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.
The network is run on LinkedIn so join me there - https://www.linkedin.com/in/danbowyer/
With full interview audio and video uploaded to all major outlets.
Love to hear from you - dan@superseed.com
Upside
Burnham’s Britain - AI Creates A New World Order - How Trade Becomes War
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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).
