E429 | This Week in European Tech with Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen, Lomax Ward and Andrew J. Scott

0:00Welcome to Upside, where we dig into the real stories behind the headlines affecting European venture.

0:22This show is not investment advice and the hosts of this episode may be invested in the funds and companies featured. This week it's Lomax from Outsized, Andrew from 7 % and Mads and myself from SuperSeed VC. And we're talking markets. Markets up, markets down, markets all around. A little M &A. Oh, and did I say markets? Then we're going biblical with AI Jesus. Forgiving thy spying neighbour. Healing deals of the week. And Google's going for a whiz. Plus we've got all of the latest in AI in AI Corner and deals of the week. right now markets what is happening in markets now actually before we go into markets guys what's been happening this week andrew what's been happening with you are you good bad ugly and different i'm amazing you are amazing off to asia you are a white middle-aged vc you are amazing sorry i interrupted you so you're off to you off to off to asia off to asia uh tokyo singapore and in five days.

1:23Never been so excited to go. And I've been prepping this week. Super cool. Super cool. Lomax, what's been happening with you? Usual, you know, deals, founders, portfolio. This week was Father's Day in Portugal called the Dia do Pai. So I got made this little hat by the best father in the world, Meio Pai do Mundo. How is your Portuguese? it's getting better I can do restaurants better than yours Dan or mine there you go I'm in, I'm sold Mads-a-doodle, what's been happening with you? so we had kind of looked at the fascinating news from BYD, they're at it again they kind of launched the news of the five minute battery charge and that's five minutes for a 470 kilometer range they're reporting now tesla they have a fast charger already but it's 275 kilometers in 15 minutes um mercedes they've sort of done tried to do one better at 325 in 10 minutes but the byd offering is just another league and it kind of it's at a level where you can start to compare it to filling your tank and this is done now isn't That is the hodigo.

2:47You are now in the same playing field as an ICE engine. Yeah, I mean, we just need enough charging stations now, right? I mean, it's just fascinating. And the engineering that has gone behind it has been incredible. Kind of the stuff that has got into making sure that these cells don't overheat and melt and get damaged. It's super, super smart stuff. So it'll make it even tougher for the European automotive makers to catch up. but I think the good news, kind of the silver lighting is the upside, if you will is a big boost for the overall EV industry and that's exciting of course. And a bad week for Tesla right, with all the basically nearly all Cybertrucks recalled this week.

3:29Yes wasn't there a massive core panel that would peel off on the freeway, wasn't that the issue? I don't think it's core but it's certainly a panel that peels off that they need to replace which you don't want hitting you at 80 miles an hour on on the freeway what's been happening with me so i've i've been pondering what really deep tech is and i know obviously lamex and andrew this is your world so i'd love to hear a definition from you i was doing a couple of deck roasts this week which always makes me smile a little bit because opinions and obviously who doesn't have an opinion over a pitch deck and how how important is a pitch deck when you're the pitch deck when it's all really about you so how does the material frame you and vice versa and i've also been digging into some really really boring startups so some of the startups that do some of the stuff you've never even heard of in sewage treatment or manufacturing behind the scenes the stuff that we invest in but i find obviously super exciting but i think to most to the lay person in the street would find pretty bloody boring boring is good though right you know boring i love it yeah yeah I think maybe I'm being over defensive because I'm always a bit oversensitive to this stuff.

4:38And I'm telling my wife what we're doing or my friends what we're doing. And they're like, what? What? You do what in intraday bank liquidity and finance? What? So I think there's, I love the boring stuff. Boring is also a function of positioning and brand and press. I mean, Wise, Transfer Wise became a cool company. Who would have thought bank transfers and FX was cool? but they sort of made it cool by putting naked people in london liverpool street um and becoming a really successful business so i think you can it's in the eye of the beholder but i think people are swayed by success and by brand positioning i think yeah no i think that's fair i'm trying my brain immediately went to what sectors or spaces couldn't you make sexy and i couldn't really think of i think you could do pretty much anything with anything with the right branding agency but we're going to talk about markets because this is even that's fairly us centric there are some very very strong european angles so i'm going to be a little bit market so trump has been fiddling around on purpose or not is the debate is this a a purposeful market market flattening crashing but there has been some ipo activity some m &a activity and it's not just the US.

5:53So taking a look at the Klarna IPO to start with. So Klarna has filed a revised F1. So that's the S1 for foreign companies this week in March. The company is aiming for a valuation of 15 billion, aiming to raise over a billion. Now that's a third of the valuation of 45 back in 2021. So it's a bit of a step down. However, still seen as an important part of getting the market activity repushing. The IPO should take place in April. Hopefully, Klarna listing on the New York Stock Exchange. It was founded in Sweden, which gives it the European angle, obviously, for us. In 2005 by Sebastian and Niklas, although Niklas has stepped back since 2015.

6:34And they're IPO-ing in the US. However, the Topco is in the UK. It's a UK PLC. And obviously, it was started in Sweden. So lovely, lovely little European success story. Interesting fact. UK listed companies that move and list in the US don't necessarily do better. That's not a massive data set. There's only a set of 12 companies over the last 10 years. But those that moved, research shows that share price didn't move that much, but liquidity did. Now, Mads, what else is happening on the markets front? Because you've got some other sexy stories in M &A too. Yeah, I think the wider context is that after two years of an exit slowdown, the high profile exits are really picking up.

7:16And we've got these long-awaited IPOs that now finally are happening. You talked about Klarna. We also briefly touched on the CoreWeave IPO, which I'll try and unpack a little bit now. And then we'll look at some of the M &A that's taking place because it's actually super exciting. So alongside Klarna, CoreWeave is going public either later this month or early April. And it's worth noting that the CoreWeave IPO just over the last few weeks has been reduced in size from$4 billion to$2.5 billion in terms of the capital that they're planning to raise. Markets have been choppier. NASDAQ is down about 11 % from the February peak.

7:54And it's unclear what will happen to the final valuation of the company. Now, as a brief recap, so CoreWeave operates data centers and what they provide is bare metal GPUs to AI developers. So it's different from traditional cloud providers because when you log on to AWS or onto your Google Cloud or Azure, you use virtualization or you access virtual slices of hardware. But with CoreWeave, you can get the whole thing. And that's been super popular. And that's why the business has been growing at an incredible pace. So in 2024, the revenue was$1.9 billion, which is a great basis for going public, you might say, in 2022, it was 16 million.

8:40So it's grown from 16 million to nearly 2 billion in two years. It's absolutely nuts. And it's all GPU driven as part of this wider AI trend that, of course, we are talking about a lot on the program here. On the M &A side, CoreWeave recently announced the acquisition of the MLOps platform, Weights and Biases, for$1.7 billion. Now, Weights and Biases is a Databricks competitor, and that's also an exciting company. So what we're seeing is this sort of set of kind of almost reverse babushkas where you've got one private company acquiring another private company and then going public. Overall, I'd say that it's a great thing for the ecosystem because we have all this liquidity that is now going to flow through.

9:25We also covered the$3 billion acquisition of Moveworks last week. And then I'd say, lastly, there's a big, big kahuna that landed this week. And it's so big that it's one for the record books. And I'm talking about Google's acquisition of Wiz, which you alluded to earlier, Dan. Briefly, what is Wiz and why is the deal important? Well, firstly, it's an Israeli cybersecurity outfit. And their specialty is in what they call agentless cloud security. So what does this mean? Well, it's the ability to scan for vulnerabilities without installing agents on every single device, making it much easier to monitor large fleets of tech and networks and servers.

10:10They also create a digital twin that can simulate the security posture of your infrastructure setup, and they have strong visualization and management tools. So it's a great tool suite for enterprises to manage the security of their tech infrastructure. Why is the deal important? Well, it's the most valuable M &A deal for a VC-backed private company ever. Woohoo! It's$10 billion more than Meta's acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014. And it's happened in record time. So Wiz made it from kind of founding the business in 2020 up to$700 million of ARR in just five years. and that have exited now at$32 billion on a 45X revenue multiple.

10:59Nice. So it's an amazing deal. It's Google's largest acquisition ever, more than twice as big as the Motorola acquisition. And it's the highest exit valuation for a cybersecurity company, $4 billion larger than Splunk. So a terrific deal, one of the largest tech deals of all time. Just a few that were bigger. You had the Dell E &C. Mads, one quick thing. Why did Google buy them? What was the why? Google is behind AWS, and they're behind Azure in terms of cloud size. And they're thinking about inorganic strategies to try and catch up. They want to be as big as the two market leaders, and they're seeing this as a great strategy because, as we all know, if we look to the future, there are some certainties.

11:45There's going to be more focus on health. There's going to be more focus on food. And there's going to be more focus on defense and cybersec. Because why? You know, the more important technology becomes, the more important it becomes to secure that technology. And so this is just seen as an ever-growing area. But wait a second, guys. The fat lady has not sung yet because the specter of the FTC looms large over this transaction. So we'll all remember the Adobe Figma acquisition, which was blocked by the FTC. And we had been saying in the last few months that the FTC, with Lena Kahn gone, has had its wings massively clipped by the Trump administration.

12:18But actually, if you look at what's happening last week, the investigation into Microsoft that was announced under the Biden administration by the FTC, the FTC confirmed last week that they're going to continue with that antitrust probe, which you would have thought might have been pushed under the rug with the new kind of light away FTC. And for this transaction, the FTC have said that they will scrutinize this and they've said that they will scrutinize it properly, which means that this deal is not done yet. So it's an amazing deal, as Matt said, for all the reasons that he said. And actually, Dan, you brought up something interesting last week.

12:53You'll remember that in the Figma transaction, there was a$1 billion break fee, right? Which meant that when the deal didn't happen, Adobe paid Figma$1 billion. In this case, the break fee is$3.5 billion. So actually, Wiz, even if this deal doesn't happen, which it may, if it doesn't, they're going to be$3.5 billion better off on their balance sheet, which is pretty nice. For a five-year-old company, thank you very much. Yeah, I think it's a great point you're raising, Lomax. I think basically Google are looking at this and you can say putting 10 % aside as a breakup fee, more than$3 billion, it's generous, maybe we could call it, aggressive, ambitious, especially given the risks that are looming over it.

13:30I think they're taking a view. And I think the view they're taking is that where the last administration was quite ideological when it came to antitrust, this administration is very transactional. And I think they are gambling on the Trump administration, yes, putting barriers up, but ultimately acquiescing and doing some kind of deal. Google, you do X and we'll wave this deal through. And the question, of course, is what is the pound of flesh that Trump and his administration will extract? But I think that's why they have the courage here to put that large breakup fee at risk. And a couple – I mean, by the way, guys, talking about markets, the market hated this deal, right?

14:13So Alphabet shares down 3 % off the back of it. They're using a third of the cash on their balance sheet. So they have$90 billion on their balance sheet. This is an all-cash deal, right? So it's a big bet, and they're buying, as Matt says, a 45 times revenue. They trade at six times revenue. So there's a big discrepancy there. Clearly, Wiz is growing, so the revenue multiple will go down over time. But the market hates it. But clearly, Alphabet feel, for the reasons Mad says, in the cloud business, they need to make a move. And this is the move they've made. It just feels odd that they didn't do more along the way to kind of mitigate this.

14:48It kind of feels like some form of lacking in Google's strategy to need to do this deal. but maybe that's not the right lens but it just feels a bit hinky. Anyway, Andrew, what are your thoughts on this? Big corporations. Yeah. It's always going to be tricky starting a balance between national suffering capability or economic interest and just allowing the markets to do their job. And I don't think there's really a clear strategy on this yet. It seems to be, to your point, Dan, seems to be a bit applied to them, a bit ad hoc. I'm unconvinced that the monoclonies and emergency commissions are truly independent in any case.

15:28So, yeah, it's a challenge. I think we need to focus on, from a national perspective, being a Brit, you need to focus on making sure that your public markets are resilient and do their job and do what they said on the tin. I don't think that's true at the moment. So we're back to policy changes and back to streamlining and back to all that good stuff. so well maybe um i mean what trump has now abolished the department of education so maybe he can just you know if it's not transactional enough for him he can just abolish the ftc and and move on with his life who knows who knows what goes on in the in the u.s in the u.s cabinet as mad's mentioned you know who's the biggest who's the biggest venture shareholder in in whiz index 12 european venture fund who's the biggest shareholder in figma i think it was index right So, you know, two of the biggest M &A transactions in the last three to five years in venture have been majorly cornerstone by European VC.

16:24Absolutely. Masterclass. Love it. I want to shift gears. I want to talk about foodome sequencing. A bit of an odd sideways move here. So this is Brian Johnson from the Don't Die movement fame. He wants to sequence food akin to the human genome. So the background being that it's actually really hard to eat clean. So he wants to start a company that sequences 20 % of the food that makes up 80 % of the US diet, which apparently isn't just Blue Skittles and Mountain Dew, I'm told. So a question for the room, and probably Lomax, this is one to lean on you for, is will this make a difference? Is there a place now for startups to focus or elsewhere in this kind of longevity space focusing on food?

17:08food and do you think within our lifetime here's a question for the whole room do you think within our lifetime we will raise a generation of kids that will live forever so hello max can you kick this one off okay lots to unpack maybe you start let's start with food so we talked about it before and i know andrew has a big bugbear about this and you know i'm sure we'll chime in later we know that we have a massively fucked food system particularly in the u.s right we have 42 percent of americans are now clinically obese and 50 are either diabetic or pre-diabetic right which means their budget levels are kind of trending on the way towards that's 50 now the numbers are lower in europe but you know if we don't watch it we could be heading in the same direction so we know that we have structural problems in the food industry right now the problem is from a startup perspective in a way we've actually had a bit of an experiment here to see you know the kind of concept that brian johnson is talking about like sequencing food or whether it's actually sequencing food, whether it's actually profiling food, whether it's better information.

18:04I have no doubt that all of this is necessary. We've actually had, we have a startup in the UK called Zoe, right? Which has raised a lot of money from, you know, people that we know. And I'm a customer or I'm a customer of Zoe and they have a tons of subscribers, which is helping bring transparency into your food, right? And Zoe has been a fantastic business with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. However, one thing interestingly about it, as I've mentioned on this pod before, is the churn rate at Zoe is huge right from what we can gain like glean publicly it's around 50 of users churn within nine months but that makes sense because you you get your month's worth of data you learn which foods spike blood sugars and then you go great you know why would i stay and a point we've made on this before to be honest when it comes to food like 90 of it is just common sense it's like drink less alcohol eat less sugar eat more greens you know eat less volume eat less ultra processed food So in a way, it's a very, very simple, right?

19:00But that's a very hard message to get across at the population level. I personally am a bit like, I struggle to see looking at the Zoe example and thinking about, you know, Brian Johnson doing a very expensive sequencing of lots of food and trying to sell that information data in a kind of consumer subscription app. I'm not convinced that that's like a major success story. One thing that I think actually does move the needle on food is our friend, our dear friend, regulation, right? Which is something that we do. And, you know, we talk about Europe being good at regulating, et cetera. But you know what?

19:33I think in America, they've been asleep at the wheel here, right? There's a complete conflict of interest between the food companies and, you know, the population health, right? I'm sorry. It's just very, very clear that they are optimizing for profit. it. And we also know that Big Food, you know, is a very small, closely held group of companies, right, that operate not a monopoly, clearly, but it's a, it's an oligopoly, effectively, right. And they also have, particularly in the US, like huge power in Washington, right. There's massive, you know, regulatory capture, right, by those companies.

20:08In the UK, you can see small examples, right. So in 2018, we introduced a sugar tax, right, which levied a tax on the amount of sugar in soft drinks right so it's a it's a very specific problem but it's you know it's it's a it's a good test and we've actually seen quite interesting data off the back of that right so i think you know you've seen meaningful i think obesity rates in year six girls in one test came down by 20 right so this is present preventing 10 000 cases of obesity you know in the uk alone within that cohort which is phenomenal right so actually apart not only that that also raises money for the exchequer now maybe only 500 million but that's still something particularly in the context of what's going on in the uk at the moment so i think that doesn't take into account the other side so the the things that aren't going on in the health service because of that so surely there's an offset there of course exactly yeah obesity rates the comorbidities from obesity diabetes etc etc etc so for me i'm not i'm a bit skeptical about the brian johnson thing sure he'll get some subscribers i don't you know i wouldn't back it as event as a vc i love it that he would might you know do it and if he wants to you know raise private money and have a go then you know for sure that's great but i think actually to move the needle at the population level interventions by governments quite frankly is the is the biggest quickest needle mover andrew what was your bugbear i've got a few about food i've got a few it might take some time I think there are three things here.

21:34There's the food we choose to eat, the food available to us to eat, and then how we eat it. And so we think about the food we choose to eat. Eating well is, I think, relatively easy, but people either don't want to or they don't know how to. So they're either not educated on why the food they eat is a problem, or they just don't care and they live in ignorance. and you see this i see have friends who do this so we eat too many burgers who eat too many carbs they know what the right thing to do is yeah they don't and i'm one of those guys we just spend an entire podcast unpacking the psychology and how you can make changes to regulation as you say all the way from sugar ratios in food to levels of fat or ingredients and i actually have a very dim view of the food industry globally the only reason europe is any better is because of some of the regulations all food companies are interested in maximizing profit there's no real thought to the health of the consumer unless you happen to be working in a niche or working towards selling healthier food because you think that's going to increase your profit margins that's just the nature of capitalism and so regulation unfortunately is something we really should lean on the food available to eat my second point is one of the biggest challenges because even healthy food now and i think this is the food dome issue that brian johnson talks about and i actually think it's an amazing idea is because of the way food is packaged and processed and washed and transported a lot of it is infected, if you like, with microplastics and other chemicals we don't know about.

23:20So even if you go and buy an organic tomato, I was reading that it might have, you know, a tomato in itself in total might have sort of over 20 different types of sugar, 300 different flavonoid molecules, 50 different antioxidants, but also trace pesticide residue microplastics and you think you've got a healthy organic tomato but actually you're eating stuff which 5 000 years ago if you picked a tomato off a bush you wouldn't be consuming and that's got to be having a fundamental effect on on human health you know you boil a kettle a plastic kettle you end up with microplastics in the water you use a plastic tea bag is proven and doubling the university to a piece of research where billions of microparticles of plastics went into then the cup of tea that you're drinking.

24:11How is that legal? And we have this information. Why is it legal to have plastic tea bag? So I don't think any of this stuff can be good for the bodies that we carry around all these. And I think there'll be a health pandemic in future. I think we'll find out that cancers and other things can be rooted back to the microplastics we're consuming. And then the third point around how we eat it is, again, stuff we can change probably. I have spinach and eggs for breakfast if you're interested in that fact. But I was told off recently for microwaving the spinach in the bag because when the plastic in the spinach bag heats up to a certain temperature, it releases microplastics into the spinach.

24:58so everything we eat is um you know the the plastic we use to stir boiling water the teflon on the frying pans if it's scratched or if it's heated to a above a certain temperature starts to degrade and releases chemicals into the food chemicals there is a big question why are any of these things legal when we know we know these facts so what do we do about it you can get militant and start banning all these things or you can make a buy educated buying choice but it is hard it's a lot of work or you can or you can uh become a billionaire and do a brian johnson and have a team of people and actually the food and sequencing will be very interesting and in a way to be honest the people who should be using that data is the regulator to make decisions i mean one of the big problems with food is at the population level i think people vote with their pocket quite frankly and you see this in the context of clean meat and all these kind of you know there's taste and and environment and everything but people vote people vote on the price really right at the population level so that's that's one thing um and i agree with andrew like the whole thing is you know we're gonna i'm probably gonna wake up in 20 years time and we'll realize that that there's a whole bunch of stuff that's been incredibly i have no doubt that all of these things plus all the digital form radiation the pollution the way that our food is processed packed and distributed are going to conflate to some pretty serious health conditions and on fertility and on and on the stuff that we haven't even haven't even considered yet but i guess the question it's interesting if you turn sorry to interrupt dan it's interesting if you turn it on its head and said what if it wasn't a legal requirement to list ingredients and food the answer is companies would not bother to list the ingredients for food if it wasn't a legal requirement to list the nutritional value companies wouldn't bother because they have no interest in doing so so i think there is a real piece i'd love to see some hefty blanket regulation which the food industry would squeal at but imagine if they had to run their food through the testing process to find out when it arrived at the consumer what level of microplastics were released into the food and there was a traffic light system so you could see would that change how supermarkets package their food i bet it would because a lot of consumers would stop buying it or they'd make choices that are different to the ones they make today so it's a good example i think where governments can make foundational decisions which have a huge impact further down the chain rather than tinker around with tiny decisions um a lot of the first step is to actually transparency from the businesses because i can't go and pick i don't have time to go and pick fresh food if i can find it in a field i do have to go to a supermarket so therefore let's at least make consumers possible for them to make good decisions i think upf the ultra processed food the messaging around that has been landing right you know again i don't know how much it's landing at the population level but it sorry i mean has it made a difference this is the challenge is that i think you nailed it it's like if you are okay if you are a poverty line what are you going to do you're just going to go you're just going to feed the kids with whatever your turkey twiddlers whatever you can get wrapped in plastic and cyanide you just need to get you know so you've got a fiver as your budget what are you going to do that's that's totally it no i know i think the way you i'd see up if i look at some of these plant-based startups right which have all gone bust in the last few years right you know like in the last like 18 24 months a lot of that has been like consumer pushback against the amount of ultra processed ingredients they have in order to kind of recreate the meat flavor for example in plant-based meat so you can kind of see that and did you see mns a lot in marks and spencer in the uk you know the kind of posh supermarket released these like new cereals that came out last week or the week before.

28:39So they released a box of cornflakes, right? And on it, they have a very simplified packaging. And it just says one ingredient, corn, right? And then it has like the equivalent of Cocoa Pops. It's like four ingredients, like corn, oats, cocoa flour, and something else. And they all taste like shit. They all taste like shit. But worse, corn is not good for breakfast. Corn is not good. And also, you know, we're fighting against generations of the food pyramid, made, which was released, you know, and then endorsed by the United States Department of Agriculture, essentially produced for the food industry, because those carbs, those grains were cheap.

29:15And so it's told, eat loads of these things. We are not designed to eat loads of those things. Actually, animal fats and other stuff should be the thing you eat most of not, not corns and not cornflakes in the morning. I can't think of it. Can you think of a cheaper way to mass manufacture a product with very little nutritional value that all turns into sugar that you can feed to kids and sell billions of boxes of. Well done, Kellogg's. I mean, you're just murdering the kids. You really are. If you just fundamentally change what kids ate in the morning, the experience of the average teacher across the globe would fundamentally shift to a better experience.

29:48You shove a load of corn in them in the morning, and then they have a sugar drop, and they all turn into absolute monsters. It's actually criminal. And the worst thing is, most Western countries It's a toxic food pyramid when there was just because the US did. And we've been teaching this thing for decades and it's pure BS. It's complete BS. And it's been proven to be complete BS now. But gents, here's the question for the room. Where is the opportunity for startups? Because all of this is mind shift stuff and culture stuff. But I've got to bring it back to the point of the pod, which is what do startups do?

30:28What do investors do? Is there a place to play or is it just a regulation tip? Going back to the Zoe, the startup that sort of measures your biome. I mean, first of all, there are some question marks over how much analysis of your poop really does provide efficacy because the biome of the intestines and the stomach is so complex. We're still trying to unravel it. And some of those measurements and then they tell you what you should change are not always accurate. it and i'm sure there's some great stuff that comes out of it but one of the reasons people might be dropping off if they are low max is that you've got to be able to affect change so you know we look at a lot of a lot of female health stuff we look at a lot of food health stuff and the question we always ask the founders how are you going to make this sticky because unless you can affect some change both emotionally and practically with with the user they're going to drop off you know you you use your star for running and your strava running app because you measure the number of steps you do you measure how fast and how far you run so when you improve you can see you can actually see a tangible improvement and progress but if i get my biome sequence and all this information what simple steps as a consumer can i take to then see an outcome where i improve and i think that's really challenging you've always got to take it through to an emotional outcome for the user and a lot of these companies start up to do the first step which is they do a great job of measuring your bloods or they do a great job of measuring your your intestinal biome but it's not then obviously clear how i press a button and i'm told do this do this one thing and actually that will improve my health quite we don't know i mean just on the on the gut microbiome we don't know enough about it quite frankly and by the way it changes every minute every second every minute every so you can do it you can do a sequence one day and get some results but it changes over time yeah depending on how many of your qualfits you eat probably Well, yeah, exactly.

32:16But I think in terms of opportunities, I'm still I'm an investor, you know, an investor in various food tech companies. I still think even though it's gone through, we talked about here, a bit of a bit of a bear market in the last 24 months. I'm still long term bullish on that. Right. Because for the partly for the reasons we talked about the health impacts. Right. Also, there's the global impact. We know that roughly a quarter of agricultural land is dedicated to developing feedstock to feed to animals. Right. Which we then kill and eat. So it's a hugely inefficient food system. Right. both from a kind of cost supply chain and environmental footprint.

32:47So I'm long-term bullish on, you know, we talked about it last week, what the FSA in the UK, the Food Standards Agency, has just launched this sandbox for, you know, clean meat companies. And, you know, in Europe we have Meatable Gourmet, Hoxton Farms, etc. They have, you know, in the UK you have a whole bunch of other, you know, impossible foods, etc, etc. I am long-term bullish on that. So startups working to recalibrate and reset the global food system for sure. But for the reasons we've said, huge incumbents, massive incumbents. And I think price is the biggest differentiator at the population level.

33:22So there's a lot of things to work through in order for those to be big billion-dollar returns. I have no doubt. And food is a trillion-dollar market. It's massive from a startup perspective. And no one's going to argue with the term, are they? No one's going to argue with TAM and no one's going to argue with how essential it is. So I'm long-term bullish on food tech, if done in the right way. Mads Food Tech, where would you play? What one thing would you focus on or what one startup would you invest in if it came across your desk? Let's take a step back. Where are some of the challenges in this?

33:59I think it's easy for us to say we should regulate more. And genuinely, I think that's a necessity. Otherwise, we can't get this under control. But I think short term, the challenge is that with regulation will come price increases. And food inflation is just the last thing we can afford right now. The truth is the modern food industrial complex has been excellent at shipping lots of very cheap calories to our populations, which may not keep them healthy, but it keeps them alive. And so I think there's sort of a twin track we have to explore, right? And on one hand, how can we make sure we increase the food safety standards while also finding whole new ways of making food that can enable us to create cheap food that is also healthy?

34:46And that's not an easy thing to do. I think some investments we've made, you've made some investments, Lomax. I mean, one of the things we're looking at is how can you fundamentally re-engineer the plants? How can you re-engineer the biology so that it can produce more and better whole foods with less pesticides in more adverse conditions? And maybe that kind of avenue will lead to the types of results we need. But I don't think there is one clear, easy way. Yes, I'd say, you know, from our perspective, just ban the whole thing, you know, all this nasty stuff. The challenge is the moment you do that, the price of the grocery basket might double or triple.