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Good morning - welcome to a new edition of Sunday CET.

Let’s get right at it.

Dragos

Market talk

✍️ Quite a few interesting stories in the Euro investment ecosystem this week - i.e. seed for AI workers, (lots of) hot multi-purpose robots, Nordic AI startups in US, Romanian early stage crews, up and coming Spanish startups, royal blood investing, confirmed rumours + rumours yet to be confirmed, vintage deals sold for scraps, fresh powder etc. All packed in tomorrow’s intel digest - subscribe and get it too, it’s pretty good, I am told.

💲 Accenture produced $3 billion for the full fiscal year, including $1 billion in Q4, in new GenAI bookings.

• for comparison, Open AI expects a $3.7 billion turnover this year, to go 3X next year.

• in other words, the $ extraction from the value chain between a creator and a distributor is roughly the same today.

• it will be interesting to follow how that split evolves in a few years, as the overall pie is getting bigger for the foreseeable period. Keep in mind that there’s multiple Accenture-like distributors of AI software in the world, head of tail including consultants like McKinsey, PwC etc

🤯 Speaking of OpenAI, one of this week’s piece of news was a bunch of people leaving the company, which is not a coincidence at all and to be correlated to the whopping 6.6 billion raised from the private investors, largest ever fundraise from private investors.

• a simple explanation for leaving is folks cashing out their stock options for the wealth opportunity of their lifetime.

• it is actually a good thing, part of a virtuous cycle - this money is recycled back into the economy, and some of it will be further used to do other startups, create jobs, raise more money, pay taxes and so on.

• something that, for example, Europe needs badly as most of the money into the startup world comes top down from the EU via various channels.

• keep in mind that the majority of European startup exits also happen in the US, because the local markets are just bad for liquidity events - that means the exit money likely stays in the US, rather than recycled back to Europe.

✍️ Another one related to the OpenAI’s economy → investment bankers making money via a Greenshoe clause.

🇬🇧 Revolut is pointing the finger to Facebook for being a platform where scammers thrive.

• on the first half of 2024, Meta platforms accounted for 62% of all scams reported to Revolut, higher percentage of scams compared to last year, despite continued rhetoric that it is curbing fraud.

🇮🇹 Campari wants to deseasonalize Aperols from being summer drinks only, and will promote that by hosting a concert series in the Alps during the coming ski season.

• for those not knowing already, Aperol was acquired by Campari in 2003, when the aperitif was drunk only in the Veneto region of Italy and its sales were less than €50 million.

• it’s now Campari’s growth engine, currently accounting for around one-fifth of Campari's nearly €2 billion annual sales.

🇬🇧 When markets are tough, you gotta compete - eBay removed seller fees in the UK marketplace.

🇫🇷 LVMH signed a $1 billion sponsorship deal with Formula 1 which will run for 10 years.

🇩🇪 GetYourGuide also signed a sponsorship deal with an NBA team - the Brooklyn Nets - to be on the jersey patch and an official travel experiences partner.

🇪🇺 The EU will introduce 45% tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles - the Chinese are expected to retaliate on Europe’s finest chocolate and cognac.

🎥 Apple is rethinking its movie strategy after the disappointing box office performance of several big-budget films - rolls back movie theatre releases.

🍔 Menu price increases at McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and other chains are sparking consumer revolt.

🇪🇺 The EU AI Office announced assembling a team to work on a code of practice - members are called chairs and vice-chairs, which sounds funny if nothing else.

• it looks like the EU doing EU things in order to justify their jobs - in the last couple of years, politicians have discovered this new hobby called AI and keep taking all sorts of stabs at a technology wave that is yet to emerge into an ecosystem.

• the upside is that at the end of the day, some of them may be more familiar with how AI will or will not kill us all.

• the downside is that the output of their work has little practicality use since doing AI business involves exploring un-beaten paths and taking risks, which is radically different than collecting chair thoughts in a committee.

• should there be a correlation between the two though? I guess it’s not wrong to look at the abstract side of things as long as the output doesn’t stand in the way of people doing actual work to provide politicians with a raison d'etre - funny thing is that the business community keeps telling them they’re doing more harm than helping - this week SAP’s CEO, for example - and yet…

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Quickies

🗣️ Let’s assume we have an inventory around of 100k robots in the world that will 100X in the next ten years → apply AI to the current state of business of selling quasi-dumb machines operated via remote controls. How will this space evolve and how winning startups look like? link

🙈 Founders set up meetings with Euro VC's weeks ahead of US ones for practice.

⚠️ Smart investors follow the best intel sources to get a good grip of the Euro investment ecosystem. Join them, don’t miss out.

🧊 Switzerland and Italy partly redraw border over melting glaciers.

👾 Russia’s espionage war in the Arctic.

₿ Americans lost $5.6 billion last year in cryptocurrency fraud scams.

🥱 Ai fatigue

🤖 Phone ordering strawberry chocolate using AI and Twilio.

⛪ What happens when the Catholic Church chases influencers?

👕 Now that the media declared him to be the second richest dude on planet, Mark Zuckerberg is officially a boomer: he will sell t-shirts.

💲 Gen Z run entire businesses built on Airbnb arbitrage.

📱 A quarter of iPhone users say green bubbles are a dating dealbreaker, while among Android users, a third felt pressured to switch to iPhone - link

🎶 Manu Chao put out a new album in 17 years. So did Coldplay, which says it will be their last.

🥸 The Poopcopter is the first aerial bound dog poop removal system.

That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!

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