E688 | This Week in European Tech with Dan, Mads & Lomax

Welcome back to another episode of Upside where Dan Bowyer, Mads Jensen of SuperSeed, and Lomax Ward of Outsized Ventures go behind the headlines shaping European tech, capital, and power.

This week’s episode opens, as always, with light deal banter, closing jokes, and a reminder that fourth-time founders are still the most bankable asset in venture.

From Saudi Arabia’s surprisingly coherent Vision 2030 to Europe’s chronic inability to articulate a shared mission, this is a wide-ranging conversation about strategy, scale, and what actually forces societies to act.

Along the way, the panel digs into autonomous AI agents that can negotiate car purchases and manage your inbox, the $100B arms race between OpenAI and Anthropic, ASML’s signal on the durability of the AI buildout, and why defence spending is becoming Europe’s most structurally important tech opportunity.

The episode also tackles the uncomfortable questions: whether Europe only moves under pressure, whether the United States of Europe is real or pure projection, and whether social media bans and AI retraining schemes are genuine policy or just optics.

This is Upside, where optimism is earned, not assumed.