Upside
This week's happenings in startup and investing land. Getting underneath VC, and discussing how to better support the European startup eco-system.
Every week we share what's been on our mind and get under the skin of VC, investing, startups and founder psychology.
From the team behind SuperSeed who invest in technical teams solving difficult business problems.
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Upside
IPOs Unfreeze - 3 Sovereign Euro Deals Land - Do You Hate AI?
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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 flow of $49B a quarter. Stock down on earnings - maybe we've collectively lost our minds.
(07:00) The Great IPO Unfreeze. SpaceX at $2T (an AI company wearing a rocket suit wearing a telecoms business), OpenAI at $1T (the most consequential S-1 of the decade, Dan bets it ain't pretty), and Anthropic's "final-final" pre-IPO round, number four. Sure.
(13:24) Unitree IPOs in Shanghai at $67B. The dancing robot company actually shipping units. The Android of humanoids? Europe, please build the layer on top.
(20:00) Europe writes its own future. Mistral grabs Vienna's EMMIE for neural physics simulation, EQT wins the €5B Scale-Up Europe mandate (sorry Atomico), and HMRC picks Quantexa over Palantir for £175M. Buying British: hopefully not the B-player.
(27:30) American AI rebellion. AI now polls worse than ICE. Molotovs at Sam Altman's house. Europe, take note.
(33:30) Prediction: France will cave on ESOP rules by end of '26. Mads disagrees.
(36:30) Deal of the week: Isomorphic Labs, $2.1B Series B. Demis's side hustle is going great.
(38:50) Week ahead: Salesforce earnings (where art thou, Agentforce?), AI-stack reports, and the S&P 500 rule change that could let SpaceX/OpenAI/Anthropic into the index faster than feels reasonable.
