30 Jul 2026Zuck’s AI Acceleration | Pacing The Frontier | AlphaFold Dispands | Granola CEO Joins
Andreas Helbig (Atomico): Europe's Capital Gap & Scale-Up Funds
Andreas Helbig, partner on Atomico's venture team and a third-time guest but first time in person, explains why scale-up funds are proliferating: European pension funds put just 0.01% of AUM into venture versus roughly 3% in the US — a massive capital gap that politicians now broadly accept. The ScaleUp Europe fund drummed up public and private capital; Atomico narrowly missed out to EQT, which he graciously praises. The next step, he argues, is a broader, distributed European resilience effort that grows many more venture funds beyond these lighthouse initiatives, alongside the UK's roughly £1B scale-up effort.
Role Models, 'Vibes' & Pan-European Builders
Andreas says the underlying quality of European builders is the best he's seen in 11.5 years of investing: gifted 20-somethings who once went to Goldman or McKinsey now start companies. He credits role models — from Niklas Zennström and Skype to founders at Legora, Neko, Granola and ElevenLabs — plus better knowledge resources like YC's startup school and a societal shift making entrepreneurship a desirable career. The hosts tie this to Deirdre McCloskey's finding that pro-innovation vocabulary spiked before the Industrial Revolution ('vibes build markets'), and Andreas argues every European country is too small: per Atomico's Tom Beemeyer, only ~25% of a unicorn's workforce comes from its founding country, and Skype's multi-country story shows unicorns are pan-European by necessity.
Pan-European Stock Exchange & Going Direct on X
On a long-proposed pan-European stock exchange, Andreas says individual national markets' trading volumes are too small and billion-dollar companies end up listing in New York anyway; he'd welcome a unified exchange but admits he's not an expert and that power dynamics between exchanges have stalled past attempts. On creating more discourse, he insists European tech must be on X, where debate forms days before it hits LinkedIn. The hosts cite the Zuckerberg–Nikita Bier–Paul Graham–Musk reply chain and Bernard Arnault's classy public response as proof that CEOs going direct works — and argue seed-stage founders should do the same.
The EU AI Act: Smart Regulation & Trusted European AI
With the EU AI Act due within weeks, Andreas hopes for 'smart regulation' that positions Europe as the trusted, sovereign AI partner for safety-critical deployments, citing Revolut as proof European fintechs thrived under regulation. He points to Atomico portfolio companies — PhysicsX in industrial simulation (Temasek-backed), an enterprise R&D platform trusted by L'Oréal, and Frontier Health selling into the NHS — as examples of European trust winning global customers. He pushes back on the 'Europe only regulates' meme, notes Jensen Huang's tongue-in-cheek post about open and closed AI both needing compute, and the show signs off day four of a five-day week.
18 Feb 2026OpenClaw Joins OpenAI, Legora Eyes $6B, Netherlands Tax Unrealised Gains
Andreas Helbig (Atomico): 'You Can't Vibe-Code a Bank'
Helbig offers the counterpoint to Owens: in the short term we overestimate AI and in the long term we underestimate it, and building a bank or company takes more than code—distribution, consumer trust, and regulatory compliance. He discusses the weekend vibe-coded core banking ledger that went viral, Lovable switching its CRM to HubSpot, the "grow your own potatoes" analogy, the FDE motion, and critiques Salesforce's Agentforce and SaaS stock-based compensation.
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Andreas Helbig (Atomico): Klarna, branding & defense tech
Atomico partner Andreas Helbig recounts Klarna's 20-year underdog journey from Stockholm School of Economics to its NYSE debut, praising its pink branding and Snoop Dogg stunts, and argues European founders should lean harder into bold storytelling, citing portfolio company Streis' 'The Laundry' AML podcast that drives about half its pipeline. He then explains Atomico's growing defense-tech focus — defending European values, a large commercial opportunity with MODs and primes open for business, and exceptional founder quality — plus softening LP attitudes and how being 'from Europe for Europe' helps in competitive deals against US funds.
CompliantVC: parody account mogging European VC
The hosts spotlight @CompliantVC, a weeks-old parody account under the name Henrik Jornason with an AI-generated profile photo, whose posts mocking European regulation and taxes — a fund cut from €100M to €1.2M after VAT and approvals, a Norwegian 'rocket ship' at €1M ARR after nine years — racked up hundreds of thousands to millions of views. They praise the shitposting run and debate whether the avatar is AI.
Sabah Keenyad (Veed): YC rejections to Sequoia
Veed founder Sabah Keenyad joins after the hosts dropped caps at his studio, opening with his viral tweet framing the decade since leaving college as an overnight success. He tells the bootstrapping story — rejected by YC four or five times, his co-founder working a job and paying half his salary to keep Veed alive, building to roughly $6M ARR before Sequoia invested — and describes today's scale of about 10M monthly users, split roughly half AI-generated and half edited video. He also covers hiring 30-year Apple veteran Pete Steiner as CTO to provide long-term direction against 'feature soup,' and the never-satisfied founder mindset, before the hosts discuss bootstrapping versus VC-backed growth.
AI bubble circular financing & the Louvre heist
The hosts recap Guillermo Florez's 'Are we in a bubble? 10 things you should know,' walking through circular financing loops among Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, Oracle, CoreWeave, and AMD and how actual value creation may separate this AI cycle from the dot-com bubble. They then cover the Louvre daylight robbery by thieves in high-vis jackets — the dropped French crown included — and swap a story about sneaking into a festival backstage using the same trick.
Bello Wurtz joins the studio
Tech Europe and The Sandbox founder Bello Wurtz joins the hosts in the studio. The segment opens with greetings and a quick 'what's new' exchange before this part of the recording ends.