Mostly Awesome

In this episode, we talk to Sarah Fleischer, 3x founder and Co-founder & CEO of tozero, a Munich-based startup that recovers lithium and graphite directly from battery waste. Sarah is a mechanical engineer and CDTM alum who has raised over $20 million and recently launched tozero's industrial demo plant in Germany. We get into her path to tozero, which includes two earlier ventures that di...

In this episode, we talk to Pip Klöckner, tech analyst, angel investor, and host of Doppelgänger, Germany's leading tech podcast. Pip started doing data entry at Idealo, climbed through marketing and product, advised Rocket Internet and KKR, and now invests his own money and breaks down tech for a living. We get into how he actually never wanted to start a podcast and kept saying no until his co-h...

In this episode, we sit down with Magnus Grünewald, the 23-year-old founder and CEO of Lyceum, who recently raised a massive €10.3M pre-seed round to challenge US hyperscalers. Rather than just a story about a young founder raising capital, this conversation offers a revealing look into what it takes to build "impossible" deep tech from Europe. Magnus shares how his tenure as Chief of St...

In this episode, André Petry, co-founder and CEO of Tacto, joins us for a wide-ranging conversation about ambition, agency, and what it means to build from Europe. We trace André’s journey from a 400-person village to CDTM, Berkeley, and eventually to founding one of Germany’s rising industrial software companies. Along the way, he shares how discovering a community of optimistic, self-directed pe...

In this episode, Julia Gottfriedsen, Head of Data Science & AI at OroraTech, shares how space and artificial intelligence come together to address one of the most pressing challenges of our time. We follow Julia’s journey and explore how technology, leadership, and vision can shape the future. She reflects on how seeing Earth from orbit, with its atmosphere and absence of borders, influences h...

In this special guest episode, Judith Dada (General Partner at La Famiglia) and Hanno Renner (Co-founder & CEO of Personio) join us to reflect on their time at CDTM and how it shaped their journeys over the past decade. They talk about what made CDTM so formative, how it created a culture of ambition and trust, and why it continues to be a launchpad for some of Europe’s most impactful founders...

Erik Muttersbach, co-founder of Forto and now Zauber AI, joins us to talk about what it takes to build globally competitive tech companies from Europe. A CDTM Spring 2013 alumnus, Erik reflects on his journey from being the first employee at DailyDeal, to launching and scaling Forto into one of Europe’s leading digital freight forwarders, and now starting over with Zauber AI. We dive into why most...

Verena Pausder joins us to talk about what Germany needs to truly scale innovation. We dive into how the next generation of founders is redefining work, what’s broken in the startup ecosystem, and how AI can bridge the gap in digital education. She shares lessons from leading the German Startup Association, building companies, and investing in women’s football. This episode is about mindset shifts...

In this episode, we sit down with Gustaf Alströmer, YC Partner and former Head of Growth at Airbnb, to explore how AI is rewriting the playbook for early-stage startups. From why output matters more than effort, to what truly defines exceptional founders today, Gustaf shares lessons from working with hundreds of companies. We also dive into the European startup ecosystem, building ambition at scal...

Insights from Marc Klingen CEO and co-founder of  Langfuse , the open-source LLM observability platform. In this episode, we dive Marc shares his journey of moving back to Europe post-YC and establishing a high-agency, high-trust team culture. We delve into the complexities of building an open-source community, the hurdles in exciting developers about your product, and strategies for monetization....

In conversation with Clemens Meyer, Technical Director @ Google DeepMind. This time we first dive into Clemens’ journey from startups to joining DeepMind and making an impact in interdisciplinary teams. Then how to balance exploitation and exploration in research, with a focus on measurable progress tracking and finally Google’s early role in the AI race, and reflections on the exponential nature...

Insights from Viet Le, an Early-Stage VC and Partner @ General Catalyst: Betting on Young, Naive Founders and Navigating the AI Hype In this episode, we dive into a conversation with Viet who shares his unique investment philosophy focused on young, naive first-time founders. The discussion covers controversial opinions on the current AI hype and the importance of building and selling efficiently...

In this episode, we are talking to Thomas Kirchner. Thomas is an entrepreneur and founder of ProGlove, a company that sells smart gloves used in countless German and international companies for speeding up the manufacturing process. The idea of ProGlove is simple, yet brilliant: every time you scan a barcode of a part when you assemble, for example, a car, you have to pick up a scanner from your p...

Hamza Tahir is a software developer turned ML engineer. An indie hacker by heart, he loves ideating, implementing, and launching data-driven products. His previous projects include PicHance, Scrilys, BudgetML, and you-tldr. Based on his learnings from deploying ML in production for predictive maintenance use-cases in his previous startup, he co-created ZenML, an open-source MLOps framework for cre...

We just released a brand new episode of our podcast featuring an in-depth conversation with the co-founder and chief product officer of Tanso, Gyri Reiersen, a groundbreaking company revolutionizing carbon accounting and emission reduction processes. Join us as we delve into the world of sustainability and technology, exploring how Tanso automates processes in carbon accounting while building the...

Welcome to the new season of the Mostly Awesome podcast! Our first episode will drop on May 10, but before that we wanted to give you all a sneak preview of what season 5 is all about. Over this season, we will be chatting with different changemakers and innovators – we can’t wait for you to hear! We’re also stoked to have Ruby Zhang, Claudia Dalmau, and Ali Raza as our fearless hosts.

When you think about trees, what comes to mind? In most of our heads, they are probably the prime example of “something good for the environment”. Even though it is by far not the only way to capture carbon, there is an increasing trend to quantify and enhance the environmental benefit of sustainable forestry. We are happy to have Gesa Biermann as our guest today. Gesa is a Co-Founder of Pina, a s...

Today we welcome Johannes Hussak in our podcast, one of the co-founders of Kertos, a platform that automates data privacy operations. Always fascinated by technology, Johannes did his bachelor and master at Technical University of Munich in Energy and Process Technology and went to an abroad semester at Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. It was during his studies when one of his friends dre...

This week we are excited to welcome Eva Spannagl, head of Strategy & Business Development at Moss, founder of Femstory, business angel, and personal inspiration to both of us. Eva studied at ESCP Business school and the Universidad Carlos tercero de Madrid. She held a variety of internships during her studies and ultimately joined McKinsey full time when she graduated from her masters. During that...

How do you found a VC firm, really? Today we will talk to Claudius Jablonka, a former CDTM Centerling and Center assistant who co-founded 10x Founders. Claudius co-founded and led the Munich office of Plug and Play Ventures, one of the most active early-stage investors in the world. In 2020, he and 6 other partners co-founded 10x founders, now a €160m early-stage fund which is backed also by CDTM...

Some people say the entrepreneurial spirit is something you are born with. This is something that could be true for our guest in today’s episode, Vanessa Westphal. As a very young child she already started selling stones in front of her house to top up pocket money. And she kept the entrepreneurial spirit ever since. Having spent more than 10 years building a corporate career at Siemens, last year...

The startup ecosystem has seen many software startups over the last years, but how about a software startup that aims to ease the development of new electronic hardware products? Our guest in todays episode, Sebastian Schaal, is diving into exactly this area. He is the co-founder of Luminovo, a company that speeds up the process of electronic hardware development, leveraging software and machine l...

Welcome to the new season of the Mostly Awesome podcast! Our first episode will drop on October 4, but before that we wanted to give you all a sneak preview of what season 4 is all about. Over this season, we will be chatting with 6 different changemakers and innovators – we can’t wait for you to hear! We’re also stoked to have Julia Kozlovskaia and Jaclyn Hovsmith as our fearless hosts.

In this week’s episode, we welcome Vidya Madhavan, Founder and CEO of Schmooze, the dating app where you swipe memes instead of people. Coming from Engineering and Business Background, Vidya will tell us how she did not build “just another dating app” but rather the fastest growing one. During this episode, we will get to hear Vidya's thoughts on how an MBA and Entrepreneurship complement each oth...

For this week’s episode Passionfroot is on the menu! The co-founders Jennifer Phan and Michelle Tian combine backgrounds in venture capital at Rocket Internet and tech development at AirBnB and Shopify. In 2021 they co-founded Passionfroot with the aim to empower independent businesses of tomorrow. With this passion in mind, they are developing a back-office tool tailored to creator businesses. Tu...