Disrupt or Defend

Berlin's startup scene has changed. When funding was cheap, an idea and a pitch deck were enough. Now, early-stage founders are walking into banks — not VCs — because capital has gotten expensive and the runway has to come from somewhere. The conversation that follows gets into what that shift looks like from the inside, and what it means for the kind of companies being built in Berlin right now....

Everyone says small businesses will start building their own software. Tim Metzner has a sharper read: most owners are too busy surviving to ever maintain their own tools. ㅤ Host Daniel Kazani , co-founder of Softup , sits down with Tim to work through what makes a software company defensible when technology stops being a moat. They get into why he chose to step out of the day-to-day at the insur...

Real estate moves slowly. AI moves fast. Daniel Kazani sits down with Frederik Raspé , founder and CEO of Acquirepad, to figure out what happens when you point fast technology at a slow, trust-heavy industry. ㅤ Acquirepad takes the manual admin out of commercial real estate investing. Frederik explains how AI reads the messy documents real estate runs on, rent rolls, lease agreements, investment...

What separates a SaaS business worth a real exit from one that buyers quietly walk away from in 2026? ㅤ Daniel Kazani , co-founder of Softup , sits down with Dirk Sahlmer , partner at FE International, to talk about how AI is reshaping SaaS M&A. After six years on the buy side at saas.group, Dirk now advises founders through sell-side exit processes, and he's seen both ends of how exit value...

Spotify and Netflix both know what you like. The one place that exists for your literal taste, the restaurant, hands every guest the same printed card. ㅤ Daniel Kazani sits down with Amir Khoshbakht , co-founder and CTO of Lokalia, to talk through what happens when AI moves out of the dashboard and into the dinner table. ㅤ Amir's team is rebuilding the restaurant menu as a personalized surface....

The hype says AI is coming for your engineers. John McKinney , a fractional CTO who has run engineering at AOL and a string of CTO seats since, says it is closer to "super Google." ㅤ Daniel Kazani , co-founder of Softup , sits down with John to talk about what has actually changed in how software gets built. The conversation lands on the shifts that matter most for founders and engineering leader...

Most people think of AI as a productivity tool. Dr. Adam Link sees it as something else entirely: a wealth transfer mechanism, one that's quietly shifting money from people who don't understand AI toward people who do. In this episode, Daniel Kazani of Softup and Dr. Link break down what that actually means for founders, developers, and anyone trying to build financial security in a world where AI...

Less than 20% of Germany's "hidden champions" use AI systematically. That single stat sets the tone for this conversation. Daniel Kazani of Softup sits down with Dr. Annette Doms - EU AI Act strategist, serial founder, and one of the most influential voices on AI in the German-speaking world - to ask the question that most Mittelstand leaders are afraid to answer out loud: are we actually ready?...

Most internal tools are outdated before they ever ship. That's the problem at the heart of this conversation - and it's one that almost every technical founder has felt personally. Daniel Kazani sits down with Dario Di Carlo , CEO and co-founder of bricks.sh , to talk about why internal tooling is quietly draining engineering teams, and why the vibe-coding shortcut will make it worse before it mak...

The hype surrounding artificial intelligence forces investors to separate true innovation from mere noise. Daniel Kazani , co-founder of Softup , sits down with Blerina Sanocki to explore her exact framework for evaluating early-stage startups. ㅤ They discuss the difference between building an AI-first product and being an AI-forward company. Blerina shares why she actively seeks out underreprese...

The bottleneck in software is no longer building the product: it is getting it into the hands of users. As artificial intelligence compresses development timelines, distribution and go-to-market strategies are becoming the true competitive advantages. ㅤ Host Daniel Kazani , co-founder at Softup , sits down with Ben Robinson , CEO of Aperture.co , to examine this shift. Ben explains how his firm a...

Autonomous AI agents promise massive productivity gains, but with autonomy comes severe financial and legal risk. If an AI system deployed in banking falls victim to a prompt injection attack, it could falsify compliance records or authorize illegal transactions. A human might notice a mistake after one or two errors, but an AI could execute thousands of false transactions per second, potentially...

Artificial intelligence models are hungry for high-quality human knowledge. For years, developers scraped this data without asking permission or compensating the creators. Now, massive lawsuits are forcing the tech industry to rethink how it acquires training material. ㅤ Host Daniel Kazani of Softup sits down with Julie Trelstad to discuss how authors can protect their intellectual property and e...

Traditional real estate systems often come with rules, limitations, and legacy baggage that can stifle creativity. Host Daniel Kazani speaks with Bobby Bryant, M.Ed.x2 about building a solution that bypasses the MLS entirely. Bobby explains the strategy behind hōmhub.ai: a peer-to-peer, AI-powered Real Estate Operating System. They discuss why he chose a non-MLS approach to allow for features like...

Manufacturing generates massive amounts of data, yet many factories still run expensive machinery on settings that have not changed in a decade. Daniel Kazani sits down with Dr. Jonathan Spitz , Founder and CEO of GaussML , to discuss why having data does not always mean having information. ㅤ Jonathan explains his "small data" approach to industrial optimization. Instead of requiring months of da...

Real estate runs on data, but most of it is trapped in PDFs, lease agreements, and siloed legacy systems. In this episode, host Daniel Kazani sits down with Dr. Nino Paulus , Co-Founder and CPO of AlphaPrompt , to discuss how generative AI is bringing order to this chaos. Nino explains how his team moved from building simple dashboards to creating an AI that functions like a senior analyst—capable...

Brands are losing visibility because they rely on click-based attribution in a world moving toward answer engines. Daniel Kazani speaks with Malte Landwehr , CPO and CMO of Peec AI , about the reality of AI search. Malte explains why 25% of leads might come from LLMs even when tracking software shows 0%. They discuss the transition from SEO to GEO, why static dashboards are disappearing, and the h...

Learn more about facial vital sign detection: shen.ai & caire.ai ㅤ Healthcare has historically lagged in digitalization, creating a significant opportunity for artificial intelligence to jump-start the industry. Host Daniel Kazani sits down with Dr. Lucas Mittelmeier , an investor at Heal Capital , to discuss why the sector's heavy administrative burden makes it a prime target for disruption....

AI Trends in Germany - Presentation (PDF) — Follow along with the data discussed in this episode ㅤ Germany currently faces a distinct tension between its technical potential and actual financial commitment to artificial intelligence. While the country ranks high in AI skills and research, private investment stands at just 1.8 billion euros, compared to over 62 billion in the United States. Host D...

Manufacturing is no longer just about moving atoms. It is shifting toward software-defined automation and fully autonomous systems. Daniel Kazani sits down with Miroslav Kriz , Principal Partner at Momenta, to discuss how AI is reshaping the factory floor. They explore why industrial innovation requires different safety standards than typical software, where a "hallucination" can mean physical dan...

This episode was recorded on Dec 10, 2025. ㅤ Automation and digitalization were huge topics for decades, but “it’s no longer enough.” Host Daniel Kazani talks with Pascal Faerber , Managing Director, Digital Services Germany at Orange Business , about agentic AI and why it is “fundamentally different” from reactive gen AI. Pascal frames agentic AI as proactive, understanding goals and desired out...

AI has shifted from a buzzword to a genuine, intelligent assistant. Host Daniel Kazani talks with Dajana Stojchevska , a senior software engineer at Google in Munich, about how AI is embedded in day-to-day engineering work, not about replacing engineers, but about boosting productivity and removing friction so teams can focus on the cool stuff. ㅤ Creation, collaboration, and knowledge management...

Being discoverable on ChatGPT has become a board-level problem for most companies. Host Daniel Kazani talks with Vlad Shvets about Qvery, an AI agent software that helps brands measure and grow their visibility and share of voice on the AI search engines. Measuring brand visibility is a new challenge companies need to address, requiring new tools and software. The way we search Google is very diff...

We are living through the most significant platform shift since the Internet. Host Daniel Kazani talks with guest Shefqet Avdullau , an angel investor, advisor, and speaker focused on growth-stage B2B SaaS, FinTech, ad tech, and health tech. The conversation starts with a story that moves from coding to multiple ventures to a meaningful exit, then into investing with a mentor who gave a head start...

A wave of excitement and activity around AI is hitting management consulting, and many leaders are asking the same questions. What is this AI thing? What do I do with it? And what does it really mean for my business? In this episode, host Daniel Kazani talks with Matthew Murphy , a partner at AMEND Consulting in Cincinnati, about how technology and AI now sit at the forefront of almost every new c...