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
AI Wars, SaaSpocalypse & Muskonomics
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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 model found 500+ serious open-source security issues → “bots find bugs better than eyeballs.”
11:06 — Alphabet CapEx shock
Alphabet expected $180B CapEx in 2026 → market flinches despite earnings beat.
Take: hyperscalers signalling capacity constraint and “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Debate: monster spend now vs how long monetisation takes (ads, pricing, enterprise budgets).
18:53 — “SaaSpocalypse”
~$300B wiped off software stocks on fear that seat-based SaaS collapses into usage/agent-driven economics.
Claude Code “agentic workflows” spook the market: if models do the work, why pay the tool tax?
Counterpoint: SaaS doesn’t die—it de-rates (from “growth multiple” to “utility multiple”).
Lomax: market likely overcorrecting; enterprise adoption is slow and messy.
26:07 — EU–US tech uncoupling (or… vibes?)
France moves to ban civil servants from Zoom/Teams/WebEx → pushes homegrown “Visio” by 2027.
Germany (Schleswig-Holstein) + Austrian army shifting off Microsoft to open-source alternatives.
Group take: sovereignty goal is real, but government-built software ≠ winning strategy; better to back founders + procurement pathways.
32:44 — Spain vs social media
Pedro Sánchez pushes: CEO accountability, misinformation/hate speech enforcement, under-16 social restriction.
Smart framing: shifts from “free speech” to public health.
Pushback: slippery slope risk → censorship-by-proxy debate.
39:20 — Muskonomics: SpaceX + xAI + “data centres in space”
Core claim gets roasted: physics/energy/cooling/payload/latency all feel brutal.
Bull case (Lomax): if anyone can brute-force iterate at scale, it’s Musk + launch cadence.
Bear case (Mads): narrative may be a financial wrapper to justify merging/funding xAI via SpaceX halo.
51:10 — Anthropic Super Bowl ads + OpenAI shade
Anthropic pokes OpenAI over ads in AI (“we’d never”).
Take: brand landgrab + positioning move; debate whether the ads were funny or cringe.
53:52 — Europe corner: critical minerals reality check
EU auditor warns Critical Raw Materials Act targets likely missed (dependency on China still extreme).
Problem isn’t geology—it’s permitting + processing + time (10–20 years to mine/start).
US hosts rare earth summit; Europe tries to coordinate while still exporting heavily to the US.
56:53 — Deal of the Week
Lomax’s portfolio: Portuguese founder Pedro building LLM-driven clinical trial planning → reduces protocol amendments/costs.
Raises $52.5M Series A (one of Iberia’s biggest; top-tier EU Series A scale).
Dan: January saw 5 new European unicorns (Aikido shoutout highlighted).
Mads: new European growth fund Cambara targeting €30–50M checks; €750M raised toward €1B.
