Creandum

I haven't said much recently about what I'm working on, but since this article is out now, I might as well say a few things. ➡️

We are looking for more amazing researchers and engineers to join our team. EquiLibre Technologies is a frontier AI trading research lab. We train our own foundational models, use our own RL algorithms, and trade our own money. The proof is in the pudding. [THREAD] equilibre.ai techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/the…

14/ The best thing about us @creandum isn't the portfolio or the brand - but that we actually LOVE each other. Founders feel it the second they walk in the room. Grateful, thrilled, and humbled by our team (and big kudos to events!!!!!!) and blessed to represent our presence in the US💚

13/ to close it out, we got some vinyls involved and hosted all the @creandum family + our favorite ecosystem people at Charmaine's for drinks

12/ beyond the talks: yoga, kayaking, running, biking, duffy boats, sauna, Sausalito strolls. the summit was the scaffolding. the relationships are the point!

11/ alongside the mainstage, our very own @HanelBaveja broke out our founders into small rooms of ~12 founders, hosted by some great @creandum friends. 1/ Matt Wilson (Jack & Jill) on building in a post-Opus 4.5 world 2/ @ypatil125 (@appliedcompute) on lessons from building Codex 3/ @andrewdsouza (@boardyai) on running 1,000 FTEs vs 25 4/ @JULIOMARTINEZG (@Abacum_ai ) on cracking US GTM 5/ @DavideGrieco (@clay_gtm) on AI-native growth teams 6/ Wouter Van Den Brande (@DecagonAI) on AI-native GTM 7/ @lindh (Kive) on productivity per employee 8/ @MadhavanSF on monetizing AI products 9/ @TajTalks (@CoreWeave) on enterprise AI

10/ @lukeharries (head of growth @ElevenLabs) closed us out - by far the most tactical session of the summit Luke is one of those rare growth leaders who's gone from 0 → 1 → 100 in record time. Took ElevenLabs from $2m → $500m ARR. now the company is valued at $11bn. Luke had no growth background when he started. 3 lessons: 1/ Launch and launch again. New models = new capabilities = new viral moments (even if it’s unlocking European founders default to underselling - push every T3 launch toward T2. his formula in the picture 2/ Build growth systems, not campaigns. Litmus tests: if you go on holiday, does your channel still work? in the AI era, does it keep improving without you? 3/ Enablement engineering is the unlock. Give marketers @Lovable and @n8n_io, but gate it with a small team of friendly engineers who handle security reviews and approvals. Otherwise you get non engineers pushing untested code to @salesforce Advice for the europeans in the room: "Be a little louder"

9/ our very own @creandum VP @filiphmark moderated a design panel with @felixhaas (Lovable) and @iansilber (head of design @ OpenAI). A few takeaways: 1/@OpenAI's design lead said generative UI isn't ready. "nothing is truly generated on the fly. it's too slow, too unpredictable." imagine ChatGPT looking different every time you opened it. nobody wants that. the unlock is personalized but predictable - Spotify-style, where content adapts but the UI stays the same 2/ @Lovable users have stopped browsing the App Store. they just build the app themselves - finance, scheduling, comms, all in one place. the middle layer is collapsing in real time Felix: "building a product today is incredibly easy. building something people fall in love with is harder”

8/ on day 2, our very own @fredrik_ opened the floor to our portco founder @alanchang (@fuseenergy) hosted by @collision (@stripe) Couldn't have set this up better - @fuseenergy was at a few millions in ARR not that long ago and now a $5bn company. @stripe processes ~2% of global GDP and is up ~100x in volume over the last decade. 3 insights from John: 1/ Good company management is overdetermined. There aren't 1000 right ways - there's basically one: customer obsession, pushed against organizational entropy 2/ Stripe's agentic commerce bet starts with developers, not consumers. Vibe-coded apps today can do almost everything except the last step: registering the domain, paying for hosting, calling a real service. that's where Stripe is unwinding 20 years of anti-bot infrastructure to let Codex actually transact. the downstream is the real story: agents are anti-aggregator. they surface niche brands that couldn't reach the top of Amazon or Google. great news for the long tail, less great for the existing search layer 3/ Stablecoins are no longer a 2030 thesis - ~25% of Stripe's payment volume now flows through Bridge On building startups: “Markets are fair. If you deliver for customers, make them happy, follow through on your promises - that mode of happy customers compounds”

7/ Beautiful dinner at Shack15 with the SF skyline and golden gate bridge as the backdrop. Had very own @johanbrenner and @Kathi_Wilhelm give a heartfelt speech. Got @peteflint and our very own data scientist in resident Gustav involved to chat about network effects and data infrastructure in the age of AI @fritjofsson @shelgesson

6/ We had @juliajchou from @AbridgeHQ showcase her operator discipline. Abridge serves 250+ health systems sitting on 2bn+ clinician conversations a year, solving the #1 driver of physician burnout in america. 3 insights from her: 1. Make AI access frictionless from day one. Every single member gets unlimited Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor. the unlock is access itself 2. Enablement is a daily ritual, not a policy doc. The company pushes for AI demos at every all-hands and info sharing across internal slack channels (#ai-hype-machine, #ai-tools-for-all). They have 30 context agents fan out across RSS/HN/Reddit/X each morning to surface the top 5 AI posts relevant to their space 3. Before each hire, install an AI headcount test. Can AI close this gap in 6 months? Is this role trust-dependent or workflow-dependent? Are we hiring for today's ceiling or tomorrow's floor? Her line: "How you build is what you build"

5/ our very own @simonschmincke set us up for Tom Blomfield’s (@t_blom, YC, prev @ Monzo) talk, which landed personal for many entrepreneurs in the room. Tom built Monzo from "this'll never work" to 25% of UK adults having an account. Almost every investor on his cap table was American - and that’s not pure luck. A few things we learned: 1/ Tom showed us some sayings german and english people use to put ambitious people in their place “tall poppy”, “above your station”, “who does he think he is”, “the bigger they are the harder they fall” - Americans don't really have equivalents, the American default for ambition is "tell me more" 2/ Permission to dream is the SF unlock. "in the UK they say you're an idiot. here they say - how can I help" 3/ You don't have to relocate everything, but sales has to be here. Tom watched Monzo's American cap table form because american capital believed before british capital did Takeaway: Take more risk

4/ Next up, our @creandum founder @staffanhelgesson hosted @AppliedInt CEO Qasar Younis (@qasar). Qasar is the definition of intentionality. Every detail at @AppliedInt is engineered, from culture to counter-positioning. they now build for everything from Porsches to fighter jets. 3 insights from him: 1/ Culture is just the way two people behave with each other. Everything else is downstream - feedback, decisions, disagreements. the smallest-unit interactions, multiplied across the whole org 2/ Founder culture is not a values doc. Don’t wait for a scheduled all-hands to address culture problems - tackle issues head on immediately. 3/ Being an outsider, especially in Silicon Valley, can help because you’re less constrained by what everyone thinks is possible. We’re entering a period where small teams can do things that previously required enormous organizations, and that creates opportunities for founders who are willing to think in a new way.

3/ Our very own @nicckopp and @creandum gp @ @specht_p kicked us off on winning in the US Nic is the definition of relentlessness, and enabling CFOs to go for zero-day close at Rillet is the testament. 3 insights from him: 1/ Move where the gravity is, and move fast. After many redeyes between NY and SF, Nic decided to move his whole company and family within a few weeks. If you're truly serious about the US, you need to. you can't run it from the back seat. 2/ Ride the micro-hype cycles. Sometimes, being European defaults founders to undersell. Don’t hold back. When Opus 4.6 dropped (on a Saturday), Rillet had 1,000 people sign up for a "Vibe Coding for Finance" webinar by Tuesday. This has become a weekly live workshop rillet.com/vibes 3/ The bar for early hires needs to be exceptionally high in a way most founders aren't willing to enforce. Rillet tests for scrappiness, drive to its mission, and deep AI curiosity, not pedigree

2/ at @creandum, we’re fortunate to have been early believers in @eldsjal @Spotify, @bernhardsson @modal, christian @traderepublic, @antonosika @Lovable, robin @bfl_ml, @nicckopp @RilletHQ, @emileifrem @neo4j, and many more a few of our more recent portfolio additions that flew in for the week (and they're all hiring!) 1/ youngest CEO of a federally chartered US bank in 140 years @FerdiDabitz @augustus_bank 2/ co-author of DeepStack, the first program to beat pros at no-limit poker @Lifrordi @ EquiLibre 3/ Revolut's 5th employee, now running a $5bn company @alanchanguk @fuseenergy 4/ Founder of a company automating structural and MEP engineering to redesign mission-critical federal facilities and military infrastructure (dm me for more info) 5/ Special advisor to the UK Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street @Michael_JRYoung @LindusHealth

1/ in January, I joined the investment team @creandum to help build out our presence in South Park and get behind the relentless entrepreneurs building the future Last month, we hosted our SF Founder Summit here, flying in ~100 entrepreneurs from the @creandum portfolio, immersing them into what it means to be at the nexus of this AI revolution and what it takes to conquer the US. we’re really proud and excited to share some highlights to the world cc: @_fredrik @specht_p @johanbrenner @shelgesson @fritjofsson @simonschmincke @HanelBaveja @Kathi_Wilhelm @richardkeuntje @filiphmark & team

Some personal news - Polymarket has acquired Craft Agents, and part of the Craft team is joining Polymarket. I'll be leading Product Engineering, with the goal of building one of the best product and design engineering teams in the world. I'm incredibly excited for what's next.

Introducing Europe's 50 hottest seed-stage companies. euroseed50.com

𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆, 𝘄𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝘄𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗻. 3 announcements that will change everything for @superscale_ai 🔥💬🚀 First, we have closed a $5M Pre Seed round led by @creandum (Investors in Lovable, Spotify, Trade Republic, depop, Amie and more) with participation from S16VC and Interface Capital. As we are assembling the best group of investors imaginable around Superscale, we are beyond excited to welcome them in one of Europe’s fastest fundraises ever, starting to term sheet in 6 days 🏎️ Second, we are launching Superscale’s product. As of today, everyone can sign up and start creating marketing content, just by prompting. It is a product you have to experience. We are starting with Social content focused on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. Discover all features in the video. Third, a special announcement for our first customers: Comment “Magic” on this post or on X and we will DOUBLE your credits for the first month, that is literally 100s of ads you can create, starting at $49 / month. Today, you will discover prompting to create your marketing content. Welcome to a new era, welcome to Superscale. Comment “Magic” for 2x credits on your first month 🚀🔥

Honestly, @lovable just breaks all scaling rules. The fastest-growing startup in Europe. 🤯 $17.5M ARR in 3 months 💰 $2.1M ARR added every week 👀 85% Day 30 retention- better than ChatGPT 🚀 30,000 new apps built every single day Just the start and my 5 Key takeaways with @antonosika 👇