I’m Julien Simon.

30+ years in tech. I’ve built, scaled, and evangelized AI at AWS, Hugging Face, and Arcee AI. Today, I’m an AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital, a European PE firm, where I help software companies cut through the noise and ship AI that actually works. Learn more at julien.org and fortino.group.

What I write about

AI, technology, and the world around them — through the lens of someone who’s spent three decades building things, not commenting on them from the sidelines.

That means deep technical analysis when it matters. It means questioning the AI infrastructure bets that everyone else takes for granted. It means looking at what “digital sovereignty” actually means in practice, rather than what European politicians put on a slide. It means calling out the latest Brussels masterplan to regulate what they don’t understand.

I have opinions. They’re informed by engineering, not ideology. You’ll agree with some of them. You won’t agree with others. Either way, you’ll get the reasoning, the evidence, and a perspective you won’t find in the usual echo chambers.

Expect a mix of:

AI in the real world: what ships, what doesn’t, and why

Tech industry analysis: infrastructure, investment, and the money behind the hype

European tech policy and sovereignty, with the skepticism it deserves

The occasional takedown of whatever the EU Commission decided to inflict on the tech industry this week

Who reads this

Engineers, tech leaders, investors, and anyone in Europe (or watching Europe) who wants an honest, technically grounded take on where AI and technology are actually heading, not what a press release says.