E700 | This Week in European Tech with Dan Bowyer, Lomax Ward & Eyal Malinger

15:19Eyal Malinger:But jokes aside, no, look, I mean, this is a company that has had operational challenges over the last couple of years. So it does seem to, it does feel like it's in meme stock territory. But I think the edge AI point that I raises is a very interesting one. Do you think that then if we run in more compute on the edge, this will have a, it's not going to have a meaningful impact and dent on energy and energy costs or not? You know, as in like, if you run more and more edge, like AI on the edge, then you're kind of distributing the energy that's needed, right? rather than concentrating it in these big data centers, right?

15:51Eyal Malinger:A specific, I don't know. That's a much, like that would assume there's going to be a lot more compute on the edge, right?

15:57Lomax Ward:I mean, some of these models are so tiny. I mean, the Gemini's latest is operating on the iPhone, right? And that's a very battery hungry thing.

16:05Eyal Malinger:I just think forward to Optima. I mean, actually thinking back to the robots and things like that, I don't know. I mean, yeah, probably won't be big enough to dent what's going on in the cloud, of course.

16:13Dan Bowyer:Dan, the beauty is you have models of different sizes and different memory and hardware requirements. The reason people are running things locally is because they keep running out of cloud tokens or open AI tokens. Is it better for you to spend five or 10 grand on a Mac studio plus whatever power you're consuming to run it visa versus what you will pay cloud and API tokens or running it in a virtualized environment? I don't know. But I think there's been a lot of these talks about having more distributed edge compute and edge AI as a way to both power low, but also just in terms of where do you want to put those compute resources?

16:53Dan Bowyer:So I think it's a positive development if that is what will happen.

16:57Lomax Ward:Well, it also means that you don't have to worry so much about security, control, access, and all of those challenges that you have when everything is being transmitted up and down or left and right. So I don't know. I don't know. I mean, it's so interesting to see how this all unfolds. It kind of leads on to the next stories that caught my eye this week about ai is basically just causing a bit of a fuss so we have intense workloads in in the bay so there are a few stories this week about 996 and grind core and all of these things where people are working every hour that god sends to build these ai businesses a kpmg partner was fined for cheating using ai i'm not quite sure why that was a headline but i think there are some maybe some more depth behind that and thropping and and the pentagon are falling out over usage and can and should ai be used against the the people i think that's probably a worthy argument so i don't know where we'd want to take this but it feels like and i know this is obviously easy click rage and ai is still main news cycle so the news likes to pick up on this click ragey stuff but which one would you pick up on first and what caught your eye on these in this bucket so i'll

18:11Dan Bowyer:I'll start from Anthropic because I think it links really well, really neatly to the first topic we talked about. And that is basically what Anthropic was saying is that we do not want our models to be used to let the computer autonomously decide on a kill decision or attack decision. Now, I think from a moral compass, corporate moral compass perspective, it's beautiful, right? But it's beautiful right until the point when your adversary autonomous drone doesn't have one. And that's a problem here, right? Palantir gets it, right? You maintain peace through technological superiority, not pristine ethics.

18:48Dan Bowyer:And I remember I was at business school and we had this like hours of waffle about corporate accountability and morals. And by the way, I believe in them. But I remember thinking to myself is that all of those, you know, me coming from Israel at that point in time, all of those Westerners keeping talking and, you know, they had this luxury to adhere to those beautiful moral values. But the real world, where the other 7 billion people live, don't really play by the same rules. And I think, you know, I found this quote from Alex Carr from Palantir, and he says, our adversaries will not pause to indulge on theatrical debate.

19:23Dan Bowyer:I love it. Theatrical debate about the merits of developing technologies with critical military application. They will proceed. And I think that is really what is coming out of here. And I think I'm really hoping if listeners taking one thing from today's discussion, is that they wake up and realize that the rest of the world doesn't play by the same moralistic liberal rules that we've been used to.

19:49Lomax Ward:And it's one after other way to call. This is a debate that we've had a few times on this pod, is that actually that was all a front, and this stuff went on behind the scenes regardless, and there was this political facade and all Trump has done effectively, because I'm kind of blaming him for everything, is just put everything out on the kitchen table. So all of this stuff was going on, the politicians would say their piece, but actually there was some pretty heinous stuff going on behind the scenes. So maybe it just feels like this is just a never-ending spiral of decay then. It feels like if you're thinking that they're thinking that you're thinking, then we're just going to build these horrific war machines unless Dario or somebody goes, I don't want my technology being used.

20:34Eyal Malinger:I don't think Dario, you know, I think Dario is trying to have his cake and eat it here. He wants to sell and make money out of the, you know, out of the US defense budget. But at the same time, he doesn't want to live with the moral burden of knowing that his AI was used in autonomous, you know, weapon systems or used to spy on, you know, their own citizens. I'm sorry, Like he is trying to have his cake and eat it. It's very, very simple. I think it's kind of related maybe. It's like the world has moved. And what we'll talk about, meaning security conference a bit later, like the world has just moved on and you can blame Trump, maybe not.

21:08Eyal Malinger:It's just a natural progression of things. It's partly the rise of China. It's partly other things. And I'm afraid the context has changed. And so if you want to be a software company working for the US government, you want to win those contracts. perhaps the US government as the customer is going to do what it needs to do to protect its people. And so I'm afraid I actually, much as I admire and love Anthropic as a company, I'm not with them on this one.

21:33Lomax Ward:Yeah, I think that's fair. It's just like, obviously, we've all got young children and just thinking what kind of a world are we bringing them into and technology and AI and how do all these bits connect? But again, we will see. Also, I saw that OpenAI have hired Peter Steinberger. He had a pop of the EU, Lomax. Did you have any thoughts on this?

21:53Eyal Malinger:Well, I don't have any thoughts because I do my fair bit of EU and UK bashing, particularly when it comes to technology and investment. But Peter Steinberg has not held back at all, right? So famously behind OpenClaw has been poached or hired or gone to join OpenAI, basically saying, I'm all in 996. I want to build agents that my mom can use. In the US, people are optimistic they get behind you they are you know about the art of the possible what what could go right the europeans want to hold me back they don't want me to work too hard they're worried that i'm going to burn out open air has all this amazing talent that will work six to seven days a week with me amen to that so he's um so he's off that was pretty quick basically as quick as the whole open claw peter steinberger thing kind of happens and everyone was celebrating and people were organizing meetups around Europe.

22:49Eyal Malinger:And actually it was a moment two weeks ago, maybe talked about it here, that Europe could actually stand up and be like, oh, this is pretty cool. This normally doesn't happen in Europe. But at the moment it happens, within a fortnight, he's already off to the West Coast. It's just like, guys, I thought things had got better. But it kind of reminds you. And I put out a message, a tweet, whatever, this week, sort of saying that if you go into European Twitter or European LinkedIn at the moment, Everyone's getting very excited about the Series A's, the Series B's, the Series C's, the 50 mil, the 100 mil, the 150 mil, the 200 mil rounds.

23:21Eyal Malinger:But hang on a minute. That is better than five years ago. But, you know, look what's happening in the U.S. with Anthropik raising 30 billion, with OpenAI trying to raise 100 billion now. You know what I mean? Like the goalpost keeps changing. And I don't want us – we're supposed to be an optimistic pod. but Steinberger is just like yeah another example where we can't retain a particularly pretty special dude I would say you know from what he's done

23:45Dan Bowyer:yeah yeah Dan you mentioned that you know immediately Sam Altman called him and Saka called him and Dario called him and all said come work for us and how come no one from Europe called him and maybe they did your answer was like maybe they did but who would have called him right who could have called him to get him extra good enough

24:06Lomax Ward:Do you know who would have called him? Jan Lecun.

24:11Eyal Malinger:Jan Lecun, maybe, or like, you know, all the demine guys in London. I don't know. Exactly.

24:18Dan Bowyer:And look, I think as much as we love Eurobashing, right, I think the question is, it's really also about ecosystem and geography. I believe the guy was based in Austria, right? Yeah, he's Austrian, yeah. And I love Austria. We have one of our best exits in Austria. Some great companies there. However, if I were to start and invest in an AI company, I don't know if that were my first choice. So the question, again, is hypothetical. If Peter were based in London, would he have told these guys, I love what you're doing, give me the money. Let me build a billion dollar AI center here because I have the talent.

24:54Dan Bowyer:I have the labor laws. I have everything I need in order to develop this here. And it made me think, again, I'm in Israel right now for a few days. there have been many cases similar where when that happened, the people did not necessarily relocate. Some did, but many of them brought the money here to build here because the talent and ecosystem and capital were here. So I think the takeaway for Europe is more what can we do from a regulatory, from a government perspective to enable more ecosystem, right? labor laws, ease of opening a company. It's all of the soft things that I think are regulation, GDPR, that are holding innovation back that can be unlocked at the government level.

25:35Dan Bowyer:I always give them as an example. Why do we have such an amazing fintech ecosystem in the UK? And I believe one of the reasons is because the FCA had the sandbox. It had the regulatory framework to enable fintech companies to grow and thrive and break things without breaking too many things in the UK. We have to do something like that with the AI world in Europe to have any standing chance against other companies.

26:01Lomax Ward:I saw that Andreessen were setting up in Sweden, I think. So you don't have to have that many things going on in the territory to start getting some American interest. I'm not sure what's anecdotal and what's the reality of that, but over the last maybe five, 10 years have changed some of their taxation and some of their structural laws to make it much easier to invest in the flow of capital in sweden to happen so i think you know i think i think also we are going to talk a little bit about the um the munich security conference which also brought up some of these kinds of themes so it feels like it's happening but you know obviously if the americans are running at a rate or not in that direction it's always going to be europe playing

26:43Eyal Malinger:catch up you know as i11 labs did pre-seed pre-seed in london and then you know a16z got on the phone flew over the next day you know i actually tested out the product before they met the founders which basically no one in europe had done and took the deal off the table you know very quickly by all accounts so i think like there is just something in the water that we still don't quite get in europe when it comes to that velocity and speed i think it's changing and there are clearly like exceptions to the rule i mean i mean and maybe sort of nice irony or or juxtaposition is that Andreas Klinger is also Austrian, right?

27:15Eyal Malinger:And he's the kind of big proponent of EU Inc. So actually, I hope, you know, maybe he took Peter behind closed doors and was like, come on, man, you know, what are you up to? But things are moving slowly. But I thought you were saying, Ireland, around labor laws, et cetera. I mean, capital, weight of capital is a big one, right? It's just huge, huge walls of money in the US. I think it just comes up every week, doesn't it, Lomax?

27:39Lomax Ward:We're always talking about how do we get the flow? No, no, not at all. but I'm saying it does. It's something that I think that leaders in the EU with the best political will will change, but we'll have to see. They don't get it, man.

27:54Eyal Malinger:We had this thing where Macron was like 30 million for AI two weeks ago. And again, I just mentioned the$30 billion round that Anthropic just raised. I mean, how much was raised in the whole of European venture in last year? About 40 billion. It's literally the whole market in one deal.

28:11Lomax Ward:it's a different game um i want to talk a bit uh take up some more positive ai news so david stark from ground up ventures he's open sourced his open claw instance including the licenses for fund managers to be able to improve and work in their vc workflow so he's connected all of his toolkits his hubspot whatsapp linkedin all of his messaging and servicing and back office toolkits to enable him to manage better deal flow, meetings, due diligence, reporting. I thought we've seen a number of people in our industry automating and using these incredible AI toolkits. I thought it was super cool that he's open sourced all of this.

28:51Lomax Ward:Lomax, would you use it? Where are you at? Because we spoke a few weeks ago and neither of us were super up on the AI toolkits, but would you use it?

28:59Eyal Malinger:Well, first of all, if you're a venture firm now and you're not using some form of AI in your business somewhere, then I think you're probably going to be out of business in the next few years, right? Any firm.

29:08Lomax Ward:I would remove the word or the letters VC.

29:11Eyal Malinger:Then I think you have, but now, unlike a few years ago, right? So if you wanted to do this five, six years ago, you basically had to, unless you were technical yourself, you had to, even if you probably didn't have the time if you're running the firm, you could do what EQT did. They started to build this thing called the mother brain, which they were using predominantly for sourcing. Now that, I don't know actually how well that's worked for them, but if you were doing that five, six years ago, that was a very, very, very expensive build, right? Like writing any code years ago. And so a lot of venture firms couldn't do it.

29:43Eyal Malinger:It was prohibitively expensive. You could be spending 10, 15K a month on this, right? Which for a small venture firm would be a lot of money, right? If you're running a pre-seed seed fund. Now, there's two things that have happened. You've either got off-the-shelf tools built by Harmonic, Spectre. There's tons of these companies now. That's mainly for sourcing. Or, and or, you can obviously start to do it yourself with natural language prompts, with code code, with open core, et cetera. And so that is a really, really exciting time to be running a small venture firm with a very, very limited budget.

30:19Eyal Malinger:Like anyone running a small business now, there's really cool, exciting things that you can do. and you intimately know your own processes so you can start to work out what you can automate. But the thing is, every single firm runs in a different way and it depends on whether you're a pre-seed or seed or series A and series B. And also, how big is your team? In my case, it's me and my investment partner, Rod. We're two of us. We don't need to have a lot of institutional kind of knowledge and processes because we don't need to share information. Once I've shared the information with him, the job is done.

30:54Eyal Malinger:I don't need to go and build a big complex process for me, but I can just send him a WhatsApp and be like, are we doing this deal or not? Or should we go and do the referencing now? Now, against that backdrop, so different firms, different needs. Let's have a look at what David Stark at this fund actually did. I don't want to be like patronizing. I call it a bit cute. I think it's nice. I don't know whether I would use all of this stuff, to be honest. So first, 10 minutes before every meeting, a WhatsApp message arrives with full context on the participants from HubSpot, LinkedIn, and Crunchbase.

31:23Eyal Malinger:That's pretty cute. That's quite nice, you know, fine. I mean, you could just sit down 10 minutes before and just do the Googling yourself. Yeah, or what I do now is put all the information into an LLM. Second, the bot joins Google meetings on its own, records them, extracts action items using Claude, and sends a summary by email. Okay, fine, nice. A new email with a deal comes in. There's a sort of process to get that into your HubSpot. That's pretty helpful if you're having a lot of about deal flow. And so, and then they open source this now. So those are some quite nice kind of features, I would say.

31:54Eyal Malinger:And I think lots of firms have sort of built a variation of that themselves and or you can buy those on the open market. I think it's necessary. For me, the most important thing as an early stage investor is seeing deals and winning deals, right? And winning deals is really a personal thing.

32:16Lomax Ward:Unless you're Andreessen or Sequoia or Index or whatever.

32:20Eyal Malinger:Yeah, it's brand. But I sort of put brand and personal into the same thing. It's like what you stand for, right? Funny enough, I actually did see a VC firm the other day that's built a product using AI that their founders can use for lead gen, for new customers. So that's actually pretty cool. That's an example of a firm trying to win a deal, I guess, using a tool they've built with AI. creating value being value add yeah but actually yeah but actually i mean yes and you know is a friend of mine but i went through it with him and actually they do win deals as a result of it because they do deliver value off the back of that further towards origination sourcing is like that's the kind of key and this this chap here david start didn't really talk about that with his if i can either build we're working on stuff here at outsized and or you can buy these things off the shelf to pick up signals for founders before they'd even started companies that's

33:12Lomax Ward:hygiene now low max it's already hygiene this is the challenge that i have with this if everyone has access to everyone and everyone's spamming everyone no i know i know and my big question

33:21Eyal Malinger:everyone many people have a software license from one of these companies right so we talked about them just now it's like well i said to you how many how many yeah the moment someone puts up stealth on their linkedin or put yeah you get scraped the hell out of yeah they get bombarded but i still think dan there are ways to get that kind of information asymmetry like down and actually me they're not even founders at that point they're just individuals who might be in a position to start a company right i think that's very possible and maybe harmonic have not covered

33:55Lomax Ward:that yet for example yeah then they're pretty good i mean we were we've used all of them we're a harmonic customer at the moment and they're pretty good have you done many deals using harmonic yeah we've done two so i i just think we are now already in a world where all of the vcs using these ai toolkits there's one bit which is the back office which i think let's just automate and yeah you know get really slick at running back office anything that is forward facing and you know automatically pinging founders that are in stealth mode on linkedin a connection request and an email maybe there's value in that i just feel like i don't think you get like as i don't

34:35Eyal Malinger:think you get alpha by doing all the other vcs are doing and if all the other vcs are taking

34:39Lomax Ward:taking isn't it hygiene though isn't it something that you have to do but you must

34:43Eyal Malinger:between hygiene and alpha hygiene is just like you know sort of table stakes staying alive as a venture manager and having an answer for an lp when they ask you but alpha is like am i actually delivering alpha? Am I delivering top decile returns? So I think, yes, it's now probably table stakes and necessary to have some kind of AI in your sourcing of founders as a venture firm. And if you don't have a question answer for that to an LP, then you have an issue. But I don't think by just by taking a subscription for these off the shelf harmonic spec or whatever products, I don't think that's how you get alpha, right?

35:22Dan Bowyer:I'll try and touch on both points. I think the first point that Lomax touched about calling things cute is that a lot of the work that is workflow automation. Yes. And many of us, again, so I've been using Zapier and I've had a lot of great Zaps which do exactly that. We have a call, the call gets transcribed automatically. The call then gets uploaded to the CRM in the right place, all the nodes, boom, go into the CRM. And then if we're a bigger team, can we create other things into Slack? Sure. Again, I can program or they need to program almost anything. Zapier is incredible in doing what it does.

35:55So that is more internal efficiency.

35:58Dan Bowyer:I think what the AI does is probably makes us a lot more efficient and able to process a lot more deals. If you think about our work as sourcing, picking, winning, I think the sourcing becomes table state. And maybe the picking, maybe we can review more companies. I think where the, and remember an alpha is a constant, isn't, the alpha isn't fixed. Whoever was using those signals four years ago, five years ago, first time I saw Spectre was five years ago, probably had alpha for a few months or for a few years, right, while they were using those tools. And so I think if you want to be on the efficient frontier of the alpha, then you have to have an agent running on OpenClaw or whatever platform you're developing that thinks and does those things for you.

36:39Dan Bowyer:Rather, an agent develops its own tools, its own heuristics, find those founders. Oh, that's an interesting layer,

36:44Lomax Ward:So you're saying just come up a layer and sit on top and let it work itself out.

36:50Dan Bowyer:Yeah. And which is, I think, what the smart, the advanced people who are now working on the efficient frontier of these things is having an army or small army of cloud bots or open cloud as I call it right now, taking out pieces of our work and delivering it to them. Now, we can then talk about the juniors not having an entry point in the industry. But really, that is what it is. right? Suddenly you can, as Dan or as Lomax, have 20 more associates doing the work.

37:21Lomax Ward:Isn't the entry point for those analysts and or associates to then be the manager of the toolkits? Maybe.

37:29Dan Bowyer:Awesome.

37:30Eyal Malinger:We'll see. All of this is great, but it doesn't help me with the hardest thing that I have at Creaseed, which is winning, getting access to deals. It's not getting into deals. Is it?

37:42Lomax Ward:Is it not meeting? So meeting the founders isn't the challenge for you. Geddy, I always fear that we're missing deals.

37:48Eyal Malinger:There are always more exceptional founders. But, you know, like actually, it's a competitive world out there, right? And getting into really, really good deals can be very, very hard. And AI is not going to help you with that. Stop turning this call off and getting on a plane to get in front of the person can, or sending them five customers, it can. But you have to find them first, right? Yes, I'm kind of, yes.

38:11Dan Bowyer:but I guess Lomox's point is if sourcing becomes table stake and all of the farmers are exposed to you how do you win them right you either win them by brand or by other kind of magic and that is

38:22Lomax Ward:you own a space I think this is what's happening for the non-tier ones is we're having to own a niche is my take I can't see any other way what's the supersede niche then and industrial automation I don't think it's good enough it's physical AI it's it is industrial I don't think it's narrow enough. Mads and I argue about this constantly. I think we have to be even more narrow to win in this world. Now, here's the thing. What you say you do and what you actually do can be not totally, but slightly blurry. So we could position ourselves purely as manufacturing, but still slide in a supply chain or an energy because it's still almost a subset of or an associate with.

39:01Lomax Ward:I can't see any other way around niching and building brand and knowledge around you owning whatever it might be this sovereign tech or this defense or this manufacturing channel and then building all of the associated utility around that i can't i can't see any other way i

39:16Eyal Malinger:don't know i don't know how else no i think you're right now we're now getting into a sort of discussion around the future of venture but i mean and and you know i'm not the first person to say this but the way i increasingly see things especially when you see thrive who just raised a 10 billion dollar fund and andreessen raising 15 billion at the end of last year or beginning of this year. You call them tier ones, these big behemoth platform firms. And then I think you have the micro VCs. I think you literally have kind of sub 50 mil funds, sub 100 mil funds that have a sort of reason to exist, whether they're defense focused or health focused or automation focused or, you know, virtual reality focused or whatever it marketplace focus.

39:56Eyal Malinger:And I think this sort of messy middle can be a very be a very very hard place going forwards i think

40:03Lomax Ward:let's talk about the munich security conference this was the the 62nd munich security conference that took place this week a bit of background it was founded in 1963 by you old heinrich von kleist schemenzen schemenzen just to ruin my german friendships a german aristocrat and resistance fights. He did that long ago. Yeah, meaningfully, casually, racially offend everybody, I think. So he'd been part of the Staffenberg Circle, which was an attempt to assassinate Hitler. So he had a very personal touch on building this security conference. It now assembles over 450 senior decision makers. And this year, there were 40 heads of state included in that plot.

40:46Lomax Ward:I've seen it noted as the Davos for security wonks. Last year, J.D. Vance kind of crack that transatlantic alliance with his speech. This year, I felt like Rubio was a bit more consensatory, trying to maybe make some bridges or save some relationships. I'm not sure how happy Trump would have been about that, but we'll see. This year was branded pretty much under destruction and wrecking ball politics. All the kind of little sound bites that we would expect with the Americans doing what they're doing and Europe responding how it's responding. I love some of the speeches. I love listening to Callas on Europe doesn't need saving.

41:24Lomax Ward:MERS, we spoke about last week, I think, which is the old order is over. And you saw AOC and Gavin Newsom starting potentially to tee up their stakes for a presidential run. But I guess to bring it back down to us, I enjoyed watching and hearing and reading about the whole of the conference. But how do we pair it back to what we do startups investing europe where are the opportunities what should we talk about here lomax what would you focus on first no right i think like yeah you

41:54Eyal Malinger:could really geek out on the politics and geopolitics of this but actually it's not really part of our remit today to do that but i mean you know stepping back this was generally a very peripheral intelligence security defense minister event until last year when jd vance really shook rattled the saber um saying you know famously or infamously that europe's biggest threat is the problem you know enemy from within i think personally rubio carried that on he was a bit more charming um in his delivery but i would ultimately say that i would never have heard

42:26Lomax Ward:those two words to put together but sure okay no i think he's basically saying the same thing

42:31Eyal Malinger:i think you know what what was the you know mertz clearly has woken up and you know not drunk with who's woke up and smell the coffee so like you just set the tone at the beginning of the conference i think this is a continuation of what's been happening over the last 12 months the in terms of what it means for us is that you know defense spending will only continue to increase and even actually right off the back of munich kia starmer has announced that in the uk he would like to accelerate the increase of defense spending to three percent which he'd kick back to next parliament but he wants to bring it to this parliament right i don't know whether Keir's thumb is still going to be around, but you know, in a week.

43:10Eyal Malinger:Exactly. So for context, he committed to take it up to 2.5 % by 2027, but 3 % was deferred, but now that's been brought forward. And then you had some big deals, not big deals announced at the conference, but there's stuff happening in the background, right? So Stark just raised a lot of money from the Americans, actually, from Founders Fund. So robotics company or drones company. So Peter Thiel is in a European... Well, that brings up a point, exactly, which is that Founders Fund, which was founded by Peter Thiel, who himself originally was from Germany, but clearly is an American billionaire.

43:45Eyal Malinger:Boris Pistorius, the German defense minister, has come out and said he's very uncomfortable with giving German Bundeswehr contracts to Stark if Peter Thiel is on the cap table. So then we get into this whole sovereignty of cap table issue, which, by the way, some people have come out and said that the Germans are being a bit European about this. And it's like, well, actually, I think that's rubbish. As in, like, I know for sure that the Americans, for their defense contractors, worry about sovereignty. So why shouldn't the Europeans be allowed to worry about it, too? You can't tell Europe that it needs to have sovereignty and then instantly go and beat them over the head when they start to worry about who's behind.

44:30Lomax Ward:But the challenge is they're not worried about the Chinese or the Russians. They're worried about the Americans. So this is the conversation, right?

44:37Eyal Malinger:Yeah. Helsingren just announced their new or second German resilience factory, which is now up and running and live. So all these things are happening in the background. I think effectively the media security conference is more of the same. There's lots of stuff to go into, but ultimately, you know, I think the Europeans, I don't think the Europeans get it properly yet, but they certainly get it more than they did before. And actually Ursula von der Leyen did mention that they were going to look at the kind of common defense article in the European treaty, which is, I think, 27.4 or something, which is the equivalent of Article 5.

45:13Eyal Malinger:because at the moment it's in a kind of very like white me mouthed um language the exact language of it is if an eu country is the victim of armed aggression on its territory the other eu countries have an obligation to aid and assist it by all means in their power

45:31Lomax Ward:which is a bit it's a bit soft everything and nothing that can mean that can mean it's like here's some here's some here's some porridge here's a sandwich here's for your troops on the

45:43Eyal Malinger:front line yeah so so i think i think actually she has a point where um she have a plan to to bolster up and make a bit make it a bit more like the article 5 nato nato provision which basically obliges all nato members to come bail out another one i mean the americans are still i think lindsey graham the the u.s senator was behind closed doors giving um the danish prime minister a lot of grief about Greenland. So that definitely is still going on in the background as well, yeah.

46:09Lomax Ward:Well, I mean, I remember her, she basically said, somebody asked her, has the Greenland issue been resolved with the states? And she said no. It was like, it wasn't even politically, it was like, no, this has not been resolved.

46:20Eyal Malinger:I think much the same at the political level, like people kind of get it more. I do, like if I was selling technology, you know, you've got these big budgets, the German defense budget for 2026 can be 115 billion euros. Like how much of that is actually going to go into technology versus into barracks and recruiting and quite basic stuff where money hasn't been spent for the last 30, 40 years. But clearly, Helsing and Stark are winning contracts. So, you know, we'll see.

46:47Lomax Ward:So more of the same. So I guess there's nothing really to see here from the conference,

46:52Eyal Malinger:except we are going to see more defense spend

46:54Lomax Ward:and we should be...

46:56Eyal Malinger:Yeah, and also I would say, you know, the Rubio conciliator, I don't think Rubio was really conciliator. I don't think that was a robot.

47:02Lomax Ward:kind yeah i thought it just did maybe it just didn't sound as obnoxious as jd vance and maybe i'm projecting jd vance just jars me whenever he opens his mouth he's he's so acidic and so unpleasant and and rubio was not he was a bit more political and a little bit softer and a little bit but you know europe and the us have always been friends we're always going to stay friends so that was maybe maybe i'm being too kind you have some health and bio good news we've got compass

47:31Eyal Malinger:pathways and saver saver couple of good updates this week so compass pathways which is a london based listed company working on psychedelic medicines which actually one of the leaders in the world something that it's an example of an area where europe does uh take a lead announced the readout of a second phase three um technical trial for using psilocybin a synthetic version of psilocybin which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms for use in trd treatment resistant depression so this is patients who've used all other existing avenues to to cure their mental mental history their depression are now be have the option or in these trials were given doses of psilocybin or synthetic psilocybin and showed phenomenal phenomenal improvement in their mental health and no political kickback so far i mean it hasn't being recognized so as a reminder you know clinical trials go phase one phase two phase three phase one is efficacy so phase one is safety and then phase three is ultimately efficacy this is now past everything so this would really mean that actually this could be approved and on the market in probably 27 not in 26 so that'd be a pretty amazing thing um that's quick well it's quick i mean you know that started going through the clinical trials process four or five years ago so not back when 1936 well yes uh but that then there's hundreds of millions of dollars later um but i do think that that's a really really cool thing and there's a company called sabah health which is just but i'm also not the clinical is that how you say it's santa is it it's working on cgm so continuous glucose monitoring they have a a simpler non-invasive patch it's much easier to apply because if you probably have ever used any of the abba abba or dexcom cgms you have to it's quite it's quite it's quite a big chunky thing yeah yeah yeah

49:24Lomax Ward:it's like a claw is it's like it's like a like a crustacean clamped on the back of your arm

49:29Eyal Malinger:exactly yeah so this is this is kind of a new a new product for that and actually that's a that's kind of a game changer if that comes through so actually two things that are both pretty game changing on the device and on the um on the drugs front coming out of europe this week

49:43Lomax Ward:will i always wonder if the apple watch or other wearables will be able to do diabetes tracking i know there's a challenge obviously with sweat and obviously it should be it needs to be blood to so far but is it is there any potential for it to be tracked by any kind of wearable you have still

50:02Eyal Malinger:i think you have a lot of r &d to do to get that to get that done but yeah what happened my deal

50:08Lomax Ward:of the week very quickly is quantination so quantination is i think it's the large level quantum fund in europe raised so that i just a very quick shout out to them i think it's a quantination fund i think it's a billion isn't it you've had a i remember when quantination had

50:24Eyal Malinger:like a 20 million dollar fund you know back in what that was in like five they came to they came to dragon the first dragon chase i think in 2020 i think that i mean it's it's obviously american money i think uh is uh american money they're french though yeah well paris and new york now so they've uh you're not reading a fun fund announcement they always keep it they always have to run obfuscate how much they've raised you know it's always that's a deliberate that's a

50:49Lomax Ward:feature not a bug is it we've raised a lot of money don't look exactly um is it all in we're not quite sure it's not quite there exactly is it committed is it is it the aspirational final close them out yeah i listen i'm up for anything quantum fusion super smart ai they've been a stew

51:07Eyal Malinger:of there's another quantum fund that got announced recently called furgun that announced and a fund backed by ifo which is the danish um government i think they raised up to a billion as well so actually quantum has its own specific funds now and that is a place where europe has

51:25Lomax Ward:actually got some amazing teams ah this is this is what i mean i think i've said this before i think it's where we should double down we should be doubling down on what we have what we know what we're good at and quantum and fusion we're good at it europe is baked in it with two of the best

51:38Eyal Malinger:funded teams in the u.s came out of europe right so it's like what came out of the uk when they when they yeah yeah yeah um cyquantum came out of bristol and uh quantinium came out of cambridge yeah so bring it on on this note well not on the quantum note but um huge seed rounds of one billion up to$1 billion at a$4 billion free money valuation led by -

51:59Lomax Ward:Oh, this is the ENF ball. Yes.

52:02Eyal Malinger:And Everall led by Sequoia, David Silva, who's behind all parts of the team that developed AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and a key deep mind architect. So he's left and he's being, I mean, this is a crazy, this kind of stuff, this is a sign of the maturation of the ecosystem, no? I mean, you never get a billion dollars around in Europe until now. So that's backed by Sequoia. firms like NVIDIA, Google and Microsoft are in tools to join the round too. And yeah, it's a new architecture. It's reinforcement learning and experience-driven intelligence. So not just scaling up LLMs, which are other...

52:38Lomax Ward:Experience-driven intelligence.

52:40Dan Bowyer:Hey, Al, have you got any deals of the week? The only one I was going to mention is I think the Netflix Warner Brothers going forward is a huge deal really because it releases the M &A Valve all over the world. And I'm hoping that's going to be, it's a water source of the FTC and the DOJ in America signaling to the world that, hey, is it going ahead? Well, looks like it's only waiting for several to vote right now. So from my understanding, at least, is from a regular perspective, once it goes ahead, I'm hoping that's going to be basically the FTC and the DOJ saying, okay, deals can happen now.

53:12Dan Bowyer:And we're hoping that's going to restart the machinery of exit for VCSNP. That's, again, the hope and the expectation. And how much of that will come to Europe, I wonder. This bitch, who knows

53:23Lomax Ward:in that case my lovely humans I will catch you all next week thank you so much bye