Upside

Anthropic’s Fable - Technical or Political - The G7 AI Backroom Chat - Europe's $Trillion Company 20.06.2026 44min

Upside is a weekly show that looks behind the headlines affecting European venture. This week Dan and Mads are joined by Joe Schorge of Isomer Capital — one of the people who literally decides which European VC funds get to exist. England beat Croatia 4:2, a new PM may have appeared overnight, and somehow we tied none of it back to venture. Onwards. 02:25 Economic vibe check — S&P on a record tear (up ~24%), but 75% of economists now whisper "20% drop." The FTSE hits 10,504 and the UK ...

Has AI Hit Its Glass Ceiling? Quantum IPOs at 500x Rev?! & Siri Goes Google! 13.06.2026 1t 9min

Upside is a weekly show that looks behind the headlines that will affect European venture, start-ups and investing. On the show this week: 3:03 — SpaceX IPO day: pop, flop or nothing-burger? 7:16 — OpenAI files for IPO — own OpenAI at $1tn or Anthropic at $965bn? 9:50 — Bending Spoons files for Nasdaq: Europe's app-Berkshire 14:01 — ECB's first hike since 2023, and Iran 14:35 — European Quantum Week: inside OQC's £260m round 24:45 — Quantum sensing: navigation without GPS 31:08 — Fable &a...

Time To Rip Out Palantir? - Where Is The AI ROI? - And Florida Sues OpenAI?! 06.06.2026 55min

Plus it's EU Sovereignty Week, more on the EU's Palantir Problem & who's now in the the $80bn club? This week Dan and Mads are joined by Matt Russell, Head of Secondaries at VenCap, the 40-year-old firm with a look-through portfolio of ~500 funds and ~17,000 companies, and seemingly exposure to every name that's ever mattered. We get into why secondaries aren't the bargain-bin everyone thinks, why Brussels keeps reaching for the statute book instead of the chequebook, whether the ...

AI Winners Beyond NVIDIA - Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 Is Out! - A Zero Employee Startup Raises $30m! 30.05.2026 52min

This week, Dan and Mads dig into the AI infrastructure boom spreading beyond GPUs, Europe's sovereignty contradictions, the era of the zero-employee unicorn, and a Pope weighing in on AI. 00:00 — The week's headlines and some chit chat. 01:15 — Ferrari's Luce, SpaceX Starship postponement, Gary Lineker's VC firm, Kirkland & Ellis builds its own AI stack. 07:00 — The new Dealroom report: London reclaims top spot from Paris. 08:30 — AI infrastructure beyond GPUs. Micron and SK ...

IPOs Unfreeze - 3 Sovereign Euro Deals Land - Do You Hate AI? 22.05.2026 40min

This week on Upside: Nvidia is so rich it's literally throwing money at shareholders, three megacaps queue up to IPO, and Americans discover they hate AI almost as much as politicians. (00:47) Mads at the BBCA / UKPC. Same name, same problem, same answers nobody's implementing. Plus a quick spin through Ben Evans' latest, ASML's revenue upgrade, and Meta canning 8,000 engineers. Cool, cool, cool. (02:30) Nvidia returns $80B to shareholders - roughly the GDP of Tunisia, give or take. Free cash...

Upside Special - What Would European Investors Back With Their Last Euro? 16.05.2026 44min

Upside Live from Montenegro: Five GPs, Five BetsRecorded live from a Montenegrin port at a European LP/GP gathering of 80 investors, Dan asked 5 European investors the same question: If you had to put every penny of your fund and personal capital into one bet in Europe, where would it go? (01:21) Jens Lapinski — German super angel Jens would back the full AI stack, money transfer infrastructure, training environments, enterprise deployment. On sovereign AI, he argues the US-Europe...

Anthropic Builds - ASML defends - Meta Cracks 09.05.2026 56min

Hosts: Mads Jensen (moderator), Lomax Ward (Lisbon beach bum), Dr. Andrew Scott (serial mute-button offender) Missing: Dan Bowyer — scaling actual mountains. We told him to come back alive. Mostly because nobody else wants to moderate. [02:30] — ARM vs Spotify: One the Market Loves, One It Doesn't Both posted good numbers. ARM got rewarded, Spotify got a -13% haircut and a 25% YTD drawdown despite record margins and 761m MAUs. Lomax calls ARM's AGI CPU pivot a "bet the farm." Mads drops the C...

Musk v. Altman - UK Eats EU AI Act - SMRs Solve UK’s Energy Crisis?! 01.05.2026 40min

Every week on Upside, we look behind the headlines to expose the real news affecting European venture, startups and investing. Charles hands Trump a bell, Musk says he's not building AGI (this week), and Brussels manages 12 hours of trilogue with absolutely nothing to show for it. Meanwhile Big Tech spent the GDP of a small country on GPUs, and Europe, yes, Europe, quietly dropped two near-billion-dollar AI rounds out of UCL. Buckle up. (00:48) Round-up King Charles's grooming of Trump ...

EU Eats Its Own - Europe Gives Up On Space - Is SpaceX Really Buying Cursor? 24.04.2026 45min

Upside is a weekly podcast that unpacks the real news behind the headlines affecting European venture startups and investing. Hosted by Mads and Dan from SuperSeed. This week: the EU admits it wrote a bad AI Act (shocking), Sergey Brin is wheeled out of retirement again, SpaceX buys a coding company because of course, and Wall Street invents a new way to short private credit. Dan and Mads untangle. (02:00) DeepSeek V4 drops overnight — Chinese open-weights model benchmarking at Opus 4.6...

EU Hungry for Hungary - Solo Founder Unicorns - & Let’s Ship Something Great! 18.04.2026 42min

Upside is a weekly podcast that unpacks the news and headlines that will affect European venture startups and investing. This week Dan and Mads go deep on what Hungary's political earthquake means for European capital flows, why Anthropic is speedrunning a monopoly, and whether one bloke with a laptop can really build a unicorn (spoiler: it's complicated). [03:28] Orbán Out, Money In Hungary was the EU's most corrupt member state and Orbán was Russia and China's favourite circuit-breaker i...

Menacing Mythos, Mega IPOs & Dimon’s Doomerism 11.04.2026 48min

Upside is a weekly podcast that looks behind the headlines affecting European venture, startups and investing. On this week's show... Anthropic is having the week of its life, Jamie Dimon wants you to know the sky is falling (again), and Germany spent €2 billion learning that shipbuilding is hard. Dan and Lomax fly as a duo this week. 00:00 – Intro & News Radar – Iran ceasefire (maybe), global VC hits $300B in Q1 alone (70% of all 2025 deployment), four companies absorbed $188B of that, R...

Why $800m Mistral? - Who’s Boycotting Palantir? - When CoreWeave Crushed Poolside 04.04.2026 53min

Every week we look behind the headlines affecting European venture, startups and investing. This week it's with Lomax from Outsized Ventures, Andrew from 7 Percent, and myself, your host Dan Bowyer from Superseed. 00:00 – Dan declares himself sexy for the first time ever. The physical AI / reshoring zeitgeist has finally caught up with what SuperSeed's been doing for a decade. Lomax gently reminds him that being in vogue doesn't actually fix anything. 06:01 – Quick-fire news roundup: Art...

The AI Token Economy - Europe Finally Writes a Big Cheque - Cursor Caught Out 28.03.2026 57min

Every week, we look behind the headlines to explore what's coming down the track that will affect European venture, start-ups and investing. 00:00 — Meet Harry Destecroix Dan butchers the fund status (already closed, Dan), Harry sets out the SCVC thesis: generalist deep tech, breakthrough technologies from UK universities, everything from quantum to advanced therapeutics. 01:40 — EIF's €15B Fund of Funds: Salvation or Same Old? The EU's massive growth-stage vehicle promises to unlock €8...

Jensen Drops a Trillion - Hyperscalers Go Broke - & Some Guy Cures Cancer with ChatGPT 21.03.2026 57min

Every week on Upside, we try to unpack the news that's going to affect European venture, start-ups and investing. If you're a founder, GP, or LP, this is the show for you to catch up on the week's shenanigans. Hosted by Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen, and Lomax Ward, all European venture capitalists. 00:00 — Nvidia's GTC: Jensen Drops a Trillion-Dollar Bomb Three new chips announced, each more ridiculous than the last. The Groq inference chip does 35x tokens per watt. Vera Rubin does 10x...

It's a Recession. Europe Smashes. London Maxes. 14.03.2026 37min

Every week we dig into the news affecting European venture, startups and investing. This week, Trump may have speed-run a global recession. Europe is having a moment. Cursor might be toast. And Jensen Huang promises a chip that will "surprise the world." 00:00 — The Oil Shock: Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz, 20M barrels/day offline, IEA buffer lasts ~20 days. Dan calls it: we're in recession territory. 01:37 — Europe's Energy Crisis 2.0: Gas storage down 40%, prices doubled, the post-...

AI Safety Theatre & War - What Is It Good For? 07.03.2026 1t 8min

Every week we unpack the real stories behind the headlines affecting European venture. Hosts: Dan, Lomax and Mads - All European early stage VCs. 02:00 — Why Hormuz matters more than you think. 04:08 — Europe: affected, not influential. Europe keeps ending up front row for crises it cannot shape. 10:38 — The startup angles: energy, drones, sovereignty 13:29 — “Fast fashion” warfare. Ukraine-style low-cost interceptor drones versus million-dollar missiles. Warfare has entered its b...

Intelligence Crisis, Europe’s Rearmament Boom & The End Of AI Safety 28.02.2026 59min

Upside is a weekly review of all of the news affecting European venture, startups and investing. VC Hosts: Dan, Mads, Lomax [03:05] Nvidia Earnings — 14th consecutive beat. Data centre rev up 75% to $62B. Stock basically flat. The market has priced in perfection. Bull case: 16x 2028 earnings, Rubin shipping, China at zero = pure upside. Bear case: custom ASICs climbing, 75% margins under siege. "The question is whether the AI companies can actually monetise it." [09:11] Ukraine, Four Ye...

Clone Wars, Euro-Meme Stocks & Magic Mushrooms 21.02.2026 42min

For the week's latest news behind the headlines affecting European Venture, startups and investing. Hosts: Dan Bowyer, Lomax Ward Guest: Eyal Malinger — Co-founder, Resurge Growth Partners (venture equity — the gap between VC and PE) [02:18] Humanoid Robots at China's Spring Festival Gala Four Chinese firms showed off cable-free dancing robots. Eyal's reaction progression: "game over" → "Clone Wars" → "why are there swords near children?" China controls ~90% of humanoid shipments. H1/G...

Is AI Simply Making Work More Fun? 14.02.2026 46min

01:52 - Anthropic's Insane $30B Round Started as $10B rumour, became $20B in January, closed at $30B. 03:21 - The Great Model Migration Sam finally kicked OpenAI off his iPhone homepage. Claude's in. 08:23 - Claude Code: Mads' Love Letter Mads hasn't looked back since discovering Claude Code's skills and agentic workflows. It's not just better writing anymore—it's a whole different way of working. 09:36 - HBR Report: AI Makes Us Work MORE Generative AI isn't reducing work, it's in...

AI Wars, SaaSpocalypse & Muskonomics 07.02.2026 1t

Upside captures all of the week's news affecting European Venture. 01:22 — AI models: two flagships drop 20 minutes apart Anthropic ships Opus 4.6; OpenAI replies with GPT 5.3. Key tension: best model vs stickiest workflow (tooling + habits = raw benchmarks). China keeps coming: Kimi K2.5, Qwen3 Max — strong performance at lower cost, plus “swarm”/multi-agent vibes. 07:02 — Recursive AI + security flex OpenAI: “GPT 5.3 helped build itself” (debugging training pipeline). Anthropic: claims mod...