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 Winners Beyond NVIDIA - Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 Is Out! - A Zero Employee Startup Raises $30m!
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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 Hynix cross $1T as the 40-year DRAM cycle breaks.
13:40 — How much AI capex is enough? Pascal's wager and the hyperscaler bet.
16:00 — Snowflake's CoCo pops 37%, Salesforce stumbles on the seat-based model. The applications-layer thesis in action.
19:30 — S&P 500 rule changes: SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic's IPO clock accelerates.
24:20 — Claude Opus 4.8 lands. Anthropic eclipses OpenAI as the most valuable frontier lab.
27:00 — European sovereignty in action. Dutch state blocks Kyndryl on CLOUD Act risk; ASML can't expand Eindhoven over nitrogen rules; €1.1T of European industry pushes back.
34:00 — The AI-only company era. Polsia raises $30m at $250m with zero employees and a 2.1 Trustpilot. Spell it backwards.
36:30 — AI-washing. Standard Chartered's "lower-value human capital", 7,800 cuts, and the real story behind the UK NEET crisis.
42:00 — The Pope's AI encyclical. 135 years after Rerum Novarum, Anthropic's Chris Olah stands at the Vatican.
47:00 — Predictions: which AI unicorn collapses first?
48:45 — Deal of the Week: Cognition's $1bn raise (Mads) and Eddy Grid's profitable Dutch energytech.
51:30 — Week ahead: CrowdStrike and Quantinuum earnings.
53:00 — Mads turns 21 (again)
