This Much I Know - The Seedcamp Podcast

In this Seedcamp Deep Dive, Carlos is joined by Dan Bladen, Co-founder of Kadence, and Tushar Agarwal, Co-founder of HubbleHQ as they share their founder stories and experiences with pivoting their businesses during the Covid -19 pandemic. Listen in to learn more about the latest trends in hybrid workspaces and the commercial real estate market along with what it means to create employee-centered...

In this episode of This Much I Know, Carlos Espinal is joined by Matt Miller, a Partner at Sequoia Capital. Matt started his entrepreneurial journey at a young age, first as an avocado seller and eventually when he took two years off university to work on a restaurant tech product. Today, he helps lead Sequoia’s initiative in Europe, where he works on finding great companies to partner with. Throu...

In this episode of This Much I Know, Managing Partner Carlos Espinal speaks with Emi Gal and Diego Cantor, co-founders of Ezra, about how digital healthcare will become. Every year, 20 million people are diagnosed with cancer, 10 million of which are detected late. Ezra's core mission aims to change this equation through their next-generation cancer screening technology that uses AI & MRIs. Carlos...

“Consumers of today like to have a dialogue with their brands...consumers can now ask the harder questions.” Ingvar Helgason, Co-Founder of VitroLabs In this week’s TMIK, Managing Partner Carlos Espinal and Seedcamp team member Polina Stavrovski chat with two very exciting guests, Ingvar, and Joy Howard who are both building companies in the sustainable fashion space. Ingvar’s mission with VitroLa...

In this Seedcamp Deep Dive, Head of Brand Natasha Lytton speaks with Maria, Head of Product at Spill about the intersection of technology with mental health, and the growing opportunities that exist when offering accessible mental health services moving forward for both patients and clinicians. Spill’s mission is to “put high quality talk therapy in the pocket of every person on Earth” by not usin...

Seedcamp EiR David Mytton and VP Devin Hunt have both been successful, technical founders (Server Density, Lyst). As they scaled respective internal teams, they gathered a plethora of experiences on the matter. On this week's TMIK, our Managing Partner Carlos Espinal chats with David and Devin about "Unpacking the Stack", and the various angles to consider across product, engineering and design te...

“Technology alone is not enough. Without the right governance, it may still lead us down the road of overconsumption and environmental catastrophe.” — Azeem Azhar, Author of Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It Azeem Azhar knows a thing or two about what direction exponential technology is heading toward, and how it's challenging our well-establishe...

“Keep it simple. Be brilliant at the basics”. This is the advice that Andrew Bartlow, Founder of Series B Consulting gives to small, high-growth organisations looking to scale rapidly on this week’s This Much I Know episode. Managing Partner Carlos Espinal chats with Andrew about Andrew’s recently published book, “Scaling for Success: People Priorities for High-Growth Organizations.” The two discu...

90% of startups fail. For early-stage founders, this can come from both false positives or negatives. Two factors include: bias towards early adopters vs. mainstream customers, that are mostly necessary to scale, or giving up too early on a project that turns out to be a billion-dollar business idea a couple of months later. Tom Eisenmann, Professor at Harvard Business School, discusses this and m...

The landscape of working and hiring remotely has drastically changed. Recruiting some of the best global talent as an employer requires a lot of knowledge on highly locally specialized topics because doing the statutory minimum is simply not enough anymore. Dee Coakley, the CEO and co-founder of BoundlessHQ, is on a mission to make it easy to employ anyone, anywhere. In this episode of This Much I...

Restructuring a company can happen on all scales. Whether it’s within a founding team or a huge corporation, there are important common threads that are applicable across all business sizes to ensure value creation. On this episode of This Much I Know, we have a very special guest, Managing Partner Carlos Espinal’s father, Carlos Espinal Sr, Business Transformation & Restructuring Specialist, to d...

The power of community lies in the ability to thrive virtually and scale across borders. Behind these communities, lie powerful and dedicated leaders whose intrinsic motivation to connect and support members creates compounding value. On the final ‘Precious on Community’ episode, Precious speaks with Erika Batista, VP International at On Deck on managing and growing their communities. On Deck is a...

The power of community lies in the ability to thrive virtually and scale across borders. Behind these communities, lie powerful and dedicated leaders whose intrinsic motivation to connect and support members creates compounding value. On the second-to-last ‘Precious on Community’ episodes, Precious speaks with Hung Lee, Curator at Recruiting Brainfood on managing and growing communities. Recruitin...

"Diversity of the leadership... is the number one thing you should be doing as a founder at the early stages. Because that is going to pull in more diversity over time — that's how networks operate." — Hephzi Pemberton, Founder at Equality Group Diversity and inclusion within startups is essential in innovating and adapting in our fast-paced world. Bringing people with distinctive life experiences...

We've said it before and we'll say it again: the world of managing people and organising teams is brimming with changes. COVID-19 and new societal views on working in the 21st century (90% of Generation Z, for instance, want a human element when it comes to their job role and interactions with their coworkers) are changing workplaces of all types. Founders and investors are picking up on these tre...

Being a leader is a lonely journey. COOs, due to their incredibly diverse job descriptions, are particularly at-risk of feeling lonely and unable to confide in people within their teams. This is what seasoned COO-turned-CEO Ben Branson-Gateley from Seedcamp portfolio company CharlieHR and Kelsey Traher from Marvel felt. In search of a community that didn't exist, they teamed up to start their own...

"If you try to grow too quickly, you miss a really critical opportunity to create the foundation of community and figure out a model that works really well and is repeatable. Don't try to do too much too quickly." David Spinks, Co-Founder @ CMX A decade ago, the term 'community' didn't strike most as a central component of company-building, even though it was. Fast-forward to today, where the inte...

"[When hiring,] you're asking someone you've just met to effectively babysit your child. That's the sort of trust you need to have...you're effectively giving them your baby to help it scale." — Duncan Finlayson, Partner @ True Hiring top-tier talent for your startup is arguably as important as developing a good product. A new hire is a big investment that affects a team's productivity and a compa...

Humans are innately community-seeking. It's why we section off into groups on playgrounds, congregate around political leaders, and build families, biological or otherwise. Communities add value, and membership goes far beyond group identity; it even drives purchasing decisions. From clothing and bottled water to open-source software, community is a powerful tool for company building, and one that...

“That’s what gets us super excited — being able to see a product that fits a very specific need in the market, that even if it’s built super roughly, already exposes the needs that the founder has identified.” Few know the B2B venture space in Europe better than Point Nine Capital. From Delivery Hero and Zendesk, which both IPO’d, to Typeform, Clio, and Vend, the Point Nine team knows how to spot...

“B2B is all about social science and social context. It’s counterintuitive because you’d think that is B2C but in B2C, it’s more about the vision and brand and riding on this huge wave that is building up in the viral market. In B2B it comes down to people. If you have the ability to observe, listen, shut-up, and work your way from that, that’s the biggest asset that founders can have in terms of...

Not many people know that Evan Frank introduced our now-managing partners Carlos Espinal and Reshma Sohoni to each other during Seedcamp’s infancy. Even fewer are aware that Reshma was his first boss in NYC. And virtually no one (likely not even the Seedcamp Team) knows that Evan was single-handedly responsible for onboarding Seedcamp onto Gmail. But Evan Frank’s accomplishments far surpass his in...

The world of financial services is changing. From managing taxes to saving for retirement, the way in which we manage our money is being disrupted from all angles. And for good reason — a 2019 survey by the World Economic Forum found that only 28 percent of millennials and Gen Zs trust their banks to be ‘fair and honest’. The dissatisfaction with traditional financial institutions has led to a wav...

‘We’re not a backpack company. We are a community and real brand.” — Jason McCarthy Jason McCarthy never set out to start an outdoor gear company. After university, he decided to serve in the US army, where he eventually became a Green Beret across Iraq, West Africa, and Europe. While serving in the Army Special Forces, McCarthy started making go-backs, now known as a go-ruck, for his friends and...

Can I lead the company I started? It’s a question founders and their investors ask themselves a lot. While most founders (four out of five, to be exact) want to stick around as CEOs of their own ventures, more than half are pushed out by the time their company is three years old. Of course, founder-CEOs do exist: Phil Knight, Anne Wojcicki, Reed Hastings, the list goes on. Mike McDerment, Co-Found...