We talked to the father-and-son VC team who are launching a new fund to back European tech startups

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Joi Ito/Flickr (CC)/Index VenturesSaul Klein (left) and Robin Klein (right.) Saul and Robin Klein are a father and son team who have invested in some of Europe's biggest technology startups. Saul Klein also cofounded LoveFilm and startup accelerator Seedcamp, and was one of Skype's original executives. Now the pair are joining forces for their own venture capital fund: LocalGlobe, which they say will invest in startups at the seed stage across Europe. So far the fund has announced investments in online mortgage advisor Trussle and also Estonian job search app Jobbatical. Business Insider met with the Kleins at LocalGlobe's office in London to talk about Europe's technology potential, whether we're in a tech bubble, overvalued startups, artificial intelligence and Brexit. Robin Klein: The number of new companies being formed just keeps growing and growing and growing. We think seed capital of a kind that we provide is just fundamental to this ecosystem. It's what we've done for years, it's what we think we know, what we think we're good at. But it's never going to meet the aspirations of thousands of founders who are creating great companies. Saul Klein: On the UK/Europe side, as my Dad said, we've both been involved in the industry now for [a long time.] I started doing this in October 1993, so well over 20 years since we put The Telegraph online. You add innovations, the first e-commerce transaction in the UK was 1995. I then went off to the US and spent 1995 to 2002 in the US so I saw the US bubble burst. I didn't see the UK bubble burst. But we did invest in about eight companies at the time, including lastminute.com. In the US when we saw the bubble burst there, our fortunate seed investment in the US was a company called Pyro Labs which was Blogger which got sold to Google before the IPO. The bottom line is that we've both lived and worked through at least three or four very significant cycles where things have been amazing then things have been terrible and'no tech company will ever get funded again,' 'no company will ever go public.' 'Everyone's crazy, what are they're thinking?' 'This whole internet thing is just these stupid kids.' 'It's going to go away.' We've seen here in Europe and in the US these very, very significant cycles where the sentiment, whether it's media sentiment, investor sentiment, public market sentiment, corporate sentiment, [they] have all gone through massive crashes.

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