Two kinds of money
Last Friday night I walked home past a club in the centre of Belgrade. You know the picture even if you’ve never stood in it: a queue folding around the corner, a velvet rope, a doorman with the face of a constitutional court, and that particular electricity of thirty people all quietly calculating their chances.
And right next to it — the same street, ten metres away — a restaurant door with no queue at all. A woman walked up, gave her name, the maître d’ ran his finger down a page, nodded, and she disappeared inside. Four seconds. No rope. No electricity.
I couldn’t help but wonder: how much of what we call competition is just standing at the wrong door?
On Monday I wrote to you about deadlines — that there is never just one. Today I want to tell you something that took me longer to learn, and that I have never once seen written on the front page of any funding website. European grant money comes in two kinds. And they behave like those two doors on that Belgrade street.
The first kind of money behaves like the club. Horizon Europe, the EIC programmes — the famous names, the ones that make the press releases. Everyone can see this door from the street; that’s rather the point of it. You submit, you are ranked against everyone else in the queue, and the list is cut where the budget ends. It is a real competition with real numbers: across Horizon Europe, 16.4% of proposals get funded — while 54.6% are judged good enough to deserve it. [1] Read that pair of numbers again, slowly. More than half the queue passes the doorman’s quality check. The room is simply smaller than the queue.
In the EIC Accelerator the maths gets sharper: in one recent full year, 923 complete applications, 61 funded. [2] That is the front page of grant money — the beautiful people, the photographs, the announcements.
I want to be clear: there is nothing wrong with this club. It is honest about its rules, the selection is real, and the companies that get in — you met three of them on Monday — get something no bank will ever offer. If your technology is genuinely ahead of the field, the queue is worth it. The club is not the problem.
The problem is that most companies think the club is the whole street.
The second kind of money behaves like the guest list. Cohesion funds, national programmes, sector schemes, voucher funds — money that was assigned in advance to a territory, a sector, or a type of expense. Nobody ranks you against your neighbour. The question at this door is not “are you better than the others?” It is “do you meet the conditions — and is there money left?” You match the criteria, your documents are in order, you filed on time: you’re in. Like a name on a list.
This money almost never makes the news, and once you see why, you can’t unsee it: there are no winners to announce. No ranking, no gala, no “61 out of 923”. A press office can’t do much with “everyone who qualified, got it.” So the street stays quiet — and the quiet gets mistaken for absence.
Let me show you three doors from that quiet side of the street.
The EUIPO SME Fund reimburses small companies for protecting what they own — and this year it also became the neatest proof of how list money works. The trade mark vouchers, worth up to 75% of the fees, are already gone: the budget ran out months before the official closing date, simply because enough names showed up. The patent vouchers are still open until 4 December. [3] Nobody lost a competition here. Some companies just read the list earlier than others.
The LIFE programme put €601.5 million on the table for 2026 — greener production, cleaner energy, circular economy — and the applicant list is not “laboratories only”: any legal entity in the EU and associated countries qualifies, ordinary companies included, with the nearest deadline on 22 September. [4] And in my part of Europe, the EU and the EBRD are running a €377 million digitalisation programme for small businesses across the Western Balkans — you take a loan through your local bank for automation or green tech, and a grant pays you back 10% of it in cash. [5]
None of these doors ask you to be the best in Europe. They ask you to be eligible, documented — and early.
And the scale of the quiet side is not small. Of the €513 billion programmed under the EU’s cohesion policy for 2021–2027, €412 billion had not yet been paid out as of this summer. [6] That is not a queue folding around the corner. That is a room with the lights on, waiting for names.
Somewhere between the velvet rope and the guest list, it occurred to me that we do this in the rest of life too. We assume that anything worth having must have a crowd in front of it — a job, an apartment, a person. We measure value by the length of the queue. And so the loudest door gets thirty hopefuls, while the list next door goes half-read.
Here is the main thing I want to say. Grant money is good money — both kinds of it. The club rewards the exceptional; the list rewards the prepared. A company that knows which door it is standing at stops wasting seasons: it doesn’t spend months polishing a competition bid for a door where no competition exists, and it doesn’t stand in a voucher line expecting applause. The first question about any grant is not “how much?” and not even “when?” It is: which kind of money is this?
That question is so important to me that when I built Grants To Go, I gave it its own line on every single grant card: competitive or allocative. One line. I couldn’t find it written anywhere else — which is half the reason I built my own place where it would be. And if you’d rather walk the street with someone who knows every doorman on it, the experts are there too.
As for that Friday night — I stood for a moment between the two doors, the loud one and the quiet one, and I thought about how many companies are in that queue right now, calculating their chances, while their name has been sitting on a list ten metres away all along. Then I went home and started this letter. Check both doors. One of them may already be expecting you.
Next Monday: what actually happens to a company after grant money arrives — not the press-release version, the measured one. Economists spent years comparing the winners with the companies that missed by a hair, and the difference between them is not the one you expect.
— Alena Bairak
Sources
European Commission, SWD(2025) 110 — Interim Evaluation of Horizon Europe: 16.4% of proposals funded; 54.6% assessed as high-quality. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex%3A52025SC0110
European Innovation Council, 17 February 2026 — “61 start-ups and SMEs secure EIC support in latest round of the EIC Accelerator.” https://eic.ec.europa.eu/news/61-start-ups-and-smes-secure-eic-support-latest-round-eic-accelerator-2026-02-17_en
EUIPO — SME Fund 2026: window 2 February – 4 December 2026; trade mark and IP Scan vouchers exhausted, patent and plant variety vouchers open. https://www.euipo.europa.eu/en/sme-corner/sme-fund/2026
CINEA, 22 April 2026 — “LIFE Calls for proposals 2026: €601.5 million for a greener, more competitive Europe.” Standard Action Projects deadline 22 September 2026. https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/life-calls-proposals-2026-eu6015-million-greener-more-competitive-europe-2026-04-22_en
EU Delegation to Bosnia and Herzegovina / EBRD — “EU and EBRD launch €377 million SME digitalisation programme in Western Balkans.” https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/bosnia-and-herzegovina/eu-and-ebrd-launch-%E2%82%AC377-million-sme-digitalisation-programme-western-balkans_en
Cohesion Open Data Platform, European Commission — 2021–2027 planned amounts and payments. https://cohesiondata.ec.europa.eu