Charlie Songhurst

I would say it's probably entrepreneurs in markets that are non-obvious.

And I don't mean because their end market is non-obvious.

It's people addressing global problems, but in some secondary city in Romania.

because capital markets at that stage are just not efficient enough to find them.

There's a famous company, UiPath, I think now worth about 10 billion, that came out of Romania and sort of is a paradigmatic example of that.

I think if you were to say, where is there a core option, it's probably something in crypto.

It may exist or it may not exist.

I think one of the great questions is, is everything in that space now out of this exciting like-off space, or is it at the Google and Amazon stage?

That's a very, very hard question to answer in foresight, irritatingly obvious in hindsight.

But it does seem there's a probability mass of something being very big there because there's something about finance where it's demarcated by nation state, even though it's a pure electron good.

And so anything that's just pure numbers in the sky should actually be globally scalable.

But it isn't because of the existing numbers.

finance regulatory environment and the existing historical paths, sort of banks when they were physical institutions.

That makes me think this globalization of finance has a potential for multiple trillion dollar market cap companies over the next decades.

It is amazing that if you look at the top 10, maybe even the top 20 by now, companies in the world by market cap, they're exclusively US and China.

This is an absolutely fascinating stat and says so much about the last 30 years.

There's a very sort of dark line of thought, which says one of the best things about Europe is that you probably have a less geopolitical risk than

any other place.

There's something about the horrors of Somme and Verdun and Stalingrad that makes it sort of unimaginable for Germany and France to have a conflict, whereas I think it is much more imaginable to have China, India, US, those sort of countries have conflict.

So in some ways, one of the things you have in Europe is a sort of absence of systemic risk of wipeout.