On Your Terms

On the freedom to depend without surrendering agency. The theme for PIRATE Night 2026 - June 24th, Cologne and a Call for Contribution.

PIRATE has always been a community of people who think about position as much as product. This year, that question has become urgent. That’s why we decided to make it the theme of this year’s PIRATE Night on June 24th.

Every founder I know has had the moment.

It doesn’t announce itself. It arrives when a platform changes its terms and a distribution channel you spent years building disappears. When the payment processor you rely on suspends your account without warning. When a board conversation makes clear that your company’s strategic direction is no longer yours to set.

The moment is this: you realize the ground you built on isn’t yours.

You chose your infrastructure because it worked. Your distribution because it converted. Your tools because they were fast, cheap, and familiar. These were good decisions.

But somewhere along the way, without quite deciding to, you stopped choosing. First the tools. Then the direction. And eventually, the thinking. You were no longer building on your terms. You were building on theirs.

The Balance of Convenience and Freedom

For most of the last twenty years, the smartest move a founder could make was to build on the best available infrastructure - regardless of who owned it. It was cheaper and faster than building alternatives. The logic made sense.

That wasn’t wrong. It was rational, in a world that felt stable.

Then the world stopped feeling stable. The energy crisis made this visible. Europe had built much of its industrial cost model on cheap gas from a single supplier. When that assumption broke, businesses optimized only for efficiency had no buffer. Those that had diversified - even at higher cost, even when it seemed unnecessary - kept running. The difference was not competence. It was architecture. And it was a reminder that the terms of any supply relationship - energy, data, infrastructure, capital - belong to whoever controls the supply, not whoever depends on it.

Again and again, the same pattern appears: the infrastructure we build on belongs to someone else, and when priorities diverge, theirs come first.

Dependency is the condition. Agency is what we need to preserve. Sovereignty has become a difficult word - used defensively, as if it meant withdrawal or walls. For founders, that is not the frame.

Sovereignty, for an entrepreneur, is not the absence of dependency. It is the freedom to choose your dependencies, shape them where you can, and exit when they stop serving you.

To operate, in other words, on your terms.

That distinction changes everything. Pirates understood this better than most. They were never alone - they depended on crew, routes, alliances, ports, and weather. What they refused was dependency without agency.

This is not a call to do everything yourself. That would be vanity, not sovereignty. Progress is built on specialization. Companies grow because they trust suppliers, partners, platforms, investors, and customers. Dependency is not the problem. Unchosen dependency is.

The Stack Beneath Your Stack

Your product is not only your product. It sits on a stack. That stack has owners.

Below your application sits your cloud infrastructure. Below that sits the hardware. Below that sit the chips, the cables, the physical supply chains that make the digital economy possible. Alongside all of this run your payment rails, your distribution channels, your data relationships, your capital structure. Each layer has owners. Each owner has interests. And at some point, those interests may matter more to them than your company does.

Most founders know this pattern from distribution. You build an audience on a platform. The reach grows and starts to feel like an asset. Then the algorithm changes. The reach doesn’t decline gradually - it breaks. You realize you never owned the audience. You were borrowing it - on their terms. A newsletter is a different relationship. You own the list. The algorithm changes; you still have a direct route to your readers. That is a relationship on your terms.

The same logic runs through every layer of the stack. If the terms change tomorrow, what happens to your business?

At the extreme, this is digital feudalism: building by someone else’s rules, on someone else’s land, paying rent at rates someone else sets, with limited recourse when the terms change.

Infrastructure also carries jurisdiction. Your data does not live in “the cloud.” It lives in a specific building, in a specific country, subject to a specific set of rules. If you do not know whose rules those are, you are not the owner. You are the tenant. For European companies, in particular, this is no longer a compliance question. It is a strategic one.

Exit, Voice, and the Test Worth Running

Here is the test. Pick your most critical dependency - the platform, the tool, the supplier, the capital relationship you could not easily replace.

Can you still influence the terms? Could you walk away if you had to? Are you staying by choice, or because you drifted too far to leave?

The first question is voice. The second is exit. The third is loyalty - the only healthy version of staying. If the answer to all three is no, you are not in a partnership. You are a resource with a service agreement.

The goal is not to eliminate dependency. Dependency is how economies work. The problem begins when the terms were never really chosen - or when they stop serving you and you no longer feel free to say so.

When you are inside a system that stops serving you, you have two real options. You can use your voice: negotiate, push back, advocate for change. Or you can exit: build or use something better. A third state is genuine loyalty - staying because the relationship truly serves your goals, and you chose it clearly.

A dependency is healthy when you still have a voice. The other party listens because you matter to them and because you could, in principle, leave.

A dependency is dangerous when you have lost both: too integrated to influence, too locked in to walk away.

If you cannot leave, it is not a partnership. It is captivity with good onboarding.

The Diagnosis Is the Roadmap

Every unhealthy dependency is a market opportunity for whoever builds the alternative. The diagnosis above is also a product roadmap.

Take open-source software and open AI models. When model weights can be inspected, adapted, or run locally, at least part of the relationship changes. You have more room to build, more room to negotiate, and a genuine option to leave. Open source is, in this sense, exit built into the architecture - not a complete answer, but a changed negotiation.

There are many more layers like this: payment rails that do not freeze merchants into silence, social graphs that companies can take with them, identity systems not owned by the loudest platform. The people building these are not waiting for permission. Some of them are in the PIRATE community.

This is also where the European opportunity sits. Not in copying the giants, but in building the alternatives to them. Europe does not win by becoming a late copy of someone else’s model. It wins by building different defaults: resilience as architecture, human agency as a design principle, interoperability as leverage. The founders building this are not building a niche. They are building what comes next.

Some companies will not just use the next layer of infrastructure. They will become it. The opportunity is not only in what runs on the stack. It is in the stack itself.

The Hard Part

Dependency is cheap at the beginning. Sovereignty feels expensive until the day you need it. Resilience is what you were paying for all along.

Sovereignty is not something you declare. It is something you demonstrate when a relationship you depend on stops working.

Can you ship without a platform’s permission? Can you reach your customers if an algorithm changes? Can you say no to a capital relationship whose terms no longer fit yours?

This is where #intheblack - our theme from 2019 - returns. Profitability is not just a financial metric. It is strategic oxygen. A company that cannot say no financially will struggle to say no anywhere else. Financial freedom becomes strategic freedom.

But there is one more version of this, and it runs before any technical choice.

The first act of sovereignty is hearing your own thinking clearly.

Most founders are not being led by vision. They are being led by a consensus they didn’t help build.

Every founder starts with a vision. Then the investors arrive with a timeline. Then the market signals what is converting this quarter. Then the peer group starts to agree on what everyone is supposed to be doing. And slowly, without a single dramatic moment, the original thinking gets replaced by a version shaped by everyone else’s priorities.

The deepest form of dependency is not technical. It is cognitive. The sovereign entrepreneur can tell the difference between conviction and compliance dressed up as strategy.

The right to be unpredictable - to build something that doesn’t fit the current template - is not a luxury. It is the precondition for building anything genuinely new.

Not Walls. Your Terms.

Pirates were never isolationists. They traded, formed alliances, and depended on their crew. What they refused was an arrangement where someone else could determine their fate without their knowledge or consent.

Sovereignty is not a state you achieve. It is a direction you keep facing. You do not build it once and put it on a shelf. You lose it through the choices you stop making. The most dangerous moment in any dependency is not when you enter it. It is when you stop noticing it.

The people we want in the room are not the ones with the perfect stack. Nobody has that. They are the ones still asking the harder question: where have we traded agency for convenience? They build in exit before they need leverage. They stay financially healthy enough to say no. They can still hear their own thinking through the noise. And whatever they depend on, they chose it.

Not walls. Not isolation.

The freedom to choose - and the courage to keep choosing.

#OnYourTerms.

Call For Contribution - PIRATE Night 2026

This is the theme we’re building the evening around. Now we ask you to help shape it. A few questions that can guide the content of the night:

🔥 What did you do when you realized the ground wasn’t yours - and what would you build differently from day one?

🔥 Which layer of the founder’s stack is still broken? Are you building the alternative?

🔥 When did you say no to the obvious choice - and what did that actually cost, and buy you?

🔥 If agency is the scarce resource - what are you building to give others more of it?

🔥 This is bigger than your stack. What can this community build at the ecosystem level that none of us can build alone?

You don’t have to follow the theme. But let it provoke you.

We’re looking for talks, workshops, performances, installations - or just moments that matter. If it belongs in the room, bring it.

The Call for Contribution is open. We are curious to hear yours.

🙏

Be kind,

Manuel