Episodes
Christian Vollmann - founder and CEO of ⁠Carbon One⁠. Founded in 2022 they have raised approximately $14M to date with the mission to lower the green premium on green methanol and thus reduce the world’s dependency on oil, gas and coal. Their aim is to establish circular carbon economies in three hard-to-abate industries: container shipping, aviation and chemical production. Prior to founding Carbon One, Christian has built, sold and IPO-ed multiple business. First one, called iLove for...
Published 11/06/24
Colin Hanna - Partner at Balderton Capital. Balderton is multi-stage venture firm with over twenty years of expertise in aiding European founders from the initial seed stage through to IPO. According to Dealroom they have invested in over 30 companies valued at over a billion euros - among them Revolut, Sinch and Waye among many others. Recently they’ve raised $1.3 billion, divided into a $615 million early-stage fund and a $685 million growth fund for more mature companies. The capital...
Published 10/22/24
George Henry - General Partner at LocalGlobe - the seed fund which is according to Dealroom figures, EMEA’s most successful investor in unicorns at seed stage. LocalGlobe invests across Europe and some of its notable investments include Wise, Improbable, Motorway, Tide and Automata. George himself focuses on finding the next generation of industry-transforming businesses to serve two over-looked sectors: the creative economy and SMEs. His investments range across several sectors and include...
Published 10/08/24
Lukas Saari - CEO and Co-founder of Tandem Health. Tandem is building an AI co-pilot for healthcare practitioners. Their first product is an ambient scribe that listens during the patient-doctor consultation, transcribes the conversation and generates the draft of the medical note. They were founded only 1 year ago, and recently closed a ~$10M seed round, led by Northzone, to accelerate their expansion from Sweden to across Europe. Before Tandem, Lukas has worked at Spotify with machine...
Published 09/25/24
Florian Brand co-founder and Co-CEO of ATAI Life Sciences. ATAI was founded in 2018 and is a global, listed, biopharma company with the vision to heal mental health disorders so that everyone, everywhere can live a more fulfilled life. They were one of the pioneers to use psilocybin in treating mental health and they have raised around $400M equity and debt from Petter Thiel and other investors to build a portfolio of compounds like MDMA, DMT and others, to go through clinical trials and...
Published 09/17/24
Michael Lazarenko, founder and CEO of Embedd. With Embedd they provide a unified framework so that all the components coming from tens of different manufacturers can communicate with each other on the circuit board. They raised $1.2M Eur pre-seed round led by Cocoa in May last year and now they are ready and gearing up to raise their seed round. During this episode we discuss how they took 350 meetings to raise the pressed, the importance of storytelling when of explaining something...
Published 09/11/24
Alexandre Momeni - Partner at General Catalyst. Alex specialises in healthcare and AI and has been instrumental in bringing some of Europe’s biggest AI deals to General Catlayst’s door. For background 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 familiar with including Airbnb, Stripe, Discord and Snap and in Europe they have made more than 20 investments in companies like the...
Published 08/21/24
Robert Jäkle is a Partner at Visionaries Club. Visionaries is a leading European early-stage VC fund with offices in London and Berlin. The fund is backed by over 30 unicorn founders - such as the founders of UiPath, Flixbus, Miro and Skype - as well as leading European family business entrepreneurs. Bobby joined the fund on day one and has helped build it over the past five years. He now co-leads the firm's seed fund and has made several investments in Fintech, Compliance, HR, and...
Published 08/14/24
Aleksander Larsen is the Co-Founder, Chairman, and COO of Sky Mavis, the company behind the popular crypto game Axie Infinity and the Ronin Network. SkyMavis is the breakout company at the intersection of gaming and blockchain, they’ve raised around 300 million dollars according to Dealroom and Crunchbase from top investors like a16z, Accel and Paradigm. During this episode we discuss about Aleksnaders’s move to Vietnam to pursue the opportunity at the intersection of gaming and blockchain,...
Published 08/07/24
Annie Duke is a Special Partner focused on Decision Science at First Round Capital Partners, a seed stage venture fund. Annie is a prolific author in the decision making space having written "Thinking in Bets" - a national bestseller, "How to decide: Simple tools for making better choices” and the latest book “Quit - the power of knowing when to walk away”. As a former professional poker player, she has won more than 4 million dollars, won a World Series of Poker bracelet and is the only...
Published 05/21/24
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...
Published 05/14/24
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...
Published 05/07/24
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...
Published 04/30/24
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...
Published 04/23/24
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...
Published 04/11/24
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...
Published 03/19/24
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...
Published 03/04/24
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...
Published 02/15/24
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...
Published 01/18/24
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...
Published 01/11/24
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,...
Published 12/14/23
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...
Published 12/05/23
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...
Published 11/14/23