Time To Rip Out Palantir? - Where Is The AI ROI? - And Florida Sues OpenAI?!

Plus it's EU Sovereignty Week, more on the EU's Palantir Problem & who's now in the the $80bn club? This week Dan and Mads are joined by Matt Russell, Head of Secondaries at VenCap, the 40-year-old firm with a look-through portfolio of ~500 funds and ~17,000 companies, and seemingly exposure to every name that's ever mattered. We get into why secondaries aren't the bargain-bin everyone thinks, why Brussels keeps reaching for the statute book instead of the chequebook, whether the NHS can actually rip out Palantir (spoiler: with what?), and the three biggest IPOs in history queuing up at once. Plus: Florida sues Sam Altman, Europe's two-tier AI future, and a baby that won't sleep. 00:52 — Meet Matt Russell: a secondaries 101, and why the best deals are the ones you pay up for. 04:23 — EU Sovereignty Week — CADA, the four tiers of "sovereign," and the great Azure/Bleu/Delos licensing fudge. Mads's verdict: stop tinkering, complete the single market, unlock the pension capital. 19:00 — Europe's Palantir Problem — MPs want the £330m NHS contract torn up and handed to a British supplier that doesn't exist. Featuring the ghost of the National Programme for IT. 24:45 — The Enterprise vs the AI Bill — Uber caps staff at £1,500/month, Pizza Hut delivers cold, and nobody can forecast token spend. So how do you measure ROI? (Answer, eventually: cashflow.) Andreessen's "sand into intelligence". 31:25 — The $80 Billion Club — SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic all crowding the exit. Why buybacks mean the market can absorb it — and why SpaceX needs to 100x revenue by 2030 to justify the price. 39:30 — America Sues Its Own — Florida takes OpenAI (and Sam Altman, personally) to court as Trump waters down his own AI order. Limitation of liability, load-bearing. 43:05 — Dan's prediction: a two-tier European AI stack (sovereign Mistral/Aleph Alpha vs "tamed" US models) — plus Matt's "models are airlines, not utilities" framing. 48:33 — Deal of the Week: Stark (€300m at €2.5bn defence drones the Pope wouldn't approve of) and Dan's pick, Gigaton (née Carbon Re, £26m). 50:18 — The Week Ahead: WWDC and the eternal wait for a real Siri, an ECB rate hike, and Friday's main event — the biggest IPO of all time. Upside: looking behind the headlines that move European venture. New episode every week.