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

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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.

Upside looks behind the headlines to uncover the real stories affecting European venture. Hosted by Europe's leading emerging managers investing early in innovation; space, resilience, deep tech, and physical AI.

Recorded 31 July. Dan, Mads, Lomax and Andrew on the FTSE having a record week precisely because it owns no technology, a Chinese memory maker worth more than Intel on the strength of laptop RAM, and a 24-year-old's hedge fund discovering that leverage cuts both ways.

[00:00] Nobody's on a yacht

[02:36] Markets: FTSE record high, NASDAQ in correction, SOX in a bear market. Winning by owning nothing anyone wants

[04:37] Big Tech earnings — Jassy floats a trillion-dollar AWS. Meta spends like an emperor, sells nothing

[08:06] CXMT: +466% on debut, 1,600x earnings, zero HBM. Ten percent float, capital controls, and a very enthusiastic retail bid

[10:30] Amazon's 5,000 satellites vs Starlink's head start. AST SpaceMobile's tennis-court antenna

[13:00] Situational Awareness unwinds. Hubris, meet Griffin

[16:53] VIX calm, VXN screaming, a 99th-percentile gap

[18:07] Jevon's Paradox: efficiency never saved anyone any coal

[20:12] Thinking Machines loses four of six co-founders. OpenAI nears 1bn WAU

[22:27] Give Hiring in the UK - £48k for a nuclear propulsion cyber lead. £57k for Cabinet Office TikToks - Gah

[23:53] The US humanoid import ban is more than you think, and the death of the Shenzhen shortcut

[30:40] Nvidia backstops $250bn. Numbers stop meaning things...

[34:34] HAWK's key size halved in 60 hours and $100k of Claude

[42:46] Mads' software factory reinvents the paperclip maximiser

[45:58] Meta + BlackRock's $14bn El Paso vehicle, conveniently off-books - more fancy financing to come

[46:48] Deals: nuclear turbines, Humanoid's unicorn Series A, synthetic defence environments, more quantum

[51:34] Week ahead: Palantir earnings, Anthropic IPO still bumbling

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Views are the hosts' own. Not investment advice.