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
China Blocks AI - Are UK Pensions Now In Venture!? - Is it 1999?
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Live from a Lisbon beach studio, Dan, Mads and Lomax dig behind the headlines shaping European venture. This week: China's AI power play, is UK pension money finally trickling into venture, and a full 10-vs-10 slugfest on whether we're partying like it's 1999.
01:10 — Quick news roundup. Grok 4.5 with Cursor, all three flavours of GPT-5.6, Nvidia shedding $1tn (still up 1,500% since ChatGPT), and UK startups raising $17bn in H1 2026 across four mega-rounds.
03:17 — Last week, settled. Tesla smashes deliveries at 480k on European demand; SpaceX's index entry proves a non-event; Samsung's 19x profit jump still can't lift the stock.
06:13 — Burnham and the OBR. A sobering warning: £100bn a year in cuts or tax rises to stabilise debt, against a new PM promising to spend more.
09:24 — GPT-5.6 gets the nod. OpenAI's public launch arrives only after government sign-off — a sign of the strange new times.
10:41 — China's AI playbook. Distilling US models, then gating their own. The lads debate Europe's exposure and why Mads thinks Nvidia's Nemotron wins whatever happens next.
21:10 — UK Pensions pile in. NEST's £200m venture sleeve via Schroders. Small beans, late-stage, top of the market — but is coercion or incentive the right unlock?
32:00 — Is it 1999? Ten reasons yes (CAPE past 40, $800bn circular deals, burn rates) versus ten reasons no (real revenue, saner multiples, constrained demand). The core split: this time the tech actually works.
46:13 — AI Corner. Fable 5 goes metered and chews credits alarmingly fast; Sonnet 5 mops up the low end; ID verification goes live.
48:57 — Portugal special. The 1755 earthquake, Pombal's proto-prefab "birdcage" buildings, and why Lisbon punches above its weight on unicorns per capita.
56:50 — Prediction. Europe's opening: win the real-world, industrial, regulated applications when the bubble deflates.
58:15 — Deals of the week. Luffy AI (£8.1m), Proxima Fusion (€411m), QuantumDiamonds (€91m), plus Blue Origin's $130bn raise.
1:00 — Week ahead. US CPI, ASML and TSMC earnings, and the VW restructuring showdown.
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