WHERE IS YOUR EGO?

A piece for the Middle East Investor Network

Lanre Okunnuga  |  July 2026

The Double Standard

As a tax lawyer specialising in investment management and asset and wealth management, I have spent two decades sitting in rooms with investors, founders, and management teams from across the globe. The stories that have stayed with me are rarely about the numbers. They are about what people believe capital is for, and who it should serve.

I keep reading that Europe has a capital problem. What I hear less often is the observation that Middle Eastern capital may be uniquely positioned to solve it, and what that means for the investors and allocators who deploy it. Too much government. Not enough private. The wrong kind of institutions backing the wrong kind of founders. The argument is usually made with confidence by people whose own markets have never had to confront the same constraint.

BYD received state subsidies at every stage of its growth. Tesla took a $465 million government loan in 2010 and survived on it. Neither story gets told as a failure of government capital. Both get told as triumphs of vision. The government involvement disappears from the narrative the moment the outcome is successful.

The double standard is visible. But naming it does not resolve the underlying question. Something deeper is at play. And that something has a name.

What Venture Actually Is

Venture is different from every other asset class, and the difference matters more than most investors acknowledge. Infrastructure has a concession. Debt has a covenant. Real estate has a lease. Equity has a market. Each of these asset classes has a mechanism that mediates between the capital and the outcome. A structure that sits between the investor and the investment and absorbs some of the cultural signal.

Venture has a founder. A human being with a vision, a culture, and a way of seeing the world. There is no structure sitting between the investor and the founder. You are underwriting a person, not an asset. And people carry their cultural operating system with them into every room they enter, every pitch they give, every decision they make under pressure.

This is why the cultural operating system matters more in venture than in any other asset class. The closer capital gets to people, the closer it gets to their ways. Their norms. Their validation mechanisms. Their definition of what success looks like and who gets to decide when it has been achieved. An investor who does not understand the cultural operating system of the founder they are backing is not just taking financial risk. They are taking a translation risk that no term sheet can price.

The Map

Every culture places its Ego somewhere different. Ego here does not mean arrogance. It means the north-star orientation. The thing a culture points toward when it asks where value lives and who gets to claim it.

In Europe the Ego is in the culture. Stability. Collective norms. The long institution. The sense that what was built over generations has meaning precisely because it was built over generations. Risk is tolerated when necessary and absorbed slowly.

In America the Ego is in the market. Individual validation. The exit. The number. Failure is not a stigma but a credential. Speed is not impatience but evidence of seriousness. The market is the arbiter of worth, and the market moves fast.

In Asia the Ego is in the age. Hierarchy. Patience. Long-term orientation built across generations not quarters. Respect flows upward. Decisions take the time they take. The long view is not a strategy. It is a value.

In Africa the Ego is in the individual. Personal drive operating inside a communal context. The self as engine. The community as destination. Ambition is personal. Its fruits are shared. The two are not in conflict. They are the same motion.

In the Middle East the Ego is in the relationship. No dominant home market pulls the investment decision. The capital exists without the distraction of scale. That is not a limitation. It is the cleanest vantage point on the board.

The above is a map. Not a hierarchy. Not a ranking. A map of where different cultures place their sense of worth, and how that placement shapes every investment decision made by the people who carry it.

What the map reveals, when read from the Middle East, is something worth sitting with.

Ego Tendencies

The visible concentration of successful African diaspora professionals and entrepreneurs in places like Atlanta and parts of Texas is not accidental. Individual drive meets market validation in environments that reward both ambition and community. The coasts are pure market Ego. Atlanta and parts of Texas have both, and that combination is familiar to anyone who grew up in a culture where the self and the community are not opposites.

Europeans and Asians recognise each other quickly. Two cultures that place Ego outside the individual do not need to explain themselves. European and Asian long-term capital partners frequently close deals on shared time horizons where US-style speed and quarterly pressure create friction instead. The patience, the deference to process, the sense that relationships are built before transactions are closed. These are not obstacles. They are signals of compatibility that neither side needs to articulate.

We Took Corporations for Granted

Separate from regional Egos, there are three Egos in every room. The market Ego. The founder Ego. The investor Ego. Each competes against the others.

The public market, dressed as corporations, used to sit between capital and culture. When wealth moves through listed vehicles and institutional mandates, the Ego is filtered. A board of directors, advisers, governance structures, fiduciary frameworks, committee processes. These were not just administrative overhead. They were a prism. Every investor came in with a different Ego, a different orientation, a different definition of success. The corporation absorbed all of it, distilled it, and produced a single investment direction. The translation happened inside the structure. Automatically. Without anyone having to negotiate it by hand.

There were approximately 8,000 publicly listed companies in the US in 2002. Today there are fewer than 4,000. Wealth was always private. Now businesses are going private too. More and more of the world's investing is happening through private markets, and the prevailing structure used in private investment is flow-through. Partnerships. Fund structures. Direct deals.

The prism is not gone. It is concentrating. The increasingly large IPOs of late; SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, suggest the public market still has a role for the largest outcomes. But for the vast majority of private capital, the translation layer has thinned considerably. Flow-through structures are inherently light on fixed procedural, operational, and regulatory frameworks. Contracts hold partnerships together, and every party to that contract has a say in how it gets written. The translation that the corporation was doing in the background now has to be done manually, by the parties in the room, through negotiation, through relationship, through the slow work of understanding whose Ego is driving the deal.

As wealth migrates into private funds, family offices, and direct investment vehicles, those filters thin further. The capital owner's Ego enters the room directly. European private wealth, now operating without the institutional buffer, increasingly behaves like the market it is chasing. The Egos are mixing. And when they mix without a filter, the one that moves fastest tends to win.

The final agreement tends to read closer to the strongest Ego in the room. Depending on the scenario that can be the investor, it can be the market, or in some rare cases it can be the founder.

Observations: US and EU VC

To understand why Middle Eastern capital matters to the European venture story, it helps to understand why European capital failed it.

American VC struggles to read European markets. In 2025 US venture capital deployed approximately $330 billion at home and sent roughly $21 billion to Europe. Returns in America are strong, but a 6 to 7% allocation to Europe suggests more than attraction to home markets. It also suggests deterrence. You cannot run a market-Ego approach inside a culture-Ego operating system. The signals are different. So are the validation mechanisms. What looks like risk aversion from San Francisco looks like institutional memory from Amsterdam. What reads as slow decision-making from New York reads as proper diligence from Frankfurt. The operating systems are not broken. They are simply different, and the investor who mistakes difference for deficiency will not show up at all.

When a European founder raises from US investors, they are routinely asked to incorporate in Delaware. The capital does not come to them. They go to the capital. The founder is outnumbered. The market they need to face is in the US. The investors are in the US. The market Ego and the investor Ego are pointing in the same direction. The founder's Ego is the only one pointing back at Europe. In most cases, it does not survive the weight of the other two.

When the Egos Blur

In 2025 Europe deployed 22% of what the US deployed in venture capital. Many large US pension plans allocate well over 10% of their portfolios to venture. European pension funds allocated less than 0.1%. That alone is a tenfold difference in relative terms.

Then private wealth made it worse. In America, the market Ego, as you would expect, saw upsides locally. US pension plans allocated well over 10% to VC from collective savings, and private wealth followed. Rich Americans threw their wealth at local VCs because opportunity was everywhere. The two pools moved in the same direction.

In Europe, private wealth left. The Dutch millionaire, who understands Dutch founders, Dutch markets, and Dutch risk better than any outsider, invested in US venture because European venture took too long to cross borders. European pension capital was historically fixed income focused. The regulatory frameworks that governed it were built for liability matching, not long-duration illiquid assets. It was not unwilling. It was instructed elsewhere. And while pension capital sat on the sidelines, more than half of EU venture capital raised in Europe flowed outside the EU. Less than 20% of US venture capital does the same. European venture capital, raised in Europe, was chasing the faster market too.

Pension capital sidelined. Private wealth departing. Venture capital exporting. Nobody was left to fill the room. And then, as if that exodus was not bad enough, when European founders raise from US investors, they are routinely asked to incorporate in Delaware. The capital does not come to them. They go to the capital. The cycle completes itself with every company that leaves.

Policy as Last Resort

European capital stopped acting like European capital. The culture Ego that should have backed European founders, European markets, and European risk was drifting toward the market that moved faster. Policy stepped in to break the cycle and jumpstart localised investment behaviour. The UK's Mansion House Accord and Dutch pension reforms represent the largest structural reallocation of institutional capital in a generation; moving hundreds of billions of euros toward private markets. The capital was always there. The framework that could channel it was not. That reallocation is still underway. The window it creates is open now.

The Fifth Ego

The regional Egos sit on an axis. At one end, the individual. At the other, the collective. African and American capital places its Ego in the individual. European and Asian capital places it outside, in the culture, in the age, in the institution. Between those two poles sits the relationshipEgo. Neither fully individual nor fully collective.

Middle Eastern capital places its Ego in the relationship. The relationship is the unit of trust. The relationship is how deals are structured, how commitments are made, and how disputes are resolved. It sits between the individual Ego and the collective Ego, which means it can read both. It speaks both languages. It can move between the patience of the Asian long view and the urgency of the American exit without losing its own orientation.

And crucially, it is not distracted. Every other major investor base has skin in the game of the market they deploy into. America invests in America. Europe invests where its culture points. Asia invests along generational hierarchies anchored to its own markets. The Middle East has the capital without a dominant home market pulling the investment decision. That is not a weakness. It is the cleanest vantage point on the board. Seeing the whole board gives you one luxury. Timing.

PIF, Mubadala, QIA, ADIA and ADQ have deployed significant capital into European technology, infrastructure, and strategic sectors, frequently on terms driven by long-term alignment rather than auction price. Often the deciding factor was not the highest number. It was the deepest relationship. In an era where sovereignty is increasingly a dealbreaker, Middle Eastern investors will have to lean on that ability significantly.

The Middle Eastern investor is not an American investor deploying into a European founder who then loses the battle and ends up in Delaware. A European founder backed by Middle Eastern capital does not face the same Ego imbalance. The market Ego and the investor Ego are no longer pointing in the same direction away from Europe. The relationship Ego does not pull the founder toward a single dominant market. It may be the catalyst that keeps European founders deploying into European markets, or at minimum deploying for European reasons rather than American ones.

Europe did not choose government as its primary backer of venture. It arrived there by elimination. Private wealth left. Institutional capital was constrained. The culture Ego drifted toward the market that moved faster. Those who argue against government involvement in European venture are right. But the argument is incomplete without an answer to the question it raises.

If not government, then who?

Middle Eastern capital is positioned to answer that question. The relationship Ego can read both rooms. It can back the European founder with the patience the culture Ego requires and the conviction the market Ego demands. It can sit between the individual and the collective and close the deal that neither side could close alone. And timing, as always, is everything.

 For the allocators and investors in this network, the question is not abstract. The relationship Ego is yours. The vantage point is yours. The timing is yours. The only question worth asking now is what you intend to do with it. 

The question was never where the capital is. The question was always whose Ego was driving it. The answer, for the first time in a generation, may finally be pointing in the right direction.

About the Author

Lanre Okunnuga is a dual-qualified US tax lawyer with 17 years of experience across the Netherlands, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He advises on fund structuring and cross-border capital deployment for institutional investors and emerging managers in European private markets.

He serves as Senior Counsel to the Middle East Investor Network and speaks regularly at private markets events on cross-border capital deployment and fund structuring.

Sources

PitchBook 2025; European Women in VC and Pensions for Purpose, October 2025; CEPR/VoxEU February 2026; ECB May 2026; KfW Research Focus No. 506, July 2025; Invest Europe/Cambridge Associates; Dealroom.co 2024–2025.