SPEAK LIKE A CEO

“Communication is so important for us because communication is part of the treatment. What we don’t want to do is take an old, grumpy doctor and sit him in front of a camera and treat our patients,” says this week’s guest Florian Semler, co-founder and CEO of Formel Skin.  Formel Skin is a telemedicine scale-up that treats skin conditions. They are on a mission to make medicine approachable and ac...

Valerie Bures is a serial entrepreneur, and founder, CEO, investor, board member, and a mom of three with an incredible track record.  Over the past 20 years, she founded and scaled Mrs. Sporty, Pixformance and VAHA - successful businesses at the intersection of fitness, health and technology.  Mrs. Sporty is a Europe-wide chain of fitness clubs that Valerie helped to scale to around 300.000 membe...

“Make it a story people remember. That’s the great thing about startups. Startups have great stories to tell. That’s what founders should use.” Our guest is the accomplished entrepreneur Jan Reichelt. He built and sold two massively successful ventures, Mendeley and Kopernio, before bringing 10x Founders into existence in 2021. In a short period of time, 10x Founders has become one of the top fund...

Sophie Chung is back on the podcast! She is the founder & CEO of Qunomedical where she is building a much-needed CRM for hospitals to improve patient care. A force of nature, Sophie was our guest on Episode #9, “No Bullshit”, and she still lives by that mantra - now more than ever. Sophie and Oliver discuss how especially in tough times, “No BS” really counts. But you often see the opposite, argue...

“We knew that if we didn’t jump, we’d regret it for the rest of our lives.” It was a leap into the unknown that paid off. Jochen Engert is the founder and former long-time CEO of Flix, a German startup best known for Flixbus that has grown into a global tech and transportation company with more than 60m passengers per year - a journey he describes as “absolutely crazy”. Jochen led Flix for 11 year...

Storytelling is bloody difficult. It is only easy if you don’t know how it is done. Fortunately, Communications Designer Jeremy Connell-Waite breaks it down for us. He leads IBM’s "Wild Ducks" industrial storytelling programme, where he coaches partners to create compelling pitches and presentations. Stories are how you move people to action as a leader. But not random ones. Effective stories and...

“The role of the CEO is to tell stories and make sure that they become true.” Josef, who has two nine figure exists under his belt, is a serial founder, successful entrepreneur, and investor. But success didn’t come easy. Starting out at the age of 16, he dropped out of school to build his first company which he sold only two years later to buy his parents a house. Since then, Josef, who loves to...

Hybrid working is here to stay. What’s harder to figure out is how CEOs and founders can lead, communicate and make an impact in this brave new work. Top international executive coach Bettina Hausmann and Oliver Aust both see opportunities in communicating in a hybrid world - if done right. In this episode, they give leaders the roadmap to be more impactful and avoid the spectre of mediocre commun...

“There is no day without communication.” In his new book “Helden werden in der Krise geboren” (Heroes are born in crisis), Holger G. Weiss dissects the archetypical, existential crises many founders encounter - from product to founders to investor crisis - and how they avoid meltdown and instead emerge stronger. As German Autolabs founder and CEO Holger knows, communication is a central part of yo...

Life's a pitch and you need to nail this skill for basically everything you do in life, says Bryony Cooper. Her life story is both unusual and impressive: She stepped up to the mic early as a professional singer, which gave her the communications skills and stage presence to successfully pitch her first tech startup. After building several startups, she became a VC and currently is the Managing Pa...

How do you write four books in four years? Should you write a book? Welcome to a special episode in which Oliver gives us a behind-the-scenes look at how he managed to write and publish 4 books in 4 years, the last two of which became Amazon bestsellers. Oliver not only shares why he did it, but also shares his process and hard-won insights on writing, building an audience, publishing and marketin...

To shape the mobility of tomorrow, “you need to adapt your messaging, depending on who you are talking to. You need to put yourself into the shoes of the respective audience, be it the users of our service, the team, shareholders, or even politicians.“ Our guest knows what he is talking about. John David von Oertzen is the CEO of Mobimeo, a Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) provider that aims to change...

2023 prediction: companies will relentlessly focus on revenue through storytelling, marketing and communications. Because cost cutting only gets you so far. Sherilyn Shackell has a clear view on the importance of marketing: "The CMOs should be present in every boardroom." They are the ones who feel the pulse of the customers, hear their heartbeat and can make all the difference. Sherilyn is the Fo...

How do you get businesses to see something boring as a competitive advantage? Like data protection. Compliance used to cost companies a fortune in legal fees. That's tough - in particular for small and medium-sized businesses. So Miloš Djurdjević set out with his co-founder Daniel Deutsch to build a real painkiller. “There’s a lot of anxiety involved in this topic due to personal liabilities that...

The less you tell people, the more they understand. That’s the simplicity paradox. In Message Machine, Jag and I set out to provide founders with everything in one book they need to know about communications to scale and to avoid failure. On the Speak Like a CEO podcast released today, we speak with our amazing guest host Lena Carlson why we wrote the book, the process of writing it (blood, sweat...

"The biggest mistake a company can make is not to communicate at all. As a founder, you need to start in the early stages and continually be strategic and smart about it,“ says Christian Meermann. Together with Daniel Glasner and Filip Felician Dames, Christian has backed some of Europes most game-changing ventures. Their VC Cherry Ventures teams up with founders from all industries, beginning at...

Want to know the essentials of branding in 30 minutes? In this special episode, Phil Rumbol walks us through the process of building and re-positioning brands. There is really no better person to ask for guidance on marketing and branding. Phil is a business leader, award winning marketing director, founder and CEO with a broad range of experience from startups to agencies to global brands. He has...

Shilpika Gautam is a Guinness World Record Holding climate activist and CEO and founder of SALT Global. Before creating the fintech platform to finance the climate transition, Shilps became the first-ever person to stand-up paddle the river Ganges in India from source-to-sea. 100m people worldwide watched her journey on the Discovery Channel - the result of a cold email. Not one to shy away from b...

Every company faces an existential #crisis as it grows. "As an entrepreneur, you need to speak about the difficulties you are having“, says our guest today. His unconventional view: Start your conversations, your investor pitches and company presentations with the bad news. Klaus Wegener, co-founder und Managing Director of 35up, knows what he is talking about. He has seen companies rise and fall,...

There are many football apps for professionals. And now there is one for the "real football“ - the amateur game played and loved by 190 million Europeans. Lukas Röhle co-founded Prematch App with Fiete Grünter und Niklas Brackmann. This year, the three amateur footballer players stormed the app charts. Shortly after its rollout across Germany last summer, the football community app climbed to the...

A growth-driven entrepreneur who built ventures in six countries, speaks four languages who is also a comedian in his free time best known for his standup and improv performances? There is only one person who fits this description: Daniel Hanemann, the CEO of wundertax, the startup he co-founded in 2016 and returned to as CEO in 2022. His mission is to make tax returns easier. "It’s all about conn...

We all want more sustainable fashion and ethically produced goods. But greenwashing and wishy-washy information make us unsure which products are really sustainable. Enter Impactbytes (https://www.impactbytes.io), the growth engine for sustainable e-commerce. It’s the brainchild of the impressive Amsterdam-based founding trio Noor Veenhoven and sisters Marcella and Melissa Wijngaarden. The @Techst...

How can you build an emotional connection with your customers? Especially if you have tens of thousands? Certainly not by sending them the same old email, maybe adding their first name from the database 🙄 But by speaking to them as individuals. "Customers want to feel special, like we’ve made the effort to get to know them“, says our guest. What used to be impossible or at best a tedious and time...

A brand is a statement. But you have to mean it. 🍋 Our guest today was analysing the markets during his studies and had an idea. He dropped out of university and jumped right into it. In 2020, Max Linden co-founded the fintech start-up lemon.markets — a stock trading API that enables developers to program their own trading algorithms, bots or applications. Despite his young age, business angels a...

Why is there no Vestiaire Collective for furniture? Why isn’t there a platform that gives designer furniture the second life it deserves? This was the question Gemma Comabella posed herself while she was Managing Director DACH for MADE.com. And she hit a nerve. Pre-loved furniture is more than just a gap in the market. It is also a solution to reduce the environmental impact of our love for all th...