Romania no longer has an entrepreneurial mindset problem, but rather the risk of losing its entrepreneurs to other countries. This is the conclusion of Brian Mac Mahon, Director at Nathan Family Office and founder of Expert DOJO, who spoke at Forbes România Business Bridges 2026, the event organized by Forbes Romania at Forbes on Fifth in New York.
“The mindset is not the problem. What we don’t want to happen is to lose these great entrepreneurs to other countries. When you build bridges, they are about maintaining the incredible innovation at home, but then bridging into places where that innovation can fully flourish,” Brian Mac Mahon said.
Until recently, his diagnosis for European entrepreneurs was an excess of logic. “What America has is this ability to embrace the impossible, not even expecting it to be possible, but just expecting it to be a little bit less impossible. For us Europeans, it’s not logical. The simple thing that’s always held Europeans back, Romanians, Irish, everybody else, is that we’re too logical in how we approach things,” he explained.
Irish by origin, Mac Mahon came to the United States many years ago, became a director at Nathan Family Office, a multi-billion-dollar family office based in California, and later a partner in it. The office owns significant real estate in the San Francisco area, but has completely changed its strategy. “We haven’t made an investment in real estate for the last seven, eight years. Instead, we have become one of the most prolific venture capital investors in the world, with over 300 investments over that period, because we recognized what was happening now and what the opportunity was,” the investor said.
“In the world today, there are over 800 unicorns, billion-dollar companies which are still growing. Twenty years ago, there were only 13,” Mac Mahon noted. “This isn’t just about Romania helping entrepreneurs because it’s good for entrepreneurs. This is about Romania becoming a world power by harnessing the full force of these companies and where they are going. Because it’s not going to stop. It’s going to keep on growing at an unparalleled rate,” he said.
For the next decade, the investor sees three priorities: educating children, training entrepreneurs, and a bridge that works both ways, with the diaspora involved in building companies at home. “I really hope that over the next three, five, ten years, I’ll see Romania really embrace this era of entrepreneurship: how we educate our kids, how we train these great entrepreneurs to build some of the biggest companies in the world,” Brian Mac Mahon concluded.
