The European Startup Show

[1:55] Overview of Balderton [3:46] What do you think makes for a good VC?  [5:32] Where are you making big bets going into 2022? [6:30] Why is there a difference in the US and Europe when it comes to web3? [7:52] What is your take on the NFT opportunity? [13:26] Opportunities in fintech [17:52] Team vs Idea - what is more important? [23:36] Organizational design from Series A to Series B [33:02]...

[2:10] What motivates you and what makes you keep going one startup after another? [13:36] What makes Inkitt different from all the other self-publishing platforms? [18:30] Who are your readers and what is trending? [20:53] What was the turning point where growth took off? [24:34] How did you manage the downturns in the business? Books mentioned Alchemist from Paulo Coelho

Maritime industry [1:34] Why did you start Deepsea? Why has the maritime industry been so late in modernizing? [6:53] Being two engineering founders, how did you supplement the business knowledge that was missing? [09:56] How did the pandemic affect your business? What did you need to do to adapt? Startup advice [12:15] What are some of the challenges and lessons you learnt in the early stages?  [...

[01:40] Why did you decide to focus on the travel industry? [04:10] What are some of the big trends you see in the travel industry? What do you think has changed permanently and what do you think will go back? [5:27] What are some of the opportunities you see for travel startups [8:16] Your leadership style  [11:17] How do you hire? What questions do you ask in interviews? [19:33] How do you keep...

[1:26] Early life and value of hard work [2:43] Experience and most memorable moments from your time at Google and Twitter as an early employee [7:15] Pivoting during the pandemic [21:50] Future of the workplace Links: Envoy Book recommendation: The Cold Start Problem

[01:53] What convinced you to begin yet another online fraud prevention company? [4:52] How did you structure your product, your team, and other aspects of your company to get quick time-to-value, your core promise to customers? [11:59] Could you tell us more about your hybrid model of sales?  [15:15] How easy is it to start a tech company in Hungary? And what are the biggest challenges of setting...

[2:10] - What was the initial concept with which you started Glovo? [7:44] - How has the tapering down of the pandemic affected your business? [10:17] - How do you deliver groceries in 10 minutes?   [17:36] - How profitable is your q-commerce business? [20:50] - How do you build loyalty in this business? [23:23] - What is justifying the huge amounts of capital being invested in this space?  What w...

Healthtech and Healx [1:53] What inspired you to start focusing on rare diseases? [3:28] Could you define what rare disease means? [3:43] Why has what you’re doing never been done before? And how is your approach to drug discovery different from others? [5:53] What are the trends you’re seeing in this space? And what do you think is accelerating this high amount of investment in health tech? Start...

[1:42] How did you go from scuba instructor to insect farming? [4:24] I don’t see insect protein based food in the market, why so much funding in this space? [7:17] How do you actually do insect farming? What is the process of farming black soldier flies and creating proteins out of them? [10:31] With the recent Covid pandemic, do you think the perception against meat has shifted? What does this m...

[2:05] From where does your fascination for business and entrepreneurship stem from? [3:21] When you met Angela (co-founder), what fascinated you about her work and what made you think that this had commercial opportunities? [7:42] How did you determine which application to develop first?  [10:42] If you had to redo the phase of trying to find your first application, how would you do it differentl...

[1:59] How did you come to focus on women-led businesses? [3:20] What do you think Europe has done to encourage women-led businesses and what more can be done? [5:06] What are the main barriers women face in attracting investments? [7:32] From an investor perspective, how do you balance the business objectives of revenues and scale when the founder is considering starting or expanding their family...

[2:18] How did you come to joining Bramble as employee #1? [6:12] How did you organize yourselves with three founders, in terms of responsibilities, in the beginning, and how that has evolved now? [8:16] What is the right time for ideas coming out of research institutions and universities to spin out on their own? [11:01] What is the funding journey for deep tech look like? What are some lessons l...

[2:14] What does ESG really mean and where are we today? [10:27] What can startups do for ESG? [13:11] What triggered you to start Net Purpose? [20:11] How do you ensure businesses don’t make false claims about their environmental policies or make token gestures but have very little impact? How much can the data be trusted? [23:47] How did you figure out product-market fit? [33:39] How did you fun...

46% of entrepreneurs say access to capital is the biggest headache for their startups and yet while overall capital invested in European tech has increased even from last year ($41B, 130% increase from the year before), the interesting statistic is that the number of pre-seed rounds has decreased. In today’s episode, I talk to Melinda Elmborg who is the accelerator co-lead at Fast Track Malmö abou...

My guest today is Kaarel Kotkas, Founder & CEO of Veriff. Kaarel is a 25-year-old Estonian entrepreneur, whose online identity verification start-up Veriff is set to be the next tech ‘unicorn’ or billion-dollar company coming out of Estonia. Today’s short 30-minute podcast is jampacked with so much wisdom - like how they were able to raise money in less than a month, why YCombinator took them to U...

My guest today is Dan Garrett, the CEO, and co-founder of Farewill. Farewill is UK’s largest Will writer, accounting for 1 in every 10 Wills written. How did Dan, someone with a design background end up re-inventing the death industry? And more importantly why? In our conversation I found out more about the death industry and how Dan uses technology to make death-related services more approachable...

When you are thinking about your go-to-market strategy, when should you go direct and when should you build a partner strategy? My guest today is Malhar Kamdar, the Chief Ecosystem Officer at Celonis who sat down with me to talk about how Celonis thought about their ecosystem strategy - when they decided to double down on it; what makes for a successful ecosystem strategy; how to structure it and...

Joyce provides early-stage companies with strategic and operational CFO services to prepare the companies for predictable growth, fundraising, and global go-to-market success. Prior to Pegafund, Joyce was an advisor, investor, and board member of European and US B2B software companies including being an early growth investor at Columbia Lake Partners, a Bessemer-backed European debt fund. In this...

In this episode, I sat down (virtually) with Marie Outtier who is the director of product management at Twitter and prior to Twitter, co-founded Aiden, an AI-Powered marketing analytics platform that she sold to Twitter within 3 years of founding the company. Along the way, she got pregnant and also started a family. In this episode, I ask her about the most important lessons she learned reflectin...

In today’s episode, I talk to Daniel Murphy, who is considered one of the top 50 experts in the product marketing domain, and get his help to demystify product marketing and answer the most important questions for entrepreneurs - how should I think of product marketing for my stage of the company, how can I hire for it, how should I measure its effectiveness. I also get his top tips for getting cu...

Kair and Martin were leaders in Pipedrive, the most recent unicorn from Estonia. (Kair headed product marketing and Martin was head of customer success). Based in Tallinn, Klaus has raised money from Creandum of Sweden and most recently from Global Founders Capital whose portfolio also includes Slack, Revolut, and DeliveryHero. In this episode, I discuss their journey to founding Klaus, how to fin...

My guest today is Ola Sars, Founder of Soundtrack Your Brand, the world's fastest-growing music-platform for B2B, which he co-founded together with Spotify back in 2014. Ola is an expert in music-tech, having founded several music-tech businesses including Beats Music which was acquired by Apple and transformed into Apple Music. Soundtrack Your Brand supplies streaming music to businesses and publ...

I was so inspired by my guest today, Cristina Fonseca. Cristina was one of the founders of Talkdesk, a cloud-based help desk software that became Portugal's third "unicorn" after raising US$100M in series B funding at a valuation of over US$1 billion in October 2018. Then she went on to co-found the early stage Portuguese VC firm, Indico Capital Partners, and now is starting her next venture, an A...

My guest today is Ciaran O’Leary, co-founder and general partner of BlueYard Capital, an early-stage VC focused on transformational technology with a big focus on fostering innovation across Europe. In this episode, Ciaran talks to me about the importance of having a thesis when investing, what is still missing in Europe even though entrepreneurship has gone mainstream, what they are doing differe...

Adrien Nussenbaum, co-founder and US CEO of Mirakl on: Big Trends in Retail and Ecommerce; Evolution of Buyer Behaviour and Growing a business to $100M ARR