SPEAK LIKE A CEO

„You can’t make change happen alone!“ says Mali M. Baum. Together with her team, she is shining a light on others. As CEO and founder of WLOUNGE and the MAGDA GROUP fund, Mali has created an ecosystem that supports female founders and promotes diversity in business and technology. Mali has over 20 years of experience as a founder and is active internationally as an investor, speaker, mentor and ec...

"Our best marketing employee is Elon Musk!“, says Caro Gabor with a twinkle in her eyes. Musk’s goal of fixing the „incredibly inefficient“ car insurance market while making a lot of money from it has gotten the attention of the car industry. For car buyers, getting insurance is the least favourite part of the purchase. This is about to change. Caro’s aim is to make the insurance experience deligh...

Speak Like A CEO is back after the summer break. Today's guest is the CEO and co-founder of a trailblazing company that digitalizes the conservative insurance industry and has raised $115m+ in the process: Getsafe. The InsurTech scale-up is based in Heidelberg. „Not being in Germany's start-up tech capital Berlin gives us the freedom to build a company culture that is independent of startup trends...

"You don’t have to be 65 to live your dreams,“ believes our guest. Her business is all about giving people this opportunity much sooner in life, by helping them to build wealth. Christine Kiefer is the co-founder of RIDE Capital. RIDE is a private bank for the digital age that helps customers structure their portfolio in an optimal and tax-efficient way. Customers already trust RIDE with close to...

Say no to borders and bureaucracy and yes to openness and simplicity! Our guest today believes that international mobility is beneficial for all and is doing her part to make the process a positive experience for businesses and employees. Having experienced the expat life herself, polyglot Hanna Marie Asmussen, co-founder and CEO of Localyze, knows exactly how complex and bureaucratic it can be to...

Dare to rethink how money should work. This is what our guest today is passionate about. And that future of finance starts with a new story about money. Katharina Gehra is the co-founder & CEO of Immutable Insight and manages one of the leading crypto hedge funds in Germany. Coming from the traditional world of finance, she is now an integral part of the crypto industry. Katharina has been invited...

Today's guest is one of the key players in the German and European FinTech scene. As co-founder and CEO of company builder finleap, Ramin Niroumand and his team were instrumental in building 15 companies that are now worth €3bn+, including Element, Penta, Clark and Solarisbank. Several of these have already achieved unicorn status. Never one to rest on his laurels, Ramin recently founded his own v...

Selling is hard. To make the sales conversation better our guest today has built Demodesk, a revolutionary screen sharing and video conferencing platform. It acts like an AI-driven sales consultant that assists you by analysing data and giving suggestions to improve the conversation with the customer. You can compare this with the real-time assistance in cars today, says Veronika Riederle, the CEO...

How do you know what kind of business has huge potential? It’s easy to connect the dots looking back. It’s way harder is to recognise trends in society before they become obvious, and use that insight to build a business that develops a new market. That’s exactly what Jannes Fischer did. He is the CEO and founder of Vermietet.de, the market leader in digital solutions for private landlords. Helpin...

„If you want people to buy in to who you are, then you have to have a really, really great story behind it.“ Freda Katunda Olsen Born in Kinshasa, raised in the USA and currently living in Germany, our guest today is on a mission to create lasting change globally. Freda Katunda Olsen cofounded LEAP in 2020, an ed-tech startup that provides healthcare education across Africa. In partnership with UN...

What is the foundation for everything you do in business? It’s communications. But developing communications skills is hard and time-consuming, unless …. .. you find a way to blitzscale them. We know you are in a rush, so how can you speed this up? The key is to break down communications into a number micro-skills and learn the techniques that help you make progress fast. That way every founder ca...

Our guest today is passionate about enabling the next generation of entrepreneurs to build high-growth businesses. He believes they are more important than ever to create innovation, jobs and to keep Europe competitive. And there is nothing more powerful for a new business than to find its North Star and ensure that everybody can recite it in their sleep. Martin Schilling is the Managing Director...

When it comes to Web3, “messaging is the biggest challenge” said investor Chris Dixon. “There are a lot of misunderstandings around it, some of it is self-inflicted by the community. You have a lot of people who react negatively to crypto, which can lead to over zealous regulatory behaviour.” Our guest today is working to change all this with transparency, great storytelling and an exciting new ve...

The scarcest resource today is #talent. And finding it is often stressful for both sides. Zenjob co-founder Fritz Trott, our guest today, experienced first hand how difficult it was to find a suitable part-time job as a student. Together with his co-founders Cihan Aksakal and Frederik Fahning, he made it his mission to solve that problem. Today Zenjob offers a state-of-the-art tech solution that f...

Today’s guest is one of the most influential women in tech. Nicole Büttner is the founder and CEO of Merantix Momentum, a leading AI solutions firm, and a board member of Merantix, one of Germany's top investors and company builders for artificial intelligence applications. A tech-optimist through and through, she is pushing Europe to become a global leader in AI. Her impressive background in busi...

Ten years ago, the founders of the London-based fintech unicorn SumUp went from door to door to convince merchants to trust them with their money. It’s been an incredible journey since. We have all used SumUp paying for coffee or shopping at independent retailers and now take convenient payment options for granted. But that wasn’t always the case. The historically slow-moving payment industry has...

Our guest today is the CEO of Nuri (formerly Bitwala) and a digital thought leader. Nuri enables customers to invest in cryptocurrency directly from their bank account. As Kristina Walcker-Mayer puts it: it is banking without the bankers. Kristina is rapidely becoming the chief storyteller of neobanking, shaping topics around investing, blockchain, cryptocurrency and modern leadership. In this epi...

Jerome Lange went from trying and failing to build a babysitting business as a student (no founder-market-fit) to building an operating system for construction sites (founder-market-fit). It’s badly needed: construction is pretty much the only sector that has become less efficient in the last 40 years. This has become untenable, as we need to build faster, better and more sustainably in light of c...

Gerrit McGowan is an investor, entrepreneur and startup mentor who has coached over 1000 founders and entrepreneurs across five continents. He is also the host of ‘The Most Awesome Founder’ podcast and recently launched the Rainmaking Venture Studio in Germany that partners with corporates to invest and build high-growth companies. In this episode, Gerrit and Oliver take a deep dive into the all-i...

"What is leadership but language? Changing the way we communicate changes the culture. Changing the culture transforms our results.“ (L. David Marquet) What’s the role of a leader? Certainly to set the strategy, focus everyone on what matters, bring in top talent, and ensure there is enough money in the bank. All of these require a high proficiency in communication. And have a huge impact on how t...

Our guest today turned the Why? question into a thriving business. A clinical psychologist by training, Sarah Reitz worked in consulting until her work had lost its purpose. Pondering her personal dilemma, she emerged with two co-founders and a novel business idea that addresses a growing need. The result: whylab - a digital fitness studio for mental wellbeing Tune into an episode in which Sarah a...

Your organisation's culture is the key to its success. Its not just a nice to have and the mission statement you put on your website. It’s the path to happy and high performing employees, to securing profitability and retaining talent, to building a strong and resilient company. Our guest today is a company culture builder par excellence. Kristen Mashburn coaches leaders how to get more out of the...

Millennials want convenience, like being able to open a bank account in 10 minutes. The GenZ cohort expect convenience and also want a purpose they can relate to. So how well you communicate your purpose is becoming a main differentiator for companies targeting this group. Still, so far very few fintechs have created financial products for the next generation of customers. Bastian Krautwald's comp...

Pour yourself your favourite drink for this week’s episode. Communicating under the influence is not without challenges, and so is communicating about alcohol. More precisely, we are talking about spirits, with the person who represents one of Europe’s most valuable agri-food export sectors. Ulrich Adam is the Director General of spiritsEurope, the Brussels-based association that represents the in...

First: create a market. Second: own it. Third: expand globally. Amboss' market share is simply off the charts, bigger than Google’s, and the Berlin EdTech has big plans to make up-to-date research accessible to ever more medical students and doctors around the world. A decade ago: studying for your medical exams or accessing up-to-date medical research was a time-consuming grind. Scientific commun...