Tech Deciphered

The SaaS multiples run was long, but it had to come to an end. Or Had it? Navigation: Intro Setting The Scene The Roots — This Didn’t Happen Overnight The Structural Thesis — Why This Isn’t Just A Sell-Off The Private Market Fallout The Bull Case — Is The Market Wrong? Separating The Wheat From The Chaff — Who Survives? Wrap-Up & Key Takeaways Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Introduction Nuno Goncalves PedroWelcome to Episode 75 of Tech DECIPHERED, the SaaS Apocalypse: Why AI Breaks or has Broken or Broke the Software Business Model. In today’s episode, we will talk about what’s been going on in SaaS. SaaS, also known as Software as a Service, as a sector, has just had its worst month since the 2008 financial crisis. Give or take, around 1 trillion in software stock market cap has evaporated this year, and it was triggered in many ways by the rise of a lot of the things we’re seeing, in particular, agentic AI. We’ll talk about it later.One of the key triggers seems to have been the launch of Claude or Claude Cowork. There’s a lot of fears that the model that is taken as SaaS to be the darling of investors, both VCs, private equity funds, and also retail investors, has now evaporated. The sweetheart industry no longer works. Bertrand, what happened to SaaS? What’s happening? Bertrand SchmittSetting The SceneWe are in the middle of what some are calling the SaaSpocalypse. I think that was a coined term early this year. It’s pretty bad. We are recording that March 13th. Definitely January, February of this year, 2026, were really terrible. There is no question about it. Strangely enough, since the start of the war with Iran, there has been a small rebound, so we will see how it goes. But also to give some context, we are still not worse than what happened in 2022. We are still in a better place so far. I would say the difference, there is clearly a focus in terms of SaaS versus tech in general for that down term. Nuno Goncalves PedroWe’ve seen obviously a lot of things happening, right? A lot of announcements. The iShares expanded Tech-Software ETF down 25% year-to-date. Everyone seems to be running into panic, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs. Basically, Jefferies, I think, as you said, originally termed this the SaaSpocalypse. But definitely, it seems like everyone’s trying to sell stock and saying, “Hey, SaaS is going to die.” We’ve seen a lot of interesting elements to this, we’ll talk about it later, around AI eats software. Software eats the world. AI now eats software. I guess AI eats the world.But the reality is, we’ll discuss it later in the episode, it might be just a lot of stuff that’s reacting to what’s actually happening in the market, that there was a couple of misses in terms of numbers, that the growth of some of the key SaaS players that are driving a lot of the public stock wasn’t that great recently. That adding to some launches like we mentioned, the Claude Cowork launch, et cetera, has led people to say, “Hey, maybe some entire spaces of SaaS don’t make much sense going forward.” Bertrand SchmittActually, I don’t know if you noticed, but I think it was yesterday, it was announced that the CEO of Adobe just resigned. I was shocked how bad they managed the transition to AI. I guess it’s one of the first victims of what has been happening. From my perspective, and I will go deeper, but there is a bit of an overreaction. Claude is amazing as a tool, but the launch of Claude Cowork, a few plugins decimating the market, I think that’s an overreaction in the sense that many of these SaaS companies will be able to actually benefit from AI as well. Or some of the new AI tools really, really depend on the existence of an underlying SaaS layer that’s controlling some processes, some data. So I think we have to be careful about the extremes.At the same time, what is true, the growth rate has been going down for SaaS. If you look in the 2021 to these days, we move maybe from 30-11%, 12% average growth rate. It’s a dramatic difference in growth rate, and you cannot keep the same valuation when your growth rate has been divided by three. I mean, that’s just not possible.I think that there might be some overreaction about what company like Claude can truly achieve. At the same time, the reality is there that while SaaS compan

Who dares to make predictions in the current landscape? We do!  Our Predictions are back. Will our track-record continue on a high or will we be fundamentally wrong? Listen in to our Predictions for 2026 Navigation: Intro What will 2026 be all about? AI, AI and … more AI The big Hardware movements Of Start-ups and VCs Regulatory & Geopolitical Headwinds… and the Wars Fintech, Crypto and Frontier Tech Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show:   Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Introduction Welcome to Tech Deciphered Episode 74. That would be an episode about some predictions about 2026. What will be 2026 all about? I guess this year is probably starting with a bang. We saw the acquisition of xAI by SpaceX. We saw an acquisition from Grok by NVIDIA. What’s your take about what would be the big themes in 2026? I guess it would be for sure about AI and space. Nuno Goncalves Pedro What will 2026 be all about? Yeah. I predict a year that will be a little bit more of a year of reckoning in some way. There will be a lot of things that I think we’ll start seeing through. The fact that we are in the midst of an amazing transformational era for technology, the use of AI, but at the same time, obviously, a ridiculous bubble that is going alongside it as we’ve discussed in previous episodes. I think that we’ll start seeing some early reckonings of that, companies that might start failing, floundering, maybe a couple of frauds along the way, etc. I’ll tell you what I will not make many predictions about today, which is geopolitics. Geopolitics, I will not make predictions at all. Who the hell knows what’s going to happen to the world this year in 2026? I don’t dare making any predictions on that. Back to things where I would make predictions. I think on AI, we’ll have a little bit of reckoning. We’ll talk about it a little bit more in detail during this episode. Interesting elements around the hardware and physical space. Physical space, we just dedicated a full episode to it. We won’t go into a lot of details on that, but definitely on the hardware side, we’ll talk a little bit more about it. The VC landscape is going through an incredible transformation. We’ll talk about it today as well and some of our predictions for this year. What will happen to the asset class? It seems to be transforming itself dramatically. Obviously, that has a very direct impact on startups, so we’ll talk about that as well. And then to close a little bit the chapter on this, we will address some regulatory and geopolitical, let’s call it, headwinds without making maybe too many complex predictions. We shall see. Maybe by that time of the episode, we will be making some predictions. You guys should stay and listen to us, and maybe we will actually make some predictions about the geopolitical transformations that we will see this year in the world. Then last but not the least, we’ll talk about fintech, crypto, frontier tech, and a couple of other areas before concluding the episode. A classic predictions’ episode. We normally have a pretty good track record on some of these, but right now, the world is going a bit interesting, not to say insane. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, and going back to some news, Groq technically was not acquired, but, practically, it’s as if it got acquired. I’m talking about Groq, G-R-O-Q. The AI semiconductor company focused on inference AI, and it was late December. It was a way to end the year. This year, we started again with an acquisition of xAI by its sister company, SpaceX. I guess that’s where we are starting. AI, AI and … more AI We are going to start on AI. That’s definitely the big stuff. Everything these days, I guess, is about AI or has to have some connection with AI, or it doesn’t matter. I think every company in the world has seen that. You have to have the absolute minimum on AI strategy. You better execute on this strategy and show results, I would say. For the companies that were not AI native, you truly have to have a way to transform yourself. I guess at some point, the stretch might be too much, and it’s not really reasonable. Then you maybe better stay on what you are doing, especially if you’re in tech, you better be moving faster to AI. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Just to highlight, and I think throughout the episode, you’ll see that there&#8217

Infrastructure was passé…uncool. Difficult to get dollars from Private Equity and Growth funds, and almost impossible to get a VC fund interested. Now?! Now, it’s cool. Infrastructure seems to be having a Renaissance, a full on Rebirth, not just fueled by commercial interests (e.g. advent of AI), but also by industrial policy and geopolitical considerations. In this episode of Tech Deciphered, we explore what’s cool in the infrastructure spaces, including mega trends in semiconductors, energy, networking & connectivity, manufacturing Navigation: Intro We’re back to building things Why now: the 5 forces behind the renaissance Semiconductors: compute is the new oil Networking & connectivity: digital highways get rebuilt Energy: rebuilding the power stack (not just renewables) Manufacturing: the return of “atoms + bits” Wrap: what it means for startups, incumbents, and investors Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Introduction Welcome to episode 73 of Tech Deciphered, Infrastructure, the Rebirth or Renaissance. Infrastructure was passé, it wasn’t cool, but all of a sudden now everyone’s talking about network, talking about compute and semiconductors, talking about logistics, talking about energy. What gives? What’s happened? It was impossible in the past to get any funds, venture capital, even, to be honest, some private equity funds or growth funds interested in some of these areas, but now all of a sudden everyone thinks it’s cool. The infrastructure seems to be having a renaissance, a full-on rebirth. In this episode, we will explore in which cool ways the infrastructure spaces are moving and what’s leading to it. We will deep dive into the forces that are leading us to this. We will deep dive into semiconductors, networking and connectivity, energy, manufacturing, and then we’ll wrap up. Bertrand, so infrastructure is cool now. Bertrand Schmitt We’re back to building things Yes. I thought software was going to eat the world. I cannot believe it was then, maybe even 15 years ago, from Andreessen, that quote about software eating the world. I guess it’s an eternal balance. Sometimes you go ahead of yourself, you build a lot of software stack, and at some point, you need the hardware to run this software stack, and there is only so much the bits can do in a world of atoms. Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Obviously, we’ve gone through some of this before. I think what we’re going through right now is AI is eating the world, and because AI is eating the world, it’s driving a lot of this infrastructure building that we need. We don’t have enough energy to be consumed by all these big data centers and hyperscalers. We need to be innovative around network as well because of the consumption in terms of network bandwidth that is linked to that consumption as well. In some ways, it’s not software eating the world, AI is eating the world. Because AI is eating the world, we need to rethink everything around infrastructure and infrastructure becoming cool again. Bertrand Schmitt There is something deeper in this. It’s that the past 10, even 15 years were all about SaaS before AI. SaaS, interestingly enough, was very energy-efficient. When I say SaaS, I mean cloud computing at large. What I mean by energy-efficient is that actually cloud computing help make energy use more efficient because instead of companies having their own separate data centers in many locations, sometimes poorly run from an industrial perspective, replace their own privately run data center with data center run by the super scalers, the hyperscalers of the world. These data centers were run much better in terms of how you manage the coolings, the energy efficiency, the rack density, all of this stuff. Actually, the cloud revolution didn’t increase the use of electricity. The cloud revolution was actually a replacement from your private data center to the hyperscaler data center, which was energy efficient. That’s why we didn’t, even if we are always talking about that growth of cloud computing, we were never feeling the pinch in term of electricity. As you say, we say it all changed because with AI, it was not a simple “Replacement” of locally run infrastructure to a hyperscaler run infrastructure. It was truly adding on top of an existing infrastructure, a new computing infrastructure in a way out of nowhere.

IWhat is our children’s future? What skills should they be developing? How should schools be adapting? What will the fully functioning citizens and workers of the future look like? A look into the landscape of the next 15 years, the future of work with human and AI interactions, the transformation of education, the safety and privacy landscapes, and a parental playbook. Navigation: Intro The Landscape: 2026–2040 The Future of Work: Human + AI The Transformation of Education The Ethics, Safety, and Privacy Landscape The Parental Playbook: Actionable Strategies Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand SchmittIntroduction Welcome to Episode 72 of Tech Deciphered, about our children’s future. What is our children’s future? What skills should they be developing? How should school be adapting to AI? What would be the functioning citizens and workers of the future look like, especially in the context of the AI revolution? Nuno, what’s your take? Maybe we start with the landscape. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe Landscape: 2026–2040 Let’s first frame it. What do people think is going to happen? Firstly, that there’s going to be a dramatic increase in productivity, and because of that dramatic increase in productivity, there are a lot of numbers that show that there’s going to be… AI will enable some labour productivity growth of 0.1 to 0.6% through 2040, which would be a figure that would be potentially rising even more depending on use of other technologies beyond generative AI, as much as 0.5 to 3.4% points annually, which would be ridiculous in terms of productivity enhancement. To be clear, we haven’t seen it yet. But if there are those dramatic increases in productivity expected by the market, then there will be job displacement. There will be people losing their jobs. There will be people that will need to be reskilled, and there will be a big shift that is similar to what happens when there’s a significant industrial revolution, like the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century into the 20th century. Other numbers quoted would say that 30% of US jobs could be automated by 2030, which is a silly number, 30%, and that another 60% would see tremendously being altered. A lot of their tasks would be altered for those jobs. There’s also views that this is obviously fundamentally a global phenomenon, that as much as 9% of jobs could be lost to AI by 2030. I think question mark if this is a net number or a gross number, so it might be 9% our loss, but then maybe there’re other jobs that will emerge. It’s very clear that the landscape we have ahead of us is if there are any significant increases in productivity, there will be job displacement. There will be job shifting. There will be the need for reskilling. Therefore, I think on the downside, you would say there’s going to be job losses. We’ll have to reevaluate whether people should still work in general 5 days a week or not. Will we actually work in 10, 20, 30 years? I think that’s the doomsday scenario and what happens on that side of the fence. I think on the positive side, there’s also a discussion around there’ll be new jobs that emerge. There’ll be new jobs that maybe we don’t understand today, new job descriptions that actually don’t even exist yet that will emerge out this brave new world of AI. Bertrand SchmittYeah. I mean, let’s not forget how we get to a growing economy. I mean, there’s a measurement of a growing economy is GDP growth. Typically, you can simplify in two elements. One is the growth of the labour force, two, the rise of the productivity of that labour force, and that’s about it. Either you grow the economy by increasing the number of people, which in most of the Western world is not really happening, or you increase productivity. I think that we should not forget that growth of productivity is a backbone of growth for our economies, and that has been what has enabled the rise in prosperity across countries. I always take that as a win, personally. That growth in productivity has happened over the past decades through all the technological revolutions, from more efficient factories to oil and gas to computers, to network computers, to internet, to mobile and all the improvement in science, usually on the back of technological improvement. Personally, I welcome any rise in improvement we can ge

Can AI be a co-founder? Do you need a technical co-founder, any more? How about a business co-founder? What can AI do for you as co-founder? Will this become the “brave new world” of start-ups, small and medium businesses? For this and much more discussion, a no BS perspective on AI as a potential co-founder. Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Intro Welcome to episode 70 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we’ll talk about AI as a co-founder. Can AI be your co-founder? Do you need a technical co-founder anymore? Or do you need a business co-founder anymore? What can AI do for you as a co-founder? Will this become the brave new world of startup and small businesses? Nuno, what’s your take on this topic? Have you started seeing that for early stage startups, the AI co-founder? Nuno Gonçalves Pedro Yeah. We start seeing this notion of people now—”Oh, I could be a single founder.” I mean, single founders have existed for a long time. We’ll come back to a little bit the taxonomies of founding teams. But definitely, is now a little bit of a trend where people are like, “Well, I don’t need a co-founder. I’m just going to go do my own thing.” Normally, the case is made more for, “Oh, I don’t need a technical co-founder. I can vibe code and put some stuff together and go through things.” As we go through the episode today, I think we’ll go into the details on why technical co-founders might still matter and why there are certain areas of technical founding that might not matter as much where AI can really be your co-pilot, so to speak. The Classic Case for Co-Founders But maybe let’s start with what is the case for co-founders? Why do you need to have a co-founder? Why can’t you just do it yourself? Historically, there’s been really sort of an angle where there’s sort of these two entities in the founding team. Right? The business founder and the technical founder. The business founder is the person that runs business related activities. If you’re doing, for example, enterprise software, SaaS, et cetera, your business co-founder is responsible for go-to-market like hiring sales—in particular, at the beginning actually being the person who does sales, establishing partnerships, creating and managing elements that are more related to admin with the help maybe of third parties around finance, et cetera. The business founder is more the person who’s focused on the business aspects of the company, which would be go-to-market, which includes sales, channel partnerships, marketing, et cetera. Might include, as I said, the admin side, et cetera. Then the technical co-founder is more focused on elements that are connected to the technology stack, development of the code base. If it’s just software, development of software, could be more on the product side as well, someone who’s more of a product manager, et cetera. That’s why you need those two entities. Because you need these two entities, so to speak, these two people. Because you need someone who has more knowledge of how to develop a code base, how to get it off the ground, how to develop the MVP, the minimum viable product early on. On the other side, you need someone who figures out: how do we get this thing to market, how do we actually deploy it, how do we monetise it, how do we create partnerships if they apply. That’s why we’ve had this classic case for founding teams. Now just to be very clear, it is also true that we’ve also had single founding teams for a long time. We have companies that have been founding only for one person. But at the end of the day, the ethos has been, let’s have two co-founders, one on the technical side at least and one or more on the technical side and one or more on the business side at the very least. Bertrand Schmitt That’s true. That’s what you have typically seen. Maybe, going back historically, maybe the most famous example of this technical co-founder plus business co-founder has been the founding team of Apple—Steve Jobs with Mr Wozniak. Steve, on the business side; Woz, as he was called, on the technical side. That has been that maybe that’s reference point for all of Silicon Valley for decades. At the same time, it has not been true for every successful company. If I take HP, for instance—if I remember well, they were both technical co-founder

What do we travel with? How do we prefer to travel? What are our travel hacks? If you are seasoned travel or just getting into that hamster wheel, this is the episode for you. Our thoughts, best practices and hacks on traveling. Share with us yours on LinkedIn or X. Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro INTRODUCTION Welcome to Episode 69 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today we’ll go on a slightly softer note and discuss our travel hacks and preferences. Bertrand and I often are asked, “What do you guys travel with? What do you prefer to travel with? What are your travel hacks?” And a few other questions in this world of hamster wheel travelling. Today we’ll share a bunch of our preferences. We’ll share a lot of the things we travel with, from luggage to electronics to other services and devices. We will share to the best of our knowledge, how to really do it in style, if that’s at all possible, once you’re in that hamster wheel. We’ll share some of our hacks, not only for business travelling, but also for leisure travelling. Interesting stuff. We all have our hacks. We all have our stuff going on. PREFERENCES TRAVEL Airlines, alliances, loyalty programs Maybe we start with airlines and all the things around that. Bertrand. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, sure. Don’t get me started on Air France, who cancelled on me a huge quantity of miles without alerting me, without notice, just a few weeks before I was supposed to take a flight. I will try my best to never use them again. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It was that bad. Air France is out, so that’s the beginning. Let’s maybe talk about the guys who are in. I’ll give you my top airlines around the world. Obviously this depends. Depends if you have to travel through that region or if you’re travelling to that region. My favourites, I think maybe not sure if it’s in full order, but I would say Emirates, obviously, Qatar Airways. If you’re hubbing through Middle East or if you’re going to the Middle East, two amazing airlines, probably two of the best in the world. I would say maybe Emirates is my favourite now. I have to be thoughtful in how I put that forward. Qatar is also exceptional, obviously if you’re hubbing through Doha. Incredible airline as well. The Asian ones in general, we’ll leave the Chinese for a second because that’s a different ballgame all together. Let’s not say all Asian ones and obviously different ones are great. I’d say Singapore Airlines continues being systematically an exceptional airline. They’ve become very expensive, but an exceptional airline. A little bit SOP driven, only airline in the world, true story, that I complained not once or twice, but three times on the same incident, and I actually never got a response from them on an incident which is interesting. In general, service is exceptional. Their facilities at Changi Airport are exceptional. The planes are really well-kept, the food is great, very attentious, and really like them. Cathay, I haven’t flown with them in a while. They went through a bit of a slump at some point. They were my favourite for a long time. Then they went through a bit of a slump in terms of product in particular, in terms of the quality of the product, in terms of the quality of the seats, service on board, et cetera. I’ve heard positive things recently, so maybe worthwhile putting them back on my Top 5 list around the world. Then the Korean Airlines in general are pretty strong on service. Depends a little bit on the plane. I’ve had always better experiences with Korean Air than with Asiana. Maybe Korean Air gets that last Top 5 thing. Talking about the negative ones for me that I try to avoid. I try to avoid as much as possible some of the European ones. TAP Air Portugal, the Portuguese one, is actually pretty decent by European standards. British Airways depends on the format of the plane. I find their business class service and product not to be as compelling as other airlines right now. I always found the service on British Airways, you only get great service on reshares if you’re in first class. On long haul, even in business, it’s a little bit matron. It’s like, “Sit down and just stay put, and we’ll serve you, but we won’t really be particularly paying attention to you.” In some ways, TAP Air Portugal, I thi

America’s AI action plan … “Winning the AI race” has just been announced. What is it all about? What are the implications? How will the rest of the world react? A deep dive into the announcement, approaches by EU and China, and overall implications of these action plans. Navigation: Intro (01:34) Context of the White House AI Summit Pillar I – Accelerating AI Innovation Pillar II – Building American AI Infrastructure Pillar III – Leading in International AI Diplomacy & Security Comparing Approaches – U.S. Action Plan vs. EU AI Act vs. China’s Strategy Implications and Synthesis Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno G. Pedro Welcome to episode 68 of Tech Deciphered. This episode will focus on America’s AI action plan, winning the AI race, which has just been announced a couple of weeks in by President Trump in the White House. Today, we’ll be discussing the pillars of this plan, from pillar I, the acceleration of AI innovation, to pillar II, building of American AI infrastructure, to pillar III, leading in international AI diplomacy and security. We’ll also further contextualise it, as well as compare the approaches between the US Action plan, and what we see from the EU and China strategy at this point in time. We’ll finalise with implications and synthesis. Bertrand, is this a watershed moment for the industry? Is this the moment we were all waiting for in terms of clarity for AI in the US? Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, that’s a great question. I must say I’m quite excited. I’m not sure I can remember anything like it since basically John F. Kennedy announcing the race to go to the moon in the early ’60s. It feels, as you say, a watershed moment because suddenly you can see that there is a grand vision, a grand plan, that AI is not just important, but critical to the future success of America. It looks like the White House is putting all the ducks in order in order to make it happen. There is, like in the ’60s with JFK, a realisation that there is an adversary, there is a competitor, and you want to beat them to that race. Except this time it’s not Russia, it’s China. A lot of similarities, I would say. Nuno G. Pedro Yeah. It seems relatively comprehensive. Obviously, we’ll deep dive into it today across a variety of elements like regulation, investments, view in relation to exports and imports and the rest of the world. So, relatively comprehensive from what we can see. Obviously, we don’t know all the details. We know from the announcement that the plan has identified 90 federal policy actions across the three pillars. Obviously, we’ll see how these come into practice over the next few months, few years. To your point, it is a defining moment. It feels a little bit like the space race of ’60s, et cetera. It’s probably warranted. We know that, obviously, AI platforms, AI services and products are changing the world as we speak. It’s pretty important to figure out what is the US response to it. Also interesting to know that we normally don’t talk about the US too much in terms of industrial policy. The US seems to have a private sector that, in and of itself, actually stands up to the game, and in particular in tech and high-tech, normally fulfils or fills the gaps that are introduced by big generational shifts in terms of technology. But in this case, there seems to be an industrial policy. This seems to set the stage for that industrial policy and how it moves forward, which, as you said, we haven’t seen in quite a long time. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. At the same time, on one side, yes, there is some level of industrial policy, but I feel quite a big part is getting the government out of the way so that private companies can truly innovate. Because America, like many other countries, have accumulated over decades regulations, you could call it over-regulations of many sectors and industries. I would say part of it is showing the way, but part of it is really a lot about just removing obstacles along the way that were posed by decades of government regulations and acknowledging that if these regulations are not removed, it could truly impede America’s chances to win the AI race. Nuno G. Pedro How did we get here? Obviously, there was an executive order in January this year, 2025, on removing barriers to American leadership in AI, the directive being the US to become the world

Nintendo Switch, the Nokia 7110… what are the tech devices and gadgets that changed your life? How about you biggest disappointments?In this episode of Tech Deciphered, we will share ours. We look forward to hearing yours. Share on LinkedIn or via email or X Navigation: Intro (01:34) Tech That Changed Our Lives Our Worst Tech Purchases Reflection & Takeaways Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand SchmittWelcome to Tech Deciphered, episode 67. This will be a lighter episode as summer is upon us. We will discuss and talk about tech that changed our lives, as well as tech that disappointed. Some of you might know, some of you might not know, but both me and Nuno are tech nerds. We have played with tech most of our lives, always looking for the next available new piece of technology to use or collect. We are going to talk about that and maybe start on the positive side. The tech that changed our lives. Nuno Goncalves PedroI’m sure everyone has their stories. Even if you’re not a nerd, there’s going to be that piece of equipment, that mobile phone, that gaming console, that whatever, that dramatically changed you, made you more productive, or allowed you to do something that you’d never done before, et cetera. It’s always an interesting conversation to have, and it creates a lot of wonderful memories. It brings you back to places, it brings you back to that moment where you bought the device, that first time that you used it, the experiences you had, some of them maybe actually, not necessarily positive. We’ll come back to the worst tech purchases of all time. Shall I launch Austilities, Bertrand? Shall I tell my first one? Bertrand SchmittSure, Nuno, feel free. Nuno Goncalves PedroGood stuff. I’ll start with maybe the one that I’ve had the longest memory on, which is the Philips Videopac. Now, many of you will have no clue what I’m talking about. Bertrand SchmittNo idea. Nuno Goncalves PedroThe Videopac. Even Bertrand, which is impressive. The Videopac was a video game console that worked with cartridges, launched obviously via Philips. I’m not sure if the one I had was actually from Philips, question mark. It was the same format and I remember it very fondly. It was really a gaming console with a little joystick. Very basic thing. The Videopac was actually launched first thing in ’83. I’m not sure when I first started using it, but I suspect I was 7 or 8 years old, so that would have been a couple of years thereafter. I remember it fondly. We got it from Andorra. If you guys know, I was born in Portugal. Andorra is this small-owned country between Spain and France, and they had no sales taxes back then, so you’d go there and buy stuff really cheaply. I think that’s what we bought when I went there with my parents. I remember it very fondly. I remember playing games on it. Strangely enough, I don’t remember any of the games I played on it, but I remember it very fondly as one of my first computer experiences and stuff. That was pretty cool. Bertrand SchmittNice. I think in France. I’m not sure this one was available. At least it doesn’t ring a bell. I think we had some Atari consoles in France. Me, actually, I didn’t start with a console. I started with a regular computer. Not the PC kind. It was an Atari computer. Actually Atari 520ST, very popular in Europe. There was also Amiga that had similar computers. It was Motorola CPU 68000 if I remember. It was my first computer. Also, could be used for gaming, of course, 3.5-inch disk, if I remember well, some colors, I would say 320 times 200 pixels. It was great. It was a start for me of understanding computers, starting to program them. I might have started before actually to program computers, but it was not a computer I own. That was the first computer I owned. That was quite amazing at the time. I remember doing quite a bit with it. Nuno Goncalves PedroMy first computer was actually the Schneider Euro PC. I’d played before with the ZX Spectrum and with an Amstrad computer. Those did not belong to me. They were not my purchases. They were not for me. They belonged to my uncle. Bertrand SchmittNot the same. Nuno Goncalves PedroMy first one that I owned was the Schneider Euro PC. It’s the first computer ever that I coded in. People probably don’t remember Schneider at all. It was a computer division. Bertrand Schmi

The reckoning is here. Once a safe harbor, Big Tech has finally also gone full out on layoffs. Is this a structural shift to employment in Tech? Will the subsequent talent spillover be great for start-ups and entrepreneurship? Will it positively affect other industries? In this episode of Tech Deciphered, we will answer these and other questions in a deep discussion on the Global Tech Labor reset. Navigation: Intro (01:34) Layoffs & Restructuring Shifts in Compensation & Perks Rise of Fractional, Freelance, and Solopreneur Work Talent Spillover to Other Sectors Geography & Culture Shifts Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Welcome to Episode 66 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we’ll talk about the global labour tech reset. Tech and big tech, which seemed immune to any lay-offs, seems now to be under fire. Massive lay-offs over the last 2.5 years, a lot of discussion around the importance of having a computer science, computer engineering background, and so what seemed to be a safe haven for any graduate is now under stress. Today, we will discuss the structural perspective on what’s happening in the market, if this is a long-term trend or not, what has led us to this, and what is next. We’ll talk about the rise of fractional freelance and solopreneur work, as well as talk about talent spillovers, and some of the usual geographical dynamics around the space. Bertrand, a huge shift in tech. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, definitely. It’s pretty big. I think it started probably around 2022, once we got some changing interest rates that have a pretty massive impact in stock prices for a lot of companies. At that time, a lot of companies decided, and usually under some pressure, that it was time to be more efficient, to generate more cash. Yes, you want to grow, but not grow at all cost. You have to go efficiently. That’s when we started to see some share price going down and step by step, quarter after quarter. Some change in attitude with a lot of big tech and that has created some impact in term of lay-off from different parts of the business, from the sales team to the DNA, to even engineering R&D. What is also been happening since 2022, 2023 is a change of focus. A lot of focus is being put in AI. A lot of investment in CapEx is going to AI. At some point, if you want to keep doing all this investing, investments, you might have to get some other part of the business in order to create additional savings to do all the spend you can in AI. There has been more recently a switch. It’s not about just efficiency to push all the… But generating the ability to invest in AI. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s part of a broader movement. Before we step back a little bit and go back in history, even recently, we’ve heard that there’s talks between Meta and a bunch of private equity firms like KKR, Brookfield, Apollo, and others, to actually help in financing data centers. Meta is a gigantic company, so one would assume they have cash to do all these things. Maybe they don’t. To your point, that level of efficiency that is now needed in the market where you need to throw actual money, CapEx, into the building of infrastructure, the building of the core underpins of what you’re doing is pretty vital. But let’s go back a little bit of a second, and we’ve talked about it maybe in our early episodes. Companies like Meta, Facebook back in the day, Google, Alphabet now, and others had a tendency, in particular in the Bay Area, to hoard engineers. They would over-hire. There was a lot of discussion that some of these players had as much as 20%-50% the engineering resources they needed, and part of that is that they didn’t want their competitors to have them, and so in some ways, we went from hoarding too much capacity to the days of COVID that in some ways illustrated that there were a lot of people that maybe were not working very hard also on the engineering side, not just on the sales, et cetera side. That right-sizing, I think, has been a long time coming. We discussed in a past episode that there was a little bit of an adaptation, or an adaptation, rather to the market by a lot of these public companies saying, “Now that I have a mandate where there’s lay-offs happening in other industries, I can do it myself.” But this time is different, and I think the message of probably today’s epis

Robotics is a field that seemingly hasn’t really delivered on its promises. Sure, plenty of robot arms and other robotic solutions in logistics and industrial spaces, but what about the rest… including, Consumer?! Navigation: Intro (01:34) B2B Robotics Consumer Robotics Looking Ahead Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Welcome to Episode 64 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we will discuss robotics. Our new overlords are coming. Robotics is a field that seemingly hasn’t really delivered on its promise. Sure, plenty of robot arms and other robotic solutions are out there. But somehow it feels like we should be actually already controlled and dominated by our robotic overlords. Today, we will discuss B2B Robotics, their growth, adoption, industry use cases, the drivers of innovation in that space, players in that space, challenges. We will also talk about consumer robotics, talking about also robots that have gone mainstream, personal and social robots, emerging trends that are happening in the home, market dynamics. Then we’ll look ahead to the future of B2B, the future of consumer, and the societal and workforce impact, which obviously is going to be the last but not the least topic that we will address today. Let’s start with B2B. B2B Robotics. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, thank you, Nuno. It’s certainly a growing space. As you say, it might not feel like it, but at the end of the day, we already have quite a few millions robots in B2B. It’s estimated that the stock of your operational robots, industrial robots, is around 4.28 million units in 2023, which was a 10% increase year-on-year. If we look at China, and I think we talk about the fact that we are installing around 400,000 robots a year. China alone by itself has been installing 276,000 units in 2023. China is definitely a leader in that space and that might come as a surprise to some. That number, to put it into perspective, is five times higher than the second place, Japan. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think China has recognized a long time ago that because of its population composition, that they’re going to have a lack of people to produce, to be in factories, et cetera, so they actually have been adopting robots now for many, many years. I think now, you were joking with me just before we recorded this, but now that we’re having trade tariffs and all that stuff, it might make sense to have a broad discussion around why robotics in an industrial environment are key. Bertrand Schmitt Definitely. I think that actually I was surprised to hear that, when we’re making this recording on April 15, I was surprised to hear in the Trump administration, quite a lot of very positive support regarding AI and robotics. It looks like part of the plan is already acknowledging this is not like the old-school jobs that we are going to bring back. It would be a different type of jobs. There will be way more robotics than before. Obviously, more robotics is possible thanks to the latest advanced in AI. There is some consensus that, yeah, it’s not just bring back the old jobs as they were, but it would be a new type of jobs. It would be a new type of industrial revolution and acknowledgment that robotics are here to make all of this not just more efficient, but even possible. Because it’s clear that if you take the US, for instance, there is actually not so much unemployment in the US. For an industrial revolution to happen, we need to bring our new friends, the robots. Nuno Goncalves Pedro If we go through the use cases where we see robots coming in, obviously manufacturing, automotive and electronics will probably come to people’s mind. A lot of robot arms are being used there. More than serve your classic solutions, et cetera. But it’s a lot of robot arms using on specific pieces on the line, a lot of pieces of robotics that we don’t recognize necessarily as robotics, but are actually roboticized systems used, in particular on automotive, again, in consumer electronics. Basically, it has to do with the fact that there’s a tremendous lack of… One, there’s going to be, at some point, the limitation on how fast you can produce, so that’s very obvious. Two, there’s actually even lack of people that can do some of these roles. Some of it is actually high precision work. In most of these environments, there are environments where humans need to coexist

The current landscape of fundraising for start-ups, companies and VC funds, as well as best practices and hacks… and how to get those investors to giving you the money. Navigation: Intro (01:34) What is the current evolution and landscape for fundraising for start-ups? What is the current evolution and landscape for fundraising for VC firms? What are the best practices – strategies, processes, tactics and hacks – for fundraising overall … for start-ups? What are the best practices – strategies, processes, tactics and hacks – for fundraising overall … for VC firms? How to get investors (VCs and LPs) to commit to giving you money? Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Hello and welcome to Tech Deciphered episode 63. In this episode, we are going to talk about the evolution and the current landscape of startups and VCs fundraising. We will talk about this evolution and landscape for fundraising, both from a startup and VC sides. We are going to talk about the best practices, strategies, process, tactics, and hacks for fundraising on both sides when you are a startup or when you are a VC firm. And ultimately, we will finish on how to get investors to commit to give you money. Hi, Nuno. How are you? Nuno Hey, Bertrand. We’ll start with the evolution and current landscape of startup fundraising. It’s been a couple of exciting years. We got to the height of it all, the bull of all bull markets, actually in 2021, post-COVID. Then we had 2022 and 2023. Very sharp correction, dramatic reduction in venture investments. ’24 was a good year. It’s a year that scaled back again, seems stabilizing. I think we’ll see what ’25 has on hold. My prediction is that it’s going to be a great year. Bertrand Yeah, 2021 was pretty shockingly good post the start of COVID. After a sharp wait and see by end of 2020, things were going back not just to normal, but to overdrive. It’s really by the end of 2021 that the music stopped. We had to worry about inflation with interest rates going up. 2022 was definitely bad for startups and VCs alike. But as you said, 2024, we are back to a better place. I would have the same bet for 2025, as you have, Nuno. Nuno One interesting piece is there’s something that I think changed everything in 2024, which is AI. If we didn’t have AI in 2024, I don’t think we would have had this landscape. Important to note, and we’ll talk about it later on when we talk about the landscape for actual VC fundraising, that the way that VCs work in their cycles and how they raise money, there’s always a little bit of a lag around the table. It means there’s still a lot of what we call dry powder with VC firms. This means that VC firms have raised quite a lot of money from limited partners for 10-year funds with, for example, four-year investment periods. Therefore, they still need to deploy capital in whatever market they’re in. The fact that there were a lot of AI opportunities means that they’ve been deploying a lot towards, for example, AI place. That’s going to change as well. We’ll talk later about, again, the VC fundraising landscape, but there’s going to be a little bit of an adaptation on those two time lags around the table. But for me, the big effect of 2024 was without a doubt, AI. Bertrand Yeah, and it’s very interesting because when you think about it, the new AI revolution started with LLMs, with OpenAI launching ChatGPT. And this is an event that actually started end of 2022. So that AI revolution, financing, fundraising, actually started in 2023. But at that time, it was still so bad from an overall macro perspective that it was not enough to change the big trends. But at the same time, for sure in 2024, I think it had time to turn around. We’ll talk more precisely about the numbers, but it’s pretty clear that, as you say, AI has taken over. Nuno The height of it from the numbers we have in mind shows that on a global basis, 2021 was the all-time high in terms of startup investing at 750 billion. We’ve now had a significant reduction, basically around 349 billion, if the number is around correct, but certainly as deep as that in 2023, returning basically to levels that we saw back in 2018-2020. 2024, we went back up to around 370 billion. I think this year is going to be higher as we discussed before. One clarification I wou

Our analysis of the Space & Aeronautics, Defense and Homeland Security industries from key trends to investment landscape… to perhaps, more importantly, evil vs no evil? Where are we now? Navigation: Intro (01:34) Why now? Geopolitics Aerospace and Aeronautics Defense and Homeland Security Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno G. Pedro Welcome to Tech DECIPHERED. In today’s episode, Episode 62, we’re going to discuss space and aeronautics, defense and online security. We are going to talk about key trends, why now is such a wonderful time to be looking at this space not only from a startup perspective but also from an investment landscape perspective. We’ll also go into the whole evil versus no evil topic. Specifically, we will discuss why now, and the geopolitics of the industries, aerospace and aeronautics, defense and homeland security, and then we will conclude. Bertrand, why now? Bertrand Schmitt Why now? I think this industry, this sector, space, defense, homeland security has seen not just a lot of growth and quite a few very successful companies coming out, but it’s an interesting complete turnaround, if you look at that from an entrepreneur or from a VC investor perspective. Why now? I think there has been, I would say, historically, there was a lot of scepticism, a lot of concerns by entrepreneurs, investors alike, centred around the military industrial complex. Bertrand Schmitt We probably all remember the famous Eisenhower’s farewell address where he was sharing his distrust of that military industrial complex. And venture capital shunned these sectors also due to long sales cycle, in some cases only one client, the Department of defense for many startups, as well as ethical debates. Bertrand Schmitt At the same time, it’s an evolving landscape. Startup came with disrupting legacy models. It’s not just a cost-plus approach. It’s a product approach. It’s agile. It’s innovation. The debate around, is it evil to is it something we must do in order to address global threats, basically coming to the forefront for investors and entrepreneurs alike. Nuno G. Pedro It’s a supply and demand issue. It’s not just that startups are not necessarily interested in it because it always creates this issue around, is it evil? Is it good? Are we doing something good or not? I think there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of supply issue because of that angle. But it’s also a demand issue. Contracts historically with military take a long time to be hashed out. They depend on doing trials and proofs of concept. Nuno G. Pedro I think on the other hand, it’s an industry that historically was very resilient and dominated by services. Particularly the US military want to own everything, and so, therefore, there was this notion that whoever was the provider provided it to provide it as a service for them. There are services that still need to be done today, but the industry has been largely productized, and there are a lot of products. I buy planes, I buy weaponry, I buy a bunch of different software systems that will allow me to operate, but they’re productized. I think that’s one of the big shifts that we’ve seen and why now is a good time to look at it. Nuno G. Pedro If I’m a startup, I don’t need to go through 3, 4, 5-year cycles until I sell anything of scale. Then on the plus side, once I sell, it is at scale. There’s a lot of money in the military. We’ll talk a lot about the numbers later on, but there’s definitely a lot of money in the military complex that warrants the focus of startups. Nuno G. Pedro The other part is venture capital firms. Venture capital firms, historically, maybe because of the whole evil versus no evil and perceived ethical issues have stayed away from it. But we have more and more active large firms in the space from Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz. We ourselves have invested in companies that are around both the Homeland Security and the military complex space. So as a venture capital investor, because then the cycles to sales are better, because then startups scale faster, the economic piece of it has been solved. Nuno G. Pedro Then, on the other side, the whole ethical issue has been really put into perspective. There’s clearly a lot of geopolitical tension right now. Defense as an industry. It’s an industry that

Our review of 2024 and what 2025 holds for the world and the Tech industry. From geopolitical dynamics to M&A and IPOs, regulation, crypto winters and summers, to inflation and DOGE and many other things. Navigation: Intro (01:34) Review of 2024 What’s next, 2025? Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Welcome to Tech DECIPHERED Episode 61. It’s at this time of the year where we look back what happened in the past year in 2024 in tech, as well as trying to put some thoughts into what 2025 might look like, what might be the next big things happening in global tech industry. Let’s start with our review of 2024. Nuno Goncalves Pedro It’s been an interesting year. A year of elections around the world, so maybe we start at that level. The landscape geopolitically has become very interesting. I’d seen some chart that shows the most gain on the right ever globally across elections. I think there’s some message going on that people are really not happy about, status quo. Obviously, in the US, Donald Trump got elected, so he will again be the President of the United States next year or starting next year. Nuno Goncalves Pedro In Europe, we’ve had a lot of countries that went to the right. Austria, I believe the right wing party won. A lot of interesting and somehow shocking results in some cases with very populist views, for example, countries like my own Portugal, and all around that. Very significant geopolitical transition where it seems like populism is here to stay. Nuno Goncalves Pedro There are significant concerns around the world around immigration. There are significant concerns around the world around security. There are significant concerns around the world around economic growth. I think the elections that we saw this year, for the most, are reflecting upon the discontent of citizens across the world, of which the US is just but an example. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. Actually, I’m not sure anymore about that when we call populism, one side or the other, what it really means at some point, it doesn’t sit right to me anymore. I think 10 years ago, maybe I had some concept about what it means. But today, I’m not really clear, to be frank, because when you see Trump and his alliance with people like Elon Musk or JFK, it’s not clear they are populist at all. The same in Europe. I’m not really clear, what is true is for sure more right wing, moving away from left or centre. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, this will have a significant impact on a lot of topics, and we’ll go through that. France also went more right wing, at least in term of parliament. Germany, we will see next year, actually. They’re preparing for election, the government in Germany. I think it was the day or the next day after the result of the US election, the government imploded. There are new elections scheduled for early next year. It looks like it will also go more right wing. It will make certainly for an interesting change of policies and politics. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Indeed, all of all, I think a lot of renewed discussion around what is the role of countries, governments, different counties, provinces, states in the case of the US, local government, is the system fully broken or not? A lot of debate around precisely the incentives that people have to vote for a party versus another and what are the key issues that are on their mind. But as I mentioned, I feel it’s clear that it’s the economy, stupid back through the day, and security have been effectively the key considerations for this year. Nuno Goncalves Pedro In terms of the overall year, it was a year that was supposed to somehow be really awful. It wasn’t. It wasn’t a year that was awful. Stock markets have gone up, in particular in the US, driven mostly by technology, The Fed rates started to go down, so it seems like inflation now is more and more under control. We see a lot of movement around, in particular, the technology stack of the fence that has taken us to the next level. There’s a lot of bright spots. I think we had anticipated maybe a very bleak 2024. It certainly was not in terms of equities, both on the public markets, but also on the private market side of the fence, including venture capital. Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’ll come back to that later. I think there is somehow certainly on the private markets a huge impact of AI. AI is dist

In a few decades, will Europe be good for anything beyond food and tourist experiences? With Europe lagging on innovation, productivity and with extremely costly decisions on the Energy side, and needing to defend itself, what is next? Navigation: Intro (01:34) New report out from Mario Draghi Profound mistakes in Energy initiatives increasing costs and competitiveness Dalio and Lee Kuan Yew comments Lack of growth in Europe, lack of creation of new European champions Too much protection for employees? Too Complex regulations around companies and innovation initiatives are too bureaucratic Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Welcome to Episode 60 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we will discuss European competitiveness. The competitiveness of all of Europe, not just the European Union, but the whole of Europe. It’s been in the news recently. There’s been a new report out from Mario Draghi a couple of months ago that really mentions what is happening in Europe, what are the things that need to be done for Europe to increase its competitiveness going forward. Nuno Goncalves Pedro There have been a lot of discussions around the world on Asia, in particular, and American dominance of the world economy. Europe is lagging behind. What do we make out of all of this? Maybe let’s start with the report out from Mario Draghi and the conclusions of that report. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, I think it was for once, a pretty interesting and pretty lucid report from a commission by the European Commission and written by Mario Draghi with a lot of support from many CEOs and also entrepreneurs to provide feedback to try to explain what’s happening, what’s going on. I would agree with everything in terms of analysis or conclusion, but I must say it’s a good read. Bertrand Schmitt Maybe a few points that he’s making is first acknowledging that there is an issue in European competitiveness and growth since the past 20, 25 years. This lack of competitiveness and growth has increased with a great financial crisis from 2008-2012. In 2012, there was a crisis around the euro. I think it is indeed time to try to look back at what happened and try to get some sense about what could be done differently going forward. Nuno Goncalves Pedro A couple of really astute observations. Obviously, the GDP growth of Europe has lag behind that of the US and China. The period of time from 2002-2023, the US has grown 2% and both on constant prices and constant PPP prices. China, 8.3% and the EU, 27 at 1.4%. Obviously this report is on the EU. Clearly lagging, and the lag is significant. Nuno Goncalves Pedro If we look at GDP at constant prices, there was a 17% delta in 2002 between US and Europe, and now there’s a 30% delta between US and Europe. It’s lagging you further behind. Even more seriously, China has outpaced it on constant prices. If we look at constant PPP prices, the EU was actually 4% above the US back in 2002, and it is now below 12% of the US. Nuno Goncalves Pedro China has outpaced both of them at constant PPP prices. This is worrisome. I think Mario Draghi makes, or the report makes a bunch of very significant and strong statements, which basically are saying, “We cannot, as the European Union, continue like this and have the social welfare that we put in place in all these countries.” something’s got to give. Nuno Goncalves Pedro He goes on to make a couple of proposals and what he thinks needs to be done in Europe. But very significantly, what he’s saying is this is a crisis. We need to address it. This is not just a nice report, please read it. It’s like we cannot afford the lifestyle that we’re having. Nuno Goncalves Pedro If Europe or European Union was a household, it would be going bankrupt, I think is what he’s saying. We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. Something’s got to break at some point. Either the social welfare construct that we have will not work any more, or we, as Europe, will need to really reassess how we behave, et cetera. Very interesting report. A lot of fear at the beginning of the report immediately. Then three areas that he recommends action on for Europe in order to reignite growth. Bertrand Schmitt Yes. First, I would like to say that, yes, some are doing analysis based on PPP, but there is a risk when you do that. Because PPP is cute when you try to estimate cost of

Do we need yet another new AI platform? Would new foundation models stand a chance in today’s market? Will OpenAI, Anthropic, etc be the new Tech winners … or will they just get acquired, at some point? Navigation: Intro (01:34) Landscape Recent gigantic acqui-hires The Big Players How will the hardware change? Will there be a next wave beyond GPT? Is it too late to come in and disrupt the big players? Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Welcome to Tech Deciphered episode 59. Again, this will be an episode on AI. This time we make the case for not starting yet a new AI platform and not investing in one either. What’s happening in AI? I guess all of you have heard about all the massive investment made by some of the leading players, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, XAI, Oracle, as well as even some smaller startups from Anthropic to Mistral. Bertrand Of course, Amazon has built its own frontier model as well as is providing infrastructure to a lot of players. But isn’t there already too much capital going into AI platforms and isn’t it going too fast? Nuno Well, we think probably yes. That’s going to be the thesis of our discussion today. Some of the startups you mentioned, by the way, they’ve raised a ton of money. I mean, Anthropic is well above 8 billion. Mistral is at a couple of billions as well, right, at this stage? Bertrand I think we are closer to a billion. Nuno It’s around a billion. Yeah, around a billion, several billion for Anthropic. Then there’s a couple of companies we will talk about later that raised a few billion that are no longer independent. It feels like too much. It feels like there’s a gold rush of sorts. It is probably a good analogy. A lot of investors putting capital into it. Nuno But at the same time, it’s being matched by the big players, Microsoft, Google, Meta by pushing LLM, XAI, OpenAI, we could argue, is it a big player already or not? But they just raised a ton of money as well. At 150 billion valuation, right? I mean, it’s like… Bertrand Yes, 150 billion valuation. Nuno It’s like, okay. They’ve already said, well, we are going to continue raising money. We’re going to continue spending a lot of money as well. It feels like a gold rush. It feels like there’s too much capital deployed into it. Something’s got to give, someone’s going to fail. Maybe that’s a good segue to the fact that we already start seeing some moments that are quite interesting. Bertrand Maybe to OpenAI, to jump back, to be fair, they’ve reached more than 3 billion of annualized revenues, and that was based on numbers from June. This is very high valuation for sure. But it’s also coming with one of the fastest growing business ever in terms of revenues. Nuno Yes. We will see if it’s sustainable, the business that they’re building, because there’s no competition. People are using other services out there in tandem. I see a lot of people, for example, using perplexity rather than ChatGPT. We’ll see if Gemini catches up at some point or not. I would argue they have grown very fast, but they have not faced as much competition as they’re probably starting to face right now. At least that would be my thesis. Nuno In any case, we start seeing signals of companies that go to the market and get bought out, and they get bought out for amazing amounts. If we look at Google and there, I would argue, acquihire of Character.ai. It seems to 2.5 billion to get the team and I guess the tech as well. But it feels a bit like acquihire. They’re trying to get the CEO back into the fold at Google. So interesting, I feel. Nuno The Inflection one was at least in the highest hundreds of millions. We heard 650 million for the IP licensing deal from Microsoft to get the founder and CEO to join Microsoft to head AI. Let’s say it’s around a billion and let’s call it even, but that’s like another gigantic acquihire. Nuno What gives? And it’s a little bit like it feels a little bit like free money. I’ve had a bit of a chance to think about this. It’s not just that it feels a little bit like free money. It’s some of these acquirers, like the Microsoft of the world, et cetera, might still be overvalued themselves, question mark, and therefore they’re basically putting capital because they have the capital

Another election year and it’s already a dramatic one. Biden vs Trump turned into Harris vs Trump. An attempt on Trump’s life. What’s next? This episode will focus on the implication of the elections for Tech and its ecosystem in the US and globally. Navigation: Intro (01:34) Harris vs. Trump Silicon Valley / Tech business at large views Implications for Rest of the World Our take Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Welcome to Episode 58 of Tech DECIPHERED. Today, we will discuss the US election and what it means for tech. How will the upcoming US election affect tech and the entire ecosystem in the US and globally? To be clear, and just to put a disclaimer, this episode will not focus on policies by the candidates that do not relate to what we perceive to be implications to tech. For example, we will not be discussing topics like pro-choice versus pro-life, and other things that are obviously very central to the decisions that many of you will make in how you will vote for the next presidential elections in the US. Nuno Goncalves Pedro At the same time, we will also share with you what we know to the best of our knowledge. Obviously, policies change with time, and proposed policies definitely change a lot with time, as you know, with politicians. There might be things that we will share with you today that might be different when you listen to our episode. We are not responsible for that. People and candidates change their minds all the time, even after they’ve been elected. That’s not our fault. Just with those disclaimers, that’s what we’re going to share today. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The third and final disclaimer, obviously, there will be tonality on how we discuss and evaluate some of the policies, and if they’re good or bad or whatever. But from this, you cannot also take a conclusion on, “Oh, I should vote for Trump,” or, “I should vote for Harris,” because no, this is just a view around tech and tech ecosystem. We will share how we perceive the policies and the proposed policies, and that’s literally it. We’re not giving you advice on who to vote for. Bertrand Schmitt First, this is a recording made August 28. We’ll try to be as precise and as relevant as of this date. This is before the first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. As a reminder, a French politician once said that promises by candidates only engage those who listen to them. With that as a reminder, let’s start the topic. Maybe first, we can talk about the official platform. As of today, there is an official platform if we go to the page of the candidate, Donald J. Trump, there is a 20-point page, and there is a more detailed PDF as well on the Trump Republican platform. Some of our points will try to leverage what is on this official platform page, and we will also, of course, try to leverage what was done when Donald Trump was president, because sometimes actions speak louder than words. We also pick what we have heard from the candidates on the trail, if it diverts or if it adds to that platform. Bertrand Schmitt On the other side, VP Harris’ platform is not there. As of August 28, there is no official platform on her website, which, to be frank, it’s scary because if you cannot hold a candidate to their promise after they are elected, that’s a tough place to be. Obviously, she’s part of the Biden-Harris administration, so we will leverage for discussion what was done by her administration, what was also planned by her administration, and we will highlight whatever has been shared by her, since she’s running as a candidate. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Well, okay. That’s a great start. But based on speeches—obviously, Vice President Harris is in office right now, so she’s been part of a platform—based on what analysts’ say, we’ve looked at a bunch of comparisons across the board for where they stand on a variety of issues. Maybe we start with economic policy overall, and talk a little bit about how we see the Biden-Harris administration, and obviously what things have happened around there. We will later discuss other topics like taxes, labour, perspectives, for example, on gig working, immigration, antitrust, and a variety of other topics. The economic policy overall piece that we will share at the beginning is very high-level, as you will see, then we will go in de

Did we go from a broad bubble to a gen AI bubble? What is the current state of AI and generative AI? What has been commoditized and what is still distinctive? What does the future hold? Navigation: Intro (01:34) The State of AI / gen AI On the negative side On the positive side Our take Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Welcome to Tech Deciphered, episode 57. This episode will be about generative AI, and we will be asking the question, “Are we in a generative AI bubble?” Bertrand Schmitt In our last episode, we talked about AI, what was the latest happening in terms of endpoints, PCs, Macs, iPhones, and is it a risk? Is it a benefit? Today, we’ll talk about what’s happening with GenAI. Is it overhyped? Is it too much investment? On the plus side, we’ll be wondering, okay, maybe it’s not a bubble after all, or even if it’s one, is it such an issue because basically is it laying the foundation for a new stage, a new scale of AI for an act two of generative AI. Good to talk to you today, Nuno. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Nice to talk to you as well, Bertrand. I’ll start with my answer. It is a bubble and it isn’t. I’ll come back to that. I’ll leave you guys on that cliffhanger. Let’s start maybe a little bit with where we are in the state of AI and GenAI. Are we at commodity level or not? Adoption levels that we’re seeing in the market. Interesting report from McKinsey. Some around the state of AI, they did over 1,300 interviews. It was really a survey format around AI and GenAI adoption. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Some, like the conclusions, increased adoption of AI in at least one business function. Over the last year, this dramatic increase. I’m not really sure. Everyone that said, yes, we’re using it is actually using it. I take that with a grain of salt. This is self-reported, again, and so everyone has to be using GenAI, but everyone’s aware of it. I’m sure there’s an increase in adoption for sure. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The second piece that I feel is a little bit more exciting is what are the functional areas of companies that are using AI and generative AI more actively? Maybe not super mega surprising marketing and sales, which is core to some companies, but relatively support function. A little bit surprising to me that people are seeing product in our service development as number two. Surprising to me that software engineering is so low. Again, maybe no software engineer has actually filled in anything around that. That’s why it’s so low or middle of the board, or they don’t know what their engineers are doing, really, which is also interesting. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Then very low on strategy and corporate finance were business analysis, triangulation of data, or using ChatGPT, et cetera, I would have taken a little bit for granted that people would be using it. A bit surprising on that. Just feel it’s an interesting… Again, self-reported, it’s a survey. Some interesting conclusions on both sides in terms of the functions, et cetera. Some the conclusions as well on the rapid ascendancy of generative AI. Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, for me, what I’m quite impressed, I must say, is how fast generative AI has picked up. I don’t think I remember any new technologies that move so fast in terms of adoption, because here we are already talking about adoption metrics. I mean, it moved from nowhere in 2022, 33% in 2023, 65% in 2024. Basically, as high as the adoption of AI, the general AI adoption took seven years to get there. Bertrand Schmitt Here it’s two years. I’m not sure I remember any technologies that move so fast in terms of adoption. It took years and years for smartphone to get there. It took 5, 10 years for cloud computing to get there. It’s really fast, I must say for me, is my first reaction. Bertrand Schmitt In terms of function, marketing, I’m not surprised. That’s where you can use generative AI to generate content relatively easily. It’s not mission-critical content, it’s content you can review. At the same time, it can give you some clear benefits in terms of moving pretty fast and needing less resources. I guess for some other function like software engineering, I think right now, I guess the biggest issue is that you cannot trust it. It’s not something that you are ready t