Every week, Upside digs behind the headlines shaping European venture.

This week Dan, Mads and Lomax get into Burnham's Britain and what a Manchester PM means for tech and capital; how AI is being pulled into a new world order as Washington moves from regulating the frontier to gating it, and possibly owning a slice of it; why June's "AI meltdown" was really a rotation, not a crash; trade turning into economic warfare across the US, EU and China; and the quiet return of the human, the rise of the forward-deployed engineer. Plus deals of the week and what to watch in the days ahead.

Hosts: Dan (SuperSeed), Mads (SuperSeed) and Lomax (Outsized VC).

CHAPTERS

00:43 – Quick-fire news: fusion's "first", Musk's not-a-phone, Iran & Hormuz, Google's brain drain & Gemma 4

03:14 – It's Burnham's Britain: the Starmer scorecard & what a Manchester PM means for tech, tax and risk

19:31 – AI & the new world order: the Anthropic gate, model bans and Washington's 5% stake

33:51 – Markets: rotation, not meltdown and where the next bottleneck (energy) sits

41:41 – Trade as a weapon: 100% tariff threats, Volkswagen's cuts and the China pickle

53:21 – Send in the humans: the rise of the forward-deployed engineer

59:13 – Deals of the week: Quantum Systems & EquiLibre

1:04:14 – The week ahead: Tesla, SpaceX, Samsung, RAISE Summit, VW board, TSMC

HIGHLIGHTS

– Why the "seventh PM in ten years" problem is itself a drag on UK investment and the risk-free-society thesis behind flat growth since 2007.

– Devolution vs. deployment: Burnham wants AI and capital pushed to the regions, but "sovereign British data centres" mean little without models of your own.

– The US going from regulator, to gatekeeper, to prospective part-owner of the frontier and what that sovereign risk means for anyone building on top.

– Multiple layers of the AI stack holding 80%+ margins at once, and why every memory super-cycle has ended in oversupply.

– The forward-deployed engineer as history rhyming: IBM sent engineers in the '70s, and the pendulum's swinging back.

DEALS OF THE WEEK

– Quantum Systems (Munich) — $1.2bn Series D; Ukraine-proven autonomous drones, and a mooted Stark merger to build a European Anduril.

– EquiLibre (Prague) — Creandum's largest-ever single bet; RL trading agents from the DeepStack poker team.

MENTIONED THIS EPISODE

Realta Fusion · SpaceX · Google (Gemini 3.5 Pro, Gemma 4) · Anthropic (Fable, Mythos, Sonnet 5) · OpenAI · Tesla · Samsung · TSMC · Volkswagen · Alphabet EU fine · Mistral · Quantum Systems · Stark · EquiLibre · Creandum

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

– Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 (TechCrunch): https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/anthropic-launches-claude-sonnet-5-as-a-cheaper-way-to-run-agents/

– US jobs report (BLS): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

– Trump digital-tax tariff threat (BBC): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn4rd71411ko

– Additional analysis referenced from the Financial Times (AI world order, markets rotation, trade).