Catch some of us in Copenhagen this coming weekend! We’re organizing the 2nd edition of the European defense tech hackathon in Denmark precisely because of their strategic position at the entrance to the Baltic Sea, and their support for Ukraine. Topics of interest will be maritime security and cyber!
🤼 People
The whole Munich Defense Tech Ecosystem - at EDTH x Helsing Munich meetup
This week the European Defense Tech Hub (aka me and Benjamin Wolba) organized the first defense tech meetup in Munich. We had about 50 people show up, mostly technical people, with defense interest or already working in the space. Thanks to our partners at Helsing, we had space and food. About 10 startups also pitched their ideas (dm me for a full list ;))
💼 Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
🚀 Companies
New Phase Metal - Rare earth magnets in the US
Status: Pre-Seed
Source: Network
Founders: Adam Powell, Artem Iurkovsky
Why it’s cool:
95% of neodymium magnets are produced in China today, and we are going to need a lot of them if we want to continue producing EVs and wind turbines and other electrical goods. New Phase wants to use a special recycling procedure called leaching-distillation which takes permanent magnet scraps and turns them into Nd.
[REDACTED] - 2D Materials manufacturing in the US
Status: Pre-Seed
Source: Network
Founders: Redacted
Why it’s cool:
We need to be able to produce 5G/6G and other tunable RF components efficiently in the US. Communications and connectivity are not yet solved, and chip manufacturing to enable the next wave thereof certainly isn’t!
💡 Ideas & Science
Principles by Ray Dalio
I think I first read it in 2018, but now re-reading it as a investor. Ray Dalio (founder and recurring CEO) of Bridgewater Associates lays out his principles for life and business. Principles are simple values, rules to live by and make decision making less cognitively straining. For example: “No Assholes!” is a great, simple rule when choosing who to work with.
Germany used to be the hot bed of industrialization and productivity, but a combination of complacency, outsourcing of critical capacities to China, a political attack on nuclear and general state-nonsense has put us at the back. The best we can hope for now is a call for a re-election as the Chancellor Olaf Scholz realizes firing the Minister of Finance for pushing his parties’ agenda might be a symptom of something important…
How will we know when AI is good? Evals! Or benchmark tests on which to let loose Claude, GPT and others. This one is specifically checking how close to world class mathematics problem solving AI models are, by eval company EpochAI. Terence Tao is quoted to have said several problems may resist AIs for years to come. The best AI so far had a success rate of ~2%. To be fair, these are extremely hard problems.