Oliver Holle - co-founder, CEO and Managing Partner at SpeedInvest, a leading European early-stage VC. Starting in 2011 as an angel fund, today Speedinvest became a 1B Eur European powerhouse investing in startups at the earliest phases. With their sector focused teams across Deeptech, Fintech, Marketplace and Consumer among others and operational teams, they deeply support founders in their journey. During this episode we discuss about the similarities between the AI wave with the iPhone...

Carmen Alfonso Rico - founder and GP of Cocoa VC. Cocoa is a VC fund investing between $250k-$500k angel checks at pre-seed/seed and how they like to say it “they don’t give a damn about ownership stake”. In less than 3 years she invested in some of the most talented founders from Arcane, Twirl and Plumery just to name a few, co-investing with some of the best investors in Europe and globally. During this episode we talk about why they can win competitive deals and be on the same side of...

Bernt Øivind Børnich - co-founder and CEO of 1X, an AI and robotics company producing androids to benefit society and meet the world’s labor demand. One of the most exciting companies in Europe that stands at the forefront of AI robotics. Their mission is to create androids that work among people and have a new approach to embodied learning for data collection. They recently raised over 100 million euros from EQT Ventures, Sam Altmans' Open AI fund and other notable global investors to...

Our guest today is Kaushik Subramanian, partner at EQT Ventures, investing primarily in product-led technology businesses. From offices in Stockholm, London, Berlin, Paris and New York, EQT invests in and supports entrepreneurs building the next-generation of global winners from a 1.1B Euro fund. Prior to joining EQT, Kaushik was at Stripe and Meta where he built and scaled several products to global reach and generating billions. During this episode we discuss how to choose your design...

Julius is a certified coach and has coached over 150 entrepreneurs backed by Atomico, a16z and Creandum among others, has trained over 100 venture investors and just recently released his first single on Spotify. During this episode we discuss about the moment he decided to become a coach, the learnings along the coaching journey and what are the most common challenges founders and investors have, when they reach out to him. Wanna join a peer-support community for founders? Join us at...

Dr. Nicole Paulk is the CEO and founder of the viral gene therapy startup Siren Biotechnology. Prior to being a founder she was a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF in San Francisco, California where her lab worked at the forefront of developing and engineering enabling technologies to make viruses better medicines. During this episode we discuss the evolution of modern medicine from ingesting medicinal leaves to gene therapy, we also discuss how she plans to...

Bharat Vasan, Partner and COO at The Production Board. Bharat is overseeing the consumer technology portfolio and actively invests in, advises and serves on the boards of early-stage businesses. He is one of Silicon Valley’s most battle-tested and proven CEOs and operators, with multiple successful exits and over $500M dollars raised. During this episode we discuss about some trends in consumer tech around AI and food, how they asses founders when investing and how he struggled with...

Bjarne Kveim Lie - Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Verdane. Verdane invests in technology companies with equity tickets between 8 and 150m Euro, they have Eur 5B of committed capital and over 140 investments since 2003. They have a flexible mandate and can make both minority and majority investments. In addition to making individual investments they also act as a solution provider for GPs that seek liquidity and have completed over 50 so called ‘secondary directs’ over the...

James Currier - Founding Partner at NfX. James is a five-time Founder, an angel investor in DoorDash, Lyft, and Patreon, and a Founding Partner at the venture capital firm, NfX. Before becoming an investor, James was the co-founder and CEO of Tickle, one of the internet’s first successful user-generated-content companies. Tickle grew to the 18th largest website in the world with over 150 million registered users — before they were acquired in 2004 by Monster for $110 million. It was during...

Zeynep Yavuz - Partner at General Catalyst. General Catalyst, has $28bn assets under management and is one of the world’s best known VC firms. They backed some of greatest businesses that you probably are very familiar with including Airbnb, Stripe, Discord and Snap among many many others others. Prior to joining GC, Zeynep worked as an operator focused on strategy and product at World Remit and invested at growth stages at TA Associates. At GC she focuses on fintech and crypto. During...

Chris Smith - Managing Partner of Playfair. (brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Seedrs⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) Playfair is a generalist fund with a contrarian approach to pre-seed technology investing. Based in London, Playfair invests across the UK and Europe with an intentionally high conviction, low volume approach: making 6-8 investments a year and preserving time, capital and resources to help companies post-investment. Playfair has backed more than 70 companies across two funds including Thought Machine, Andela,...

Rex Woodbury - founder and Managing Partner of Daybreak, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York City. (brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠Seedrs⁠⁠⁠⁠) Before founding Daybreak, Rex was a Partner at Index Ventures the premier venture capital firm that invested in Adyen, Revolut, Roblox, Discord, and Figma among others. Rex focuses on the application layer of technology, often investing in internet, software, and marketplace businesses with the potential for viral adoption. He also writes...

Kirsty Grant - Managing Director at Seedrs - Europe’s leading private investing platform. Under her leadership, Seedrs has become the most active investor in early stage private companies in the UK, funding over 2,000 deals and participating in rounds totalling over £2.6 billion to date. This year, she played an instrumental role in launching Seedrs' EU regulated entity. During this episode we discuss the past and future of crowdfunding, how companies like Revolut and investors like...

Mark Kugel - co-founder and co-CEO of Yuri. (brought to you by ⁠⁠Seedrs⁠⁠) At Yuri they are sending payloads to space to take advantage of micro-gravity so they can build higher quality molecules and other useful biotech assets. Did you know that it is easier to print a heart in space as it has no gravity? During this episode we discuss how the CDTM (Center for Digital Technology and Management) cohort from 2014 produced more than Eur 15B from 24 students, including Hanno of Personio and...

Ciao ragazzi e ragazze, I am here with Franscesco Sciortino - co-founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion (brought to you by ⁠Seedrs⁠) Originally from Italy, his passion for physics and plasma, took him across the world from Imperial College London for undergrad, to EPFL in Switzerland for his masters, before moving to MIT in Boston for his PhD. Beginning of 2023, Francesco raised a 7.5M Euro pre-seed round from Plural, UVC Partners and High-Tech Grunderfonds, and co-founded Proxima Fusion a...

Mikkel Skarnager - co-founder and CEO of the stealth startup Spektr. (brought to you by Brevo and Seedrs) Mikkel is a second-time founder, prior to Spektr he was the founder and CEO of HelloFlow, an innovative no-code, drag-and-drop builder for client onboarding, monitoring, and digital workflow solutions --> orchestration layer for business identity. In February 2022 only 2 years after founding the company they got an acquisition offer and sold to Trulioo for around ~50m Eur, a number I...

Fredrik Cassel - General Partner at Creandum. Creandum is a venture capital advisory firm with offices in Stockholm, San Francisco, London, and Berlin funding early stage entrepreneurs from a 450m euro fund. Fredrik has an exceptional track record having previously invested in several multibillion euro companies like Spotify, Kahoot!, Depop and Kry just to name a few. He doesn’t like to take the credit and attributes his success to the Creandum team. One Creandum as he likes to call...

Brought to you by Zoom and Brevo. If you like the show please check out the sponsors as they are the ones making it possible. Thank you! 🙏 Jevan Nagarajah - is the founder and CEO of Better Dairy. At Better Dairy they are using precision fermentation to produce the cheeses, yoghurts, ice creams, the type of products consumed and loved across the world but without having to use animals products. During this episode we discuss about the founding story and how they managed to raise more...

Brought to you by Zoom and Brevo. If you like the show please check out the sponsors as they are the ones making it possible. Thank you! 🙏 Mars Geuze is one of the co-founders of Hardt Hyperloop. Hardt Hyperloop is one of the leading teams in the world working to bring the concept of Hyperloop to life. The Hardt Hyperloop team is a talented and ambitious team coming from Delft University. They were building race cars before taking on the challenge of building a hyperloop. During this...

Antoine Moyroud - Partner at Lightspeed. Lightspeed is a venture capital firm focusing on multi-stage investments in the enterprise, consumer, and health sectors. Lightspeed invests in seed, early and growth-stage companies. For over twenty years Lightspeed has been the first investor and an early backer of some of the most innovative companies in the world like Snapchat, Carta and BetterUp among many others. During this episode we discuss about Antoine’s journey from failing Class...

Andre Retterath - Partner at Earlybird Capital, Lead of the EagleEye platform used for data driven sourcing and writing the popular newsletter Data-driven VC. With over 2 billion Euro under management, nine IPOs and 31 trade sales, Earlybird is one of the most established and active venture capital firms in Europe, having made investments in formidable companies like UiPath and N26 among others. Founded in 1997, Earlybird invests in all development and growth phases of technology...

Michel Elings is the founder of Vev. Michel, has a history of delivering successful products with over 100 million users and with Vev they plan to empower millions of freelancers and SMBs by providing the basic tech tools they need so they can smoothly run their business. Prior to Vev he founded and sold his first startup, Prss, to Apple and moved to Cupertino to help build Apple News. After returning to the Netherlands a couple of years later, he joined Booking to launch CityBook before...

Jakob Sons is the co-founder of Cansativa. Cansativa is building the largest cannabis platform in Europe and are offering the most desirable products and brands. Yummi! In 2022 they’ve raised a 15m dollar round from Snoopp Dogg's, Casa Verde VC firm and currently they have a 20m euro run rate. Well done guys! During this episode we discuss Jakobs transition from being a lawyer to founding a medical marijuana startup, his mindset of permanent improvement and the importance of deepwork and...

Our guest today is Andreas Helbig - Partner at Atomico. Atomico is the venture capital firm founded by the Niklas Zennstrom, one of the founders of Skype, and investing in disruptive technology companies from Series A onwards. They have an exceptional track record having previously invested in Supercell, Wolt, Sorare and Lilium just to name a few. During this episode we discuss about his journey as an investor from junior analyst at Project A to Partner at Atomico, what criteria they look...