Upside Podcast With Dan Bowyer & Mads Jensen – SuperSeed

Upside is a weekly podcast that looks behind the headlines to unpack what will affect European venture, startups and investing. 

Dan and Mads flew to LA to sit in row four while Donald Trump dialled into Jensen Huang's keynote. Pri went to Cambridge Tech Week. Let's unpack the week's shenanigans... 

00:30 — All-In Summit: capitalism or cosplay?
Elon, Jensen, Satya, Trump on speakerphone. Mads calls it a celebration of capitalism. Dan calls it MAGA-tastic. Also: Boom builds its own engines because Rolls-Royce wouldn't.

06:21 — Gurley's COVID inquiry - Bill Gurley calmly asks why 15 million deaths and several trillion dollars never got the Boeing treatment.

12:26 — Canada joins the EU (sort of), Trump calls it laughable, Mads treats that as the endorsement. Could the UK be next? Only 27 vetoes to get through.

15:51 — Langdock un-flips from Delaware
$1m to $50m ARR, then millions spent dismantling a US holdco with no staff because it was killing enterprise deals. The EU Inc argument, made for free.

18:00 — Dealroom: who actually funds European VC - Governments and sovereigns at 26%, pensions at 4.5%. A state-funded asset class with a 40-year liability mismatch. Dan blames 2022.

20:17 — AI Doomerism, the full conspiracy menu
Dario's essay, Elon's endorsement, then every theory from "save the IPO" to "Trump moves the deficit into crypto." Conclusion: Listen and see.

33:20 — Warsh hikes, 10-year hits 5%, capex maths
Mads walks $5.5tn of AI capex back through NVIDIA's 53% take rate to find where it snaps. Spoiler: at $3tn, everyone's in pain. 

40:01 — OpenAI: no IPO, $1.2tn round, $1bn in ads
A billion in ad run rate across a billion weekly users. 

44:26 — Luna vs Haiku: the model tier wars
Anthropic froze its cheap model to protect Sonnet. OpenAI shipped Luna into the gap. OpenRouter noticed.

45:52 — Physical AI: Agility, UBTech, Isembard - Digit 5 goes next to human workers, UBTech's factory runs on Siemens, and Isembard goes from 4 to 16 factories by franchising Britain's retiring machinists. 

50:08 — Deal of the Week
Exein ($270m at $1.7bn, from Rome of all places), Emulate's $700m "pre-seed", and Snap Specs, pre-emptively filed by Dan under perv glasses.

52:38 — Week Ahead
Trump hosts Xi for round two on chips and rare earths. SuperX on Monday: founder–corporate speed dating.

Mistral's €3bn, Europe finally reaches orbit, and Anthropic says no to the UK. Mads is off. Pri and Andrew Scott step in. 

00:45 – Elizabeth Holmes gets a documentary. Sam Altman gets a Christmas Day movie. Nobody asked for either.

03:00 – Personal AI agents want your credit card. Dan downloaded one and got the fear. Trust is the whole game now.

04:36 – Markets: ECB to 2.5%, 10-year kissing 5%, Brent over $100. Bad for us, worse for founders. Oracle's $664bn backlog: believe what you like.

05:48 – Europe raised €3.2bn in August. Everyone was on a yacht. Amazon issues sterling bonds. Revolut gets a US banking licence.

06:53 – HR tech: Andrew argues you can't automate the pub lunch. Pri disagrees.

10:10 – "100 Days to Save EU Inc." Clickbait title, real problem. Article 4 is the trapdoor.

15:00 – $2tn of unicorns built by Europeans elsewhere. The talent was never the problem. 

17:07 – Isar Aerospace: first orbital launch from European soil. One tonne. Starship does 100. Nobody in Europe is building heavy lift. Andrew is upset.

22:49 – Global public debt passes $100tn.

23:29 – AI Corner, sans Mads. Anthropic withholds Mythos from the UK's AISI. Frontier access is now gated by passport.

26:57 – 1-bit LLMs, on-device models, and why the GPU arms race may be overbuilt.

29:46 – Gordon Brown writes "innovation is the answer." Andrew's head is in his hands. Three of his LPs have left the UK.

32:54 – Anthropic's economic scenarios: 32% GDP growth, labour share collapses 14 points, robotics excluded. A lab modelling its own prize.

41:31 – An Anthropic engineer quits, predicts extinction. WSJ has the "exclusive" within 18 minutes. Both camps say "regulate me, fund me."

48:25 – Predictions: world-class models on standard kit within six months. A €1bn+ European physical AI round within 12.

50:22 – Deals of the Week: Mistral (€3bn at €21bn), Cognition ($2bn at $48bn), The Exploration Company ($450m).

52:48 – Week ahead: Dan takes a MAGA hat to LA. Pri to Cambridge Tech Week. Andrew has cancelled all his meetings to "produce work."

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Upside is a weekly podcast that unpacks the real stories behind the headlines that will affect European venture capital, startups, and investing. 

This week, Bonds, Bubbles and a £500 Toothbrush. 

Priyanka Savjani joins Mads, Andrew and I on the pod - she's the ex-founder of PriBakes, ran actual factories, and is now judging everyone else's.

02:43 - Broadcom "misses" by a rounding error, market has a tantrum anyway. Guidance says double, then double again. Fine.

04:38 - Matt Clifford leaves UK Gov for Anthropic. Turns out AI policy leverage lives in San Francisco, not Whitehall. 

06:26 - Apple rents Siri's brain from Google for $1bn/year. Andrew declares the death of Apple. Dan orders a foldable.

12:14 - Wayve hits London streets; car meets Just Stop Oil, everyone panics.

23:13 - AI Corner: Meta offers 95% off if you hand over your data. Genius or dystopia? Yes.

29:28 - Bonds. Stay awake - $160 trillion says you should.

33:33 - Circular AI financing goes from equity to debt. 29 entities, 61 flows, one nervous glance at Oracle.

37:25 - Prediction: Oracle to junk. You heard it here.

39:28 - Deals of the week: Instinct ($2.5bn, lives in iMessage, knows your credit card) and iPronics (Valencia, photonics, Nvidia on the ticket).

44:06 - The £500 AI toothbrush. Dan's £20k jaw declines to comment.

Mads is back in London, it's mid-August, and the AI train has once again failed to read the "quiet news week" memo. Dan and Mads go solo on money-go-rounds, half-trillion-dollar backstops, and a robot IPO that's 5,526x oversubscribed.

00:00 – Intro: just the two of us, we can make it if we try, just the two of us, building castles in the sky

01:20 – Markets: FTSE flatlining, S&P at records, UK GDP quietly outgrowing Germany and France. Nothingburgers all round 

05:32 – A $2–3 trillion AI IPO... timed for the US midterms. What could possibly go wrong?

06:31 – Thrive Holdings: Friend A pays Friend B to buy Friend C. It's fine. It's a billion in revenue. It's fine 

08:40 – Mistral reselling Chinese open-source models. Frontier lab to neo-cloud in one graceful pivot 

11:20 – Gemini hits 1B users; Google pays $1.5B for a 100-day-old startup. Regulators, look away 

13:44 – Nvidia lines up $500B+ of Wall Street money and guarantees a quarter of it. Compute is now an "investible asset class," apparently 

22:42 – Zuck's 6,500-word ode to open source. Dan calls bullsheets

29:00 – Unitree's $9B IPO: iPhone moment or very expensive Newton? 

36:10 – Rogue agents: Taiwan's government hacked autonomously... and one AI socially engineers its way into a Pilates class 

40:20 – Why American plumbers out-earn British graduates 

48:41 – Prediction: reverse acquihires land in Europe 

49:07 – Deal of the week: Cambridge Aerospace's $300M Series C

New episodes weekly. 

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Upside #103 - Power Laws, Poached Engineers & The Chuck Norris of Coding

Unpacking the week's news that will affect European venture capital, startups and investing. Mads and Dan from SuperSeed host. 

This week: special guest Sion Evans, MD at VenCap International, the Oxford fund-of-funds that's put $3bn into 500 funds and politely passed on Palantir. He's fine about it.

02:27 Palantir doubles revenue; CXMT becomes China's most valuable company. State capitalism: annoyingly effective?

09:58 Stoxx 600 hits a record 657. All five of Europe's best-performing stocks are semiconductors. Some don't even have growing revenue. Vibes-based repricing, live.

14:54 SpaceX's first public quarter: analyst targets range from $62 to $800. So, nobody knows.

17:45 Bending Spoons buys Airtable for $1.3bn — a mere $10bn below its 2021 valuation. Sion: "I never get tired of a billion-dollar exit."

29:13 Demis steps aside; Jeff Dean leaves Google after 27 years to run science experiments. Google invests anyway. Keep your enemies funded.

37:07 The £1bn UK Scale-up Fund, plus VenCap's receipts: 17 billion-dollar funds, 2.8x net, and the top 5 of 759 companies drive a third of all value. Power law, power law, power law.

53:45 Deals: Olix raises $312m; iron-air batteries get $43m.