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