Paul (Lightspeed)
15 Oct 2025Episode #1: EU Tech Optimism, $21m for Paid, Swedish Stealth Launch, Rishi Sunak at Anthropic
Paul (Lightspeed) on Leading EpiMinds' Seed Round
Paul of Lightspeed announces the firm led a seed investment in EpiMinds, a company out of Stockholm. Asked, via a question from Elias, why EpiMinds after passing on other marketing startups, he jokes 'we lost the other deals' and explains he ran performance marketing at his own game studio before instantly clicking with these founders. He ties his conviction to Victor's earlier 'biological LLM' framing of gut instinct: 'all I have are my patterns.'
Paul's Founder-to-Investor Journey: Giphy, Dots & Lightspeed
Paul describes scaling Giphy and Dots at the same time, the stress that led him to step aside as Dots' CEO, and the studio's acquisition by Take-Two for a couple hundred million dollars on roughly $4 million raised. A Northzone investor invited him to try investing as a venture partner, and he joined Lightspeed about four and a half years ago to bring its full US-style platform to European founders. He recalls a well-known VC once telling him he had to move to the Valley and argues great companies can be built anywhere.
Neko Health, Stockholm & Europe's Momentum
On Neko Health, Paul credits Stockholm's dense, ambitious startup community and explains Lightspeed's cross-sector approach — healthcare meets consumer — to preventative health as an alternative to annual physicals and executive screenings. He then charts Europe's change over his eight years there: geopolitics has pulled talent back from the US, large industries are positioned to leapfrog straight to AI, policymakers now champion startups, and funding levels and deal competition rival the US.
Founder Obsession & the EpiMinds Thesis
Paul says Lightspeed backs authenticity and deep domain knowledge, citing founders like Manny at Paid, Elias and Moa at EpiMinds, and Mistral's Arthur, Timothy and Guillaume. He describes sourcing across Munich, London, Stockholm, Paris, the Baltics and Southern Europe, with the hosts adding that Europe's fragmentation is a strength since different cultures solve problems differently. On EpiMinds, he argues enterprise AI transformation comes from remapping processes rather than generic chatbots, and that marketing agents should complement rather than replace agencies.