pension funds should invest more in European innovation. Isn't that a contradiction?

"Not at all. Technology companies are not tied to a physical location the way real estate or infrastructure investments are. A Dutch startup can find customers in Amsterdam today and open a sales office in San Francisco tomorrow. Technology moves across borders very easily. That's also where the challenge lies. European companies need capital to grow. If that capital isn't available here, they move to places where it is. We've been watching that happen for years."

So what exactly is going wrong?

"American investors commit significantly more capital to venture capital than European investors do. As a result, American companies have more opportunities to experiment, make mistakes, and ultimately succeed. A startup has to invest before it can generate revenue. If you don't have enough capital to try new things, your chances of success decrease as well. In the end, that means Americans are more likely to build the companies of tomorrow. Just look at today's tech giants."

Yet many pension funds remain hesitant.

"To some extent, I understand that. But sometimes that hesitation surprises me. We're often talking about allocations of just one or two percent of a portfolio. In the context of a total pension portfolio, that's a very small share. Even if such an investment underperforms, it has very little impact on a well-diversified pension portfolio."

Pension funds often point to risk and costs.

"The real constraint is not courage and it is not cost. It is craft. European pension teams are excellent public-market investors. Venture manager selection is a different discipline: sourcing, diligence, terms, benchmarking across vintages. Almost nowhere in Europe is it taught. The institutions that build that capability first will own the access, because in venture the best managers choose their investors."

Still, costs, returns, and a degree of certainty around them are major considerations for pension funds. From that perspective, their caution seems understandable.

"And they absolutely should consider those factors. But returns should not be evaluated based on an arbitrary three- or five-year period. That creates a distorted picture. Recent stock market performance has been driven largely by a small group of American technology companies. The question is whether that will happen again over the next twenty years. Even large institutional investors are asking that question today. As a pension fund, do you want to own only yesterday's winners, or do you also want exposure to the companies that will shape the decades ahead?"

Beyond investing in venture capital at all, you also advocate for greater diversity within the industry. How closely are those discussions connected?

"Investing is ultimately a people business. Investors do not evaluate all existing opportunities. They evaluate the opportunities they encounter. There's a term for that: investor homophily. People invest in what they know, understand, and recognize. That applies to everyone: men, women, younger people, older people, everyone."

Why does that matter for performance?

"Because it influences which ideas get funded in the first place. Venture capital is largely about recognizing opportunities that others don't see yet. The most successful investments have often been contrarian. Take SpaceX. The idea that a private company would become the dominant force in space exploration once sounded absurd. Yet those unconventional ideas often create the greatest value."

And that's where diversity comes in?

"Exactly. When nearly all investment decisions are made by the same type of people, you run the risk that the same kinds of ideas will continue receiving funding. Women represent roughly half the population and make a large share of household purchasing decisions. Yet many products, services, and businesses are still evaluated through a relatively narrow, predominantly male lens. When you bring different people to the table, you gain access to different networks, different perspectives, and different investment opportunities. That creates a cascade effect."

Can you explain what you mean by that?

"Many people think diversity starts with entrepreneurs. But it starts earlier, with the people allocating capital. If a pension fund includes in its mandate that part of its assets should be invested through more balanced investment teams, that change ripples through the value chain. Fund managers adjust their teams. Those teams evaluate different entrepreneurs. Different companies gain access to capital. It's like a waterfall. One decision at the top influences hundreds of decisions throughout the system."

You've spent years trying to accelerate that change. Are you optimistic?

"Cautiously optimistic. We haven't achieved everything we hoped for. For example, we advocated for much larger European funds to support female investors, and progress there has been limited. But we have seen that a single change in allocation policy can influence an entire market. That proves that systems can change."

What is Europe's biggest challenge right now?

"Europe lacks sufficient capital structures to finance innovation at scale. In the United States, university endowments, foundations, family offices, and pension funds have been investing in venture capital for decades. Europe has far fewer of those capital sources. As a result, we often have the knowledge, the entrepreneurs, and the technology, but not the ecosystem required to turn them into global champions."

Has the security debate changed that picture?

"It has sharpened it. A meaningful share of the next decade's value creation in Europe will happen in deeptech and in resilience technologies, the systems that keep societies running and secure. Security is something every pension member understands and values. I see more institutional investors beginning to look at innovation through that lens, and I think that is a healthy development."

How often are you in contact with the pension sector?

"Last year we sat down with fifty pension funds across Europe to understand this from their side. This year we are working with partners including the NATO Innovation Fund and the European Commission, and speaking with funds in fifteen countries. We publish what we find in November."

If you could leave pension fund boards with one message, what would it be?

"The real question is not how much risk a small venture capital allocation adds to a portfolio. The real question is how many opportunities you miss by not investing. Because ultimately, this is not about venture capital. It's about who gets to build the economy of the future. And whether Europe wants to be an owner of that future or merely a spectator. And this is ultimately about the members. A pension is a claim on the future economy, and members will retire into the economy we finance today."