Beginner's Mind

Invest in the wrong startup and you lose one times your money. Miss the next Google and you lose ten thousand times. Most boards are built to avoid the first mistake. Venture capitalists play by different rules. They back the team before the market, read full agreement in the room as a warning sign, place small bets, double down on the ones that work and kill the rest. Then they give the winners f...

The trait a Silicon Valley AI investor rewards most in a management team has a name almost nobody uses: XQ. IQ brings the idea and EQ reads the people across the table. The execution quotient shows in something as small as how fast a team follows up after a meeting, and in her experience the people who score high on it have no patience for those who do not. Meanwhile the money in AI moves in waves...

In 2017 another investor told Ivy Nguyen that artificial intelligence was too small a niche to dedicate a fund to. More than ten thousand AI pitches later, every pitch deck says AI. Single funding rounds have grown larger than entire venture funds, and from the outside the companies that will matter look exactly like the ones a fast follower overtakes within three years. Ivy Nguyen is a Partner at...

A seed investor at Novo Holdings would rather read your rough idea than your finished pitch deck. Most founders spend a year building the deck, forming the team and waiting until the story holds together. By the time it is ready the science has moved, the money has gone somewhere else, and nobody told them the fund they were preparing for creates companies out of raw material. Marie Schroeder is a...

What does it mean when the most respected adviser in Silicon Valley tells you that you are the best chief executive he works with, while your company is heading straight into a wall? Bill Campbell said exactly that to Ben Horowitz. Campbell was advising Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt at the time, so Horowitz assumed the compliment was absurd. Campbell explained himself: there are plenty o...

What do you do on the morning when there are no good moves left? In March 2001, Ben Horowitz took Loudcloud public in the middle of the dot-com collapse. The bankers cut the price from ten dollars a share to six in the week of the offering. The day before the deal, Yahoo announced its chief executive was stepping down. Neither of the two banks that took the company public offered the traditional c...

What happens when the moment a company finally succeeds is the moment it becomes most likely to be destroyed? Most founders assume the market rewards the better product and protects what they built. The legal reality runs the other way. The dominant theory of the corporation treats a company as a financial instrument designed to enrich its shareholders, and treats everything else as optional. That...

What happens when the instinct to help a struggling company is exactly what prevents the strongest companies from succeeding? Venture capital forces investors to make decisions that can feel deeply uncomfortable: stop rescuing the weakest, concentrate scarce capital behind the most promising, and accept that most investments will fail. Deep tech intensifies this conflict. Investors must commit cap...

How can a company have the right numbers and still reach the wrong strategic conclusion? In 2017, Volkswagen’s chief executive mocked Tesla as one of the “world champions of big announcements.” At the time, Volkswagen sold roughly eleven million cars a year, while Tesla sold fewer than eighty thousand. The facts supported the criticism, but the conclusion missed the change already underway. That m...

Private companies are staying private longer, and that changes who gets liquidity, when, and why. Founders, employees, and early investors can wait a decade or more for an IPO or acquisition. Meanwhile, venture funds face growing pressure to return capital, and many of Europe's best companies struggle to access the growth capital needed to scale. In this conversation, Christian Soschner speak...

Only one in three eligible lung cancer patients receives the targeted therapy they should get. That is not a failure of science. It is a failure of delivery. After more than two decades of precision oncology, biopharma has never had better tools: cell and gene therapy, in vivo CAR-T, antibody-drug conjugates, AI-enabled diagnostics, organoids, multi-omics, and global clinical data. Yet too many br...

Some books explain how the world works. Influence explains why people move. Why someone takes the meeting. Why an investor leans in. Why a customer trusts. Why a team follows. Why a board stays stuck. Why a founder keeps defending a decision that stopped making sense months ago. Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is one of those books that becomes more valuable the longer yo...

Most leaders think negotiation begins when both sides sit down to talk numbers.  By then, trust, incentives, timing, internal alignment, and first impressions have already shaped the outcome.  That is why smart founders, executives, investors, and board members can have the right facts and still walk away with the wrong result. In this episode of Beginner’s Mind , Stefanie Schubert explains why ne...

Most people still treat climate solutions as a cost. Wanwipa Siriwatwechaku l argues that this is exactly why so many leaders miss the real opportunity. The next industrial era will not be built by patching old systems, but by redesigning them from the ground up. In this episode of Beginner’s Mind, Wanwipa explains why industrial decarbonization is not mainly about sacrifice, compliance, or adding...

Power demand is rising faster than the systems meant to support it. AI, electrification, and industry all need stable energy, but the dominant story sold to the public was far simpler than reality.  In this episode, Bret Kugelmass explains why the real bottleneck was never just climate ambition, but how the West misunderstood energy itself. For years, nuclear was framed as too dangerous, too slow,...

Most investors think they’re rational. Most founders think they’re disciplined. Most boards think they’re strategic. They’re usually wrong. In this episode, we unpack Fast Forward Thinking by Luis Pareras — a physician turned deep-tech venture capitalist who distilled decades of investing under scientific uncertainty into 40 brutally structured rules. This is not a summary. It’s a decision upgrade...

Most biotech breakthroughs don’t fail in the lab. They fail when science meets manufacturing reality. And by the time this bottleneck appears, tens of millions are already sunk. This episode examines the most under-discussed failure point in modern biotech: the gap between scientific discovery and scalable, usable healthcare solutions. While science has never been stronger—and big pharma excels at...

Nine out of ten startups fail, yet Europe keeps funding them the same way. Governments replace judgment with bureaucracy, capital replaces experience, and failure is misunderstood instead of learned from. This conversation exposes why venture capital is a profession, not a policy tool — and why getting this wrong quietly kills innovation. In this episode, Jim Pulcrano, Adjunct Professor at IMD and...

Most goals don’t fail because of laziness or lack of ambition. They fail quietly — buried under daily noise, competing priorities, and forgotten intentions. By March, even the most meaningful goals have slipped down the list… replaced by urgency, meetings, and excuses. In the last years, whenever I work with companies or people in my executive coaching a pattern showed up frequently. In private li...

Breakthrough science has never been stronger — yet patients still miss life-saving therapies. Despite decades of innovation, most precision medicines fail at the last mile of healthcare delivery. The problem isn’t discovery. It’s how science, capital, and systems are aligned — or not. Possessing elite science is no longer enough to win in the multi-trillion-dollar biopharma ecosystem. As innovatio...

Most founders obsess over ideas. Breakthrough companies obsess over inflections, conviction, and structure . This episode unpacks Pattern Breakers by Mike Maples Jr .—a book that quietly explains why most startups never break out… and why a small minority reshape entire categories. But this isn’t a book summary. It’s a thinking upgrade for founders, operators, board members, and investors navigati...

The world has grown quiet about climate change. Too quiet. We scroll past floods, fires, droughts… and move on with our day. As if the problem solved itself. As if we’ve earned the luxury to look away. Janos Pasztor ( full episode ) has spent 40 years inside the rooms where climate decisions are made — from serving as UN Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Change to advising presidents, prime...

Europe leads the world in discovery — yet too often, its breakthroughs never become global companies. Billions in research funding turn into patents, not products. While others build empires from ideas, Europe risks becoming the world’s laboratory — brilliant, but broke. That’s the paradox at the heart of this conversation. In this episode, Karl Nehammer , Vice-President of the European Investment...

Most founders dream of raising millions. Few survive the 153 “no’s” it takes to get there. Behind every biotech breakthrough lies exhaustion — late-night calls, failed rounds, and investors who walk away at the finish line. What separates the ones who make it isn’t luck or timing — it’s resilience built into process. In this episode, Jason Foster , CEO of Ori Biotech , shares how he transformed re...

Imagine waking up to find your company’s most valuable IP leaked—not by hackers, but by the very AI tools you trusted. This isn’t a distant scenario; it’s happening inside pharma and biotech right now. And the cost isn’t just financial—it’s patient lives, broken trust, and an industry on the edge of losing credibility.  In this episode, Kat Kozyrytska shares how leaders can act before invisible ri...