Live from a Lisbon beach studio, Dan, Mads and Lomax dig behind the headlines shaping European venture. This week: China's AI power play, is UK pension money finally trickling into venture, and a full 10-vs-10 slugfest on whether we're partying like it's 1999.

01:10 — Quick news roundup. Grok 4.5 with Cursor, all three flavours of GPT-5.6, Nvidia shedding $1tn (still up 1,500% since ChatGPT), and UK startups raising $17bn in H1 2026 across four mega-rounds.

03:17 — Last week, settled. Tesla smashes deliveries at 480k on European demand; SpaceX's index entry proves a non-event; Samsung's 19x profit jump still can't lift the stock.

06:13 — Burnham and the OBR. A sobering warning: £100bn a year in cuts or tax rises to stabilise debt, against a new PM promising to spend more.

09:24 — GPT-5.6 gets the nod. OpenAI's public launch arrives only after government sign-off — a sign of the strange new times.

10:41 — China's AI playbook. Distilling US models, then gating their own. The lads debate Europe's exposure and why Mads thinks Nvidia's Nemotron wins whatever happens next.

21:10 — UK Pensions pile in. NEST's £200m venture sleeve via Schroders. Small beans, late-stage, top of the market — but is coercion or incentive the right unlock?

32:00 — Is it 1999? Ten reasons yes (CAPE past 40, $800bn circular deals, burn rates) versus ten reasons no (real revenue, saner multiples, constrained demand). The core split: this time the tech actually works.

46:13 — AI Corner. Fable 5 goes metered and chews credits alarmingly fast; Sonnet 5 mops up the low end; ID verification goes live.

48:57 — Portugal special. The 1755 earthquake, Pombal's proto-prefab "birdcage" buildings, and why Lisbon punches above its weight on unicorns per capita.

56:50 — Prediction. Europe's opening: win the real-world, industrial, regulated applications when the bubble deflates.

58:15 — Deals of the week. Luffy AI (£8.1m), Proxima Fusion (€411m), QuantumDiamonds (€91m), plus Blue Origin's $130bn raise.

1:00 — Week ahead. US CPI, ASML and TSMC earnings, and the VW restructuring showdown.

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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).

Upside is a weekly podcast looking behind the headlines to see what's going to affect European venture, start-ups and investing.

Hosted by Dan and Mads from Superseed, and this week our special guest is Neil Shah from the London Stock Exchange.

A man, his pants, and an ice cube. Dan melts on air. Neil gets called an "artificial Indian" for failing British weather. The London Stock Exchange's tech chief joins to share how the tide is turning.

02:00 — Mini market update: AI infra gets a kicking

SpaceX limps from 225 to 150, now flogging a $25bn bond and moonlighting as an NVIDIA reseller. Shiller PE knocking on dot-com's door. Nothing to see here.

05:56 — Micron: the canary, the coal mine, the lie detector

Mads explains why a memory maker tells you everything. Revenue up 346%, 85% "sassy" margins, sold out for the year, customers throwing deposits at them. Also: this is why your iPhone got 20% pricier.

10:06 — Can the UK unlock capital? (Spoiler: pensions)

A history lesson. UK pension AUM in equities: 53% in 1997, ~2.8% now. Neil tours Mansion House, PISCES, AIM reform, and 19 train stations of brand recognition. One silver bullet: pensions. Also a confession about a tragic cash ISA.

21:34 — Euro Defence attracts billions

KNDS, Stark, the EIC discovering it's allowed to do defence now the paperwork matches. Mads connects the dots from air-con bans to North Sea oil to virtue-signalling our industry offshore. Buckle up.

30:39 — The AI invoice is due. Who's paying?

Qualcomm crashes the chip party, 300 US data-centre moratoriums, enterprises haggling their bills down. Neil reveals the LSEG runs on Copilot (he's coping) and covets your Granola.

37:16 — Sovereign AI: let a thousand flowers bloom

Italy's Domyn gets anointed Europe's frontier champion. Mads thinks picking winners is "wasted money" and we should copy the Chinese: be a customer, not a VC.

41:47 — Anthropic, Mythos & the Fable blackout

fable5up.com says "no." Refresh: still no. Coming 8 July: government ID and facial scans for your fix. Backup plan: send the next PM to Washington with a letter from the King.

43:13 — Predictions

Dan: SpaceX halves to 120. Neil: please, god, no - it'll ruin his IPO pipeline.

44:01 — Deal of the Week

British Business Bank backs ten first-time UK VCs. Dan talks his own book, shamelessly.

45:07 — Week ahead

Bending Spoons IPOs (AOL and Evernote's retirement home), SpaceX joins the Nasdaq 100, EIC defence equity, and Microsoft threatens to rip Claude Code from its devs by Monday. Pour one out.