Europe must build its own future.

We want Europe to shape the next century. To build the companies, technologies and institutions that determine how we live. To give its most ambitious people a reason to build their lives here.

That future requires more entrepreneurs. People willing to choose difficult problems, take responsibility and create something that did not exist before. We should be far more deliberate about helping those people emerge.

We believe our education system leaves too much of that work to chance. We spend years developing people’s knowledge while giving them too little responsibility for what they do with it. The step from understanding the world to changing it should be central to education.

You develop judgment by making decisions whose consequences you have to face. You discover a collaborator by building something together. You gain confidence by attempting something difficult and finding that you can make progress. Education should create the conditions for those experiences to happen repeatedly.

That is why we are building Seneca, an institute for entrepreneurship.

A one-year programme where ambitious young people explore their interests, find problems worth pursuing and build together. Where their work reaches real people. Where taking initiative opens doors, and the people around them make their ambitions grow.

We want to build Seneca with exceptional founders and leading investors. People who can open up the decisions behind extraordinary companies: how they recognised an opportunity, earned their first customer, chose their team and acted when the answer was unclear. Their experience should help a new generation turn its own ambitions into work that matters.

We are also inviting sponsors and partners to help establish the institute, contribute resources and open their networks. Together, we want to make Seneca Europe’s strongest starting point for people determined to build its future.

This matters because a free, prosperous Europe needs the economic and technological strength to defend its choices. We want free societies to shape the world our children inherit. We refuse to accept a future in which autocratic regimes set the terms of their lives.

Seneca is how we take responsibility for our part in that future.

This is work worth giving our lives to. We will not watch another generation leave while we debate what Europe could become. We are building Seneca now.