Menacing Mythos, Mega IPOs & Dimon’s Doomerism

Upside is a weekly podcast that looks behind the headlines affecting European venture, startups and investing. On this week's show...Anthropic is having the week of its life, Jamie Dimon wants you to know the sky is falling (again), and Germany spent €2 billion learning that shipbuilding is hard. Dan and Lomax fly as a duo this week.00:00 – Intro & News Radar – Iran ceasefire (maybe), global VC hits $300B in Q1 alone (70% of all 2025 deployment), four companies absorbed $188B of that, Russian hackers are in your router, and a Brit insists he isn't Satoshi Nakamoto. Busy week.04:16 – Anthropic: The Full Picture – Run rate has tripled to $30B, overtaking OpenAI's $25B. Over 1,000 enterprise customers spending $1M+, eight of the Fortune 10 on the books, and 32% of the enterprise LLM API market locked down. Mythos, their new frontier model, found thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities and hit a 72.4% exploit rate versus Opus 4.6's 14.4%. So powerful only 40 organisations have access. They also acquired Coefficient Bio for $400M in stock — six employees, founded last year, backed by Dimension Capital who turned $10M into $204M in Anthropic paper. EMEA is their fastest-growing region with 9x revenue growth and offices across six European cities.22:15 – Jamie Dimon's Annual Letter – 48 pages of structural warnings. Historically brilliant on multi-year calls (fiscal deficits, fintech disruption, HTM accounting), less brilliant on timing — he's called recession four years running. This year: inflation as "the skunk at the party," private credit's $1.8T transparency problem, and JPM spending $20B a year building AI in-house with $2B in cost savings already.29:36 – Mega IPOs – SpaceX ($2T, June), Anthropic (October, $60B raise), OpenAI (Q4/Q1 '27, $852B). Combined primary issuance could exceed 2025's entire US equity capital formation of $232B. Every major 2025 IPO traded down. Worth noting.37:43 – Climate Tech Returns – Rebranded as energy security and resilience. Climate VC hit $40.5B in 2025, up 8%. 87% of US companies quietly increased sustainability spend. The money's flowing — just under different letterhead.43:32 – Germany's Defence Nightmare – €10B for six warships, four years behind, prime contractor fired, Dutch-French-German finger-pointing all round. Defence budget rising from €86B to €152B by 2029 but procurement can't keep up. The EU's new AGILE fund offers €115M for defence startups with a four-month turnaround. Welcome to the age of cheap warfare.48:34 – OpenAI Buys TBPN – A one-year-old live tech show with 58,000 YouTube subscribers, acquired for low hundreds of millions weeks before a potential IPO. OpenAI says it'll stay independent. Sure.50:44 – Predictions & Deals of the Week – Dan calls Anthropic becoming Europe's de facto AI partner. Lomax brings Gilead's $5B acquisition of German biotech Tubulis. Dan flags Zero Shot Fund from OpenAI alumni.