E384 | This Week with Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen & Lomax

0:00So what is happening this week in the world of European VC, I think a lot. And today we're joined by Lomax and my beautiful partner Mads. We have on the docket, I'm going to tell a little personal story up front first. I want to share something and then get some thoughts from the gents in the room. Then some startup news, and there's a lot of that this week, and some really positive news. And then a bit more of the macro big picture behind the scenes stuff that's going to affect us in the future. But first up, welcome Lomax, what's happening with you? Hey guys, thanks for having me back. I'm very happy to be here, all is good.

0:34um deals getting done founders doing great uh family well everything's good man everything's up and to the right you know up and to the right like our logo i love it there you go not not too obvious um so first up first up i just wanted to share a little personal story so this week i went and had a full body scan with nico health so this is the startup that was started by daniel lec and his co-founder of spotify fame and i was a little dubious to be fair um i've always thought of daniel lec as quite a slick smooth operator and i didn't think he would do anything that was too half rate and boy was i wrong this is nowhere near any of my lower expectations or old man misery cynicism this was an incredible experience so what it is it's a full body scan So they do bloods, they do skin and molds, they do cardiovascular, they do blood pressure, they do all of the health markers or most of the health markers.

1:38I think it's 70 in total. And they take millions of data points. And the whole experience was utterly incredible. And I highly recommend if you get on the wait list or if you can nag somebody for a code, I would I would highly recommend it. Only two sites, one in London, one in Stockholm. So quite, quite difficult to get in because it's quite limited space. but um so i wanted to share the personal experience and get your reflections on the space but um also have a chat about what would this mean for startups is this going to be a new kind of renaissance of health tech i mean looking back through up to 21 uk health tech attracted nearly 4 billion in vc funding out of i think on that year i think it was 11 and a half billion in total is a massive chunk of money going into health tech and it positioned the uk as the third largest market um just behind us and china so open to the floor what's your thoughts on this kind of health scanning tech will this kind of reinvigorate a renaissance for startups and other things happening and and i guess the biggest question is will this at some point cross over into the nhs because i personally believe that preventative health scanning is the future of healthcare but mads you i know you think a lot about this space do you want to kick off any thoughts on this yeah i probably don't have as much to say as as lomax on it but but as you've thrown me in here in the deep end you know i've always i've always been i've always been a a a data kraken right i love data i love time series um so i've always had kind of the fit bets the the Apple Watches, the Whoop.

3:19Well, you're wearing two. You've got the Whoop and the Apple Watch, so you're getting double whammyed. Give me all the time, Sirius. I want all the data all the time. And I just, I love this stuff. And of course, it's the future of healthcare and health technology is the way we're going to transform this and make it better. You've kind of seen the opposite story, right? The United States, where you've spent more and more and more in healthcare every year with almost seemingly worse outcomes, which is just a nuts way to do things. Whereas what we really need is to be much more effective at applying technology, spotting things early, do preventative stuff.

3:54So all that stuff makes sense. There is a slight cynic in me that sort of says, look, some of this stuff is not that hard. We know what we need to do. We need to eat better food. Sleep, drink more water, avoid the booze, don't smoke, don't do that. And I think sometimes, especially us data crackers, we can get a little busy. we're busying ourselves about measuring all this stuff and actually what we should be doing is you know put on the trainers and go out for a run you know get go to the gym and you know eat better food um so i think it's important to keep that in mind but that said yes of course this is the future of health care we should be using technology much better do you follow do you ever follow brian johnson he's doing he spends about three million dollars a year doing all of the health hacks all of the tracking and it's it's quite an eye-opener to follow him on youtube i'm not i was i didn't enjoy his kind of persona at first and then i got to know him a little bit through his content you know what all all power to you um and and and sharing his journey i mean he shares very intimate secrets that i won't i won't mention now but uh but lo max what yeah i mean you've had some you've had some health scares recently and yeah is this on your mind is this a good thing i have thought a lot about this right so you know the context here is that you know a year and a half ago i was diagnosed with late stage colorectal cancer right despite being one of the fittest people that um that i know you know i was a sub three hour marathon runner ultra marathon runner looked after my health didn't really drink didn't smoke ate well and still had this like quite killer shocking late stage diagnosis from which you know just just to context here you know if you get stage four colorectal cancer you have a 15 chance of surviving five years right now so it's it's it's a pretty um pretty scary thing to get in your 30s now the reason why all of what you just said resonates with me is because three years ago i thought of going to do the full body mri you know there are companies that are doing like ezra and um a couple of others to offer that service and and i didn't because there are a lot of doctors who are very against this right because um they're very worried about false positives and they have a valid point which is that you know you go and do an mri um scan which is a whole body scan well if you do a full body mri the chances are you're going to come up uh you're going to find a bunch of like lesions and tumors like most of which will be benign but then what happens is you need to you need to both manage your own stress but more importantly the doctors need to make decisions about going into new biopsies which can be very invasive right you know biopsies can involve like it's almost like a surgical procedure when they go in to actually extract the cells from this you know lump that they found within you i mean a friend of mine nearly died from having a biopsy just recently um so doctors talked me out of doing that so ironically had i done it i might have picked up my tumor a couple of years earlier and i might have been in a much better space you know so i think this is a very much like a personal um it means it's that i think about this a lot i think like and neko is priced and this is not an advert for neko or nico but like it seems priced incredibly well for 300 quid a year you can go and do this and if you if you pre-book it's 250 it's very very low cost and like you know if you're in your 30s 40s or in life generally what are the the two biggest things most likely to kill you is cardiovascular or cancer right so if you can stay on top of those broadly in a kind of preventative predictive way it's a no-brainer so with your own money i really think um that things like it's great that things like this are on on the market you know um and actually at the price point because the price point of the previous full body scans is more like 2 500 that kind of thing so this is yes um really game-changing i think mads is right like a lot of this is very basic i just did the zoe you know zoe uk tech startup i just did that whole how did you find it that's that's the sugar sugar monitoring yeah uh amongst other things they give you a continuous glucose monitoring and then they look at um they look at a bunch of other things um like a microbiome um my conclusion from zoe having spent about 500 quid on that right so a lot more money almost is um it's i'm actually going to probably i'm going to probably churn from it and i think the churn on it is quite high and the reason why is because exactly what mad said is that 90 of all of this is just like the conclusion is eat more fiber eat more eat more greens you know less red meat a bit less alcohol like it's like that's the conclusion it's like well okay i mean i kind of already know that and i can read a few blogs to get me to that point you know so a lot of this is like common sense um we what the thing is we call it common sense but if you apply that across the population level it's actually not common sense to people i think there's a very low hanging fruit in terms of educating um educating people about these things which don't require like a 500 quid app that require like um uh there's a sort of bunch of difficult challenging tests you need to do including poo samples and that sort of thing which is difficult to manage going back to neko i think it's very exciting from an investor point of view now look we've been investing in health tech a lot we do about a third in health tech um we've been saying this for 10 years yeah and the problem is as mark andreessen says you know being early is the same as being wrong and you know i we've been putting checks into preventative health for the last 10 years and actually they've been too early because at the government level these things are not being picked up um that's the biggest problem here you know i think on the personal level kind of in the 1 % of people who are willing to pay out of pocket, there's a market for it.

9:15And that's why actually, you know, there's premium offerings. To get governments to put money behind that, very hard. You know, they only run screening programs in the case of cancer for lung cancer, prostate cancer, colorectal cancer above 55. They run very, very, very limited programs because they need a lot of data. It's 52 now. It's coming down to 52. I think it should be 45. In the US, it's 45. And the point, I guess the point I'm saying is for a government or big healthcare system to put money behind preventative like health they need to see a lot of a lot of data and testing and a lot of like you know but do the health economic studies because you go and test a bunch of 40 year olds you find all of these non non like these benign tumors you then have the government has to pay for all of the follow-ups right and actually that's that's very expensive and those things those follow-ups are probably irrelevant that's how they think about it so well assuming that's why they don't i mean in japan they've been they've been doing preventative health it's not management but i think they do uh they do guided annual screenings for every everybody every adult in japan and they've been doing that since the 70s so i think there is uh i've i think it's going to come i wonder what the what the segue blocks are going to be to get the nhs to do this because there will be some further technical advances in you know maybe blood screening or other diagnoses, which will make the whole preventative health screenings a little bit more palatable.

10:41Yeah, we have an investment just quick, just very quickly, we have an investment in a Theranos type product that actually works, right? It's a capillary blood only 15 minute turnaround. He's not Forbes 30 under 30, is he? Actually, luckily he wasn't tainted with that brush. But he actually has a working demo that you can, you know, get on a show one day. It's very, very cool. And that's like, that's part of the future. You know, you can just do rather than sending bloods off to the lab you can do it um initially it was a consumer go-to-market but actually you know you need to start within the within the hospitals to start with i think anyway uh well i wish them every success i think it's those kinds of things that will chip away at the ability for the nhs to then to then start up investment point of view it takes a long time yeah well maybe less maybe ai will slick on that maybe there'll be some more technical advances let's wait and see i think this is a super exciting space and something that you that UK already does extremely well.

11:34So I saw that the private equity, there's a whole world of money. It's over 53 % now of all of the health tech is now PE back. And that's gone up by about 20 % over the last couple of years. So there's a lot more to come through, especially on the UK side. Health is 20 % of US GDP. It's massive. And their life expectancy is going down, right? Anyway, let's move on. It is on the 30th. So as of time of recording, tomorrow so maybe when this goes out it'll be yesterday it's chat gpt's birthday chat gpt is going to be two on the 30th of november now that feels like it's been around forever and it's already embedded in our lives i mean nearly all of fortune 500 companies use an open ai product they have 220 million weekly active users they reached 1 million users in five days and here's an interesting fact that I didn't know.

12:28It costs about a million dollars a day to run. So the question to the room is, has it improved your life? How do you use it? Who's going to win out of the LLMs and what's coming next? So that's four questions in one for you. Mads, do you want to kick off? Yeah, but thanks for raising this one. I think it's such an exciting evolution we've seen over the last two years. You know, as I wrote at the time, this changes everything. I mean, history really had a kind of a fork in the road, I think, on that launch. Kind of what happened was that OpenAI stole a march on Google. Google had the technology and was ahead of everybody in the world with the foundational research, but OpenAI was first to market.

13:10And then, you know, Google was trying to catch up, but self-sabotaged with, you know, too much working from home and too much woke confusion of what they are and who they are and what they were there to do. You're going to upset the lefties, man. Listen, I think, you know, whoever you are and however you think about the world, if we want to win, we've got to be honest with ourselves about what works and what doesn't. And it's clear that Google is just way behind. You know, I don't know if you remember kind of the issues they had around some of their generative image generators earlier in the year that they had to take off market because the stuff they put out was just so embarrassing.

13:49Now Anthropic and Elon Musk's ex-AI are going at it whole hog. Recently, Elon Musk was raising at$50 billion for his AI business, Anthropic at$40 billion. So it's amazing to see the competition. And I just hope it will last that way because it gives all of us, I think competition is really good and it gives all of us this chance to see the space evolve so quickly. So the industry overall is still betting on OpenAI. It's by far the most valuable company in this space, more than$150 billion in valuation. They're clearly in the driving seats, five times the revenue of Anthropic, which is number two.

14:32So if you assess the other players, where are they strong? Anthropic probably a little bit more on the API load. So kind of using the Anthropic API, developers are using it to build it into other apps, whereas OpenAI has got this huge, you call it the retail business, but actually it's also becoming a proper business, right, where companies, and I know we do it, folks are rolling it out to their teams to use on a day-to-day basis as part of running their companies. We're going to see more reasoning to your question, you know, what's next. We're going to see more reasoning build in kind of the OVON model from OpenAI is incredibly powerful at solving really complicated things.

15:15We saw one PhD researcher saying, look, it really replaced almost two years of work he'd done on his project. So it's incredible what these models are starting to create. There's still lots of teething issues. It's not solved yet, but that's the opportunity. More and more applications are being built on top, and there's a massive, massive impact in enterprise on the way um so that's how i see it that's how i read it i'm just really really exciting about this development here so happy birthday chat gpt happy birthday chat gpt i didn't realize that the um they only kind of officially launched a stable release in august of this year i don't know how that's measured or managed in any way but i thought that was quite an interesting gmail was in beta for 10 years wasn't it yeah but that's because they didn't want to do any customer service because the longer you stay in beta the the less promise you have to make to your customers right uh lo max what what are you using on the on the lm side how does it affect your life how does it affect your investment thinking what's um what's your take on on chat gpt and other lms couple of i guess a few things i mean the first thing is i said and i know and i'll give you like an exact a small example i mean we're using it in little ways in our business right like you know we get a bunch of information from our founders in about how their companies you know we do our call we have to call report every quarter to our LPs about what happens.

16:35Right. And there's both the numbers, which actually PT can't help with, but there's the narrative of like, this happened, these, these business, these deals were closed, these people were hired, et cetera. We kind of collect that founders, you know, kindly send that in. And then we put that into a report. Now I used to do that manually. So I'd read, I'd read all of the reports from the founders, and then I would translate that into a kind of summary. Now, you know, we can kind of just dump all of that in and create a first version of the report, which is you know 85 90 done basically um so it's pretty cool that's probably saved us i mean it's it's not like like life-changing but it's like it's saved us like you know a few hours um the interesting thing that's how a lot of it's going to be a lot of people are going to build in these little utilities like that and there's going to be lots of little touch points i think in workflow which will co-pilot hours out of the day but sorry which is which is which is meaningful i mean you know, really meaningful.

17:28The only thing I sort of think when I think about tasks like that is it saves me time, but it also, it makes me think less about what's going on in the portfolio because I don't actually do that work myself, right? And so, because I find it very helpful to kind of collect the information, work out what's important and then translate that for our investors, right? And so I think like, I'm still trying to work out how, whether it's sort of how bad a thing it is that I'm not actually doing that myself, you know? On that, I think that's a really good point. So what I find is that it enables me to work more like I would work with an analyst or an associate, where they can compile all the information, enabling me or allowing me to be more strategic and ask about where the gaps are.

18:18What are the big questions we haven't asked yet? Sometimes when you spend a lot of time in the weeds that are going through page after the page, you can become a bit numb to all the detail. And so I think that that's actually really powerful. And it's definitely making me more productive. I would say where I have maybe a little bit of a concern is that there are some of this foundational work of, you know, learning how to spot gaps and think strategically that you get from initially doing a lot of the detailed work and going through all that stuff. And the next generation, if they grow up to never having to touch any detail i there's maybe a slight uh concern about whether they're going to lose some muscle muscle memory or just some skill of you know how do you actually learn to spot these things if you've never done isn't this the same argument mads though that i don't know your math teacher told you when when calculators were invented isn't it yeah and i would i would say i think lots of people can't do mental arithmetic and if you're a you know in any kind of business line of business and you can't do mental arithmetic and you're trying to have a negotiation you're at a massive disadvantage so getting those foundational skills in early on still have huge value even with calculators and everything else yeah i mean what's the future for lms where where's it going like i don't know if this is what you're going to mention but what do you think is that is the how's it going to unfold well the beautiful thing is we don't know i mean that's why it's so cool to it to kind of live in you know invest in the space that we do we don't know and clearly the vcs don't know they're playing you know they're either making multiple bets or you know that vcs have portfolios right so you know yes we talk about 150 billion valuation for open ai and 10 billion going into the company but remember that's going in in the prep so you know it's like it's actually 150 is the wrong the wrong way to think about it and also um the you know that they have bets across a whole bunch of different things right so it's just part of the portfolio i don't think people really really know but clearly you know we've come an insane and into if you kind of take the last two years and extrapolate that over the future it's actually mind-boggling and you know i was just thinking about it you know we you like you guys we've been writing checks into machine learning ai you know since i don't know 2015 2016 right and in two years now i've got like even got my 75 year old aunt talking about ai it's like that it's just crazy it's it's like yes you know um and so i just i just think it there's there's a how far it's come in two years and how much like intelligent um mindshare is going into this now on resource is um it's pretty cool but you know one thing one thing that is for sure is that it's not going to be what a lot of people say it is or will be like people will get it wrong i'm sure um and what we'll probably end up with investors investors or futurists like we're not we're not going to have you know agi i think is still a lot longer off than people say and think i suspect and i and you know maybe call me very high level on this i think we'll end up with this kind of a really great like co-pilot model with these with these llms like they will automate away like in the same way the software automates away you know very basic tasks this will kind of automate away the next level of tasks right but you're still going to need humans up here like steering pulling the strings i i totally agree i i think i want to um we could talk about this all day and i would love to but i'm going to move on to a less a less happy less successful story which is norfolk so this is obviously collapsed recently they um i think i'm right in saying they took about 15 billion dollars in investment and then went on a bit of a spending spree, a bit of an expansion spree.

22:06So, Lomax, I don't know if you want to tee up what's happened with Northvolt and since they've gone into administration, what's happening now? Well, so, I mean, I think the high level, that's right. They raised 15 billion. They struggled commercially and they struggled, like, technically on their production line. It sort of became this, it got into this kind of vicious death spiral where it was like, you know, they were sort of on the upward curve and then a few bad things happened. and then, you know, contracts start getting lost. You get in this kind of very negative spiral very, very quickly, right?

22:37It was a quick implosion. I remember losing the$2 billion BMW contract. And I think I'm also right in saying that even now about$6 billion in debt. So they raised and there's extra debt on top. But they're also talking about staying open and still managing their North American and Canadian offering. I mean, there is actually, there's a different question here, which is more like, I think, like having been through some, obviously some bankruptcies myself, you know, as an investor, like the US is generally more like benign in this respect and can allow organizations to carry on on a kind of going concern basis in the way that Europe's a bit more of a death knell for it.

23:16that's a separate conversation but i think which is also is to kind of reflect the kind of more entrepreneurial like have a swing at it kind of version of the u.s economy let's learn our lessons and keep going um i think it's very depressing the north vault situation like we had a we had an opportunity to create like a real european champion in in this in this field i think you know probably china throwing a bunch of government money into in into into the space um has not helped things at all um you know i think back in a smaller level to like tesla's near-death experience right and i know that was basically elon who just pulled it out the bag back when he did in i don't know 2010 11 i'm not sure exactly when that famous you know famous story with any government support of course yeah that was not there was government support there were government i was i was being sarcastic i was being extremely sarcastic and the numbers there were a lot a lot smaller right like he was raising hundreds of millions not billions but you know in a way i I like, you know, I sort of feel, but we are 15 years later, right?

24:14With post-inflation and like the numbers, all numbers are a bit bigger these days. But I'm just like, you know, I kind of feel like if this had been in the US, and it's easy for all of us to like say bad things about Europe, but I'm just, I just kind of, it makes me a little bit sad. The shoulda, woulda, couldas. I just risk capital in Europe is a problem, I think. Anyway, Mads, you have a view. But it also begs the question, how much capital does one need? You can't get a business off the ground with 15 plus 6, right? That's your 21 billion dollars or euros of capital. I think fundamentally this business had massive execution issues.

24:54They lost contracts because they couldn't deliver on time. I think if you build a startup, you've got to be either really great at tech execution and product, or you've got to be really, really good at customer relationship management, and preferably both. And it seems like they weren't good at either. I mean, Elon has had product delays so many times, but was always able to bring customers with him and get them excited and to prepay and keep the business afloat. But was that the consumer side, Mads? Is that because, you know, and obviously they started with sports cars. It was a very sexy thing.

25:29They made EVs sexy. How do you make batteries sexy? This was a couple of Tesla guys. These were ex-Tesla founders that started North Pole. I think it's easy to find excuses. Elon Musk wants to go to Mars. That's never been a secret. But he's also not said, look, you know, the first rocket we're going to build is going to go straight to Mars. He has found ways to deliver business, to win contracts, to get revenue, to stay relevant. Oh, yeah, of course. I forgot the government money. The government money, I think it was$400 million they got post-financial crisis when lots of other businesses got money as well, by the way.

26:11And where most of the others went bust and didn't pay it back. And actually Tesla did end up paying the money back. So I think so many things to extract from this. But I think at the end of the day, the main lesson for me is founders really matter. Management really matters. is not enough to have a big market and throw lots of money at it. You also have to execute well. And when you don't, you can't win. Yeah, that's a good point. And by the way, no startup should become too big to fail. No matter how important, we can't have this notion. We had this conversation with Lilium in Germany, which also went bankrupt, where lots of people were astounded that the government didn't step in.

26:48I'm like, come on, no, no, this is not how free market capitalism works. No, it can't be the same. The flip side of it is we've got to become much better in Europe at doing exactly low max what you're saying, which is say, listen, it doesn't always work out. What are the lessons? And let's give it another go. Whereas sometimes we tend to see these failures as a little bit terminal, which of course they shouldn't be. There are massive lessons coming out of this. Let's learn them. If there is not a single business that could come out of this, not a single technology that could be monetized, not a single thing, what a great failure that would be.

27:22There must be something that has been developed here that can then rise from the ashes. Like for me, that is the beauty of capitalism. Yeah. Let's watch this space. Now, Lomax, we're going to quickly dip into it. I feel like we're on a doom and gloom track here, but Recursion and Accenture, what's going on here? So I think, I mean, this deal was announced in August, but it finally closed last week. And this is the merger between basically two of the leading kind of AI for drug discovery companies that have grown in the last 10 years. like recursion out of salt lake city has um done phenomenally well at both raising capital building a pipeline so they're using um ai both in um you know lead generation like in the in a pre-clinical side of of drug discovery um to try and reduce the costs right because you know we've had this concept of the reverse moore's law which is called e-room's law right people call it you know sort of tongue-in-cheek is the concept of you know bringing bringing drugs to market has um has exponentially grown in the last like 30 40 years some of its mission um sort of regulatory creep like regulators have made it more expensive some of it's like we've already kind of we've already discovered the lower hanging fruit drugs like now it's more complicated with biologics and more complex proteins and molecules but you know that is a problem and the ai for drug discovery platforms are trying to you know obviate that right by significantly reducing the the the costs of bringing these new drugs to market right um and xdnt was an amazing company that came out of Lavedine and Oxford and actually, you know, developed a really cool pipeline, did a big deal with Bristol-Myersquare, one of the big pharma companies, got assets into the clinic in phase one, started doing meaningful clinical trials, actually in solid tumours.

29:01And which is so relevant to me, but the point is, they raised$350 million, they got to a$2.5 billion,$3 billion market cap, and then they've kind of done a very soft landing, almost kind of merger with recursion. I mean, it's a great, I think it's a great deal for recursion. It's just a bit, yet another example where we have a kind of US, a US winner kind of sort of enveloping the European bet. I mean, they had specific challenges around a founder who got in trouble. But, you know, big picture, what happened? They raised 350 million. They basically exited for 500 million. I think when they had, well, 600 million, they had 350 million of cash on a balance sheet when they exited, right?

29:40So the actual equity value is for all of the kind of everything and all the hype, it's a bit of a, for the investors, it's a bit of a whimper, really. So, you know, the company carries on. You've got some details on this, Mads, haven't you? What else is going on behind the scenes? Yeah. No, I mean, look, Lomax knows the company much better than I do. but Anthony Hopkins, who was the founder, he was sacked for inappropriate relationships with two staff members. And then the chairman, I think, sort of chose to handle it outside of the board and they were both exited from the business. So the founder leaves because also the CEO, the chairman leaves, and the business becomes a bit rudderless.

30:23And we know how important founders and business leaders are for these early stage loss-making businesses. They need to keep funding themselves, they need to keep attracting talent. And if there's too much noise around them, you can't attract investors. You can't get the best talent to come join you. Competition can poach them. It becomes a bit rudderless and things implode. I don't know enough about the detail to say whether, you know, was it reasonable that he was kind of more or less thrown out of the business? The founder of Lomax, you may know more of that. But for sure, you've got a company like that, it can often be fatal to the business.

30:58Even if some of the underlying things were good and have potential in the long term. Even if you argue that it should be de-risked from that kind of key man risk by the time it's become a three and a half billion kind of market cap like company. But you're right. Maybe that is a good example where the founders still matter even at that late stage, right? Yeah. That's quite excusy. How many men are having inappropriate relationships right now in big tech or in big corporate? it i just i i'm it just feel it feels like this is quite an excuse i i don't know i don't know the detail um psychedelics is back lomax this is another one of yours on the docket yeah um rfk is it's not elon elon is a big big psychedelics dude um so what's going on so psychedelics is i wouldn't say it's back but it has a chance of being back right so you know as a reminder we're using um like natural like psychedelic medicines uh apply which is there's been tons of research over the last 50 60 years in this um predominantly to be used in mental health right indications like treatment especially treatment resistant depression like ptsd like a hugely psilocybin mdma exactly so it means kind of psilocybin mdma exactly dmt like all of these like naturally occurring molecules right which have been used by mankind for thousands of generation or sorry thousands of years and generations um and have gone through different waves of like over the last 100 years of kind of um waves of interest from you know healthcare professionals for example and we went through a last kind of boom in the last four years where you actually have like biotech companies that are taking these assets through clinical trials now um and the sort of the industry died there's almost been this big experiment with psychedelics in the last five, six years where tons of money went into it.

32:50So a few billion went into the industry to get these clinical trials started. And then we had the first major moment this year in August where Lycos, which is one of the big, big players in the space, actually got to a phase three clinical trial or got to an FDA approval, having delivered two very solid phase three, like the final stage of clinical trial readouts. And then they got rejected by the FDA. So it was like, oh, no, psychedelics is dead again. Another winter, another winter. Is it a labelling problem? Is it labelling? Because the problem I always have with these things, I remember my mum being in hospital years ago and she was taking codeine.

33:24So I did some research into what codeine was and how codeine works. I was intrigued and it's opiate based. So, you know, slightly problematic with regards to addictiveness because, yeah, my mum's an ex-alcoholic, ex-drug addict. So I was quite concerned and sure as hell she got addicted to codeine. But it just feels like a labeling problem. Because if we didn't if we didn't call them psychedelics, if we didn't call them, if we didn't have an experience of MDMA or ecstasy or know what magic mushrooms were, is that is that the challenge? Yeah, I think there's a big labeling PR problem. And of course, and that's why sort of ironically, you'd always imagine that the right side of politics would be more resistant to this.

34:07And the left side might be more progressive and open to it, especially if the data shows that actually you can have meaningful, meaningful effect within patients of these conditions. For which the existing drugs are useless, by the way. right um and but actually now why i think i've added this to the docket is that you know rfk um who who trump's who trump's brought in to run health is actually wasn't a who wasn't a republican like donald trump wasn't a republican like elon musk wasn't a republican like vivian ramsay wasn't wasn't a republican so let's let's start with a bunch of democrats recreating a third party let's start there so so exactly well whatever you know whatever flag or label you want to give them like he's actually quite open towards this so what will that mean that might mean that you know the like-off decision at the fda level gets reviewed gets reviewed and that would actually open the way for um for a bit more interest in the space i mean bright minds bioscience which is a canadian company went up 100x in two days 100x listed company absolutely crazy um which is relevant for europe because you know two of the biggest listed players in the space originally tech startups compass pathways and attire both european companies right now their share price is in the doldrums now but if this all picks up and this is not investment advice categorically not um is it could be a bit of a rebirth for the space.

35:22And then we all know what happens when public market interest picks up. That backs down into the private markets. And the private markets, you get more interest at the seed and seed in the Series A level again. So watch this space. Mads, you got any thoughts on psychedelics or anything in this space? Not really. Other than that, I've followed the discussion with interest and especially this thing that people have talked a lot around over the last year, which is that founders are made of special stuff and you have to have your head sort of put on in a certain way, I think, to go out and try and take on the world and go through all the pain and suffering you have to go through to build a company.

36:01And there's been a lot of discussion in Silicon Valley around kind of this emerging self-discovery through psychedelics, you know, ayahuasca and other things. And how many founders have gone down that route of self-discovery, come out on the other side, and actually found that, look, maybe they weren't just, you know, were no longer as driven to go and build that global company as they were before. They just didn't care as much about that. And so I think Marc Andreessen said we've lost more, you know, kind of more founders to psychedelic self-discovery than anything else, which... So stay mental, founders.

36:38Stay broken. Don't go to the therapist's chair. Don't do any ayahuasca ceremonies. don't stay broken and build global that's a really good that's a really good point mads although what i would say is when i when i've been when i was talking about these companies they are focused on people like with real like ptsd or treatment of resistance these aren't just founders with like founders with some like mommy or daddy issues or something this is like you know proper kind of um major like like majorly depressed and clinically um clinically in trouble but but um um yeah what's the lesson there mads if you see a founder off to our rescue ceremony run a mile like i think it raises all sorts of questions for us as an industry that we'll have to analyze carefully yeah yeah i think that's a whole podcast in itself gentlemen we've run out of time we had so much left can we say one more thing i think it's worth saying because i don't know yeah we talked about northfault we talked about xdnt here but you know Cradle buyer raised 75 million, which is a two year old.

37:40Yeah, let's end on a high. Let's end on a high. Boom, big Series B, right? These guys did C two years ago. I actually think we missed the deal. So, you know, whoops. Oops. Yeah. Well, yeah. Cradle have now raised 100 million. They just raised a 75 million Series B. And they're doing, you know, they're ex-Google guys using AI protein design and enzyme engineering. It's very, very cool. and it's great that you can do that in Europe because raising tens of millions of dollars for a largely pre-commercial company, I mean, that company is in market, but it's not going to be based on a revenue multiple basis, valued on a revenue multiple.

38:16It's like, that is very cool. So, you know, hallelujah for that and long may that continue. Boom. I love ending on a high. Thank you for that. Not psychedelic high, but we'll go with that one. Cheers, gents. See you next week. Bye. All right. Have a fun. Bye.

38:34Tear down this wall. It's more than just an alliance. This is a union of values. Let's start acting.