Welcome back to another episode of Upside at the EUVC Podcast, where Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed, Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures, and Andrew Scott of 7percent Ventures to break down the real stories behind the headlines shaping European tech and venture.
From Bending Spoons’ audacious European rollup strategy, to Brexit’s economic hangover, to the existential challenges facing Volkswagen, to Google vs. OpenAI’s new “Code Red”, and finally whether Europe has had its long-overdue shock moment — this episode goes wide, fast, and deep.
This is Upside, where the takes are sharp, the macro is messy, and the optimism is… conditional.
What’s covered:
02:00 The valuation reset, debt-fuelled M&A, and the Italian PE–VC hybrid model
04:00 Arbitrage: firing US teams, rehiring elite Italian engineers
06:00 Do rollups really work? Tech debt, distribution, and execution risk
07:00 Brexit revisited: GDP losses, trade collapse, and political reality
08:00 The myth of “you can’t know the counterfactual” — and why you actually can
10:00 Will the UK rejoin the customs union? And would Europe even take us back?
12:00 Europe’s manufacturing crisis: Porsche, Volkswagen, BYD and the end of German exceptionalism
15:00 China’s shift: stop importing, start replicating
17:00 Welfare-state complacency and the European stagnation problem
20:00 The bitter truth about Europe’s carbon “success story”
22:00 How to actually fix European tech: R&D, immigration, procurement, capital markets
24:00 Why 0.02% pension allocation to VC is Europe’s biggest structural handicap
26:00 Should we “Farage-pill” Europe into a tech-first agenda?
33:00 Distribution vs. loyalty: why consumers don’t care about brand
36:00 Who wins the cost base war: Google, Amazon, Meta, or OpenAI?
38:00 Anthropic’s IPO plans and what they signal about the private capital cycle
42:00 Deals of the Week: Black Forest Labs, ICEYE, Expedition Growth Capital
44:00 Robotics is the next AI wave — and the picks-and-shovels startups emerging now
