The exit theory

There is no war for talent in Europe. There never was.

Every founder in Europe knows the scene. You find the engineer, he wants to come. Salary agreed, start date agreed, and then a contract he signed five years ago decides whether it happens. Twelve months of non-compete. Three months of notice. Garden leave if he’s any good. That’s not a war for talent. In a war you’d at least have to fight: make an offer, lose a bid, pay more. Nobody fights here. The real war is legal, fought with non-compete clauses, notice periods, gardening leave and IP assignment clauses written by people who have never built anything, and it isn’t fought between companies. It’s fought by incumbents against whatever comes next.

This morning Andy Burnham confirmed that the UK will legislate so that non-competes stop being a barrier to hiring for its most promising startups and scaling firms, and he called it, in those words, the Bosman ruling for the innovation sector. ElevenLabs and Synthesia had campaigned for it, and High Court claims to enforce non-competes had risen 43% in the first nine months of 2025. Enforcement was going up, not down, right until the government stepped in. The details come at the Budget on 28 October, and gardening leave is on the table too.

The UK understood something the continent keeps missing: you can’t attract talent with visas and tax credits while leaving it chained at the exit. The exit is the market.

Talent isn’t scarce in Europe, it’s immobilised. The best engineers on the continent aren’t on the market. They’re inside the primes, the banks, the shipyards, the consultancies, under a paragraph that says: if you leave, you may not work for anyone who does what we do, for twelve months, in a territory we’ll define later. Add three months of notice. Add garden leave, which is a non-compete with a salary and a lawn. The founder who wants to hire them isn’t competing with another offer. He’s competing with a law firm, and at seed stage the law firm wins by default.

So the incumbent doesn’t need to pay better, manage better or build better. It needs to draft better. The war for talent is the story it tells so that nobody reads the contract.

California has had the opposite rule since 1872, more or less by accident, and nobody ever fixed it. In 1957 eight engineers walked out of Shockley Semiconductor and founded Fairchild; in Massachusetts they’d have been sued into the ground, in California they were simply employable. Fairchild spawned Intel, AMD and half the Valley, which is why people still call them the Fairchildren. Route 128 around Boston had MIT, more capital, more federal money and enforceable non-competes, and it lost. Silicon Valley never won a war for talent. People left, and nobody could stop them.

When the incumbents couldn’t use contracts, they cheated. Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe ran a secret no-poach cartel for years and paid $415 million in 2015 to make it go away. With non-competes illegal, four of the biggest companies on earth broke antitrust law to keep engineers where they were. That’s what mobility is worth to them.

The Bosman line is the right one, and it should sting over here, because Bosman was ours. A Belgian player, a Belgian club, a court in Luxembourg, 1995. You can’t keep a man once his contract is over. Every football fan on the continent knows the story because it changed the game they watch on Sunday. Thirty years later the same continent lets a company keep an engineer for twelve months after his contract is over, and nobody finds that strange. France even made it official: you can hold someone, you just have to pay him a bit while you do it. Germany, two years at half pay. Then the notice periods on top, three months for an engineer, six when he’s senior, which is to say the one guy who might actually have started something.

I work in defense, at a startup building autonomous naval systems in Brittany. Europe says it wants a defense-tech ecosystem, and it’s right to. The engineers it needs already exist. They’re in the primes and the shipyards. The thing they would build in a year is sitting in a notice period.

And nobody in the ecosystem says this out loud: the clauses don’t protect secrets. Classification and export control do that, and they’re far stricter than any HR paragraph. What the clauses protect is the org chart. They make sure the person who knows how to build the thing stays where the thing isn’t being built. It cuts both ways, and we accept that. If an engineer leaves us to build something else, that’s the ecosystem working. We’d rather compete on the boat than on the paragraph.

None of this needs a new law telling adults what to sign. It needs the state to stop lending its courts to one side of the contract. Make post-employment non-competes unenforceable, the way California does: sign whatever you like, nobody will come and enforce it. Let any employee buy out his notice period at the price of the notice. Keep IP assignment to what was built on the job, with the company’s time and tools; the rest belongs to the person who built it. And do it in France first, without waiting for a directive, so that every other country in Europe has to choose between copying us and watching its engineers move here.

Europe doesn’t have a talent problem, it has talent under contract.