Future Ventures: Scaling with Clarity

Send us Fan Mail Juho Risku, after 30 years across different roles, founded Butterfly Ventures, a unique venture capital firm. Previously, he was a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, raising capital and nearly going bankrupt. Now, he leads a leading Nordics investor in deep tech and hardware with over 100 portfolio companies and multiple funding rounds since 2012. This conversation reveals Juh...

Send us Fan Mail Most founders try to scale revenue by adding tools. Scott Finkelstein argues they're solving the wrong problem. After four decades in sales, $6 billion in career deals, and a stint as Chief Revenue Officer at PeopleFax, Scott has seen the same pattern destroy growth-stage companies again and again: founders hit a million in revenue, panic, and hire a VP of Sales to fix what&a...

Send us Fan Mail Stan Sirakov, a General Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures with 15+ years of venture experience, has invested in 150+ startups since 2012, mainly in regions with limited institutional VC. He founded a fintech marketplace in 2007 and helped launch Bulgaria's first incubator in 2009. His expertise covers Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Poland, and more. This conversation...

Send us Fan Mail Ivar Skårset, CTO of ENEnergy, is tackling the overlooked challenge of replacing fossil fuels in sectors that can't run on electricity. Coming from the Norwegian oil industry, he sought renewable fuels for heavy industry.  Twenty years later, the issue persists: electricity makes up 20% of global energy, while 80% involves industries and vehicles that don't electrify qui...

Send us Fan Mail Mike Solow is the co-founder of 99 Proof, a boutique investment firm supporting and scaling emerging beverage alcohol brands. With over two decades of experience, he has advised more than 200 entrepreneurs in business development, sales leadership, and capital strategy. Mike works at the intersection of operators and investors within one of the most competitive and often misunders...

Send us Fan Mail Simon Zadek has over four decades shaping sustainability in capital, policy, and markets, from the 1992 Rio Summit to ethical businesses like Ben & Jerry's and The Body Shop, battles over global supply chains, advising Chinese regulators, and senior roles at the UN and G20. He founded AccountAbility and NatureFinance to measure corporate accountability and how markets vie...

Send us Fan Mail Ben Klepacki is the co-founder and CEO of WestGen Technologies, a Calgary-based hybrid power company that reduces up to 99% of methane venting at oil and gas sites while improving economics. A professional engineer, he started on Canada's largest wind farm but shifted focus from alternative energy to oil and gas after realizing fixing the existing system could have a greater...

Send us Fan Mail Amit Jain has 20 years of experience building and scaling companies across Europe, Southeast Asia, India, and beyond. As Managing Partner at StartupBay, a Singapore-based accelerator with a presence in the Czech Republic, he has helped many founders enter global markets. He previously held leadership roles at Vodafone, developing SME and global strategies and founding ventures. Hi...

Send us Fan Mail At 16, Vincent Kuiper received a €50 brokerage account from his father for his birthday. He become interested in finance, studying quantitative finance and accounting. He then became an equity analyst at a private bank in Amsterdam, spent three years at H2 Equity Partners, where he explored 35 to 40 niche industries and managed a buy-and-build program. After earning an MBA at IE B...

Send us Fan Mail Ankit Anand doesn't fit the typical venture capital mold. He started his career as a physics teacher in India, moved to Europe to work on gravitational wave research at ETH Zurich, co-founded a medical technology company, and only then — after years of operating and angel investing — ended up as Founding Partner at Riceberg Ventures. Today, Riceberg backs breakthrough deep te...

Send us Fan Mail Debneel Mukherjee is the kind of investor most founders never get access to — a former CPA turned self-taught coder turned operator turned venture capitalist, now running Decacorn. VC from Singapore, with roughly 85% of his portfolio deployed in the United States. His career spans nearly three decades across banking, fintech operations, and global private tech investing, and he&ap...

Send us Fan Mail Robin Smith, a 20-year enterprise software veteran, has worked through all ownership models—bootstrapped, venture-backed, private equity, and public. Most recently, as COO of a PE-backed portco with 1,000+ employees, he led over €200 million in acquisitions during an 18-month roll-up. Now in his mid-40s, he left that world to pursue entrepreneurship through acquisition and found t...

Send us Fan Mail Kim Anders Odhner is the Managing Partner for Europe and Asia at Unovis Asset Management, a leading alternative protein investment fund. Before relocating to Amsterdam, Kim spent 25 years in Southeast Asia, developing expertise in emerging-markets private equity — backing early-stage companies, staying involved post-investment, and understanding food systems across diverse economi...

Send us Fan Mail Dr. Henry Erdlei is a physician-scientist pushing the boundaries of cancer immunotherapy. An alumnus of Charité Medical School and a researcher at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Henry has dedicated years to engineering immune cells to hunt and destroy tumors — and he is now applying that expertise to GoCART Therapeutics, a biotech startup developing a mo...

Send us Fan Mail EP004 — Charles Cormier on Systems, Cold Email, and Why Most Founders Get Fundraising Wrong  Charles Cormier is a founder who doesn’t wait for permission. As CEO of RaasRocket and founder of GTM Ventures and the Podbuyer podcast network, he’s learned that fundraising today is just as much about the systems you build as the people you know. In this episode, he sits down with Maxim...

Send us Fan Mail Oded Agam | NextLeap Ventures — Deep Tech Investing, the Intel AI Miss, and Building Innovation Ecosystems Oded Agam is one of those rare investors who has actually built what he now funds. With 35 years spanning Israeli startups, Fortune 50 strategic planning at Intel, and early-stage deep tech investing through NextLeap Ventures, Oded brings an operator's lens to every deal...

Send us Fan Mail From Combat Tours to Term Sheets: Paul Claxton on Founders, Capital, and AI Guest: Paul Anthony Claxton, Managing Partner, Digerati Investments About This Episode Paul Anthony Claxton didn't follow the usual route into venture capital. He served four combat tours in Iraq as a United States Marine — including leading a command intelligence center where he observed the early da...

Send us Fan Mail From EdTech Exit to AI Agents: Scaling on Your Own Terms with David Kofoed Wind  Guest: David Kofoed Wind ·(Founder of Agentwork)  David Kofoed Wind has accomplished what most founders only talk about — building two companies from scratch , taking them through Y Combinator , scaling them responsibly without overextending on headcount , and selling one of them. He's a mathemat...

Send us Fan Mail Ray Fitzpatrick, Founder & CEO, Profitual   Ray Fitzpatrick spent ten years writing checks to startups as Director of Investments at NBIF — New Brunswick's pre-seed venture capital fund — and observed the same issue recurring across hundreds of companies. Founders excelled at developing products but struggled to grasp their own finances. This wasn’t due to laziness, but b...