January to April 2025 - My Creandum Adventure
This January, I embarked on a new adventure that took me from Stanford to the heart of European venture capital. After hearing about Creandum at a London Thanksgiving dinner in November, I applied almost on a whim, and by late December I learned I’d be joining as a Visiting Analyst, splitting my time between London and Stockholm.
In London, I was welcomed by Nelson, Hanel, and my mentor Maria Raga, who pushed me to think critically about the next era of consumer technology. Together, we worked on a project mapping how consumer investing is shifting in Europe (as well as globally!), and what the rise of generative AI means for the future of consumer VC.
We set our analysis against the backdrop of earlier consumer waves. PCs, the Web, Social, and then Mobile and Cloud each unlocked huge adoption but eventually hit limits: rising customer acquisition costs, longer payback periods, and user fatigue from app clutter. Looking at these previous innovation waves, we saw that Gen-AI looked like the next steep curve because it has the potential to remove many of those barriers.
As we did more research, one data point struck us: although B2C funding in Europe has grown fivefold in the past decade, its share of total VC has dropped from 31% to 16% showing that Europe has clearly tilted toward B2B. And yet consumer brands still account for more than half of EU GDP, and many of the world’s most valuable companies are consumer-facing. With that, we saw a obvious paradox: if Europe wants to produce global consumer champions, the ecosystem must keep backing them.
Our work centered on four megatrends shaping this new era:
Experiential technology: where interfaces fade into the background and AI enhances rather than interrupts daily life.
From push to pull experiences: with AI agents and plugins dynamically shaping consumer journeys, replacing static destination apps.
Hyper-personalisation: lowering CAC, boosting retention, and raising LTV, making consumer businesses as investable as B2B.
Agentic AI: the foundation of this new cycle, with software adapting to the user rather than the other way around.
In Stockholm, these themes felt even more tangible. The city’s dense ecosystem of founders and operators helps explain why Sweden has produced more unicorns per capita than almost anywhere else. Conversations often returned to the weaknesses of the last era - the “scaling trap” of unsustainable CAC and app fatigue - and how AI’s ability to personalise and automate could help consumer businesses escape it.
We also explored how creation, consumption, and interaction are converging. AI lowers barriers to creation, blurs the line between consuming and producing, and makes interaction itself a form of content. Cultural shifts that once played out in manuscripts or social platforms now emerge through the very architecture of digital products.
Across both London and Stockholm, my growth lay in learning to ask sharper questions. How does data ownership translate into defensibility? What new business models are enabled when personalisation is cheap and ubiquitous? What role will European startups play in shaping this so-called Web4 era? And perhaps the most open-ended question of all: as agentic AI reshapes the landscape, what will be the new Instagrams, the platforms that define how we live and connect in the decade ahead?
By early April, it was time to return to Stanford to finish my senior year. I left Europe with more than just exposure to startups. I carried back a clearer toolkit for thinking about the future of consumer technology, one defined by generative AI, experiential design, and the merging of creation, consumption, and interaction - and with the conviction that Europe, despite shifting capital flows, has a central role to play in shaping that future.
🌟🌟🌟 Some resources that I used during this time:
Maria’s incredible wisdom and passion for consumer which you can follow in her Substack alongside Mal Minhas and Fernando Fanton.
A16z articles and podcast:
And now some pictures from this adventure!
