The next crisis won't hit like COVID. It's creeping—and most of us are still looking away.

What you'll learn:

• The shift from assurance to deterrence—and what it means for your business

• Why your Eastern European engineers, your investor base, and your supply chain are all exposed

• Four vulnerabilities most European founders have never stress-tested

At the start of the year, The Economist ran another piece: The headline was familiar by now: Europe needs to prepare for war.

But it's not just headlines anymore. The US just dropped into Venezuela to snatch Maduro—while declaring they don't want foreign entanglements. The Indo-Pacific and Taiwan are eerily quiet. For how long? Russia is gnawing at Ukrainian defenses and sabotaging infrastructure in northern European waters, airspace, and who knows where else we haven't discovered yet.

I used to skim these articles. I used to watch geopolitics like House of Cards — fascinated and excited, but it was far away. It was on TV and in the news.

But now I am increasingly concerned.

Over the past two years, something shifted in my practice. Defense businesses started appearing in my client portfolio. Existing clients pivoted into defense markets. And the CEOs I work with—many leading tech businesses in the German ecommerce value chain, companies born from that first wave of Berlin startups after the 2008 financial crisis—started asking different questions.

Not "how do we grow?" but "how do we survive what's coming?"

The Story

In March 2020, I was still deploying capital as an institutional investor when COVID hit like a hammer. I watched deals collapse overnight. I sat in calls where we revoked letters of intent—moments I'm not proud of. Together with the Bundesverband Deutscher Startups, I ran broadcasts on financial crisis planning. We were figuring it out in real-time, all of us.

That experience taught me something about crisis. It arrives in two forms.

The hammer: sudden, undeniable, forcing immediate action.

The creep: slow, ignorable, easy to rationalize away. (Remember the frog in the pot?)

The current security crisis is the second kind. We have time to prepare. But too many are looking away. As a society—especially in Germany—we've learned to numb ourselves to the trauma of war. It's understandable. It's also dangerous.

The Insight

There's a phrase from security analysts that captures the shift we're living through: the transition from assurance to deterrence.

For eight decades, European businesses operated in an era of assurance. Stability was assumed. Peace was the default. You could build a company without ever asking: what happens if this breaks?

That era is ending.

Now we're entering an era of deterrence—where stability must be actively defended. At significant cost. This isn't about tanks rolling into Berlin. It's about a permanent state of hybrid warfare: infrastructure sabotage, cyberattacks, geoeconomic coercion, the slow weaponization of everything from energy to talent.

What does this mean for your business?

It means vulnerabilities you've never audited are suddenly existential. Your Ukrainian engineers might receive conscription notices. Your investor base might rebalance away from Europe overnight — especially if you run a fund with professional LPs who deploy globally. Your suppliers might go dark. Your energy costs might swing by multiples, not percentages.

And here's what makes this different from COVID: the bailout isn't coming.

During the pandemic, governments froze the economy. They funded non-essential businesses to preserve the social fabric. That was the right call for a hammer crisis with a clear end.

A prolonged security crisis doesn't work that way. Fiscal policy shifts from economic preservation to sectoral prioritization. Defense, energy infrastructure, strategic manufacturing—these get unlimited debt. Germany has already carved out permanent exemptions from the Schuldenbremse for military spending above 1% of GDP.

Everyone else competes for what's left.

The capital flowing into Defense Tech right now—up 312% in the DACH region (NGP Capital Report) —isn't stimulus. It's an Iron Bubble. One in twelve VC dollars globally now flows to defense. That concentration means if you're not in a strategic sector, you're facing a capital drought while your competitors raise at inflated valuations.

Four Vulnerabilities to Audit Now

Most founders I work with have never stress-tested their business against geopolitical risk. Here's where to start:

1. Your Talent Pipeline

The DACH tech ecosystem runs on Eastern European engineering talent. Poland, Romania, Ukraine, the Baltics—over 3.5 million ICT specialists. Many of your best people hold passports from countries with active or expanding conscription frameworks.

Romania has proposed legislation requiring citizens abroad to return within 15 days during mobilization. Poland is reviewing dual-citizenship exemptions. The Baltics have high-readiness reserve models.

The question isn't whether you have engineers from these countries. It's whether your critical functions have single points of failure. Can your systems survive if three key people disappear in the same month?

2. Your Capital Structure

Who are your investors? Where are they based? How exposed are they to the denominator effect—that brutal rebalancing that happens when European asset values drop and investors pull back to rebalance or re-domesticate capital?

North American LPs provide roughly 19% of European fundraising. Family offices, particularly those concentrated in the region, face the highest default risk during geopolitical shocks. In a crisis, capital calls don't just continue—they spike, sometimes 5x in the first 30 days as GPs scramble to stabilize portfolio companies. We saw this in 2020.

3. Your Value Chain Dependencies

This is about whether your business can function even if you're fine but your upstream suppliers or downstream distribution channels aren't.

Map it. Who supplies you? Where are they located? What's their exposure to energy shocks, logistics disruptions, or regional conflict? And downstream: where are your customers concentrated? How do your products reach them? What happens if a key logistics partner goes dark?

The German e-commerce companies I work with have complex supplier networks that most have never stress-tested against a European security crisis. They never needed to think about it — and a risk department is something corporates have… but not a tech company with 500 people? Still, this is a liability until you understand it.

4. Operational Business Continuity

I recently sat in on a board meeting of one of my clients—a €50M software business. The CTO reported on their efforts to guarantee availability and uptime. Even the management team seemed surprised at how essential this work was.

In peacetime, this is operational hygiene. In a prolonged security crisis, it becomes strategic. Power redundancy, autonomous backup, internet failover—the basics of business continuity suddenly determine whether you're operating at all.

Most companies haven't asked these questions seriously. Now is a good time to start.

Your Quick Win

Pick one of these four vulnerabilities. Just one. Schedule 90 minutes this week to map it.

Not to solve it. Just to see it clearly.

Who are the three people whose departure would cripple a critical function? Which LPs in your fund have the highest regional concentration risk? Where does your supply chain touch geography you've never considered? What happens to your operations after 48 hours without grid power?

Most of what you find won't require immediate action. Some of it will. All of it will change how you think about the next three years.

I didn't write this to alarm you. I wrote it because I've seen what happens when leaders refuse to look. In 2020, the companies that moved fastest weren't the ones with the best plans—they were the ones who acknowledged the threat early enough to respond.

We have more time now than we did then. The question is whether we'll use it.

Julius