Unicorn Bakery - For the World's Most Ambitious Founders & Teams

In this episode, Remo Gerber (SkyCell) and Fabienne Doerig (CFO expert and consultant) discuss the challenges and strategies involved in building and scaling finance functions in fast-growing companies. The two share their experiences from different growth phases, from startups to billion-dollar organizations, and provide insights into the role of the CFO, process automation, successful fundraisin...

In this episode, Cyrus Hessabi from Shore Capital Partners discusses the intersection of AI, traditional services, and roll-up strategies. He shares insights on how AI is transforming service businesses, why the democratization of AI creates new opportunities, and how the next generation of service companies will be built. Key Learnings: AI-Enabled Services: Democratization of AI through cost & ad...

In this episode of Unicorn Bakery, Mike Mahlkow sits down with Finn Murphy, General Partner at Nebular, to discuss how Finn identifies emerging trends and invests in founders building the future. Finn shares his philosophy of investing 12-18 months ahead of the market, focusing on areas like AI, robotics, space-based data centers, and quantum computing. Finn discusses the challenges of being a sol...

In this episode of Unicorn Bakery, Nicolas Benady, co-founder and CEO of Swan, shares the journey of building one of Europe’s leading Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platforms. Nicolas takes us behind the scenes of how Swan started in 2019, spent two years building its infrastructure, and has now grown to process over €20 billion in payments annually. Nicolas discusses the challenges of creating a Baa...

In this episode of Unicorn Bakery, Nir Eyal, bestselling author of "Hooked" and "Indistractable", joins Fabian Tausch to discuss how to design habit-forming products, balance personal focus, and build a life free from distractions. Nir shares his unique insights on the psychology of habits, why most people misunderstand distraction, and how founders can create meaningful, ethical products that imp...

Chris Merritt, former CRO of Cloudflare, shares how the company scaled from single-digit millions to $1 billion in ARR and built a foundation for long-term, sustainable growth. Chris unpacks the strategies behind scaling go-to-market teams, aligning product and sales for maximum impact, and creating strong customer relationships based on trust and value delivery. He also discusses the challenges o...

Clay is one of THE success stories of the last years.  But in early 2022, after 5 years of building, Clay did close to 0 in revenue. Two years later, Clay did approximately 30 million in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue). Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay, shares the journey of building one of the most innovative AI-powered tools for go-to-market teams. From the early days of experimentation in...

Stevie Case, CRO at Vanta, explains how the company surpassed $100 million in ARR in just five years by building a predictable and scalable revenue engine. From founder-led sales to structuring a global sales organization, Stevie shares actionable insights for designing a repeatable go-to-market strategy and scaling effectively. She breaks down the importance of discovery, identifying customer pai...

w Strava started as a "virtual locker room" in 1995 and why it didn’t work The role of timing, technology, and social media in Strava’s eventual success Building a Community-Driven Platform: Why Strava focused on engagement over growth and how this approach led to organic scaling Creating joy and reducing friction for users is important to keep them active and engaged Key Lessons in Scaling: How S...

In this episode of Unicorn Bakery, Hunter Walk, co-founder of Homebrew, joins Fabian Tausch for an in-depth conversation about his journey from product management at Google and YouTube to building one of the most respected early-stage venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Hunter shares the story behind Homebrew’s evolution, why he and his co-founder Satya Patel decided to rethink the traditiona...

In this episode, Harper Carroll, one of the most prominent voices in AI education, joins for a deep dive into the art of creating educational content, and how she built an impressive following of over 400,000 people in just one year.  She reveals the behind-the-scenes strategies that helped her viral content stand out in a world dominated by flashy, fast-paced trends and why staying true to her ca...

Fabrice Grinda, co-founder of FJ Labs and one of the world’s most prolific marketplace investors, joins the Unicorn Bakery podcast again to share his marketplace outlook for 2025. With more than 1,100 investments and 355 exits, Fabrice is uniquely positioned to discuss the trends shaping the future of startups, marketplaces, and venture capital.  In this episode, he dives into the state of venture...

On March 5th, 2021, SAP acquired Signavio for a billion dollars – this marks one of the largest Tech Exits in the German market to date. How does a university side project become a billion-dollar acquisition?  In this episode, Gero Decker, co-founder of Signavio, shares the incredible journey of building the company – from its roots as an open-source project to bootstrapping, scaling, and eventual...

Kevin Hartz is not only one of the most influential seed investors in Silicon Valley, but also a successful founder. In addition to early-stage investments in PayPal, Uber, AirBnB and SpaceX, he founded Xoom (exit to PayPal for approx. 1 billion dollars) and Eventbrite (IPO). With his current startup Sauron, Kevin is in the process of developing new technologies for the home security market. Kevin...

Richard Socher, most recently Chief Scientist at Salesforce under Marc Benioff and one of the most renowned AI researchers in the world, has now founded you.com instead of joining one of the big AI companies. Richard believes that he can have a more positive impact on humanity. you.com now reaches millions of users and gives you as a user the opportunity to work based on the latest models. Richard...

Dan Siroker built Optimizely to more than 120 million ARR before leaving the company. The company was sold and merged, and then launched, rewind.ai-now limitless.ai, a consumer product that, unlike Dan's previous company, has a software and hardware component. Dan gives deep insights into the transition from software to hardware development and the use of AI in modern startups. He explains how emp...

Only 10% of start-ups are successful and yet 82% of founders think they will be successful. 78% of start-ups don't even manage to pay back their investors. Dave Hersh scaled a company with Jive to more than 10 million dollars in turnover, took a growth investor on board and Jive later went public. Through his other positions as a coach, board partner at a16z and also as a buyer of start-ups, he ha...

Alexander Keesling researched quantum computers at Harvard and, together with a team, decided to found a company based on his research. Today, QuEra generates tens of millions in revenue, licenses its quantum computer via AWS and is building a new quantum computer in Japan for around 41 million dollars. In the podcast, we talk about the status quo of quantum computing, when quantum computers will...

Fabrice Grinda, founder of FJ Labs and extreme athlete, explains how he has made over 1100 investments, primarily in marketplace and network-effect startups, generating an average 40% return over 26 years. Fabrice also likes to simplify a lot in his life by outsourcing things. Find out his recipe for a fulfilling life and managing virtual assistants in the podcast. What you will learn: Outsourcing...

Tushar Ahluwalia founded the Razor Group together with his founding team in 2020. Since then, the Razor Group has received more than one billion dollars in investment and credit, acquired and consolidated many Amazon FBA businesses and most recently some Amazon aggregators, such as Perch. Today, the Razor Group is the largest remaining player on the market in terms of sales and serves a product ca...

Is the European climate for early-stage start-ups improving again? After the European fundraising ecosystem was somewhat more cautious in the years following the corona boom, the question is: how is it currently developing?  Fabian meets George Robson, Partner at Sequoia Capital, probably the best-known venture capital fund in the world.  Together they talk about financing start-ups with high capi...

Monta has raised more than 120 million euros for its software platform for electric vehicles to improve the accessibility of charging infrastructure. Within 3 years, Monta has scaled to around 300 employees, is currently hiring 10-20 employees per month and is multiplying revenue annually. Previously, Monta founder Casper Rasmussen built 500+ mobile apps with his agency and bootstrapped the agency...

Scott Chachon is one of the co-founders of GitHub, a developer platform that was sold to Microsoft for around 7.5 billion dollars. We talk about the moment he found out about the sale to Microsoft, how much money he made from the sale and whether it made him happy. He is now founding his third startup, Gitbutler, after investing 12 million of his own money in Chatterbug and has now decided to grow...

David Heinemeier Hansson is the inventor of Ruby on Rails and founder of 37signals, a company that has developed products such as Basecamp, Hey.com and more over the last 20 years. However, apart from Jeff Bezos, David and his co-founder Jason Friedman didn't take any money and bootstrapped the company. We talk about the biggest cost drivers for companies, how 37signals managed to develop multiple...

What role does creativity play for entrepreneurs? And how is the understanding of creativity changing as a result of artificial intelligence? Scott Belsky founded Behance, sold the start-up to Adobe and is now Chief Product and Chief Strategy Officer there. Adobe is one of the 50 most valuable companies in the world. At Adobe, Scott oversees all new products and is deeply involved in what the futu...