E679 | This Week in European Tech with Dan, Mads & Lomax

29:19And it now has permissions in Mexico, in India, in Australia, as well as obviously its core Lithuanian banking license, which is the EU full license. So, look, it makes complete sense. The business is unstoppable. The only question now on Revolue is like, barring some major, I don't know, cyber attack or major regulatory failing, which can happen in banks, you know, can they be a$200 billion company or can they be a$1 trillion company? That's the kind of big question. Aren't they on our IPO list? I know that the UK exchange was looking to push them to do UK. Yeah, but they're not going to IP in the UK.

30:00No, I think I read the quote was something like, that would make no sense or something was the retort to the request. But it looks like they may well might be one of our 26 IPO listers, I think. I don't think it's not a 26. I think it's a 27 candidate. They've got to get that full UK license first as well before the IPA. What's the holdup? Do we know? Well, they've got the license, but it's still subject to limitations. Isn't it? Well, I don't know. I mean, Rachel Weaves is probably like harassing the PRA, the Prudential Regulatory Authority, just to tell them to get it bloody done. I wonder what the real story is there behind the scenes.

30:36Well, I'm sure the real story is, you know, you can read about it between the lines, is that some of their, whatever you want to call it, compliance, record keeping, whatever, has a little bit of a kind of Silicon Valley startup style. You know, it's always been a bit grey flavoured, hasn't it? It's always been a little bit. We need to squint at this one. Well, the flip side is, you know, you build a lot more slowly and cautiously and you have that kind of higher degree of hygiene, but you probably wouldn't have, you know, you probably wouldn't be on the cusp of 100 million users. But they're on the, I mean, surely they're on the edge of not really giving a monkeys about the UK.

31:09I mean, if they keep expanding and then buying access, at what point do they go? Well, that's very true. They've already got an EU license and they've already got a full license in Mexico, I think. And again, they've got an Indian E-money license. Yeah, you're right. You're not wrong. UK pension funds also in the news this week for all the wrong reasons. Two main key stories that I saw. One was them kind of kicking back to the government saying, look, we're not a play thing. So kind of the backstory here is that Reeves has introduced legislation to enable regulators to force a minimum amount of investment via pension funds into privates.

31:44So and they kind of kick back and we'll hang on a minute, you know, don't don't use us as your as your toy. But the main story and the main thrust of the story was that there was I think the quote was you're better off putting your bank, your money into a high interest bank account because they're underperforming and really poorly performing. But Mads, what's the what's the real story before I eat my words? Yeah, so I think it's not to be fair, it's not all of them that are underperforming, but some of them are to the tune of less than one point five percent annualized return, which is pathetic.

32:14right and especially with inflation or whatever between four and eight yeah over the last year basically basically it's just value destruction there's so many aspects to this of course the trustees and other people in the sector are right to say it's not a play thing these are people's retirement incomes in the future but the challenge is we've engineered risk out of pensions we've created a system where risk is seen as something bad and as any investor will tell you risk and return comes together. You have to take risk. And the way you minimize the risk and maximize return is via portfolio construction, is via diversification, is by having the right mix of investments.

32:56Whereas instead of what trustees are incentivized to do today, really, is to minimize fees and minimize volatility. And then you end up in the rubric that says, well, let's maximize bonds because that's where we have minimization of fees and volatility. And it turns out that this fee obsession just puts everything backwards. It's really the net returns that matter. It's much better to pay a good manager 2 % to deliver 15 % than to pay them 0.1 % to deliver 5%. But just focusing on the cost, we're forcing ourselves into the wrong returns. But it turns out if you have funds that are large enough and sophisticated enough over a long horizon, you can deliver very healthy returns.

33:38Now, Svensson, he proved that at the Yale endowment, had much more of a private strategy delivered 13 % plus annually. And that's what we should aim for, right? So we probably do need to merge some of these smaller schemes. So they have more resource, more expertise, and can do more stuff that's not just, you know, how can I find the cheapest tracker or the cheapest, you know, mix of bonds, and then deliver these, these ridiculously poor returns? How can I do 1.5 in bonds? I mean, surely just by closing your eyes and doing bonds, you can do more than 1.5. That just makes no sense at all. Lomax, what, you've got some numbers on this one, haven't you?

34:11Well, I just think, look, I mean, there's a couple of things that we've talked about this before, and there's a lot of chatter about it across policy and venture circles in the UK. How do we get more pension money in both the UK and in Europe? And just to qualify that, if I remember correctly, there are only 17 firms in that pot. If either of you know that, I think that's right. I mean, check me. It's a very small amount. Yeah. You know, there's roughly three and a half trillion pounds of pension money. When you think about big pools of capital in any economy, the pension is one of the biggest, right?

34:45And in the UK, it's three and a half billion pounds across defined contribution and defined benefit schemes. It's a trillion. Trillion, sorry. Did I say billion? I meant trillion. It's roughly 110 % of GDP, right? So it's a healthy, healthy number. And the numbers are consistent across Europe. In Amsterdam, I think it's 200 % of GDP. But as Matt says - There are six other countries. I think I remember also seeing there are six other countries where their pension pots are larger. I think Sweden or Switzerland is top of the list, where the pension fund is larger than the market. Or what was the right?

35:20Larger than GDP. Larger than GDP. And Australia and Canada are both like big, big super savers. Canada, Australia. Super savers, yeah. But the point here is like, how do you get this money in? So you can force, so first of all, I think you need to create the permission to do it. the legal framework. And that still needs some work. In the US, they did this. And I think in the ERISA, I think it was the ERISA in 1956 or something, they changed the law to make it easier or more to free up the ability of pension trustees to not face liabilities for making investments in riskier assets, right? They could think about investments on a whole portfolio basis on a much more longer term lens.

36:01So you need to create the permission and framework to do that, which actually in EU and UK, we're not quite there yet. So there is a kind of regulatory piece. There is also, you know, do you get the gun out and put it to the heads of the trustees and force them to allocate? That is a solution mooted by, you know, currently by Rachel Reeves. That's in effect. Isn't it 5 % the mandate? The mandate, yeah. But I can't, what happens if they don't do it? You know, what is it? Like, what's the penalty? I guess. I guess. Well, this is where the kickback to win on a play thing came from. And I've said this before.

36:32there's like exactly exactly there's every time like everyone a sector needs more money the pension trustees always like you know put a tin hat on because people are going to come after them but the point is this which i think you need to create the performance to incentivize get the market kind of fix this because look just look at this right i was looking through the the cambridge associates the cambridge associates produce every every quarter benchmarks it's a they're an investor both their clients and themselves they're an investor in hundreds and thousands of venture funds. And they pull all of that data together and they show the kind of returns across all of that.

37:05Now, I was looking at the top 5 % of net IRR. So top 5%, top 5 % performing funds, net IRR, net is net of fees. So forget about fees. And IRR is the internal rate of return, so the annualized return. If you look at venture, you go 2010, 53 % net IRR. This is by vintage. So So each year I'm talking about is the vintage of the farm when it was created. 2010, 53 % IRR. 2011, 46. 2012, 57. 2013, 42. 2014, 40. 2015, 35. 2016, 37. So it comes down a bit. You get the picture. It's in at around 40 % to 45 % net IRR, right? And you were talking about these guys trying to produce between 3 % to 5 % to 6 % growth a year.

37:49But you need to have an element of your portfolio trying to get after these returns, right? And the performance is there, but the problem is that that requires a level of sophistication to try and get access to those funds because it's very, very hard to do that. In a way, people like Yale, you mentioned David Swenson, Mads, who was the big guru at Yale, who kind of pioneered the investment framework of having a much higher allocation of your portfolio to privates, including venture. Funnily enough, I was actually thinking it's like they stole a march and basically secured the allocation for life for Yale.

38:24Yale got into those funds when it was probably quite easy to in the 80s and is now in there forever. Whereas if you're Cambridge in the UK and like, well, actually, I'm just going to start allocating to venture now or Cambridge as an endowment. But if you're a pension fund, if you're the railways pension or whatever, the coal miners pension fund, and you say, I want to start accessing these funds, it's very, very difficult now because it's kind of dead bend shoes, as they say, right? Or the equivalent. However, I still think it's worth going after that. 100 percent. And I also think to some extent that the premise there is that we live in a zero-sum world, whereas we're just moving money around.

39:00Whereas actually I think the argument we should be making is, look, we are living in a low growth Western world right now because we have two rigid rules. It's too difficult to get stuff done. And we're not allocating enough capital to next generation technology that can help boost growth. Whereas if you're in a world where you have two or 3 % annual economic growth, the returns you can get are much bigger because you're creating much more wealth in society. Yeah, I agree. Sorry, just, but what I, what I was, my point is performance. We as managers need to show the performance that justifies the pension trustees allocating money to us.

39:42Those numbers are a lot. 100%. Those money, those returns, I just quoted a largely US fund. This is why people often talk about EU and US venture being comparable at the cohort level in terms of returns, which more or less it is. But if you look at the top decile or the top 5%, it's very, very different. It's very difficult to access top 5 % US venture for the reasons I just said, like the slots are allocated. But if European funds, where there is still room, could start to actually generate those kind of IRR numbers, 35, 40, 45%. Then you're sitting at a pension. Then at that point, it's criminal as a pension trustee not to invest in that stuff.

40:22This feels very catch-22 though, Lomax. This feels like, you know, I'm not going to give you a credit card until you've got credit kind of thing. It's a bit catch-22. We need the allocations to create, which has already begun without them, but we need the allocations to then create the next generation of winners, which then recycles back through the network. So I don't know how you break that cycle unless somebody goes, do you know what? We're going to force you or we're going to make it so sexy and incentivized to do so or something. There are two other aspects to it, I think. One is UK pensions are incredibly expensive for the taxpayer.

40:59It costs the treasury 40 to 50 billion pounds every year in subsidies and tax rebates for people to pay into pensions? And is it then fair that that cash is turned around and invested in large cap US equities? Maybe not. Do we need to subsidize provision of capital to Meta and NVIDIA? Probably not, right? So you can get the tax break, but funds have to be invested in productive assets here in Europe. I think it's not an unreasonable expectation. That's part of the kickback though, isn't it, Mads? That's part of the rejection of this kind of - I think there's a huge difference between forcing people to do something and saying, if you want the incentive, which is a very generous incentive, it's one of the biggest cost line items in the budget, we're going to have to do something in return.

41:46Yeah. I think that makes complete sense. So something caught my eye in the papers today. So a pension fund, if you saw this, guys, a pension fund of more than 10 ,000 German dentists, I need to keep a straight face when I say this, is now suing its pension. You're not going to throw in a 230 joke, are you? I don't know where you're going with this. It's going to, is suing, the pensioners are suing the managers of a 2 billion euro pension fund for investment losses of over 1 billion. So like, you know, half the fund, right? Because they made a bunch of dodgy investments in, wait for it, venture capital.

42:25Which goes back to my performance. Now, when I look at the actual investments they made, it included a shrimp farm and some slightly dodgy sounding direct. Not venture. Well, sorry, I guess it's what the German press, pension press call venture capital and various kind of dodgy sounding direct tech companies. Right. It doesn't, you know, they haven't made it investing in any kind of. I would love to have been the manager there. Wouldn't you like, what are we going to do? Do a shrimp farm. Exactly. But my cousin came with an awesome idea. But my point is this, is that, you know, that will, first of all, that that kind of story doesn't really help anything what we're doing here.

43:00But you really need to show performance and you need to show that good money can be made and that there is a deserved right in all of these portfolios for an allocation to what is an amazing asset class. I'm kind of with you, but it's not just we're not just talking about venture here. We're talking about all kinds of privates of which venture for most will be a very small part. But you've still got to be part of this. surely that's part of a diversified portfolio surely that's that's the whole point is that you're going to have a little bit of the crazy risky and then the less risky privates and all the growth or whatever it might be and all up into the public so i don't see why we why that can't be in much more of a natural a natural thing but we're going to stick with markets because the ftse this week hit 10 000 for the first time ever and one thing that i didn't realize because it's almost ignored and there is no fanfare is that the ftse actually beat the s &p 500 that's right matt isn't it yes depending on which currency you use etc i mean obviously we've had we've had the benefit of defense really rallying and the uk the footsie 100 is defense heavy you've had babcock you've had rolls royce you've had ba systems have all been absolutely skyrocketing okay well that's awesome isn't it shouldn't we be celebrating shouldn't we be opening the champagne and popping corks blimey it's a good thing does it tell us very much about the future wealth of the United Kingdom?

44:20I don't know. I think some of the defense stuff might be more transient. I don't think, I'm not sure that BAPCOC is going to turn into the growth engine that's going to drive UK GDP going forward. But yes, it's a good thing. I'm still choking the wind, baby. Sorry, Lomax, you go. Hang on, pop quiz. What's the percentage of technology in the FTSE 100? 0.1? 0.3? Don't ruin my joke, but it's 1%, right? Is it one? Well, is it a S &P 500? Well, I guess it's obviously so driven by MAG 500, but it's MAG 7, but it's, yeah, 30, 35, yeah. Well, 30 is just the MAG 7, right? It's 30%, isn't it? Yes, yes, yes, yes.

45:02Yeah, it's got to be a little bit more than that. I'm always intrigued by the notion of what would have happened to Trump's policies and what would have happened to tariffs if AI wasn't part of the picture. because i can't help but think that ai has supported trump's policies because i cannot surely if the mag 7 didn't exist the effect on the s &p from tariffs and all of the other exposure that would have hit more trad businesses would have been massive surely i don't know madzy this is your world not mine yeah but also sorry but also you know trump's been flouting the gdp growth in the US in the last year?

45:40Like how much of that was driven by AI and the data center? It's all AI. I mean, it's all tech. It's all AI, which is great. They've got it and I get it. He's shaking his head. It's government fiscal stimulus. Okay, you're running 6 % fiscal deficit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're achieving, what, 2 % to 3 % growth. That debt has got to be from going somewhere, right? No, no, of course. I mean, that's how GDP works. The government spends money. It's sort of, right, it pushes up GDP. Yeah, okay. Okay. Psychedelics. Let's get all woo and a wee. Lomax, what's happening with psychedelics this week? Well, let's go back to what's happening here.

46:14Let's go back. And when we made a prediction last week, I said biotech is having a really good moment. Biotech was in the absolute - Are you now talking your own book? Is that where we're going? Well, yeah, no, I'll do that. I've got a deal we're going to announce soon. I am going to talk my own book on soon, but not today. Look, biotech was in the doldrums two years ago. Absolute, like loads of companies. biotech actual drug companies trading below cash which meant that the market cap value of the company was below the cash they held on the balance sheet totally crazy at the same time digital health companies are really really struggling we're not gonna talk about that now but you know hims and hers this whole everything was in the doldrums two years ago people talked it down thought it was over and what's happening now you know the the s &p xbi etf for biotech was up 35 last year so she had a quietly you know behind the scenes had a really really good year And that continued.

47:02And I predicted this is going to continue this year. Now, psychedelics is a small part of biotech, right? Now, biotech, we talk about GLP-1s. We talk about oncology. We talk about, you know, drugs targeting chronic conditions, et cetera. But psychedelics is a small area. It does target a hugely important area, which is largely, you know, mental health, right? Which is becoming a bigger and bigger, which is both characterized by legacy drugs and medicines. hasn't really been any big breakthroughs in mental health and also now is like a much bigger bigger part of the health budget in countries right so psychedelics is having a moment as well and this week bright minds biotech which is actually a canadian company but psychedelics is relevant because two of the biggest companies in psychedelics are in europe i had a positive readout on a phase two trial for a compound targeting targeting extreme child epilepsy this is a synthetic compound that they developed called bmb 101 it's non-hallucinogenic so it's kind of psychedelics adjacent, but it's psychedelics light.

48:02Psychedelics light. You know, interestingly, the comp here is a company called GW Pharma, which you may remember was a UK company founded by Dr. Jeffrey Dye, who I think was called like Dr. Cannabis or something by the Daily Mail, which sold for 7 billion three years ago, right? To Jazz Pharma, which was taking cannabinoids, like part of the broader cannabis family. They actually had a drug for also childhood epilepsy, right? So this is kind of a comp and that's up for 7 billion. So Bright Minds, listen to this. Bright Minds was trading at 1.3 Canadian dollars a share in middle of 24. It's now trading at 130 100x in 18 months.

48:44Lucky I bought some. Look, and then Compass at the same time, just while PsychoDatics is having a bit of a week, Compass Pathways, which is a UK company, which is actually taking psilocybin, which is the active component of what we call magic mushrooms which is applying that to ptsd and to trd which is treatment resistant depression this week got what we call ind so investigational new drug applications you get the approval from the fda to start in-person clinical trials for one of their compounds and their stock is up as well so so more we're going to see more in psychedelics i think and there are some big trials reading out this year i think that this is part of i i will probably be beating this drum a bit this year.

49:22There's lots of really cool stuff happening across both sides of the Atlantic. The broader, more depressing story is that China has just jumped past everyone in biotech and everyone's kind of missed that. So we can talk about that another time. But generally, this is a cool time. That's okay. A bit of competition is no bad thing. So bring it on, I say. Well, I do think that at some point, Trump, when he's got through his big agenda list, is going to get to biotech and realize, shit, we need to invest a lot more money here because the Chinese have now totally stolen a massive margin. Only if there's a grift in it for him, if he can build a little Trump uni hotel plaza somewhere.

50:01Always. Yeah, there's always a way. Staying with the states, staying in gambling territory. I'm trying to, you know, can you feel my segue here? CES is happening right now. We'll just finish, I think, CES 26. Now, this is a consumer electronics show, but there's a lot of non-consumer stuff happening and AI being everywhere all over the place with either mobility or robotics and Intel, Qualcomm, AMD and NVIDIA all had new releases. So obviously silicon is a big part of our future as everybody knows. Interesting fact, China is the world's largest market for semiconductors. I can only find 24 figures but they were roughly at 350 billion twice the size of the US and five times the size of Europe.

50:44I'm sure 25. Maybe the proportions are the same, but the numbers would have changed. And no surprise, NVIDIA's announcements, I think, made the most waves. What really piqued my interest the most was the self-driving car software, where they're open sourcing not only the models, but also the data. Mads, tell us more about Alpamayo. Well, firstly, Alpamayo is really cool. So it's full stack, a full software stack for autonomous driving. And it's named after the Alpamayo Mountain Peak in Peru because that mountain peak is notoriously hard to climb, say people who have done it. And so is making cars drive by themselves.

51:25It's notoriously hard. It's a hard to scale problem. And that's why it was named thusly. It contains a number of things, Alpamayo. It contains some beautiful VLA reasoning models that can map what cars see, kind of the context and then driving actions. And it's got the emphasis on handling this long tail of trigger scenarios that are always very difficult. Elon Musk, he was out quickly saying, yeah, it's super easy to get autonomous cars to the first 99%. And then that last 1 % you spend on working for 10 years. Any risk for Tesla in this? I think there's risk for Tesla and Waymo and everybody else in the sense that it is a competing technology.

52:04If you're Wave, this could be directly competitive with Wave. Now, we know that NVIDIA have also invested in Wave, and we know that they are kind of the beautiful arms dealer, arms merchant that sells to everybody, and now also have launched their own technology. It's really, really cool that they are announcing this together with Mercedes, and they are announcing that they're shipping level two automation, so that's supervised steering and braking, in the next one to two quarters. So it's coming out very, very soon. Of course, it's just level two. It's still supervised by humans, but they're saying level four should be 2027.

52:38Of course. Next year, baby. Next year. Everything is next year. Well, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Now, Jensen is all about physical AI, as we know. He's been talking about that for a little while. They were running the manufacturing cloud. They had this whole omniverse technology where they were saying, look, we'll work with manufacturers to provide clever physical AI models that they can use to create and simulate digital twins and other things. That didn't work out very well. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars doing it. There was very limited demand. People in the industry were saying that the software wasn't very good.

53:15It was quite clunky and there was a gap between the vision and the execution. And it turns out that making this software is a lot harder than people might think. So NVIDIA, obviously, world leader in the semiconductors and all the software that sits on top of their GPUs to make them work. But then there are the applications on top and they haven't had a very good track record there. It feels like a weird one to do, Mads. It feels like a weird focus, self-driving cars. If you ask Jensen, he will say that physical AI is the biggest opportunity in the world, far bigger than GPUs, far bigger than anything else we touch.

53:52And that is his roadmap. And that's where he wants to go. So is this a hedge or is this a genuine direction? Are we going to see more apps out of NVIDIA? Well, they've now done manufacturing in a number of adjacent sectors. They've looked at logistics and they're in automotive. So this is absolutely what they're trying to do, but in partnership with others. But you're right. I mean, the chips are crushing it$148 billion of revenue in the first nine months of the last year. But the vertical software applications have not done quite as well. Alpamyo might be different, right? It's focused on one domain, just driving, as opposed to many, many different manufacturing domains.

54:31And Mercedes is shipping. Look, we're saying we're going to ship this year. So hopefully it'll work. Well, the German automotive, I've just got a new car and I was trying the assisted. I'm doing my air quotes for those that are listening, not watching. Assisted driving mode, which is shit in bad weather. It cannot track the roads at night in the rain. You're pulled all over the place. I'm like, okay, we need, obviously, having read the notes on Jensen's release on Alpha Maya, I thought, yeah, we need something hopefully smarter, especially for the German automotive, because I know they're so far behind the Chinese.

55:04Talk about China, Mads. Very quickly, they are now able to, they've approved the sales of the H200s. Is that right? The expectation is that it could happen as soon as this quarter. It was the big battleground. First, the Chinese were buying lots of GPUs. the Americans say you can't have the good ones. You can only have some cut down ones and you can't have any and then you can't have them anyway. And the Chinese were saying, well, we don't want them because we've got our own stuff. Huawei is building their Ascend chips. They're manufactured over by SMIC. We can design them. We can manufacture them.

55:37It's all great. Turns out it's really, really hard. The yields have been low. The performance has not quite been there and they're struggling with memory. They can't get enough memory to make enough chips. Isn't there a RAM shortage? There's a global shortage. And what the big Western manufacturers have done is they've just bought everything. Samsung, SK Hynix, they're sold out. Like you can't get allocation. The Chinese can't get allocation. So even if they can make the semiconductors, they can't get the memory to put on top of it. So it's a tricky situation. And which is what has happened is the kind of the quote unquote, the Chinese frontier labs, right?

56:15So their labs building the open source models have put pressure on the Chinese government to say, listen, you've got to let us have some of the good stuff from NVIDIA. Anything else from CES caught your eye? There is the whole discussion between AMD and OpenAI. Yeah, they're back. AMD, I thought we're going to just kind of fall back into the shadow. They are about a generation behind NVIDIA in terms of performance. They brought out the MI300. It was on spec, looked good, but the software was just not nearly as slick as NVIDIA's CUDA. And what I mean here by the software is the software that sits on top of the GPU and compiles kind of what a software developer will code when you're kind of maybe using PyTorch, when they make the LLM or kind of the AI model, and then compile that into the machine code that runs on the chips.

57:10and the technology that NVIDIA has got for doing that is just, they've got 20 years of experience in it. It's just much, much better than anything AMD has got. I also saw Intel were back as well. They had a few announcements. It also felt a little bit like clutching at straws as well. I don't know if that's fair. I guess they wanted to sign chips, but they also still have some manufacturing capability. And they're, of course, far, far behind the Taiwanese manufacturers. But I think I'm important from that perspective from a US angle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Any notes on Grok? The note is that it's hard to...

57:46I'm just taking a step back. What's happened with Grok? Grok has, it's been announced, raised$20 billion at a$230 billion valuation. And this is Grok with a K, by the way, not Grok with a Q. Which was also sold for$20 billion to NVIDIA. It seems that 20 bill is the new, what's 20 B between friends? Exactly. It just drops out of my back pocket, baby. Don't worry about it. Exactly. Now, we've seen OpenAI and Anthropic raise at perhaps lofty valuations, but with very, very strong growth rates that you could see grow into those valuations over the next 12 to 18 months. It looks like Grok, so Elon Musk's AI, is raising at somewhere between, depending on what kind of revenue numbers you believe, somewhere between 400 and 700 times revenue, which feels lofty.

58:42X might have 600 million users, but Grok's just got a small fraction of that, I think 30 million miles. So it's hard to see that this is a fundamentals-based valuation right now, but it's Elon Musk, and there might be stuff going on that we don't know. I think it's great that there are four models, by the way. There's been some really nasty stuff. I think some of the stuff around, especially the image generation, some of the deep fakes that are happening on Grok. But that's because they're running fast, right? So they're just running with not much due care and attention, just running at walls, huh?

59:16Yeah. And I actually have a lot of sympathy with that. There's the running fast and running at walls, but there's also a view that there should be less censorship in the models. And we've seen some of the other model companies veer the other way, where the model spat out stupid, dumb stuff or couldn't talk to you about important things because we can't comment on political matters. I'm sure we've all encompassed that. I've experienced that a lot, especially recently, where you're like, well, I'm asking you to do like a document scan, not like find nasty things on the web, and there are often little bricks in the way.

59:49A hundred percent. Whereas Musk is much more unapologetic free speech. I think some of the image gen stuff is inexcusable, and they need to clean that up ASAP. But it's clear he's got definite star power, and there's attracted a good round and a very premium valuation. Crazy crazies. The last on my AI list, Mads, was the Claude Code. All the Google engineers basically fessing up to using Claude Code. Have you had any thoughts on this one? No, it's just really interesting. I mean, they were saying, look, it was hard for us to pick a direction. And we had different initiatives doing different things and developing software inside of Google.

1:00:25And then Claude Code helped us mock it up in an hour and spit out code that was performant very quickly. It's not the final product, but it took us very far in a very, very short span of time. Kind of use whatever toolkits you need, guys. Let's get to the goal. Let's get to the checkered flag. Let's not forget Google is a major anthropic investor. Well, everyone's an investor in everyone, and everyone's investing in this whole... I've lost track of the circuits of cash. Well, wonderful. Okay, my boys and girls. Deals of the week. Lomax, what's your deal of the week? We had a big exit in the UK this week.

1:00:59Faculty. I know. Again, no PR. Again, no noise, right? I don't know. I picked cropped up a bit for me, but you know, it was in quite a lot of the major, quite a lot of the major publications. Anyway, UK AI specialist that builds enterprise grade AI systems and decision intelligence tools will sort of be vague as far as I can tell, but they've sold for reportedly a billion dollars to Accenture. I think Accenture basically buying cash. So it's in cash. I'm sure there's a lot of earn out in there. They already raised 50 to$60 million actually. the series a series b apex local globe mercurie here he is again talking about google being everywhere on the on the cap table yeah jan talen also on the cap table you know he was one of the seed investors in um in our topic right he's the co-founder of wise right out of um estonia so good for these guys it's a billion dollar exit i mean you know go back to 2014 when um you know deep mind sold but much less than that and it was have you guys watched the um is it the learning game what's the yes yeah thinking game thinking game sorry yeah it's extraordinary it's extraordinary what a lovely lovely lovely chap what an interesting story yeah if you haven't seen the thinking game it's the demis asabis the the founder of deep mind it's his a lot about him but obviously a lot about the business and and what they're up to i thought it's really it was a really really lovely story i think it's i think it's only on youtube or is it net was it netflix to youtube i saw on You can see it in lots of places.

1:02:27It is a kind of a full-length movie, but what Google did, I think six weeks ago, basically said, listen, it's a good movie. You should all be allowed to see it. It's for free. And within four weeks, it got 230 million views, which is pretty good for a full film, right? And it was lovely hearing the story about, you know, all the investors trying to drag them to Silicon Valley. It's like, no, the R &D is here in the UK. We're going to stay here and build a world-changing business. and so mission-centric. It was just lovely. I loved everything about it. Anyway, my deal of the week was... Sorry, Jan Talon is Skype, not Y.

1:03:03I'm confusing my Estonian... Jan Talon from Talon. Wow, there you go. That's for sure. My deal of the week was Kraken out of Octopus, so we won't go into that because we've already done that. But Mads, you're going to talk our book, my love. We had a lovely announcement come out from the team over at Biographica. Sesi and Dom are building a fantastic business. they announced they've raised 8 million to build some super, super cool technology that can help develop next generation crops. We all need to eat and we need to eat well. And we have problems with things like climate change and pesticides and things we don't necessarily like.

1:03:41And what the Biographica team is doing is helping us develop next generation crops that are more resistant to pests. So we need fewer pesticides and more resistant to drought. so we can better weather climate change and still grow good food. And it's just a wonderful thing and a fantastic team doing great, great work. Love it. Love it. All right, my gents. Fantastic. I will catch you all next week. All love, health and light. Bye-bye. Love you both. All the best.