Building as the West, While Learning from China
The Arden Letter, written by me, Nicolas Colin, traces how capital flows, industrial strategy, and geopolitics shape the West’s capacity to build—and what we can learn from China along the way.
The West has more capital than China but far less capacity to turn it into production. Europe exports its savings to American financial assets. America funnels capital into inflating stock prices rather than building factories. Meanwhile, China has outmanufactured both. The question this letter returns to every week: how does the West close that gap?
Weekly editions cover:
Capital flows and the Western carry trade: How European savings end up inflating US assets instead of funding production. Why the West is rich in capital but short of capacity. What it would take to redirect the flow.
China as a reference point: What a whole-society approach to industrial development actually produces. The lessons the West can extract without importing the system. How to study a rival up close, without illusions.
Allied scale: Why reindustrialization requires treating the Atlantic as one integrated industrial system. Where American capital and innovation meet European factories, engineering talent, and process knowledge. The deals, policies, and institutions that bring them closer or push them apart.
Geopolitics and industrial strategy: Chips as foreign policy. Compute as an energy question. Defense as an industrial catalyst. How macro and geopolitics have become the new language of technology.
The Arden Letter is named after the Harriman estate in the Hudson Highlands, where Averell and Pamela Harriman—two figures who spent their careers crossing between finance, industry, and diplomacy—are buried, and where the American Assembly once convened to deliberate on how American strength gets built. It is also Shakespeare’s forest, where exiles retreat to see clearly before returning.
Every edition asks the same question: does this move American capital closer to European factories or further away?
What readers say
If tech is really spreading into everything, then people in tech need to get much more curious about how the rest of the world works. Europe has so much figured out from which we in the U.S. can learn. Reading Nicolas’ newsletter is an unfair cheat for cribbing for that understand-the-rest-of-the-world exam.
— Roy Bahat, Head, Bloomberg Beta 🇺🇸
It’s rare to find a tech thinker who thinks as eclectically as Nicolas, elegantly fusing together the latest in politics and business with deeper thoughts drawn from authors you always thought you should read, but never quite got round to. His e-mails are that nicest of things: an intellectual treat, and one that always comes with something interesting and unexpected at its heart.
— James Crabtree, author of The Billionaire Raj 🇬🇧🇸🇬
Nicolas’s insights are thought-provoking, insightful, and put what are often complex and broad ideas into context in a simple manner. One of my favourite newsletters!
— Marieke Flament, former CEO, Mettle (Royal Bank of Scotland) 🇫🇷🇬🇧
Nicolas is schizophrenic but in a good way: he has this rare ability to look at the world from two different angles at the same time. He's both an entrepreneur and policymaker, which gives his newsletter a unique perspective on tech, society, and how they interact.
— Martin Mignot, Partner, Index Ventures 🇫🇷🇬🇧🇺🇸
I love the way Nicolas has adapted Joe Studwell's How Asia Works framework to understand a revolutionary path forward for European economies. Very smart and original. Deserves a great deal of attention.
— Tim O’Reilly, Founder, O’Reilly Media 🇺🇸
Always impressed by Nicolas’s capacity to cover the depth and breadth of each topic, with well organised information and powerful insights.
— Carlota Perez, author of Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital 🇻🇪🇬🇧
About Me
I’m Head of Research at Vsquared Ventures, a Munich-based deep-tech venture capital firm. I’ve spent more than 15 years working across technology, finance, and policy—first as a senior civil servant at the French Treasury, then as an entrepreneur, and from 2013 as co-founder and director of a pan-European investment firm.
That path shaped the thinking behind this letter. In 2013, I found myself captivated by software eating the world. By 2019, I was questioning whether manufacturing still mattered (it does). By 2023, I declared “the door is closing on startups.” Today, I believe the most important questions in technology are about what sits behind it: who has the capital to build, who retains the industrial capacity, and whether the West can coordinate well enough to match what China has achieved.
Having lived and worked across Paris 🇫🇷, London 🇬🇧 and Munich 🇩🇪, I am ideally positioned to analyze Europe’s predicament: surplus savings that flee to the US, idle factory capacity that no one funds, and a deep-tech ecosystem that is finally maturing but still starved of capital. Watching China showed me where real transformation happens—where capital meets factories at scale and software embeds in atoms.
I write The Arden Letter to highlight the need for American capital and innovation to partner with European manufacturing expertise, treating the Atlantic as a unified financial and industrial system. I also write Currency of Power with Marieke Flament, tracking the emergence of a new global monetary order.
Separately, I oversee a portfolio of investments across three continents and serve on several boards where these dynamics increasingly dominate strategic discussions. My writing has appeared in the Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Sifted and Politico Europe. The Arden Letter, formerly Drift Signal and before that European Straits, has been published since 2017. Follow me on LinkedIn and X.
Become a subscriber
13,400+ readers worldwide— financiers, executives, founders, policymakers, journalists, and academics—rely on The Arden Letter to navigate the intersection of capital flows, industrial strategy, and geopolitics.
Here are some of the most popular editions:
🔁 Late-Cycle Investment Theory
⛵ The Great Reset: From Startups to What’s Next
🌐 A Brief History of the Global Economy: 1908–2026
🏭 Outmanufactured: How China Leapfrogged the West
⚡ From Petrostates to Electrostates
🇨🇳 10 Ways to Think About China
🇺🇸 10 Ways to Think About America
💵 America Capital Partners: The World’s Greatest Investment Platform
🔧 Why Manufacturing Is Harder Than You Think
More praise
Nicolas’s newsletter is a must-read for anyone interested in entrepreneurship and technology on a global basis. With his atypical background (a high-level French public servant turned entrepreneur!), he brings perspective to emerging trends and sets forth clear stances on complex matters.
— Barthélémy de Beaupuy, Managing Partner, Committed Advisors 🇫🇷🇸🇬
I find Nicolas’s newsletter very refreshing. It provides the much-needed big picture in tech and startups, tapping into the lessons from economic, technological and political history, always giving hints on what lies ahead. I like how Nicolas tackles different trending topics from the public policy angle, which is too often missing in other analyses. That’s exactly what I need in my work at the World Bank, as we support governments’ designing and implementing tech & entrepreneurship ecosystem building.
— Simon Duchatelet, Entrepreneurship Ecosystems Enabler, The World Bank Group 🇫🇷🇱🇧
There are only a few newsletters worth paying for out there. This is 💯 one of them. Nicolas’s work will give you the unfair advantage you need.
— Ben Robinson & Dan Colceriu, Co-Founders, Aperture 🇬🇧🇷🇴🇨🇭
Super impressed with Nicolas’s thinking, analysis and synthesis around some of the most critical issues and trends in technology, policy and global issues. His curation of further reading is the best I have seen. Single most important reading list on a weekly basis for me.
— Nawal Roy, Founder & CEO, Holmusk 🇮🇳🇸🇬
I consume *a lot* of information on European tech. But I look forward to each edition of Nicolas’s newsletter because he always manages to surprise me. He is able to distill complex topics into fascinating reads with ridiculous ease. I don't think I'll ever unsubscribe.
— Gonz Sanchez, Founder, Seedtable 🇦🇷🇪🇸
Often asked about the great new tech innovation out there today, I tell people for me the greatest phenomena is not about the tech itself but near universal access to it. It has unleashed talent everywhere, and is making mass problem solving and scaled enterprises come from anywhere. Nothing has or will have more impact in the global economy, innovation and societies in a positive sense. Nicolas has been at the bleeding edge of this shift across Europe and beyond, and The Arden Letter is the must-read to a front row seat of it all.
— Christopher M. Schroeder, author of Startup Rising 🇺🇸
Nicolas connects the dots between technology, finance, society and politics in a way that stands out in the European tech ecosystem. His newsletter is elevating the quality of discourse around the key questions that matter to those operating, investing or simply interested in European tech. I don’t always agree with him, in fact sometimes I find myself on the other side of his arguments entirely. But that’s precisely the point; he is challenging the way we think about European tech and brings fresh and relevant perspectives to the table.
— Tom Wehmeier, Partner, Head of Research, Atomico 🇬🇧
