Founders and Builders

Alex Christie is the co-founder and CTO of Attio — the modern, flexible CRM taking on Salesforce, HubSpot, and a $180 billion market. Attio has raised over $116M from investors including Google Ventures, Balderton, and Point Nine, and is quietly building what could be the most important data infrastructure for the agentic AI era. In this episode we cover: Why Alex and co-founder Nick spent 3 years...

If you're building a business with AI, having a great product is only the beginning. You also need to understand infrastructure, distribution, capital, hiring, commercial strategy, and how to build the right team around you. In this live episode of Founders & Builders, I sat down with Ben Richardson, VP Strategy at CoreWeave, at the Project Europe Hackathon in Barcelona, surrounded by 80+...

Europe doesn’t need more people saying it should build products and start companies. It needs more rooms where people actually do it. We just got back from a live Founders & Builders episode at Project Europe 's Barcelona hackathon — with 90 of Europe’s best builders hacking through the night. I wanted to sit down with Kitty Mayo and Jade Yarrow and learn how YOU can get involved in their...

Joe and David are the founders of Asteroid, a YC-backed startup building AI browser agents that can automate real work inside the tools we use every day. In this episode, we go deep on why browser agents are such a big deal and what it really takes to get AI agents into the real world and how YOU can take advantage of them. We also unpack their journey through Entrepreneur First and Y Combinator,...

Satellites scan the Earth thousands of times every day, powering AI, defence, and disaster response. But there’s a critical problem that not many people know about, but that our modern world is hindered by. In this episode of Founders & Builders, I sit down with Michael Stanway and Joe Griffiths, founders of The Compression Company, who are solving one of the hardest problems in modern infrast...

If you’re thinking about starting a business in 2026, or you’ve had an idea sitting in the back of your mind that you haven’t acted on yet... this video is for you. Over the last six months, I’ve interviewed 30 founders and investors on the Founders & Builders podcast. Collectively, the companies they’ve built are worth over $110 billion... and after analysing those conversations, one clear pa...

Henrik Djurestal is the founder of Vorker.ai - a deep AI coworker built specifically for the smallest businesses: one to ten-person teams who need leverage, not headcount. Fresh off raising a €700,000 pre-seed round, Henrik breaks down why deep AI agents will transform small business operations, and why the next entrepreneurial wave won’t be no-code, it will be AI co-workers running entire workflo...

Sam Sihvonen is the CEO of Solu - a precision genomics platform helping hospitals and institutions detect, prevent and control infections before they spread. What began as a diagnostics-focused tool has rapidly expanded across major verticals from food safety and agriculture to pharma, industrial bio and research. Sam and the team believe Solu can become a company that reshapes how we identify and...

Lars Rasmussen went from being a broke founder after the dot-com crash to co-founding Google Maps, one of the most important products on the modern internet. Today, billions of people use Google Maps every day without thinking twice. In this episode, Lars shares: • How Google Maps accidentally went viral before launch and nearly overwhelmed Google’s infrastructure • Why speed, not features, was th...

Ali Parsa is the CEO of Quadrivia - an AI company creating real-time clinical agents that automate 20 to 30 percent of a clinician’s workload. The goal is simple: reduce the global shortage of medical expertise by turning routine, repetitive clinical tasks into safe, regulated AI services. Ali’s mission is shaped by decades of building at the frontier of healthcare. Before Quadrivia, he founded CI...

James Green went from a small industrial town in Redditch to becoming a General Partner at CRV, one of the oldest and most respected venture funds in the world. In this special episode filmed in San Francisco, we unpack the real story behind how he got there - and the philosophy that’s shaped the founders he backs. James doesn’t care about pedigrees. He cares about scrappiness, conviction and peop...

Companies that win are the ones who master go-to-market faster than anyone else - even if it feels uncomfortable, risky or counterintuitive. Mirko Novakovic is the co-founder & CEO of Dash0 - the platform helping engineering teams ship faster by eliminating the complexity and noise around modern software observability. Before Dash0, Mirko built and scaled multiple high-growth companies. Today,...

In this episode, Lukas opens up about the real story behind W&B’s $1.7B acquisition, what it was like inside early OpenAI, why most founders move far too slowly, and the surprising truth that you’re almost always earlier than you think. Lukas breaks down how W&B became the default toolset for the world’s best ML engineers, the strategy behind seeding researchers, why platforms often fail,...

We sat down with one of the most forward-thinking leaders in modern biotech! Dr. Dan Wee is the Chief Execution Officer (CEO) at Enveda Biosciences Enveda is challenging the traditional pharma model. Instead of operating several steps removed from real patients, Dan and the team are building medicines grounded in what people actually feel, experience and need. Since Enveda’s founding at the height...

Yanda Erlich is a serial founder, early Weights & Biases investor, and former Coatue GP who’s helped build and back some of the most important companies in AI.In this episode, Yanda breaks down what really gets founders through hard times, why trend-chasing kills startups, how to find the work that feels effortless, and why the best markets start off looking “sneaky small”. He also shares his...

Tom Wehmeier from Atomico joined us just hours after stepping off stage, where he presented the annual State of European Tech report - now in its 11th year. This year's message was clear: Europe is experiencing a genuine awakening. Ambition is rising, execution is accelerating, and the ecosystem is producing breakout successes at a rate we’ve never seen before. This conversation dives into the...

Yesterday at Slush 2025, we sat down with one of the most seasoned investors in the global venture landscape. Eric Liaw is a General Partner at IVP - the multi-billion-dollar firm behind companies like Coinbase, Supercell, Snapchat, and Zynga. Since joining IVP in 2011, Eric has partnered with some of the world’s most exceptional founders, backing category-defining businesses across consumer, B2B,...

Today, we’re joined at Slush 2025 by someone right at the centre of one of the most influential AI companies in the world. Gabe Pereyra is the co-founder and President of Harvey - the legal AI powerhouse now used by more than 700 customers across 58 countries. Harvey is changing how legal teams operate, from major law firms to in-house teams, by giving them AI that’s fast, reliable, and actually b...

Hussein Kanji breaks down exactly how world-class investors spot billion-dollar companies before anyone else - from identifying new categories to understanding when technological, cultural, or regulatory shifts create once-in-a-generation opportunities. 👉 If you enjoyed this clip - make sure to watch the full episode with Hussein Kanji! 📌 Chapters 00:00 – How Hoxton chooses the right companies t...

Yaron Inger is a co-founder of Lightricks, the team behind Facetune and LTX Studio, the company that helped make highquality, mobile creative tools mainstream and is now building video foundation models. In this episode, Yaron explains how Lightricks went from a five-person garage team building Facetune to training LTXV, why they chose to open source their video model, the product principles that...

Leo Ubbiali breaks down the biggest founder traps - from false validation and startup hype, to learning the hard truth at Y Combinator: the only signal that matters is money in the bank. 👉 Watch the full conversation to understand why distribution beats product in the early days and why founders need to stop overthinking and start selling. 📌 Chapters 00:00 – The trap of overthinking as a founder...

Hussein Kanji is one of Europe’s most influential tech investors. As the founder of Hoxton Ventures, he’s backed companies like Deliveroo, Darktrace, and UiPath long before they were household names. In this episode, Hussein explains how to spot breakout founders before the rest of the world sees their potential, why Europe’s startup scene is only just getting started, and what it really takes to...

Steve Phillips, CEO of Zappi, breaks down the evolution from a traditional services business to a scalable product company - and what AI means for the future of agencies, consultancies, and insights firms. He explains why services businesses are “fun to work in but awful to run,” how valuation multiples differ between people-based and product-based models, and why agentic AI systems could reshape...

Leo Ubbiali has built AI and data systems at Babylon Health, MoonPay, and Y Combinator. Now he’s the founder of Visum Labs, helping companies use AI and data to drive real business outcomes. In this episode, Leo explains how the best startups think about data, why most AI projects fail before they start, and what YC taught him about building fast, selling early, and quitting smarter. As always, if...

Michael Young, co-founder and CEO of Lindus Health, explains why traditional CROs (Contract Research Organisations) are slowing down medical progress — and how Lindus Health is redesigning the system to make research faster, smarter, and more efficient. He breaks down how the old incentive model keeps costs high and timelines long, why Lindus Health calls itself an “anti-CRO”, and how their integr...