Entrepreneurial Realities

Martin Giese has spent 25 years at the centre of Munich's deep tech ecosystem — and he thinks most European founders have a blind spot that no incubator programme will fix: they can't sell. As Managing Director of XPRENEURS (now UTUM Accelerator) and guest lecturer at Stanford GSB, Martin has seen founders across three continents make the same mistake. In this episode, we dig into what Stanford fo...

This is our 100th episode — and we are not celebrating with a retrospective. We are celebrating with three founders who came back to tell us what actually happened. Flora Geske co-founded SUMM-A I , a GovTech company using AI to make public administration more accessible and efficient, and winner of the TUM Presidential Award. Pablo Palafox co-founded HappyRobot , a Y Combinator-backed agentic AI...

Adrian Locher co-founded Merantix Capital in Berlin in 2016 with machine-learning researcher Rasmus Rothe . What started as an AI studio has become one of Europe's most distinctive AI organisations: a venture studio that incubates companies from scratch, a campus hosting an entire ecosystem, and — as of June 2026 — a €100 million plus fund backing AI ventures across the continent. In this conv...

Defense tech is being rewritten in real time — not in labs or conference rooms, but on the frontlines of Ukraine. Join me in my conversation with with Dimko Zhluktenko — soldier, drone pilot , founder of Dzyga's Paw ($6M raised, 70+ countries), analyst at Ukraine's 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment RAID, and now founder of Hasta , a DefTech VC fund. Dimko has lived every dimension of defense...

Meet Eden Chabanet and Johannes Moran , Co-Founder of Arctory . Arctory is a platform for shopfloor vibe coding which, since its inception, has been used in hundreds of applications. Join me as we discuss topics such as the role of vibe coding in demanding professional environments, positioning focused platforms versus generalist ones, the role of IT in a changing world, ... and how a German start...

Join me in my conversation with Simon Wilhelm , CEO & Co-Founder of Scaile . Simon understood that classic SEO techniques no longer works. His startup helps companies get visibility. After a mere 6 months, he has secured 40 plus customers from multiple countries and shares learnings with us.

Do join the discussion I had with Edgar Kussberg about Vibe coding . Edgar is a former entrepreneur where he focused on product development and gradually turned in applying his market focused approach to code development. He is currently in charge of Product development at SonarSource, a Swiss scale up which is the leader in code validation tool. We discuss on what is the phenomenon of vibe coding...

Do join our conversation with Christine Carville and Marc Goldberg , co-founders of Resilience labs, now Cerebral , a this podcast first married couple. Both started Resilience labs in 2019 to bridge a gap in the American healthcare market by  training new clinicians  while providing accessible care to patients. By integrating  proprietary education  with  AI-powered clinical tools , they professi...

The latest episode of Entrepreneurial Realities welcomes back Sebastian Mallaby, who joined the podcast once before to discuss The Power Law , his landmark account of the venture capital industry. This time, Sebastian returns with The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence — the result of three years of unprecedented access to Demis Hassabis and his inner c...

In this episode, I speak with Michael Brand , CEO of TraxSurf and Jonas Dunkel , CEO of DeepGolf , two German entrepreneurs applying AI to elite sport performance. Different sports but same ambition: replace guesswork with data, and help athletes improve with precision. A conversation about technology, entrepreneurship, and building something new far from the traditional hubs of surf and golf cult...

Rabbi Mois Navon is one of the founder engineer of MobilEye. He is also an advisor to the Israeli Government on the theme of AI and Ethics and a lecturer at ben Gourion University. Join us on our discussion on why ethical considerations profoundly matter for AI entrepreneurs and how to take these into considerations for your AI startups.

Sebastian Bastek, co-founder of Valoron , takes you on a journey of transforming mixed waste into virgin-quality fuels and chemicals, scaling a bold climate tech vision from the lab to industry and literally turning trash into treasure. Dive into the breakthroughs, the entrepreneurial journey, and how Valoron is turning circular economy ideas into reality. Hosted by Lucia Lara from the Climate &am...

This episode concludes our special series during the ⁠⁠ Munich Security Conference⁠⁠ ⁠ , where we explore the entrepreneurial realities behind defense and dual-use innovation. We speak with my colleague Florian Doetzer ⁠⁠ , who is the Managing Director of the TUM Venture Lab for Aerospace and Defense. The name of Florian’slab was changed from Aerospace to Aerospace and Defense and announced at the...

This episode is part of our special series during the ⁠ Munich Security Conference⁠⁠ , where we explore the entrepreneurial realities behind defense and dual-use innovation. We speak with Nicolas Tenzer ⁠ , a French senior policy expert who was among the first voices to warn of the dangers posed by Europe's sustained disinvestment in and neglect of its defense capabilities. Together, we explore th...

This episode is part of our special series during the Munich Security Conference , where we explore the entrepreneurial realities behind defense and dual-use innovation. We are joined by Khrystyna Rozhenko and German Stelmakh , founders of Drone Aide Collective . Khrystyna and German explain how they have mobilized funding to support drone production for Ukraine and organized hands-on workshops ac...

This episode is part of our special series during the Munich Security Conference , where we explore the entrepreneurial realities behind defense and dual-use innovation. Dariia Rekun speaks with Oleksii Markhovskyi , co-founder of Ukrainian defense tech company Frontline Robotics , and Alina Kizlevych , who works on partnerships at Darkstar and brings deep experience working with defense startups....

This episode is part of our special series during the Munich Security Conference , where we explore the entrepreneurial realities behind defense and dual-use innovation. Anastasia Lala ⁠ , pipeline manager at the TUM Venture Lab Aerospace and Defense, speaks with Artem Moroz ⁠ , Head of Investments at Brave 1 ⁠ — a Ukrainian government initiative designed to fast-track DefTech solutions through as...

This episode is part of our special series during the Munich Security Conference, where we explore the entrepreneurial realities behind defense and dual-use innovation. We speak with Benjamin Wolba , co-founder of the EuropeanDefense Tech Hub . Benjamin co-created what has become Europe's largest network of defense tech hackathons — bringing together engineers, students, researchers, and early...

Former BCG consultants and now founders Benedikt Wiechers and Michael Spira share an honest, behind-the-scenes perspective on their transition from consulting to entrepreneurship — and what it really takes to build AI-driven companies in Europe. The conversation explores the realities of leaving a secure consulting career, why execution quickly matters more than strategy once you start building, a...

AI’s energy hunger is exploding — but can photonic computing unlock a sustainable future for AI? Samarth Vadia, CEO & Co-founder of Linque, shares his path from quantum research to founding a deep tech start-up, tackling one of AI’s biggest challenges: exploding energy use in data centers. Discover how computers that run on light could transform data centers, make AI more energy-efficient and...

Can a start-up really go from founding to a successful exit in just 18 months? Dylan, founder of CareMates, proves it is possible. In this special end-of-year episode, Antoine and co-host Magnus dive deep into Dylan’s journey — from bootstrapping and rapid scaling to navigating unexpected challenges and achieving a successful exit. This episode covers: How to draft a winning EXIST application How...

Please meet Ryan Grant Little . Ryan reaches out from Kyiv where he has moved to support Defence startups in the country where it really matters. Do join us for an inspiring presentation to better understand the dynamics of Defence Technology, why this really matters to us all in Europe and hear how Ryan has genuine impact. Ryan and I met beginning of this month at the first Defence Hackathon orga...

We are joined today by two Venture Capitalists, Fadwa Ouardani and Omar Hedeya . Fadwa and Omar explain what brought them to the world of venture capital and also the initiative of "Habbitis" to support founders from the Arab Diaspora.

Meet Marcus Lobbes , visionary director of the Dortmund Academie of Theater and Digitalisation . Marcus will be the curator at the Richard Wagner Bayreuth Festival for the first ever AI powered production of the Ring des Nibelungen , bringing artificial intelligence into the world's most prestigious Wagner opera Festival. In this episode of Entrepreneurial Realities , discover how Marcus merges ar...

Lucia, our new host , talks with Dr. Andreas Weiss, CTO of Qkera , about turning his PhD research into next-gen battery materials to advance future energy storage. From lab experiments to scaling a startup, Andreas shares the surprises, challenges, and lessons learned along the way.