Hey there - welcome to a new edition of Sunday CET.

A lite one this one - I am still mostly off the grid, taking it easy and focusing on being as superficial as possible. I’m in Berlin these days, ping me to hang etc.

Dragos

Market talk

🇪🇺 Cheat sheet with what investors spent on defence tech in Europe in the past 18 months.

• is it a theme or a portfolio play? Is it conjuncture or a secular trend? Is there an exit market down the line? Some interesting startup names in there, for sure, but are they enough?

🇩🇪 Axel Springer is in talks with existing shareholders KKR and CPPIB to potentially break apart the media company’s properties into a classifieds unit and a publishing one.

• tough times ahead for the media business, as it’s cheaper to produce attention-seeking content with AI - fwiw, Schibsted did a similar move as it’s been on a group restructuring process for a while now.

🇪🇺 Apple made a deal with EU antitrust regulators that will allow competitors to use its tap-and-go payments technology, resolving a years long investigation.

• “free for a decade” - that’s Apple’s official wording, which matters, meaning an implicit expectation of a review while Europe will get other leaders in ten years.

🇪🇺 Last week the EU’s AI Act was published in bloc’s Official Journal, starting clock on legal deadlines.

• an anti progress approach of the heads overseeing tech in Europe who seem to be happily stuck in their ignorance bubble.

• btw, Facebook announced it won’t release its multimodal Llama AI model in the EU because of that. ICYMI - Apple also cut its Apple Intelligence rollout for Europe, over concerns over Europe’s Digital Markets Act.

• Europe is on a trend to isolate itself tech-wise just like the UK isolated itself as a whole with Brexit, because of a superiority complex. Spoiler: it’s not going well for the Brits.

💲 Why Mistral is undervalued at $7 billion.

💲💲 Tiger Global in talks to lead $500 million Revolut secondary deal.

💲💲💲 Google wants to buy cybersecurity company Wiz for $23 billion.

• huge exit for Index and Sequoia which own 11% and 10% respectively.

• that’s where Google looks for growth in the next decade (after it was told off by regulators to not buy Hubspot) all while Google sits on a lot of cash in the balance sheet.

• on a broader context, there’s a range of interesting under-valued tech assets in the market, because of a combo of bad macro, conjecture and/or bad management.

• best way to look into this is by following similar bets made by PE - look at deals done by the likes of Silverlake, Vista, Blackrock etc. Same key for Softbank going all in with Graphcore, btw.

🇮🇪 Speaking of Sequoia, the Americans offered to buy Stripe shares from investors in order to provide some of their LPs with liquidity.

• signal that some LPs are starved for cash and the public market events are simply not there for big time liquidity.

• it looks like an elegant deal made by Sequoia, which has been bullish on Stripe for a long time (Luciana is on their board btw).

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👓 Meta wants to purchase a 5% share in the Italian-French EssilorLuxottica, which is the maker of the Ray-Ban eyewear brand.

• this experiment went unexpectedly well for Facebook, and that’s a timid signal of more non-AI commitments - which AI Meta is all in after it decreed VR was the future two years ago and spent shitloads of money for it.

🤖 Software IPOs (click for larger version)

🇸🇪 A look inside teenage engineering w/ Jesper Kouthoofd, one of the better tech creatives from Sweden, in a as-Swedish-as-it-gets interview.

🇬🇧 Interesting chat with Matt Clifford of Entrepreneur First.

🇪🇺 The US and Germany prevented a Russian plot to assassinate the CEO of a German arms manufacturer that’s been supplying Ukraine.

• in case you didn’t know, WWI was started following the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand by South Slav nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 1914. Just a coincidence.

• btw, in the past week or so:

  • Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt.

  • he then nominated as VP an ex-VC who called Trump America’s Hitler.

  • all this gave Trump an edge for winning the elections, which respectively turned Silicon Valley investors into official MAGA fan bois over night.

  • the world experienced the largest IT outage in history.

  • UK’s newly appointed PM, Keir Starmer, first move was to re-friend with the EU - Brits finally acknowledge that it’s better to have friends than feeling superior on a lonely, rainy island.

  • meanwhile, all the UK investors and their mothers rushed off to Dubai to set up entities for funds management - we’re patriots but only to a point.

  • Europe is at peak heat wave, same with the US.

  • is this the end of the world, or what? 😃 

🇪🇺 Europe's fate is in Germany's hands now.

🇨🇳 China deploys censors to create socialist AI.

🖼️ There’s a vibrant black market for artwork stolen from the walls of Taco Bell locations across the US.

⚱️ How billionaires die.

🍲 The Michelin Guide business, explained.

🎓 Jerry Seinfeld’s 2024 commencement address at Duke.

🎥 TV series I’ve been watching - Presumed Innocent, Clipped, Lioness, Dark Matter.

That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!

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