E435 | This Week in European Tech with Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen, Lomax Ward and Alex Macdonald

28:06Now, this might be an incredibly short conversation because pretty much nothing was mentioned. I think it's holding patent time. There was very little to go on. If you were claiming benefits, obviously there are lots of reforms and freezes there. the biggest news was from the OBR downgrading growth from two percent to one percent now to put that into context the US predicted growth this year 25 is somewhere between 1.7 and 2.6 depending on on which reports you read and China's still gunning for five percent which many analysts think they will meet now Mads very little said I dare say there's nothing really to dig into here But is there anything that we should think about?

28:51Obviously, autumn budget is going to be the big one. What do we need to see from government? Maybe we can dig into a bit more about that. There are a couple of different angles. I think earlier you talked about startups and the startup angle on this. Just to start with maybe the slightly wider angle is that we spoke a few weeks ago about how Peter Kyle had spoken about the 40 billion pounds of efficiency gains the government was looking to find with AI. not mentioned at all. And this is the problem. It's a hugely missed opportunity. We need to identify those efficiency gains. We need to put them in the budget.

29:29We need to lock them in. And we need to use the gains to fund investment and tax reductions. The tax burden in the UK is now headed towards 37%, highest since the Second World War. Businesses are reeling. The wealth is leaving the country. We got to reverse that negative spiral. We got AI here. Let's use it. Let's be ambitious. So I think it was a missed opportunity. And I think that was a shame. I've had a couple of thoughts on this, right? Just thinking about why it is important. And so a reminder of why it is, right? I think for me, the biggest problem looking at this is that Rachel Reeves has set this target by 2030 of running a zero deficit, right?

30:04So basically, all the money we raise in taxes, we spend, right? So we don't actually raise any money on top at the moment for context excluding investments excluding investments yeah of course but um i think she's created a rod for home back right number one is she has very little we now know she has very little headroom on that she currently has 10 billion of headroom which is the lowest headroom any chancellor has had for the last 30 years but what it means this reminds me in the context of startups right in our world yeah okay there's a sort of implications for startups of off the back of what's going on in the economy but i thought of a couple of analogies here as to what's going on with Rachel Reeves and the UK economy.

30:40Analogy number one, yeah? You know in startups when you conduct a riff, you realize you need to cut costs, but you don't go deep enough with the first cut. So you do it once, and then you do it again six months later, and then you do it again six months later, but instead you should have all done it in one go at the beginning. And everyone starts, you create the morale, morale paranoia kicks in, you kill everything. It feels very much like this with Reeves. She set this very hard target. she announced the budget last autumn she's now come back again it's like oh we need to cut a little bit more and the same could happen again november it feels like very the analogies kind of and the second one is like this also feels like i guess we've seen this a lot on on founder boards in the last three years this the advice slash you know pushing towards break even this obsession with pushing the companies towards break even and and that can be good of course i'm not poo-pooing that but i'm also saying is you can sometimes prioritize break even the expense of growth and actual like the whole you know mission in the first place and you know looking at you know what we're doing in the uk it also feels like that at the moment it's like we're trying to be kind of like steady state when actually we're forgetting like maybe we need some fiscal stimulus here maybe we need to do what germany is doing maybe we do need to borrow a bit more and yes the borrowing costs will go up but maybe we do need to invest rather than like trying to really cut our cloth to try and like rein everything in and as you've just seen growth has growth forecast has been cut and and by the way guys in the uk do you know how you rate every time the economy goes up by one percent gdp you increase the tax take by 10 to 15 billion so the biggest way you fill these deficits is by gdp growth because of course as gdp grows grows then the tax revenue increases right so if you have a two three you know two three four percent suddenly you're you know 10 20 30 40 billion better off and you don't need to go and make the cuts they're making to the welfare, et cetera, et cetera.

32:31So those were just some observations. And I hope this doesn't continue. I'd rather just see a bit more fiscal stimulus, quite frankly. That will then flow through to what we do. Yeah, look, I think the most fatal blow to the UK economy is nothing new from the spring statement. It was what she announced last year in terms of the rise in national insurance contributions. And that is going to have a hugely negative impact on the UK economy. I've already seen lots of very large firms doing their sort of redundancy processes coming into play. And you're seeing a lot of small businesses, particularly in hospitality, places like pubs, restaurants, which employ a lot of people saying that they're going to have to cut a lot of their staff or a lot of them are shutting down.

33:16And I think that national insurance contribution rise may end up being a net negative for the Treasury in the long run. As you said, Lomax, right, all we need to do to increase tax takes is to get the economy growing, right? We need pro-growth policies. And a lot of these kind of short-sighted tax rises, whether it's implementing potential wealth taxes, increasing taxes on certain or removing non-dom status for people, right? A lot of these taxes, when they actually come into play, we find out that they're actually a net negative for the Treasury. And, you know, I'm very concerned about that, that particularly that rise in national insurance for businesses, which, you know, we're promised no, you know, no tax rises for working people, whatever that means.

34:06And I don't think we anticipated when Rachel said that, that that would, that would mean that a lot, you know, large numbers of people would be losing their jobs, right? Which is the actual case, right? So, yeah, look, we're in a precarious and perilous situation, but all of these things are choices that we can make, right? And it's very easy to undo it. We just need to embrace and pro-growth policies, right? And, you know, we need to incentivize companies to invest here. We need to incentivize companies to hire people here and to build businesses here and founders to stay here and start businesses here.

34:41And those policies are all out there. They're easy for, you know, for the government to implement if they wish. but this constant kind of war seemingly on entrepreneurship in particular um but also just generally on on private enterprise and businesses you know where we now have a minority of the population in the uk supporting the majority right there's a minority of the population that are actual net tax contributors in the uk and they're really paying for the rest of the population you know that that and that number is gonna continue to get lower and lower as wealthy and people with a lot of potential in their careers decide to leave for greener pastures.

35:20So we need to address this urgently. And my feeling is a spring statement. It sounds like Rachel may be someone who's very much under pressure at the moment and fearing for her job. And as she should be, because she should be held to account if her policies don't impact the UK positively. So it feels like it was very much, as you said, like a bit of a nothing burger. but a lot of the damage was done last year. And we're about to see the results of that. Well, maybe we need a Project UK and give her the license to be a little bit more bold. Watch this space. Let's see what happens in the auto. I know, listen, the spring statement is actually designed just to be a statement, but I was hoping for some more pro-growth.

36:02I was with you, Alex. Come on, come on, just say something. Just give us a little bit of the good juice. Anyway, Mads, AI Corner, What is happening in the world of AI this week? It's been another fascinating week, Dan. We've seen OpenAI being close to raising a new$40 billion round led by SoftBank. They've released some great models in the generative imaging space over the last week. And their deep research product is awesome. It's not brand new, but it's really, really good. It seems like they continue to be resource constrained. And they're rumored to have another half dozen excellent products more or less ready to go in the labs and to not be able to release them right now simply just because they don't have enough compute capacity to run them.

36:49So they seem to need the money and the resource to keep fueling the growth. Now, at the same time, over the last week, DeepSeek just released an upgrade to the V3 model. And it's rumored to be the best non-reasoning model on the market. It's so good that some people are even saying it's beating Anthropic Sonnet model, which is the model behind Claude. So it's serious stuff. And, you know, moreover, it's written so efficiently that it can run on a Mac Studio at home. so you don't need to upgrade it a little bit with some memory you know about half a tera but so it's it's a ten thousand dollar machine so maybe not exactly your standard laptop but it's open source you can run it at home and I can see why if you're Sam Altman you're feeling the heat and you're probably going out now to try and raise a try and raise a lot of money so you can keep running because you're kind of feeling and you're feeling the deep seek team and some of these open source teams breathing down your neck so I can sort of sense his stress.

37:53Now, at the same time, Google has just released a new version of Gemini, and it's an absolute beast of a model. It's integrating reasoning with exceptional performance. I've taken it for a road test. I found it to be one of the first truly enjoyable Gemini models. I felt in the past they've been sort of verging a little bit. They've had a little too many guardrails in terms of what they could do and what they could say, and kind of the DEI police were We're locking them down. But I feel now it's super clever, super smart. The reasoning is exceptional. So really, really enjoyed that. And so, yeah, the AI wars are continuing.

38:29Maybe one for the room here. Have any of you played with Reeve yet, kind of the new mid-journey killer? No, just seen it. Tell us. Yeah, no, it's just come out. Exceptional image generation ability, and you can kind of weave letters and text, straight into images. That was one of the problems in the past. You've sort of said, put this writing on this image, and they sort of always got the letters wrong. Well, Reeve gets it right, and you can do, you can imagine all kinds of things you can do with that. So that's cool. That's come out now just in the last week. Another thing that's been rearing its head again, which may be one for discussion, is AI and copyright.

39:09How does the room feel about using copyrighted works to train AI models? I know there's been yet another case in the past week. Yeah. Well, wasn't the case lost? Wasn't it Sony and they lost the case? Mad, do you remember? Well, I think it was initially they tried to sort of get an injunction to say you just have to stop right away, kind of broad brush, you know, without even hearing the full case. And I think that was dismissed. But I think there will still be a case. And I can't imagine that there won't have to be some settlement at some point. But it's obviously it's going to be crucial and the litigation will continue.

39:47Isn't it very simple? I mean, yeah, because injunctions obviously, you know, have a higher threshold burdens that probably means that it wasn't granted for that reason. But isn't it obvious? Like, isn't like if you have copyrighted material and someone comes along and uses that to create a commercial product and makes money off that, like, isn't that a very, very basic first principle? I'm sorry. Maybe I'm missing something. I think that's all agreed. I think it's the management thereof, right? Sorry, Alex, go. Well, the argument a lot of people are making, or certainly the foundational model companies are making, is we have copyright laws in the UK and there are different ones in the US and other parts of the world.

40:28But basically, there are going to be a lot of countries which don't have copyright laws or certainly not laws which are enforceable. and those countries are going to win in the AI war because they're going to be able to basically digest a lot more data and use it commercially, right? And so they're trying to kind of instill this kind of patriotic argument, right, that we should abandon or at least rule in favor of some of the AI models in these cases because otherwise we might lose against China in the long run. And look, it's quite a compelling argument. my view is that if we're going to do that we should be changing copyright laws more genuinely right not just making an exception for foundational model companies right and that's something that should be considered by the government but i can you know i can certainly feel for for some of the media organizations and newspapers i've already had half their lunch eaten in the in the in the first sort of couple of decades of of the internet and are now about to potentially see the rest of their lunch eaten right so i can understand why they see this as an existential threat.

41:33But yeah, look, there's a compelling argument internationally that if the UK or the US want to win in the AI war, so to speak, in the long run, and we want to have the generational companies domiciled in our countries, that we need to relax some of these laws. We need to change them to enable our AI companies to compete. It just feels like the cat's out of the bag. It feels like, I mean, I don't know what's been absorbed and what hasn't been absorbed who knows what's gone into the borg but it just feels like by the time any kind of regulation or law is signed you know you know somebody's somebody's got a copy of something somewhere well it kind of makes that the incentive for humans to create it really changes that because there's like firstly if i was you know looking at it from a creator perspective one is now i have competition in terms of in terms of machines on the creation front and two is like how do i even have protection on what i've created in the first place so it yields interesting questions in that context i mean isn't that the same argument as spotify you know crushing musicians desire to write i i i don't i don't think they're connected but i mean i mean if you're if you're a designer you're screwed right if i can go to any model pretty much now even you have to find new ways you're gonna have to find yeah you're gonna have to find ways to adapt pretty damn quickly yeah yeah if you're an illustrator a graphic designer i mean we were throwing in some brand ideas into one of the engines just to come up with some logos.

43:01It feels like that's going to be extremely problematic. I want to talk about more problematic stuff. So another week of skullduggery and scandal. The Forbes 30 under 30 orange jumpsuits are being prepped, washed and dried. This week it's Builder.ai who raised, they've raised about$450 million since 2016. They've allegedly been cooking the books. Apparently the auditor was well known to the CEO. they were buddies so this is all allegedly by the way ceo sachin douglas now stepped down 11x has been caught doing doing some some naughty nefarious things they've they've had all kinds of issues this week in the press bumping user numbers fabricating client testimonials hiding churn fudging how they display arr and there are rumors that andresen who are their series b investor may sue and apple is slightly slightly sideways but apple is being sued for empty promises over Apple intelligence.

43:55A class action was filed this week in San Jose by Apple users effectively stating that they'd been misled. Now, to be fair, if I'd bought an iPhone 16 on the back of Apple intelligence, I'd be pretty pissed off. So I guess the question is, where are the tech lines to be drawn? Where is stretching truths versus Theranos-style deceit? But first, before we go there, Lomax, you've got a slightly alternative view on these challenges. Well, no, I mean, maybe this view is a bit flippant, But I mean, my initial thing is like, as Alex made a very good case for Europe at the beginning, and I think we've talked on this pod before about the growth in Europe and we'll have more and more companies of big, significant scale.

44:35It's like maybe the flip side of that is you end up with more cases like this, quite frankly. You have more and more people raising big sums of money, pushing the envelope as much as they can. and i'm not condoning this behavior at all but i'm just saying the more we have people you know pressing the rubber pretty damn hard to the ground like this kind of thing might we might see more of this that's just a hypothesis because clearly in the us they've had much more high profile cases um you know they seem to be you know like every month there seems to be something coming out but i think in in the context of these two they're clearly very different they have their own as you say there's lots of allegations there's different fact sets in in both like one um i think the builder ai one does sound does sound a bit fishy to me i mean the founder of that company has had his own problems in the past with um money laundering allegations and and this audit you know it's funny audit because in my in our world in the seed world like you know startups don't get audited right for context right it only kind of audit kicks in what series b series c that that kind of happens but there's clearly been some issues there i think the 11x ai i'd love to hear what you know alex what you mads what you have to think about this one but no i look at it and i'm just like i think they're just maybe again maybe this one they're sort of pushing the envelope a bit like maybe they went a little bit over the edge i think tech crunch over egged it a bit in the article and a16c have already shut down the suing rumors i i think yeah maybe they were slow to take down some logos of churn customers i think there is a problem in that company and i'm very high level on this around churn we've talked about with ai agents like actually they can go down they can come down as fast as they go up and and so actually you know then there may be a churn problem in the business.

46:11There's a bigger problem with their prop. The prop is automating the sales process. So my sense of that kind of offering is that very quickly, it reminds me of those, do you remember those coffee cup pictures where people were putting the prospect's name on the coffee cup and then sending those images? This to me, this kind of automating sales engine stuff just smacks of that. It's going to get tired very quickly. Now the tech doesn't work that well. On the substance of the business, exactly. But I think in terms of the story, I think that one's a bit more hot air and that will be forgotten. That will literally be tomorrow's fish chip paper.

46:47To be fair, TechCrunch isn't... Sifted is more clickbait than TechCrunch. I find personally, but I thought... Both quite clickbaity, to be honest, but yeah. Fair, fair, fair, fair. Alex, what are your thoughts? Look, I don't know, Hassan. I saw 11X at the very beginning, didn't invest. I know some of the other investors quite well. Here's what it sounds like, right? and I haven't looked at it in detail, but it does sound like TechCrunch made some allegations which turned out to be completely false or published some rumors which turned out completely false, including the rumor that Andreessen might be suing them because all their investors have come out since and publicly supported them.

47:25So I think some of the most serious allegations were either false or certainly I haven't seen any proof in them. You know, if you have a company which is growing as quickly as they are, And to be clear, they are in the top like 0.1 % of fastest growing companies in the world. We all know when you're growing that quickly, you have issues or you have cultural challenges. You know, if their biggest crime is, you know, leaving some logos up on their website too long because they had some customers churn, you know, you could probably send me to jail for that as well at some point in my entrepreneurial career.

47:57Right. Like when you're moving that quickly, you know, are you like thinking every day, oh, I need to go and take that logo off the website? Probably not, right? And look, they should do better, and I'm sure they will. I'm sure they'll learn from it. But it sounds more like sort of the typical scaling, at least from the outside. I don't have any insider information, but from the outside, it looks like the kind of typical cultural issues that you see in very fast-growing companies. And I'm sure the team there will do a great job of addressing that. They obviously have some of the most reputable and experienced investors on the world on their cap table, right?

48:28So they have a great support network to help them fix these things. But yeah, it seems like the most serious stuff turned out to be fault or simply rumors, which I haven't seen any evidence of. Mads, got any thoughts? Is this interesting? I don't know. Lomax, I'm sort of with you. Look, if we're serious about building more great companies, there's going to be more stuff that doesn't work. There's going to be failures. There's going to be people that are pushing the envelope a bit too much. Yeah. Pissed off investors. It's just part of it. I'm just not like, I don't care. I just, I don't care. Move on.

48:59Nothing to see here. I guess it's not Toronto. Well, I'm not quite with you on that, but it isn't Toronto's, that's for sure. I want to talk about something that's come up for me. No, listen, nobody died, right?

49:13Yeah, I think I'm exploring the line between... You moved the bar on financial crime. No, listen. As long as nobody dies. I don't think Elizabeth Holmes killed anyone, did she? No. She misdiagnosed a few people. Maybe indirectly. People should do the right thing. I just don't think it's... There's so many things that I'm... It's so hard to build a company. There's so many things that it's important to talk about. And as you said, look, if the guys have been pushing it a bit too much, have been maybe over-speaking a little bit where they are, been overstating the numbers a bit. Yeah, yes. Okay, fine.

49:50They shouldn't do that. Quick slap on the wrist and move on. It's just... It seems like this... They just send some sensationalism and, oh, we got this big scan. all and isn't it terrible and lawsuits and i don't know i don't know i just i can't all this i just think it's not interesting i want to i want to it's fairly semi-similar topic to be fair but i want to i've been playing with or thinking a lot about this uh the brand issues the power of brand and the power of soft power around thinking about trump and his isolation isolationism if i can say it what's going on in the us elon musk and tesla obviously there's loads of challenges around Tesla factories and Tesla outlets being burned and cars being vandalized.

50:34And thinking about it within the lens of personal brand, company brand, even country brand. And there have been a lot of, again, this may well lean into our previous point of a slightly clickbaity and the news needing to capture eyeballs. But Q1 has been a bumper period for European stocks, just as the US market is going the opposite way. Many Canadians are choosing not to travel to the US. The numbers on average between land and air are down about 18%. Now, a 10 % drop will mean billions for the US economy. It's a big deal. So Tesla, obviously, share price dropped 40%. But if you look back to 22 and then 20, you know, Tesla's share price has been very, very volatile.

51:18There's a press story this week about a European Starlink coming online. However, when you scratch the surface of that story, it's just really, really, really hard to do. and Starlink is just so far ahead and it's so technically brilliant. So, but I guess my point being is that there is a whole world of challenge around brand for Americans, for Tesla, for Elon Musk. And how does this, is this meaningful to anyone in Europe? Is this meaningful at all? Is this tomorrow's chip paper? Maybe to your point, Mads, maybe this is just clickbait. Do you think this kind of whole branding issue or the way to brand is meaningful?

51:58Lomax, do you want to kick this one off? Well, I think the way to brand is meaningful in many respects as a general proposition. I've been thinking about this and with what Trump has done, what does that mean in terms of the U.S. positioning and their brand? So I feel that there's like what I think of as like soft and hard consequences of what's happened. And the soft consequences are literally exactly what you just said. fewer people go to the u.s like i buy cadbury's instead of hershey's chocolate i don't buy a tesla uh don't buy any bloody chocolate but who buys hershey's jesus but that is true hershey's actually horrible it is horrible you're right but um i think that's ephemeral short term i think it comes and goes if i was in the u.s i wouldn't worry about that you know i really don't think but but i think there are hard consequences to what has happened and in the case of tesla by the way that's a sort of soft short-term thing and tesla has its own specifics in my view which is like tesla is primed for you know when we move to automated vehicle avs like tesla is number one so tesla is like going to be okay so i wouldn't really worry about that but that's a separate point but there are hard long-term consequences here and i'll give you an example and there's a really good article in the ft today that um that actually symbolizes this so lockheed martin big like US defense prime makes the F-35 fighter jet now.

53:20They are having countries like Canada, European countries cancel orders for that, and or not make new orders. Because now in critical infrastructure and defense, the EU and Canada do not want to be reliant long-term on the US, whether it's for hardware equipment or software, et cetera, et cetera. And it's funny, and we talked about Enduro, for example, one of the new kind of defense primes coming out of the US, like big darling of the startup industry. And Jules just had its target market cut in half for the rest of its existence, potentially. Yeah. And so funnily enough, for those kind of companies, yeah, they are actually, when I call it hard, I'm saying that's actually a serious consequence in terms of their, like, you know, the size of their market.

54:09So that's why I feel like there are sort of two consequences of this behavior. One is short term. I don't think matters will change as the winds, as the tide comes in, comes out, etc. Quarter to quarter, we won't be talking about this in two quarters time. But I think on that long term thing, we will be talking about this in two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight years time. Because that is just like long term set. I mean, the Europeans weren't even at the moment, you let UK defense equipment form part of the new EU procurement program. Right. So let alone no one's going anywhere near the US again.

54:39They don't want to have this happen again. So I think in terms of the US brand and the US positioning, that's how I put it. And I'd love to hear what you guys think about that. But that was... I think emotion matters. I really do think emotion is becoming more and more important in a hyperconnected world. But Alex, you live in a very brand strong world. What do you think? Yeah, look, it's definitely a powerful differentiator. And when we talk about brand, it's not how something just looks and feels. It's like the values behind it. what people say about it when you're not in the room, right? And look, we've seen it maybe last year or two years ago with Bud Light and various political kind of responses to people doing certain things from a brand perspective, right?

55:22Whether we think that's right or wrong. I think all I will say is I'm sitting here in the US and people are still going about their day. Like there is business happening here. There is deals happening. People are still going to school. People are still going to work. and really the vast majority of people here don't really care about what happens in the rest of the world right and i'm just going to be honest with that it's true they they care about what happens here in the u.s and they're one of the few countries in the world that really doesn't need to care that much about what happens in the rest of the world right so look i think the defense there will be defense implications for the u.s and some industries but broadly they're kind of they're cracking on as they always do and um you know i think there will be some brand damage which will be not just temporary i think it will last you know decades potentially particularly in europe but how much that will impact people here on a day-to-day i'm pretty sure the vast majority of people won't notice it at all well i think one way to think about it is like i don't think consumers for example i can like ask us non-us consumers consuming u.s brands i think long term that's not going to change like you never write off you know but actually the people who are most wary are governments now right and governments include the people i've just talked about they are very in in the in the in the government world or the you know nation state world the u.s brand is long term damaged i would say yeah and and look i think governments have to have to decide they're going to have to decide if they want if they want to buy the most innovative defense technology in the world or not right and look hopefully this spares on a lot more european defense companies to innovate and invest and raise money.

57:00But that is a choice that some governments will currently be making. If they're not buying US, they're not buying the best equipment in very many parts of the defense sector. So I think the consequences have not been fully thought through by some of the politicians making those decisions. And they should look further into the future where the US is very much at the forefront of defense technology against some of the newest age weapons. right and you know if europe wants to act you know be a uh other strong defense against russia china and other you know other threats from from the middle east potentially they need to have the very best equipment so they should you know rather than short-term spikeful political decisions which may end up damaging themselves in the long term they should think this stuff through carefully before making those kind of decisions yeah i mean starlink will shortly have 13 000 satellites in low earth orbit right 13 000 yeah and i think the european providers have 620 total and also there's low there's there's low there's low there's mo and there's go or something isn't there yeah exactly yeah there you go we're we're we're in the we're in the mio and geo they'll have too much too much latency as well exactly that's a long longer story but this is like as alex says you can't just rip that out you know you can't just you know yeah there's no substitute mads What were you thinking?

58:22Yeah, I mean, there are a number of strands here. I mean, I think there's always been these strands in Europe, right? There's been kind of, are you sort of more transatlantic? You know, you're more of a transatlanticist by nature. Are you less so? There's always been this debate, you know, more in favor of U.S. collaboration or less so. And I've seen it in the Nordics. I've seen it, you know, around Europe. There's always been kind of the French exceptionalism, right, where the French sort of said, look, the Americans can't be trusted. So have to go away. Yeah, but not only him, right? And you've seen it the other way, where when you had the kind of the Iraq war and the French didn't want to join and you had the whole Freedom Fries movement in the US.

59:07So you've had some tension over the decades. And what feels like, for me, it's a bit of a shame coming from both a culture and a background that always was very transatlantic. I mean, Denmark has always been a very close ally of the U.S., is that in some sense, there is this sense of, were the French right all along? Can we really not trust and be close allies? Look, the Danish defense ministry has been out quite quickly and say, look, we don't have an alternative to the F-35. We're too small a country to manage and run two separate fighter fleets. We've standardized on this platform, and that's where we're going to stay.

59:47But obviously, the long-term consequences are clear. And I think what the sad thing is that much as I agree with the notion that Europe should carry more of our own weight, we should invest more in the fence, we should grow up and kind of be a little bit more masters of our own house here. I think the Trump administration could have passed on some of those messages in a better way that would have been less antagonistic. So we didn't need the schism. I just think it's a shame. Why? Why are we creating all this bad blood? We should be friends and collaborate and trade here. And communicating in a better way than kind of, you know, inviting a journalist into a group chat with your defense minister and then slagging off your allies.

1:00:30I feel sorry for the other Goldberg. I feel sorry for him. But if you look at France in the US, right, like, I mean, let's be very clear. Neither country would exist without the other one. We would not have the United States of America without France and the French support for their independence. And similarly, the French would not be speaking French today. We're not for the Americans. So I think there's a lot to be learned from how we can collaborate and help each other. And the vast majority of Europe and the US have very much the same values. So I hope we come closer together at some point.

1:01:05Even if we are European freeloaders. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so that's a silver lining scenario for me, right, is that we use this as an opportunity to grow up, invest more, take some of the right decisions, and that the next U.S. administration or the one after that becomes a little less belligerent and that we find a way back to a more, should we say, even partnership where it's not so big brother, little brother like as perhaps it has been. i'm not i'm not unconvinced the damage is generational i i think this goes beyond trump i think this goes into the understanding there are 73 million people that voted for this man so i i'm a little i'm a little less bullish on that whole forgiveness after this after this uh administration but um i want to very quickly before we run out of time lomax very quickly deal of the week for you a new deal announced today marvel fusion in germany has raised 112 million in their series Series B, Series C, led by AQT, Siemens, nuclear fusion company.

1:02:03I mean, very interesting. Great to see. We talked earlier and lamenting European growth capital. And here we have a big, you know, north of 100 million round going into a, you know, still nascent early technology. So, you know, that's good to see. Europe's been quite big on the biopharma life sciences growth capital over the last 12 months, which is also great to see. Gentlemen, lovely to catch up with you. Alex, you're hanging in the States for a couple of days. What are your plans for the rest of the week? You're trying to dox me. I'm going to be back in Europe. What's your tail number? I'm going to be back in Europe next week.

1:02:37I'm trying commercial that. I'll be back in Europe next week. But yeah, I'm spending a lot of time between the US and Europe at the moment and enjoying both perspectives and hoping we can come together as economies. There you go. You're like a diplomat. You're like a connective form. in the investing startup world. Mads, what's on your... You're traveling this week, aren't you, Mads? You're off on a map? Yeah, I'm off to Japan. Whoop, whoop. Ah, so going, eh? Absolutely looking forward to seeing spring in Tokyo. Nice, the blossoms are out. Lomax, what's happening with you? Kitting out the new office and starting to onboard LPs for the new fund.

1:03:17There we go. Let's go. Boom. All steam ahead. Travel safe, traveling will breeze and we'll catch you next week. See you later. time bye thanks guys bye bye

1:03:30tear down this wall it's more than just an ally this is a union of values let's start acting acting