Italy is known for sun, food, and culture. What it isn't known for — and should be — is being one of the top research nations on the planet. Nicola Redi has built his career on closing that gap. As Managing Partner at Obloo Ventures, one of Italy's leading deep tech VC firms, he spends his days translating breakthroughs in AI, quantum, aerospace, and computational science into companies that can actually scale. With nearly three decades spanning venture capital, corporate innovation, and research commercialization — including 15 years inside multinational corporations — Nicola sees the entire pipeline from lab bench to market in a way few investors can. 

This isn't just an Italian story. Europe and Canada both produce world-class research, then watch a lot of it get commercialized somewhere else — usually the US. Nicola is direct about why that keeps happening and what would actually have to change to stop it. He's also clear-eyed about where the real money in deep tech will be made next, and how to tell that apart from whatever everyone happens to be hyping this quarter. If you're building, operating, or investing, that filter alone makes this one worth your time. 

Key Topics Covered 

• Italy's hidden research strength — Why a country famous for tourism quietly ranks among the world's top research nations, and how that output is now becoming startups. 
• The technology-transfer model — How Obloo acts as a bridge between research labs and corporations, functioning almost like a third-party corporate venture arm. 
• Europe's single-market problem — Why fragmented rules across 27 member states hold back scaling, and what unifying the market would unlock. 
• The physical AI thesis — Where Nicola believes Europe can win even after losing the initial AI race, and why specificity beats hype. 
• What founders actually need — The skills, humility, and language scientists must learn to become operators who can build and lead companies. 

Key Insights 

Technology is a small part of the job. One of Nicola's founders — a top bio-robotics researcher — came back years after launching his company to admit the technology was only about 5% of the work. Market adoption, team-building, and execution are where companies actually win or lose. 

The real value is in the specifics. The categories everyone's talking about are usually overpriced just because everyone's talking about them. What Nicola actually gets excited about is deep tech aimed at narrow industrial problems — simulating new materials, running predictive maintenance through digital twins, and quantum built for one specific job. That's where the valuation reflects what a company can really do, not just the hype around it. 

Government's most powerful lever isn't incentives — it's buying. Nicola argues the biggest shift isn't more grants or funds-of-funds, but governments and corporations acting as launch customers for startups. As competitive pressure rises, the relationship between incumbents and early-stage companies is becoming a matter of survival: either you engage, or you get left behind. 

Links & Resources 

• Obloo Ventures: https://obloo.vc/ 
• Nicola Redi on LinkedIn: https://it.linkedin.com/in/nicolaredi 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the Guest 

Nicola Redi is Managing Partner at Obloo Ventures, one of Italy's leading deep tech venture capital firms focused on translating frontier science into scalable companies. He brings nearly three decades of experience across venture capital, corporate innovation, and research commercialization, with deep roots in scientific entrepreneurship and 15 years inside multinational corporations. His work sits at the intersection of advanced research, industrial transformation, and venture creation across AI, quantum computing, aerospace, biotech, and computational science. 

Tom Milar has spent over a decade building infrastructure for private companies — first through incorporation services out of Hong Kong and Las Vegas, and now through Eqvista, a valuation and equity management platform serving 23,000 startups. After a successful acquisition, Tom took five of his most important team members and set out to fix a problem he kept running into himself: founders were managing ownership and valuation off static PDFs and Excel sheets, working from data that was already months out of date by the time it landed. Eqvista's answer is a real-time valuation engine that now values $4 trillion in assets and gives founders, employees, and investors a live look at what their company is actually worth — like a stock ticker for private companies. 

This conversation matters because valuation sits underneath almost every consequential decision a founder makes — raising, hiring, issuing equity, planning an exit — and most founders are working with a number that's stale, opaque, or both. Tom brings a rare combination of product obsession and financial discipline to the table, having bootstrapped Eqvista to scale on roughly half a million dollars rather than chasing rounds. For any founder thinking about their cap table, their next raise, or how to give their team real liquidity, this episode is a clear-eyed look at where private markets are heading. 

Key Topics Covered 

• The problem with PDF valuations — Why the months-long lag between financials and a finished valuation report leaves founders making decisions on outdated numbers. 
• Real-time valuation at scale — How Eqvista's engine continuously values 20,000+ companies and the data behind a $4 trillion valuation engine. 
• Controlled tender offers and liquidity — How company-led tender offers let founders set the price and structure liquidity for employees and investors on their own terms. 
• Bootstrapped, product-led growth — Why a free cap table, paid valuations, and relentless customer support drove scale without heavy fundraising. 
• The most common cap table mistakes — What early founders get wrong with paid-up capital, adjusted cost base, and overcrowded cap tables. 

Key Insights 

1. Valuation is a byproduct, not the prize. Tom and Maxim align on the idea that a strong valuation flows from belief in the founder, the idea, and the market size — not the other way around. Founders who chase the number rather than the fundamentals are optimizing for the wrong thing. 
2. De-risk before you raise. Tom's view is that founders should build a product that works, reaches real revenue, and approaches profitability before going to investors — so capital becomes fuel for acceleration rather than a bet on whether the business works at all. He's openly skeptical of early-stage bridge rounds as a sign that the original plan stalled. 
3. The story behind the price is the product. What separates a defensible valuation from a guess is the ability to explain why the number is what it is. Eqvista's edge isn't just the figure it produces — it's the pricing narrative built on hundreds of billions in valued assets that auditors and shareholders can actually rely on. 

Links 

• Eqvista: https://eqvista.com/ 
• Tom Milar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasmilar 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Tom Milar 

Tom Milar is the Founder and CEO of Eqvista, a platform for company valuation, equity management, and private-market liquidity serving 23,000 startups. Originally from the Czech Republic, he moved to Asia in 2009 and built incorporation-services businesses before launching Eqvista with a core team carried over from a prior successful exit. He is a product-first founder who scaled the company through bootstrapping, freemium adoption, and a real-time valuation engine that now values $4 trillion in assets. 

Matthew Jackson is the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Alimentary Systems, a New Zealand company rethinking how the world handles organic waste and sewage. An Edmund Hillary Fellow with a track record of building and scaling high-growth ventures across global markets, Matthew has helped drive billions in market value creation — including bringing Netflix to New Zealand and triggering a wave of industry convergence that reshaped the local media landscape. But what makes this conversation matter isn't the resume. It's the way Matthew thinks about impact, risk, and the responsibility of building something that outlasts you. 

This episode switches between two styles, which makes it interesting. First, it honestly tells the personal story of the founder — his childhood, losing his father at 15, studying process philosophy, and the daily habits that help him stay steady during tough times. Then, it explains one of the smartest business ideas we've discussed: a system that turns sewage and industrial waste into fertilizer, energy, and carbon credits, all at a lower cost than landfills. If you want to see what real product-market fit looks like — where investors, cities, residents, and the environment all benefit — this is a good place to start. 

Some of the key topics covered in this episode were: 

• From media changes to climate projects — Matthew's first business helped Netflix start in New Zealand, increased its value by $2.1 billion, and led to a lawsuit that taught him what true commitment costs. 
• The Alimentary Systems model — Why combining two waste streams into one unlocks five distinct revenue lines and a 2.4x value multiplier over the traditional landfill. 
• The economics of impact — How the company hits roughly 30% IRR while saving municipalities money and lowering household costs, proving environmental gains and returns aren't a trade-off. 
• Carbon credits as arbitrage — The four-year effort to get onto compliance markets, and why the same credit can sell for $45 in New Zealand or $127 into the UK. 
• Founder psychology — Managing ego, mental health, and presence as the real infrastructure behind sustained execution. 

Key Insights 

1. Being right and being effective are two different things. Matthew argues that when you treat the person across the table as the obstacle, your ego takes over, and progress stalls. Real change comes from meeting people where they are and moving forward together — not winning the argument. 
2. The term "risk-taker" is often misunderstood. What seems like bold risk-taking from the outside is usually careful planning—trying different approaches to reduce risks before making a big move. Matthew knows exactly what his current risks are, how much they cost, and has a clear plan for how to back out if needed. 
3. Capital allocation is the number one risk every company faces. Working on the right things with the wrong people — or pointing capital at the wrong priorities — is what sinks ventures. Helping founders sharpen their capital allocation framework is the highest-leverage support you can offer. 

Links & Resources 

• Alimentary Systems: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alimentary-systems/ 
• Matthew Jackson on LinkedIn: https://nz.linkedin.com/in/matthewjackson 
• Future Ventures LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the Guest 

Matthew Jackson is the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Alimentary Systems, where he's building circular waste-to-energy infrastructure across global markets. A four-time founder and Edmund Hillary Fellow, he has helped generate billions in market value, from pioneering media access in New Zealand to advancing climate-positive sanitation technology. He works closely with Indigenous communities on water security and is driven by a single conviction: that the best ventures make an impact and return the same thing.

Stanley Wei is the Founder and CEO of Pine AI, an autonomous agent platform that doesn't just answer questions — it picks up the phone, fills out the forms, and gets things done on behalf of consumers. Pine negotiates bills, cancels subscriptions, files complaints, resolves disputes, and navigates insurance claims autonomously. Before launching Pine, Stanley held leadership roles at Gore and invested in AI through Hillhouse Capital, watching the space evolve from the early deep learning era through the DALL-E inflection point that convinced him AGI was no longer a question of if, but when. 

This conversation is important because Stanley is developing a seldom-touched part of the AI stack: the unstructured, voice-based interface between agents and the physical world. Most AI products operate in digital spaces, like drafting or querying databases, but Pine trains proprietary voice models on real phone calls. This enables agents to interrupt naturally, manage silences, negotiate, and complete tasks. Understanding this reveals the future of consumer AI and how to compete against giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. The Matrix thesis for voice agents — Why the phone call is the channel that lets AI cross from the digital world into the physical one, and why this is fundamentally different from what ChatGPT or Copilot do. 
2. Building an AI company in 2024 vs. now — How model capability went from "100% hike to build an agent" to "everything is possible" in roughly twelve months, and what that means for product velocity. 
3. The unsustainable economics of AI customer acquisition — Why building product is now the easy part, why only Google and Meta own the demand side, and why hitting critical user mass has become survival-level urgent. 
4. Defending against the LLM giants — Why Pine trains its own voice model bottom-up on proprietary phone-call data instead of building on top of OpenAI or Anthropic, and where the foundation labs leave room for vertical specialists. 
5. Running a company without meetings — How Stanley designed Pine to be agent-friendly from the inside out: no code ownership, async by default, agents talking to other people's agents to coordinate work. 

Key Insights 

1. The biggest barrier to consumer AI adoption is not capability — it's trust and education. Most consumers don't yet know what AI can do, don't believe it can do it, and have to be walked through all three layers (pain, solution, proof) before they will pay. 
2. The structural shift in the AI economy has happened on the supply side, not the demand side. Coding agents made it cheap to build, but they did not create new distribution channels — so growth, not product, is now the binding constraint for almost every AI company. 
3. People have found some of the coolest ways to use Pine that the team never planned for. For example, one user who was laid off in 2025 used Pine to make money by buying rental cars cheaply and selling them for more, earning $3,000 on one deal. Another user used Pine to cut down a $5,000 credit card bill to $1,500. The product allows users to do things the creators never expected. 

Links 

Pine AI: https://www.19pine.ai/ 

Stanley Wei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanleywei 

Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Stanley Wei 

Stanley Wei is the Founder and CEO of Pine AI, an autonomous AI agent that takes action on behalf of consumers in the physical world — from negotiating bills to managing insurance disputes. Before Pine, he held leadership roles at Gore and was an AI investor at Hillhouse Capital, where he tracked the field through the deep learning era and the generative AI inflection point. He started Pine in 2024 out of personal frustration with the chores of being an international operator, splitting time between the US, Singapore, and the UK. 

Stan Christiaens is the Cofounder and Chief Data Citizen of Collibra, one of the companies that helped define the modern data governance category. What began in 2008 as a spinoff from a semantics research lab at the Free University of Brussels has grown into a global platform used by some of the world's largest enterprises to manage data trust, lineage, governance, and increasingly, AI oversight. Eighteen years in, Stan has a vantage point most operators do not — he has watched governance get sidelined every 5 to 10 years by the next shiny technology, and he has watched the same data problems resurface every time. 

This conversation matters because AI has changed the math. Companies that treated data as exhaust instead of as an asset are now discovering that their AI ambitions are bottlenecked by foundations they never built. Stan and Maxim get specific about what those foundations actually look like, why the Chief Data Officer role is at an inflection point, and why the iceberg of unstructured data — roughly 80 to 90 percent of an organization's information — is suddenly the biggest question on every data leader's desk. If you are building, advising, or selling into enterprises right now, this is the conversation about why data discipline is no longer optional. 

Key topics covered 

1. Data as asset vs. data as exhaust — why most organizations are still "growing up" to treat data as an asset, and why fragmentation from every shiny new technology makes the problem worse. 
2. The foundations of governance done well — find it, understand it, trust it, with assigned responsibility, a repeatable process, and a system of record sitting underneath. 
3. The evolution of the Chief Data Officer role — Gartner's five versions from defensive posture to data products to "startup person," with version 6 due, and why the AI moment is the CDO's biggest opportunity. 
4. Data confidence and the AI brain — why five-nines reliability for agents is achievable but requires scaffolding around the model, and why asking an LLM not to hallucinate misses the point. 
5. Selling into enterprise as a founder — why enterprises are slow by design, why they are never greenfield, and how to find the innovation pockets that let you accelerate. 

Three key insights 

You cannot fix data after the fact. Organizations that treat data as a byproduct for years and then suddenly need AI cannot retroactively make that data useful — they have to start treating it as an asset first, which is a cultural shift before it is a technical one. 

The model is not the problem. No matter how smart the frontier LLM gets, it will not make the right decision without the right context at the right time. The work is building the harness around the model — the responsibility, processes, and curated context — not chasing the next model release. 

Patience is the entrepreneur's hardest skill. Plan for a 10-year journey, not a three-year sprint, and make sure your business ambitions and your life at home stay in harmony — because the overnight successes everyone admires were a decade in the making before they looked obvious. 

Links 

• Collibra: https://www.linkedin.com/company/collibra 
• Stan Christiaens on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stijnchristiaens/ 
• Future Ventures on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Stan Christiaens 

Stan Christiaens is the Cofounder and Chief Data Citizen of Collibra, which he helped spin out of a computer science research lab at the Free University of Brussels in 2008. Over 18 years, he has built Collibra into one of the defining companies in the data governance category, working with many of the world's largest enterprises on how they organize, trust, and use their data. He is a recognized voice on the intersection of data governance, AI, and enterprise transformation. 

While most of Silicon Valley argues over whether SaaS is dead, Neeraj Singh is quietly running the experiment that might answer the question. He's the founder and CEO of BigBinary, a 15-year-old remote-first software consultancy, and Neeto, a growing suite of affordable alternatives to the bloated enterprise tools founders begrudgingly pay for every month. NeetoCal goes head-to-head with Calendly at $30 a year — less than a single month of the competition. NeetoSign takes on DocuSign. NeetoForm takes on Typeform. The product list keeps growing, and the marketing budget stays at zero. 

This conversation matters because Neeraj has spent his career doing the opposite of what most founders are told to do. He went remote 15 years before the pandemic forced everyone else into it. He refuses VC money and refuses to "go all in." He treats Slack as a place where nothing important should happen. He keeps engineers on the bench instead of maximizing utilization. He prices like a commodity in markets the gurus call winner-take-all. And he's still in business — profitable, growing, and building. For any founder rethinking pricing, team design, or what sustainable growth actually looks like in an AI-saturated market, this conversation is a different lens on what works. 

Topics Covered 

1. Remote-first before remote was a category — How Neeraj built BigBinary's writing culture by watching colleagues take remote calls between Oracle Tower 1 and Oracle Tower 2. 
2. Why GitHub is the source of truth, and Slack isn't allowed to hold anything important — The tool stack and the philosophy behind it. 
3. Bench time over utilization — Why creative work breaks under 60-hour weeks and what billable-hours culture gets wrong about engineering output. 
4. The 31st scheduling tool problem — Why entering a crowded market is fine, why "race to the bottom" is the wrong frame, and what Henry Ford, Honda, and Samsung teach about followers winning markets. 
5. The real reason SaaS prices keep climbing — Public SaaS companies spend 50%+ of revenue on sales and marketing, then raise prices to fund it; here's the alternative. 

Key Insights 

• Commodity pricing is not a weakness; it's an honest read of the market. If you're the 31st product in a category, you are a commodity by definition. Pretending otherwise and charging luxury prices alongside competitors with deeper pockets is the actual mistake. 
• Your biggest competition is your own costs. Borrowing a tip from Jason Fried of Basecamp: as long as your expenses are less than your income, no competitor can beat you. Most founders worry too much about their rivals when they should be focusing on controlling their own spending. 
• AI hasn't lowered software prices — it's been used to justify raising them. Developers are demonstrably more productive than they were five years ago. The math says prices should fall. They aren't. That gap is the opening for founders willing to take it. 

Links 

• Neeto suite of products: https://www.neeto.com/ 
• BigBinary: https://bigbinary.com/ 
• Neeraj on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neerajsingh0101/ 
• Future Ventures Linkedin: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Neeraj Singh 

Neeraj Singh is the founder and CEO of BigBinary, a remote-first software consultancy he's been running for close to 15 years with a team of senior engineers based in India. He's the creator of Neeto, a growing suite of affordable SaaS products built to replace the bloated, overpriced tools founders are stuck paying for — NeetoCal, NeetoSign, NeetoForm, NeetoTicketing, and more. A longtime Ruby on Rails open-source contributor, Neeraj writes and operates in public on LinkedIn, X, and through Neeto's customer support — where every reply still comes from him or his team, not AI.

Hubertus Hofkirchner has spent four decades operating at the intersection of trade finance, technology, and monetary theory. He started his career at Citibank International in Vienna, designed a securities system that rolled out across smaller city banks throughout Europe, and later served as Director at Kreditanstalt Investment Bank. As a serial entrepreneur, he built one of the first online brokerages for Central and Eastern Europe, founded what he believes was the first true options exchange (sold to a British bank in 2008), and famously took over Austrian telecom operator Telering as a loss-making vehicle hemorrhaging hundreds of millions per year — turning it around and selling it to T-Mobile for €1.5 billion in 2005. 

This conversation is important because Hubertus isn't just another crypto supporter promising big changes from the sidelines. He's an Austrian-school economist and ex-investment banker who knows the traditional banking system inside out. Now, he's creating open-source tools to bring back something the world quietly lost in 1913—a peer-to-peer credit system that allows global trade to happen without banks acting as gatekeepers. With the Bitcredit Protocol now live, founders and investors should understand what's being built, why it’s happening now, and what it could mean for trade, investing, and the future of money. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. Why the Fiat experiment is failing — How political money since 1971 has produced asset bubbles, currency manipulation, and a $2.5 trillion trade finance gap that's strangling emerging markets. 
2. SWIFT as a geopolitical weapon — The Swiss trading company that got de-banked over legal Cuban sugar trades, and why hundreds of thousands of European businesses have lost banking access. 
3. The lost technology of bills of exchange — How world trade ran smoothly without internet, intermediaries, or persistent trade imbalances on the gold standard pre-1913, and why the UN's 2017 Model Law revived the legal foundation. 
4. What Bitcredit Protocol actually does — How E-cash technology, Bitcoin main chain settlement, and a decentralized mint network ("wildcats" operating in "cowders") combine to create a self-liquidating currency layer on top of Bitcoin. 
5. Four ways capital can be deployed in the new system — From buying bills of exchange and money-market lending to mints, to providing guarantee capital and running a mint yourself. 

Key Insights 

• Banks should never have been allowed to create money. Money creation belongs with the productive sector — companies shipping real goods through supply chains — not with central banks issuing currency against war bonds or commercial banks expanding credit against equities and real estate. Every major monetary distortion of the last century traces back to this single category error. 
• El Salvador's plan to use Bitcoin isn't fully complete. While making Bitcoin legal money helps store its value, it doesn't cover how businesses extend credit. Without a way to measure trade credit in Bitcoin, the country still depends on the politics of the fiat currency that supports its economy. 
• Bitcoin helps keep energy grids stable instead of causing problems. Research shows that countries with active Bitcoin mining can cut energy costs by 20–30 percent because miners turn on and off based on supply. This means there's no need for expensive equipment that only runs during peak times and often sits idle. 

Links 

• Bitcredit Protocol: https://www.bit.cr/ 
• Hubertus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hofkirchner/ 
• Future Ventures on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the Guest 

Hubertus Hofkirchner is the founder of Bitcredit Protocol, a Bitcoin-native trade finance protocol focused on rethinking trust, credit, and global commerce infrastructure. A serial fintech entrepreneur, he is the former CEO of Austrian telecom operator Telering (acquired by T-Mobile for €1.5 billion) and an economist focused on the intersection of monetary systems and trade finance. He leads monthly seminars at the Hayek Institute in Vienna. 

Dave Hertig has spent his career watching CEOs up close — first as a business journalist who interviewed more than 100 of them for UBS alone, then as the founder of Boom, where he now focuses on CEO performance under pressure. Along the way, he developed a conviction that became the spine of his work: the people the rest of the company looks up to have blind spots like everyone else, but those blind spots carry outsized consequences. Get the CEO right and the whole system compounds. Get it wrong, and no strategy, market, or product can save you. 

This conversation matters because most of what's written about CEO performance is written for the Fortune 500 — the leaders who get six-month onboarding handlers, custom briefing teams, and curated executive networks. The CEOs running companies between 50 and 1,000 staff are running on a fraction of that support, often with no one in the building willing to push back on them honestly. Dave has built a system to fill that gap, and the principles behind it apply whether you're leading 30 people or 3,000. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. The blind spots that quietly shape every CEO's decision — Why "why aren't more people like me?" is the most common — and most dangerous — pattern Hertig sees in founders and hired CEOs alike. 

2. Hire for your weaknesses, not against them — The Steve Jobs / Tim Cook arc as the definitive case study in pairing vision with execution, and why trying to fix a weakness rarely beats hiring around it. 

3. The adversarial gap — Why genuine pushback is the single hardest thing for a CEO to get inside their own company, and what happens to the people who try to give it. 

4. Accountability vs. outcome in the eyes of investors — The distinction between what a founder can control (input), partially control (output), and never guarantee (outcome) — and why integrity and transparency matter more than hitting the number. 

5. The CEO Sparring System — How a boxing-inspired protected room lets CEOs stress-test Board decks, investor pitches, firing decisions, and press interviews before they go live in the real world. 

Three Key Insights 

Judgment is more important in the AI era, not less. AI can help analyze data, compare options, and speed up decisions. It can even imitate emotional understanding. But it can't develop real emotional intelligence, read a room, or replace the human responsibility that leaders have. The polished answers from large language models make a CEO's judgment more challenging — and more valuable — than ever before. 

Authenticity is not the same as showing everything you are. The strongest CEOs Hertig has worked with put on a "uniform" when they walk into the role — measured, deliberate, strategic about what they say — while still ensuring the job genuinely matches their strengths and what gives them energy. That gap is professionalism, not inauthenticity. 

A progressive CEO wants to keep growing — personally and commercially. The CEOs worth working with are still curious, still hungry for pushback, still aware that their business sits inside a larger system. The ones who have hit a personal ceiling and stopped growing are the ones whose companies stop growing too. 

Links 

• Dave Hertig on LinkedIn: https://ch.linkedin.com/in/davehertig 
• Boom — CEO Sparring System: https://boom.ceo/sparring/ 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Dave Hertig 

Dave Hertig is the founder and CEO of Boom, where he focuses on CEO performance under pressure and works with leaders of medium-sized businesses navigating high-stakes moments. He is the creator of the CEO Sparring System, a boxing-inspired format that gives CEOs a protected room to pressure-test their most important pieces of work before deploying them in the real world. Before founding Boom, Dave spent years as a business journalist and content strategist, interviewing hundreds of CEOs across industries — work that gave him the pattern recognition behind his current focus on identity, judgment, and the human side of executive leadership.

Omar Sahyoun has spent two decades building at the edge of where consumers, technology, and physical commerce meet. He co-founded TeamBuy and DealFind, two of Canada's earliest daily-deal platforms that collectively scaled past 4 million members. He moved into fintech as a senior operator at Ariel and Purpose Financial, helping bring same-day digital lending into the mainstream. Today, as Managing Partner at Brand-FX, he runs three operating companies — Shoply (SMB commerce for retail and hospitality), Wack Jack (a 15-year-old Canadian consumer marketplace), and Go CXM (a CPG platform serving brands like Monster Energy, with one engagement spanning 30,000 sales reps). 

What I like about Omar's perspective is that he refuses to pick a side in the AI debate. He's not predicting that AI agents will eat retail, and he's not romanticizing the corner store either. Roughly 70% of commerce still happens in a physical location with a real person — that's the number he keeps coming back to —, and his bet is on making that experience smarter, not replacing it. Shoply gives a single restaurant or small retailer the same kind of personalization engine that used to require an Amazon-sized budget. Go CXM helps CPG brands finally talk to the customers their retailers have always controlled. If you're building, advising, or investing anywhere in consumer commerce right now, the conversation is worth your time — Omar has strong opinions about where the AI dollars are being wasted. He's earned the right to have them. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. The 70% problem. Most "future of commerce" conversations skip over the fact that roughly 70% of buying still happens in a physical store. Omar's whole thesis starts here. 
2. What Shoply does for a single restaurant or shop. Average order values up 20%. Table turnover up 40-50%. Repeat visits 2-3x. The numbers Omar shared on what happens when a small operator finally gets the kind of personalization Amazon has had for a decade. 
3. Who owns the customer — Why CPG brands are no longer content to let retailers control the customer relationship, and what tools like Go CXM do to close that gap. 
4. Agentic commerce, honestly — Omar's contrarian view that AI agents are already commoditized, and where the real durable advantage actually sits. 
5. The future of retail real estate — How stores evolve into digitized showrooms, what that means for landlords and logistics, and why face-to-face isn't going anywhere. 

Three Key Insights 

• AI agents aren't the moat — data is. Most of the AI conversation focuses on agents and coders, but Omar argues the winners will be data scientists who can take an LLM and tune it to a specific niche. Without clean, capturable, current data, none of it works. 
• Cohort segmentation isn't personalization. What the industry has called personalization for a decade is really just sending similar messages to broad cohorts. Real hyper-personalization means two customers in the same segment receive genuinely different messages — and that capability is only now becoming operational at scale. 
• SMBs adopt tech that disappears. The hardest part of building for small operators isn't the AI — it's the interface. Owners want to press one button and have it done. "Do it for me" beats "do it with me" almost every time. 

Links 

• Brand-FX: https://brand-fx.com/ 
• Omar Sahyoun on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/omar-sahyoun/ 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the Guest 

Omar Sahyoun is the Managing Partner at Brand-FX, a family-office-backed group that's building three companies in consumer technology, CPG, and retail. He co-founded TeamBuy and DealFind, helping Canada's first daily-deal marketplaces grow to over 4 million members. Omar also held leadership roles in digital lending at Ariel and Purpose Financial. With a background in accounting and management consulting from McGill, he's lived and built businesses in five countries and is now based in Toronto. 

Andrew Ackerman has sat in nearly every chair around the startup table. He's a serial entrepreneur, an angel investor, a venture capitalist, an accelerator operator at Dream Adventures and Reach Labs (the venture arm of the National Association of Realtors), an adjunct professor at NYU, and the author of The Entrepreneur's Odyssey — a story-driven guide to building startups in the real world. He's invested in more than 70 companies, most in PropTech and ConTech, and is currently building a holding company that buys construction services businesses and rewires their economics with proprietary AI. 

This conversation matters because Andrew has watched the same mistakes kill startups for two decades, and he can name the exact link in the chain where each one snapped. He's also one of the few investors willing to tell a founder their go-to-market is identical to the eleven other decks on his desk that week — and explain why that's not actually their fault. If you're building a company, raising capital, or investing in either, this episode is a masterclass in how to test your assumptions before they bankrupt you. 

Key Topics Covered 

A startup is a chain — one bad link, and you've got nothing. Andrew explains how investors figure out which link to test first instead of guessing at random. 

What it's like to read 1,000 pitch decks in two months. When a dozen near-identical startups show up, Andrew explains how he picks the team that will eat the rest. 

Construction is less productive than it was 50 years ago. We get into the manufacturing comparison that's been quietly making things worse, and why AI is finally rewriting who captures the value. 

The index card trick that kills bad features before you build them. Andrew walks through the prototyping exercise that costs about three bucks and a stolen bank pen. 

Why did Andrew write a story-driven book instead of another bullet-point business read? Plus, the reason Genesis comes before the Ten Commandments — and why founders should care. 

Three Key Insights 

Founders are always fundraising — the only variable is allocation. Spending ten to twenty percent of your time on relationships when you don't need money is the difference between raising on warm intros and grinding through eighty percent of your week on cold outreach when you do. 

The three dimensions of pain determine whether you have a business. Intensity (hammer-on-thumb versus hangnail), prevalence (does anyone else actually have this problem), and frequency (once a lifetime or once a week) — score high on all three, and you have a venture-scale opportunity. Score on two and you're working harder than you need to. 

A new technology or rule change doesn't give you a unique idea — it gives the same idea to a dozen other founders at the same time. Andrew's seen it happen over and over. The team that wins isn't the one that thought of it first. It's the one with a sharper go-to-market, better people, or the guts to do the opposite of what the other eleven decks on his desk are doing.  

Links 

• Andrew's website: https://www.andrewbackerman.com/ 
• Andrew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewbackerman 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

Guest Bio 

Andrew Ackerman is a serial entrepreneur turned venture investor who has spent two decades advising startups, accelerators, venture studios, and corporate innovation platforms. He has invested in more than 70 startups, previously helped build Dream Adventures and Reach Labs for Second Century Ventures, teaches entrepreneurship at NYU, and writes extensively on venture capital and innovation. His new book, The Entrepreneur's Odyssey, is a story-driven guide to building startups in the real world.

John Cowan was about to do what he'd done a hundred times before — make the calls, set the meetings, walk a young founder into the venture capital fundraising process. In a split second, he backed out. He couldn't morally send another kid into a system he knew was rigged against him: four cycles of dilution, ratchets, protective provisions, career death. Six or seven months of thinking later, he came back with an essay called The Theory of Venture Reciprocity, a new investment instrument called the SAFER, and a firm — Nextwave Partners — built to do venture differently. 

This conversation is for founders who've ever felt like they were just performing instead of truly pitching when talking to a VC. John explains how the industry has shifted from focusing on funding new ideas to prioritizing the size of the fund, what founder-friendly capital really looks like in real life, and where he's placing his bets for the next ten years. If you're raising money, advising, or managing investments with $3 million to $50 million in revenue, this hour will be one of the most honest and helpful you'll have this week. 

What we covered 

1. The structural collapse of venture capital. Why the 2009 shift to fee-driven economics turned VCs into venture banks — and what that did to founders. 
2. The SAFER instrument. John's alternative to the SAFE — re-centering the founder-investor relationship around revenue instead of equity. 
3. Killing the Unicorn cult. Why power-law thinking went from observation to ideology, and how Nextwave applies long-tail economics to startup investing instead. 
4. The machine economy thesis. Why John believes we're at the start of a long arc of innovation on par with electrification, and where the real money will be made. 
5. Geographic alpha and coalition funds. How distributed talent is reshaping where capital should flow — and the fund structure John thinks replaces the traditional GP model. 

Three insights worth sitting with 

• Revenue is the clearest indicator of early progress. If a customer is willing to pay for your product, that message is stronger than any pitch deck — and it aligns the goals of founders and investors instead of creating a zero-sum battle over ownership. 
• The Titans of rail didn't get rich on rail technology. They got rich on the economies that formed around it — towns, real estate, industry. The same logic applies to the machine economy: own the infrastructure, not just the software. 
• The next generation of transformative companies will not come out of Silicon Valley. Underserved regions — Florida, the Nordics, Latin America — are producing technical talent that the traditional VC hubs are structurally incapable of touching. 

Links and resources 

• Next Wave Partners: https://nextwave.partners/ 
• John on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncowan1 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the guest 

John Cowan is the General Partner at Nextwave Partners, a venture studio and investment firm focused on the era of autonomy and the machine economy. He's a 25-year founder, CEO, and strategist who has raised millions in venture capital across his career and become one of the more vocal critics of the traditional VC model. He's the author of Venture Capital 2.0: Building, Financing and Scaling Startups in the Post Power Law Era, with a second book on financing the machine economy due out shortly. 

Sam Hasty, partner at Active Impact Investments — Canada's top climate tech seed fund — has supported early entrepreneurs in energy, logistics, farming, materials, and resilience over eight years. He started as a Memphis math teacher, helped launch a nonprofit accelerator funded by the Steve Jobs family, and studied rural entrepreneurship in Poland with a Fulbright before his first angel investment. 

This conversation is important because the climate tech scene has shifted in two years — Series B funding declined, and generalist investors' interest waned. However, Sam argues the situation is nuanced. Active Impact recently closed a $110M Fund III, their best, with five founders achieving nine-figure exits. The discussion covers how they evaluate founders, why many climate failures aren't tech-related, and where the next decacorns might emerge. 

These are some highlights of the talk: 

• Sam's path from seventh-grade math to venture capital. How a seventh-grade math classroom in Memphis, a Fulbright year in Poland, and writing angel checks alongside the family offices that backed his nonprofit landed him in a partner seat eight years later. 
• The economics of fund sizing. Why Active Impact thinks $110M is the right number — and why most GPs should be asking themselves whether they want to be greedy with carry or with management fees. 
• The 2x2 matrix every founder gets put through. Intelligence and accountability are weighted equally, and the creative questioning techniques that prevent smart founders from gaming the diligence process. 
• The valley of death and the project finance gap. Why the 2021-2022 cohort of climate founders had the wrong skill set — and what RotaTherm's CEO had that most climate founders don't. 

Three insights worth sitting with: 

1. High-intelligence, low-accountability founders are the most dangerous bet a VC can make. They are the most sophisticated at telling diligence teams what they want to hear, which is why Active Impact relies more on reference calls than on direct conversations with the founder — ten references reveal more than ten meetings with the same person. 
2. The CEO's fluency in non-dilutive capital is now a screening criterion at seed. If the founder cannot speak the language of a debt provider, the company will get crushed on dilution at Series B, and that hurts the seed investor more than almost anything else. 
3. The bottleneck on more climate capital flowing in is not technology or revenue speed — it is exit evidence. Investors need to watch peers make exceptional returns before they reallocate, and Fervo's IPO at roughly $7B is the kind of proof point that unlocks the next wave. 

Links 

• Active Impact Investments: https://www.activeimpactinvestments.com/ 
• Sam Hasty on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/sam-hasty-a7530143 
• Future Ventures: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Sam Hasty 

Sam Hasty is a Partner at Active Impact Investments, Canada's largest climate tech seed fund, where he focuses on infrastructure and carbon solutions innovation. He is a Fulbright Scholar with eight years of venture capital experience and a portfolio spanning energy, logistics, agriculture, advanced materials, and climate resilience. Before venture, he taught seventh-grade math in Memphis and co-founded a nonprofit accelerator backed by major foundations and the Steve Jobs family office. 

Joyce Shin, founder of The Human Edge and ex-head of design operations at Dropbox, helped scale teams and systems there. Trained in neuroscience and raised across Texas, Ohio, Seoul, and Tokyo, she studied resilience and effectiveness, first after a traumatic brain injury and later professionally in tech. She left Dropbox to ask: in AI everywhere, what makes us human? She created the PEARLS framework—six skills in thinking, creativity, ethics, and leadership—areas AI can't replicate. 

This is her first public sharing of PEARLS. Many see AI as just a tool, not a way to rethink business. For startup founders building better teams, this chapter offers valuable insights. 

What we covered 

1. The PEARLS framework, fully unpacked — Presence, Edge, Authority, Roots, Legacy, and Signal as the six dimensions of human and organizational differentiation in the AI era. 
2. Why leading indicators beat lagging ones — The signals that tell you a team is cognitively decaying before engagement scores and turnover catch up. 
3. What acquisitions actually break inside a scaling company — Lessons from Dropbox on cultural integration, tooling, and the human work most M&A playbooks skip. 
4. The shift from linear careers to horizontal experience — Why disparate cross-functional exposure now beats two-years-and-promote, and what that means for how you design growth paths. 
5. The CEO's job in an AI-native organization — Why senior leaders should stop trying to dictate AI workflows and start building the container their teams operate inside. 

Three insights worth keeping 

• AI commoditizes the average, so the moat moves to what AI can't do. Partnerships, community building, and the communication of vision and story all become more valuable, not less, as automation eats the middle of the skill curve. 
• Resilient organizations are based on their identity, not just their processes. Companies that understand who they are and make steady decisions build trust with customers, employees, and partners—trust that rivals using the same tools can't easily copy. 
• Authenticity outperforms polish. The quirks, imperfections, and real-life mistakes of leadership build more trust than highly produced corporate messaging — and that gap will widen as AI-generated content floods every channel. 

Links 

• The Human Edge: https://humanedge.studio/ 
• Joyce Shin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joyceshin 
• Future Ventures: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Joyce Shin 

Joyce Shin is the founder of The Human Edge, an advisory practice that helps founders, CEOs, and organizations build the capacities AI cannot replicate. Before founding The Human Edge, she was head of design operations at Dropbox, where she scaled teams and systems through IPO growth, acquisitions, and the shift to remote work. She holds a degree in neuroscience and brings a uniquely cross-disciplinary lens to leadership, organizational design, and the future of human work. 

Shahin Nabavian, a computer scientist turned venture builder, has worked across operations, infrastructure, and transformation for the past decade. His experience includes a London-based financial startup, venture-building at Shell's maritime division, work at The Economist Group, and founding edtech startup Super Savvy Education. Now, he leads Team CMV (CentricMind Ventures), focusing on emerging technologies like infrastructure enabling companies to use LLMs effectively. Their main venture, Go-User, applies this to people services. 

The conversation is important because much of what is called' AI adoption' is actually just deployment without ROI. Shahin has observed companies of all sizes misusing chatbots, wasting tokens, and ending up with chaos. He can also explain why this happens in simple language. If your company earns $ 3m-$50 M and you're exploring AI's ROI, this episode is for you. 

Topics Covered 

• Why company culture beats company size in AI adoption. Why The Economist Group made more progress than expected, and why Shell's scale became a hindrance, not an advantage. 
• The real reason AI ROI is missing. It's not the models. It's not the agents. It's the infrastructure layer beneath them — and most companies haven't built it. 
• Every company needs a brain. What Shahin means by "AI brain," why generic RAG implementations fail, and what a librarian-style routing layer actually looks like in practice. 
• The evolving role of the founder and CEO. What AI takes off the executive plate, what stays uniquely human, and why "purple unicorns" — operators fluent in both business and tech — become the default hire. 
• Why Kodak and Blockbuster aren't technology stories. Shahin's view on Board dynamics, shareholder pressure, and the kind of CEO incumbents actually need to bring in to survive a platform shift. 

Key Insights 

1. The bottleneck isn't intelligence — it's plumbing. The models and tools are well-developed, but most organizations still need a way to understand how their business actually operates. This way, the AI can direct questions to the right source instead of randomly searching through every connected system. 
2. Engineering-led AI initiatives consistently underdeliver. Starting a transformation by focusing on tools instead of clear service goals can cause a lot of manual work, higher costs, and confusion for users. It's better to start by understanding what the business wants to achieve and then plan the system around that. 
3. Transformation is a challenge for the Board before it becomes a tech issue. Most CEOs don’t stumble because the technology is too complex; instead, they often face pressure from shareholders demanding faster results than are realistically achievable. To help overcome these hurdles, companies might consider bringing in a CEO from outside the industry, pairing them with a COO who understands the current business well, and giving them the freedom to learn from mistakes along the way. 

Links 

• Shahin Nabavian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nabavian/ 
• Future Ventures: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 
• Future Ventures Forum: futureventures.ca/community 

About the Guest 

Shahin Nabavian is the Founder of Go-User and a co-founder of Team CMV (CentricMind Ventures), where he builds AI-native systems for fast-growing companies. He holds a PhD in computer science and has spent over a decade building and supporting ventures across financial services, energy, publishing, and education — including work with Shell and The Economist Group. His current focus is on the infrastructure layer that turns organizational data into something AI can actually reason over. 

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, the "Food Professor," is the Senior Director of Dalhousie’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, lead author of Canada's Food Price Report, and a prominent researcher in food supply chain management. He’s the go-to expert for food inflation stories and provides data that guides grocery executives. With 20 years studying Canada's rising food costs, he argues that debates wrongly blame big corporations or stores, overlooking factors like trade barriers, slow regulations, retail crime, and recycling policies that lack proper cost analysis. Sylvain’s data helps differentiate between factors influencing prices and those making headlines, offering valuable insights for food producers, agtech investors, and sector analysts to better interpret news. 

Topics Covered 

1. Grocery theft as a $10 billion problem — The rise of organized retail crime, the urban food deserts it creates, and who ultimately pays. 
2. Why Canadian food companies sell in the US, not Canada — How weeks-versus-months approval timelines are quietly redirecting capital and product south. 
3. Canada's branding problem — "Boston lobster from Canada" and why a country with great products can't seem to build great food brands. 
4. AI in the food system — Where it's already working (precision agriculture, soil science, animal feed), where it's lagging (manufacturing), and where it gets ethically uncomfortable (surveillance pricing for households). 

Key Insights 

• Bad policy is the blind spot nobody can see. Interprovincial trade barriers, industrial carbon pricing, and recycling laws all add real cost to running a food business — but because consumers can't point at them on a shelf, the political will to fix them never materializes. 
• The story of grocers versus consumers overlooks how the real incentives work. When cheaper options like GMO products or newly-made dairy substitutes appear on store shelves, stores with thin profit margins—around 2-3%—don't usually lower prices for shoppers. Instead, they often choose to increase their profit on familiar products. Until labeling requirements and competition rules change, having cheaper ingredients won't necessarily lead to lower grocery prices. 
• Greenfield innovation moves faster than retrofitting. Canada's food manufacturing industry is slow to adopt AI and automation because it's weighed down by old habits and investments in outdated equipment. The best way to move forward is to build new facilities, ideally working with universities, so there's no old baggage holding things back. 

Links 

• 📺 Watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vLM1QKjrE40 
• 📊 Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie: https://www.dal.ca/sites/agri-food.html 
• 🎧 The Food Professor Podcast: https://the-food-professor.simplecast.com/ 
• 🔗 Connect with Sylvain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefoodprofessor/ 
• 🔗 Connect with Maxim on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov 

About Dr. Sylvain Charlebois 

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois is a professor and Senior Director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, where he leads research on food supply chains, consumer behavior, and food economics. He is the lead author of Canada's Food Price Report, co-host of The Food Professor podcast, and one of the most-cited researchers globally in food supply chain management and traceability. His work bridges academia, industry, and policy — making him a go-to voice on the forces shaping the future of food, grocery, retail, restaurants, and agriculture.

Tim Fung, Founder and CEO of Airtasker, leads one of the world's top local services marketplaces. Since launching in Sydney in 2012, it’s now a publicly listed company operating across Australia, the UK, and the US, facilitating over a billion dollars in jobs for flexible income. Tim is a prominent voice on the future of work and the gig economy. He experienced what most founders only theorize: raising $1.5M in 2012 when "startup" wasn't common in Sydney, and navigating many trials before success. He took Airtasker public and now, as a CEO, admits the company has fewer employees than four years ago, despite revenue growing five to six times. His insights are very relevant, especially for those building marketplaces, navigating IPOs, or integrating AI into non-software businesses. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. The origin story — How a friend with a truck and an apartment moved in 2012 turned into a marketplace that has now processed over a billion dollars in job opportunities. 
2. Solving the supply side first — Why Tim made the supply experience 10x better than Angie's, Thumbtack, and TaskRabbit, and how that one decision shaped everything that followed. 
3. Trust, payments, and the $20 fee — The escrow innovation that unlocked Series B, plus the small cancellation fee that cut cancellations by around 40%. 
4. Building rails, not blueprints — Why marketplace founders should stop trying to design every use case and start watching what users actually do — including the German bundtlet costume request. 
5. AI as enabler, not replacement — Tim's measured take on AI, the rise of the 10x employee, and why he thinks incentivizing token consumption is doing it backwards. 

Key Insights 

• The product is the network, not the app. A marketplace app with no users on it is genuinely useless. Liquidity comes first. Everything else — features, design, polish — only matters once the network exists. 
• Accountability needs both rewards and punishment. Most platforms only reward good behavior, and that's why they break. Free returns, no-cost cancellations, and frictionless agentic commerce all suffer from the same flaw: when there's no cost to bad behavior, the system fails. Tim's analogy — speed limits without fines change nothing. 
• AI's biggest impact on a non-software business is software velocity. Airtasker doesn't sell software, but it builds a lot of software to run the marketplace. AI has made that build cycle dramatically faster — which matters more than chasing AI features for their own sake. 

Links 

• Airtasker: https://www.airtasker.com/ 
• Tim Fung on LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/timjfung 
• Future Ventures: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Tim Fung 

Tim is the Founder and CEO of Airtasker. He started the company in Sydney in 2012 with his co-founder Jono Lui, after the two of them caught the startup bug while working on the founding team at Amaysim, a mobile SIM card business. The idea came from something pretty ordinary — Tim asked a friend with a truck to help him move apartments, and started wondering why people defaulted to friends and family for that kind of work when there were so many people out there who actually wanted to earn income. 

More than a decade later, Airtasker is publicly listed, operating across Australia, the UK, and the US, and has facilitated over a billion dollars in job opportunities. Tim is one of the more grounded voices on marketplaces, the gig economy, and the future of work — partly because he's been at it long enough to be skeptical of easy answers. 

Mike Feinman is the Managing Partner at Texas Business Brokers, a top M&A advisory firm for the lower mid-market and main street. His career began at PepsiCo's Taco Bell division and includes leadership at Yum! Brands across 16 countries. He has facilitated millions in sales across manufacturing, restaurants, services, and tech. He entered brokerage unexpectedly—an ex-Pizza Hut colleague asked him at Starbucks in 2014 what he'd do with the four and a half days a week he wouldn't be running his three restaurants. Mike works where founder vision meets buyer reality, often telling founders the truth before the market does. Many overestimate their business’s value and transferability. His role is to narrow that gap years before a sale. If you're 3-5 years from an exit or building without planning for one, this episode is essential before your accountant. 

Four Key Topics Covered 

1. The Origin Story Behind Texas Business Brokers — How a chance Pizza Hut connection, a mentor lost to mesothelioma, and a passed torch turned into a multi-state M&A advisory practice. 
2. The Current State of the M&A Market — Why we are in a buyer's market, why sellers are holding back, and how tariffs, energy costs, and onshoring are quietly reshaping multiples by industry. 
3. The Strategic Planning Framework Every Founder Should Run — Mike's full process from SWOT through five-year SMART vision, reverse success planning, one-year milestones, and the enabling culture that wraps it all together. 
4. The Three Risks Every Acquirer Underwrites — Key person risk, customer concentration risk, and the absence of scalable, repeatable systems — plus the "develegating" approach Mike used to get one founder out of the weeds before a $20M sale. 

Three Key Insights 

• Founders find time to do things over far more often than they find time to do them right the first time. A failed business is almost always failed planning — eyes wide shut instead of eyes wide open. The discipline to step back, run the SWOT, and build the vision is the discipline that protects valuation years later. 
• Potential, in Mike's words, is just something that ain't been done yet. And the moment a founder starts negotiating on what the business could be instead of what it actually is, the back goes against the wall. Buyers don't pay for the story. They pay for what's already on the page. A premium on outlook only shows up when the engine underneath it is already running — and even then, the buyer is doing the math on what they can do with it, not what you say they can. 
• A deal is a piece of clay that gets shaped, broken, and reshaped multiple times before close. Buyers and sellers sing Kumbaya, fall apart at the LOI, fall apart again at due diligence, and need to be brought back together at every stage. The job of a real M&A advisor is keeping every stakeholder on the same island long enough for the deal to actually happen. 

Links 

• Mike Feinman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikefeinman/ 
• Texas Business Brokers: https://texasbusinessbrokers.com/ 
• Connect with Maxim Atanassov: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov 

Guest Bio 

Mike Feinman is the Managing Partner at Texas Business Brokers, advising on lower-mid-market and Main Street deals across multiple states and industries. Previously, he held senior roles at PepsiCo and Yum! Brands, led restaurant operations, and built training and service organizations in 16 countries. He is a father of three, grandfather of four, active musician, and loves helping founders turn their businesses into their dreams. 

Sarah Romanko, an investor at Geek Ventures, backs immigrant-founded AI and robotics startups. She entered venture without traditional credentials, relying on persistence like cold outreach, online events, and paying it forward. Her approach shapes how she evaluates and supports founders. This conversation reveals how an early-stage investor thinks—what prompts a "yes" or "no"—and how founders misprice opportunities. She questions the media narrative around fundraising, explains why some founders shouldn't raise venture capital, and discusses AI's new moat. 

For founders considering fundraising or rethinking it, this episode offers a tactical, straightforward guide from someone who reviews pitch decks daily and invests early. 

Topics Covered 

• Breaking into venture without the traditional background. Sarah talks through how she got in: cold outbound, online events at 10 pm her time, and showing up consistently when nobody was paying attention yet. 
• The Geek Ventures thesis — Why the firm backs immigrant founders building AI and robotics companies at pre-seed and seed, and how being hands-on at a small fund changes what value looks like. 
• The three things that win deals at pre-seed — Founder-market fit, founders who know how to sell, and a credible "why now" that grounds vision in the present. 
• When founders should not raise venture capital — The wrong reasons people chase a round, why a fundraise does not equal success, and how taking the wrong money can quietly kill a company. 
• Cold outreach, follow-ups, and the new moat — What makes an inbound message memorable, why Sarah responds to cold emails without warm intros, and why the go-to-market moat now matters as much as technical differentiation. 

Key Insights 

1. Time-to-value is the operating principle of a VC relationship. Founders who build durable investor relationships deliver value first — an introduction, an event assist, a useful insight — before they ever ask for a check. Reverse that order, and the conversation is already on the back foot. 
2. The biggest mispricing in early-stage fundraising is not valuation — it is misunderstanding the LP model. Founders price rounds against market comps without considering whether the math actually works for the fund. A round that is too high for the underlying business not only creates future down-round risk; it also removes investors from the table before the conversation even begins. 
3. The new moat in the AI era is go-to-market, not just technology. Technical defensibility still matters, but with AI lowering the cost to build, the durable edge is increasingly trust, distribution, and the ability to win and retain customers. Founders who can articulate a fact-based, evidence-backed differentiation — not opinion-based positioning — stand out immediately. 

Connect with Sarah 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahromanko/ 
• Pitch Geek Ventures: geek.vc/pitch 
• Geek Ventures website: https://geek.vc/ 

About the Guest 

Sarah Romanko invests at Geek Ventures, focused on pre-seed and seed AI and robotics companies founded by immigrants to the US. Her path into venture was unusual — no traditional banking or consulting background — and she credits sheer persistence, cold outbound, and a habit of paying it forward for getting her in the door. She speaks regularly at industry events, mentors founders through programs like Startup Grind and Founder Institute, and writes openly about democratizing access to capital.

Nikola Borisov is CEO and co-founder of DeepInfra, offering open-source models like DeepSeek, Llama, Kimi, GLM, and GPT-OSS via APIs. He previously scaled IMO Messenger to over 200 million users, handling up to a million new users daily with cheaper self-built infrastructure. A Northwestern CS grad and Bulgarian programming veteran, he learned that distributed systems succeed at the margins. This conversation is crucial because AI inference—execution—is the silent battleground of the AI economy, yet few discuss the compute layer, which now limits access outside big labs. Nikola applies his hyperscale infrastructure knowledge to compute-intensive workloads. For those in AI, understanding this layer is vital. 

Topics Covered 

• From Sofia to scale — How Nikola progressed from Bulgarian programming contests to scaling IMO Messenger's backend to 200M+ monthly users, teaching him about doing more with less. 
• Why the bet is on open source — The strategic and structural case for hosting open-source models, why a startup like DeepInfra had no realistic alternative, and why the US has an open-source gap worth worrying about 
• The supply crunch nobody is pricing in — Demand for AI compute has roughly 4x'd in the last four months, driven mostly by coding agents finally crossing the line from "useful sometimes" to "useful always." Nikola explains why this is a GPU shortage now, not a demand problem. 
• How Nikola actually thinks about optimization — Cache token pricing is the key cost lever most teams overlook, especially on agentic workloads. We discuss why inference hardware is diverging from training hardware and Nikola's habit of the build-then-measure loop since IMO days. 

Key Insights 

1. AI's bottleneck is supply, not demand. Coding agents alone — Claude Code, Cursor, the rest — have driven token usage up roughly 4x in the last four months. There aren't enough GPUs to go around, and the big labs are eating most of the available capacity. Smaller buyers are getting priced out of the market entirely. 
2. Cache token pricing is the cost lever most teams overlook. Agentic workflows reuse massive amounts of context across tool-calling loops. Pricing — and architecting around — cached tokens separately is what separates teams that can afford to scale agents from those that can't. 
3. Open source vs. closed source won't end 100-to-zero. Nikola thinks we land at roughly 80/20 — the question is just which side gets the 80. His reasoning: information leaks, engineers move between labs, and the Anthropic GitHub commit that exposed model details earlier this year is exactly the kind of thing that's going to keep happening. You can't really isolate a model from the outside world for long.  

Links 

• DeepInfra: https://deepinfra.com/ 
• Nikola Borisov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikola-borisov 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 
• Maxim Atanassov on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov 

About the Guest 

Nikola Borisov is the CEO and co-founder of DeepInfra, an inference-only AI cloud that hosts open-source models like DeepSeek, Llama, and GPT-OSS for developers and enterprises. Before DeepInfra, he led backend infrastructure at IMO Messenger, scaling the platform past 200 million monthly users on infrastructure his team built and ran themselves — at a fraction of what comparable cloud-native competitors were spending. He's a computer science graduate of Northwestern University with over a decade of experience building distributed systems at scale. 

Grant Blaisdell, CEO of Copernic Space, is developing space's financial infrastructure by tokenizing payloads, satellite data, computing, and lunar rights, turning space into a liquid market. A serial entrepreneur and blockchain pioneer, he cofounded Coinfirm, the first AML platform for crypto, and created the first AML solution for ERC tokens during the ICO era. His grandfather, a space pioneer, helped Poland reach space. The space economy exceeds $600 billion, mostly driven by private activity, yet many lack understanding of how value is created. 

Maxim and Grant discuss building standards, marketplaces, and liquidity for this future asset class. If space seemed outside your reach, this episode offers a reset. 

Key Topics Covered

1. The blockchain-meets-space thesis — Why this is the first asset class that can be built on-chain from day one, without decades of legacy infrastructure to overcome. 
2. Who actually owns space — The emerging standards for verified ownership of orbital assets, lunar infrastructure, and mining rights, and why the US-China dynamic is reshaping the race. 
3. Tokenization and fractional ownership in practice — How Copernic Space tokenizes payload capacity, external "billboard" surfaces, satellite data, and compute, with real examples from Moon Mission One and a top-10 European rocket company. 
4. The Copernic business model — Smart contract-embedded transaction fees, strategic acquisitions and fractionalization, and the future SAI ("Space Asset Intelligence") layer — an AI-powered Bloomberg terminal for space. 
5. The hidden Musk strategy — Why SpaceX, xAI, Tesla, and Boring Company aren't separate bets — they're components of a fully integrated space stack. 

Three Key Insights 

• Space isn't an escape — it's an upgrade for Earth. The most valuable applications aren't lunar colonies or Mars cities; they're pharmaceuticals, energy, data, compute, and agriculture (think satellite imagery for wildfire prevention) that solve problems on this planet. 
• Standards beat speed. Whoever defines what "verified ownership" means for space assets — payloads, data, compute, lunar rights — captures the long-term value, just as the Dutch East India Company captured the first era of exploration. 
• The private market is already leading regulators. The US still hasn't fully clarified the securities treatment of tokenized real-world assets. Still, private players are setting de facto standards that governments will eventually have to ratify, not the other way around. 

Links

• Copernic Space: https://www.copernicspace.com/ 
• Grant Blaisdell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantblaisdell 
• Future Ventures: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/  

About the Guest 

Grant Blaisdell is the Co-founder and CEO of Copernic Space, building the financial infrastructure and marketplace for the space economy. Previously, he cofounded Coinfirm, a leading analytics and compliance platform that pioneered AML for crypto and was the first to enable AML for ICO-era ERC tokens. A third-generation space entrepreneur and blockchain pioneer, Grant operates at the intersection of capital markets, digital assets, and one of the largest emerging asset classes of this century. 

While most of private equity is chasing the same overheated deals with the same recycled playbook, Kurt Winter and Kevin Salquist are doing the opposite. As Partners at Big 7 Partners, they buy the industrial businesses nobody talks about at conferences — fasteners, gaskets, threaded rod, the components that quietly hold American infrastructure together. The companies are usually 30+ years old, founder-run, profitable, and operating in unmarked buildings you'd drive past a hundred times without noticing. That's the point. 

The contrarian discipline is what makes this episode worth your time. Kurt spent 30 years as a manufacturing operator. Kevin spent 30 years in capital markets — trading, market making, the works. They've built something that doesn't look like normal PE: hold periods of 10–15 years, little to no leverage, deal-by-deal instead of a blind pool fund, and they won't pay more than 4x EBITDA. With so much dumb money chasing the same deals right now, their approach is a real counterweight. Tangible businesses. Sleep-at-night returns. A playbook that just keeps compounding while the rest of the industry is sprinting for the exit. 

Topics covered 

1. The Big 7 thesis — why niche industrial manufacturing is one of the most overlooked sectors in private equity right now. 
2. Continuity-focused investing — how a 10–15 year hold and zero-leverage approach changes everything about how you run a deal. 
3. The operator playbook — flipping the pyramid upside down, creating owners on the shop floor, and why "quarter turns" beat blow-ups. 
4. Deal discipline — what kills a deal for Big 7, why they walk when bidding wars start, and the one that got away in Texas. 
5. Onshoring and the macro tailwind — how tariffs, reshoring, and the death of cheap China manufacturing are reshaping the runway for U.S. industrials. 

Key insights 

• Make money on the buy, not the exit. Big 7 caps their EBITDA multiple around 4x and walks the moment a process turns competitive. The discipline isn't about being cheap — it's about protecting the math when the hold is measured in decades, not quarters. 
• Founders don't underestimate their businesses by accident. After 25 years at the helm, the spotlight narrows. Kurt and Kevin's job is to widen it again — usually with basic, almost embarrassing questions like "why aren't we selling to GE?" The answers unlock revenue that was sitting in plain sight. 
• Boring is a feature. Big 7 explicitly positions itself as the contra-SaaS investment. No 100x returns, no AI hype cycle, no crypto volatility. Just essential products, steady 15% returns, and businesses that will be making the same parts a decade from now. 

Links 

• Big 7 Partners website: https://big7ventures.com/ 
• Kurt Winter on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurtawinter/ 
• Kevin Salquist on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinsalquist28/ 
• Future Ventures: https://linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the guests 

Kurt Winter is a Partner at Big 7 Partners and a 30-year manufacturing executive who spent his career inside U.S. industrial businesses — proudly domestic at a time when most of the industry was offshoring. Kevin Salquist, also a Partner at Big 7, came up through capital markets over three decades, working as a market maker, sales trader, and in cap intro before moving into PE. The two of them run Big 7's acquisition and operating playbook across niche industrial manufacturers in the U.S. 

Juho Risku, after 30 years across different roles, founded Butterfly Ventures, a unique venture capital firm. Previously, he was a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, raising capital and nearly going bankrupt. Now, he leads a leading Nordics investor in deep tech and hardware with over 100 portfolio companies and multiple funding rounds since 2012.

This conversation reveals Juho’s honesty about tough truths: why he doesn't support single founders, why deep tech teams face delays (not technical issues), and why the Nordics—17 times more startup value per person than Europe—are overlooked. It provides insights for deep tech founders, European investors, and due diligence. 

Topics Covered 

• From bulletin board systems to Butterfly Ventures. Juho ran one of Finland's biggest BBSes as a teenager in the late 1980s. Three decades later, he's running a €50M deep tech fund. We trace the path. 
• How Juho decides at pre-revenue. Tech first, then differentiation, then market size — in that order. Butterfly also uses a scoring system across the partnership, mostly to surface where partners see things differently so they can argue it out. 
• What goes wrong with deep tech founders. The pattern Juho sees over and over: brilliant technical teams who won't show the product to a customer until it's polished. By the time they do, they've burned a year they didn't need to. 
• How IP transfers work in the Nordics: Why Finland's university-to-startup model accelerates spinouts, and why Sweden's professor-owned IP creates friction. 
• Why the Nordics punch above their weight: Small markets, English fluency, a problem-oriented culture, the rise and fall of Nokia, and Slush — "by far the best VC startup event in the world." 

Key Insights 

1. Get the order right, not the decimal. 

Butterfly scores every company across the same dimensions, before investment, right after investment, and then every quarter. What Juho cares about isn't whether the market is $2.4B or $ 2.1 b. It's whether this deal sits in his top three or top five at any given moment. Most VCs spend their time on the wrong question. 

2. No solo founders. Period. 

In 13+ years and 100+ deals, Butterfly has never written a check to a single founder. When a strong technical founder shows up alone, Juho's team will often help them find a commercial co-founder first, then come back to the deal. He treats team composition as data, not vibe. 

3. Customers before polish. 

Juho's frustration with deep tech founders, particularly Finnish ones, comes back to the same point. They won't talk to customers until the product is "good enough," so they don't talk to customers. The honest version is that customers don't need polish; they need to know whether the product solves their problem. Founders who figure this out early hit revenue faster. The ones who don't, don't. 

Links 

• 🌐 Butterfly Ventures: https://butterfly.vc/ 
• 💼 Juho Risku on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrisku/ 
• 🏢 Future Ventures Corp: https://futureventures.ca 

About the Guest 

Juho Risku co-founded Butterfly Ventures in 2012 and is a Partner. The fund invests in early-stage deep tech and hardware companies, mainly from Nordic and Baltic universities. Juho was an entrepreneur for years before becoming an investor, building a web tech company in the late 90s, filing a patent for browser modification, and running a Silicon Valley operation. He lives in Finland, has been involved in over 100 portfolio companies, and meets 300-400 founders annually.

Most founders try to scale revenue by adding tools. Scott Finkelstein argues they're solving the wrong problem. After four decades in sales, $6 billion in career deals, and a stint as Chief Revenue Officer at PeopleFax, Scott has seen the same pattern destroy growth-stage companies again and again: founders hit a million in revenue, panic, and hire a VP of Sales to fix what's actually a systems problem. The fix doesn't stick because there's no engine underneath — no repeatable cadence, no clear ICP, no honest read on what's working. 

In this conversation, Scott unpacks the engine metaphor that runs through everything he teaches at Sales Scalers, his Austin-based AI sales coaching platform. He and Maxim get into why most sales methodologies are 85% the same, why founders should bring go-to-market in on day one (not after the product is built), and how the best salespeople he's ever worked with treat selling as a listening exercise rather than a pitch. If you're a founder trying to move from founder-led sales to a scalable revenue engine — or you've already made the wrong hire and you're trying to figure out what broke — this one is for you. 

Topics Covered 

1. Why founders hire a VP of Sales too early — and what it costs when you bolt a senior leader onto an engine that doesn't exist yet. 
2. The ICP intimacy gap — most founders can name their ICP but can't describe them like a friend sitting next to them, which is where outreach falls apart. 
3. Goals vs. standards — the distinction Scott uses with every salesperson he coaches, illustrated through his own son's quota structure. 
4. Buying signals beyond the obvious — how the depth of what a prospect shares tells you whether you have a real deal or a polite stall. 
5. AI in the sales stack — Plaud, Whisper Flow, Replit, and the rule Scott never breaks: a human reviews anything going out to the world. 

Key Insights 

The engine beats the tool stack every time. A junky engine that only goes 10 miles an hour will still grow your business exponentially if you run it consistently and score yourself against it. Most founders don't have a junky engine — they have no engine at all, and they're trying to add fuel. 

Honesty in outreach beats warm-up. Three months ago, Scott rewrote his cold messages to lead with something like "Hey, I know you're busy, so let me get straight to it — yes, I'm selling something." He started getting more no's. He also started getting more actual replies, including a LinkedIn message on a Sunday from someone saying they were finally ready to talk. The people who said no said it because he respected their time enough to be direct, and a no with engagement is worth more than a yes you had to trick out of someone. 

Bring go-to-market in on day one. Scott told a story about being on a panel where someone asked when founders should start thinking about go-to-market, and he said day one. The tech guy on the panel pushed back. Scott's answer was that you're building because you think you know what the world wants, but you don't actually know — you have to go find out. Five conversations with the right people, before you write the spec, will save you from building two months in the wrong direction. 

Links 

• Sales Scalers: https://salesscalers.com/ 
• Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-finkelstein-08026914 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Scott Finkelstein 

Scott Finkelstein is the founder of Sales Scalers, an AI-powered sales coaching platform built on the idea that systems should adapt to how each salesperson actually sells. He has spent more than four decades in sales across investment banking and SaaS, including

Stan Sirakov, a General Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures with 15+ years of venture experience, has invested in 150+ startups since 2012, mainly in regions with limited institutional VC. He founded a fintech marketplace in 2007 and helped launch Bulgaria's first incubator in 2009. His expertise covers Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Poland, and more. This conversation is vital as the venture landscape shifts: the US-only focus fades, and overlooked regions produce global winners like UiPath, Wise, Rimac, Eleven Labs, Telerik, and Outfit7. 

Topics Covered 

1. From zero VC to a thriving ecosystem — How Central and Eastern Europe evolved from a single risk-averse fund in 2007 to billion-dollar exits, and the micro-cycles that drive each country's emergence.
2. The diaspora investment thesis — Why LAUNCHub actively backs founders connected to the region's global tech network, and how alums from Telerik, UiPath, Skype, and similar companies are recycling capital and knowledge back home.
3. The "engineering EU, go-to-market US" model — Why most regional companies build product in Europe but sell into US enterprises, the exceptions to the rule, and what it takes to make the transition work.
4. Founder mistakes after a Series A — Overspending, premature US sales hires, selling too early, and the engineer-to-CEO transition that breaks more companies than founders admit.
5. AI inside the venture model — How LAUNCHub is automating its own workflows, why founder productivity is changing the unit economics of early-stage companies, and the new credibility risk that comes with vibe-coding. 

Key Insights 

• The first US sales leader hire is almost always wrong — plan for it. Stan has 15 years of venture data and cannot recall a single portfolio company that nailed its first US sales leader on the first try. Founders should budget for the second or third hire to be the one who actually moves the needle, and resist the pressure from US investors to skip that learning curve. 
• Big exits don't just create wealth — they create ecosystems. Every major outcome in the region (Telerik in Bulgaria, UiPath in Romania, Rimac in Croatia, Skype in Estonia) has triggered a cascade of new founders, angels, and follow-on companies. The pattern mirrors Boulder and the PayPal mafia: it's not capital that builds startup ecosystems — it's recycled operators with skin in the game. 
• The biggest gap in Central and Eastern Europe is no longer first-check capital — it's the seed lead. Angels can now fund the first $500K in most regional markets. What's missing is the institutional fund willing to lead a $500K to $3M round and bridge the founder to a credible Series A. That gap is precisely where LAUNCHub's Fund III is positioned. 

Links

• LAUNCHub Ventures: https://launchub.com/ 
• Stan Sirakov on LinkedIn: https://bg.linkedin.com/in/stanislavsirakov 
• Maxim Atanassov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov/ 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/ 

Guest Bio

Stan Sirakov is a General Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures, an early-stage fund in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. He founded a fintech marketplace in 2007, survived the 2008 crisis, and helped launch Bulgaria's first startup incubator in 2009. After fifteen years and 150+ investments, he's a leading seed investor in the region, focusing on diaspora founders, technical teams targeting US enterprise markets, and Series A funding critical for early-stage startups.

Ivar Skårset, CTO of ENEnergy, is tackling the overlooked challenge of replacing fossil fuels in sectors that can't run on electricity. Coming from the Norwegian oil industry, he sought renewable fuels for heavy industry. 

Twenty years later, the issue persists: electricity makes up 20% of global energy, while 80% involves industries and vehicles that don't electrify quickly or cleanly. ENEnergy believes renewable fluids and lignin can help because they fit existing infrastructure. This discusses how the technology works, why Australia's Top End is ideal for testing, and why capital, not science, is now the main barrier. 

What we covered 

• Drop-in fuels. Renewable alcohol-based fuels and lignin can run in engines and industrial kits that already exist, with only minor modifications. No fleet rebuild required. 
• Lignin replacing coal. It's a plant material with energy content close to coal, and it can go straight into steel production and coal-fired power plants — even ones that have been shut down or mothballed. 
• The Australia play. Arid land in the Top End, combined with cattle stations and saline irrigation, makes the whole thing work without taking food crops off the table. 
• The carbon math. The full cycle, from growing the biomass to burning the fuel, is CO2-negative. Stack carbon credits on top, and the unit economics start to look very different. 
• The capital and incumbent problem. Why oil and gas majors say "this is the future" in private, then route the conversation into renewables departments that go nowhere — and what it actually takes to fund a first plant. 

Three key insights 

1. Everyone's talking about electrification, and fair enough — it's where most of the money is going. But the timeline people throw around doesn't really hold up. You'd need to roughly five-x global electricity production, rebuild a huge chunk of the grid, and swap out something like 3 billion vehicles. That's decades of work, and probably more. Drop-in renewable fuels are interesting because they sidestep almost all of that. The pipes, the engines, the storage — it's all there already. You just put a different molecule through it. 
2. Steel is a problem on its own. You can't decarbonize it just by adding electricity, because steel is literally carbon plus iron. The carbon has to come from somewhere, and right now that somewhere is coal. Lignin can fill the same role from a renewable source, which is the thing that actually makes "green steel" mean something. Otherwise, it's just a label. 
3. In cleantech, the science usually works. The capital is what kills you. ENEnergy is a good example — they've got construction partners interested, project financiers interested, basically the whole downstream lined up once they hit the build phase. The problem is getting to the build phase. That stage in between, where you're doing the documentation and the engineering work and putting together the evidence package nobody wants to fund, is where most companies in this space quietly fall apart. 

Links 

• ENEnergy: https://www.enenergy.net/ 
• Connect with Ivar: jaksz@enenergy.net 
• Future Ventures LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZgPPHfPBZz-r5NQLq_dWfA 

About Ivar 

Ivar Skårset, CTO and co-founder of ENEnergy, has nearly 20 years developing renewable fluid alternatives and lignin-based coal substitutes to decarbonize heavy industry. Starting in Norway's oil and gas sector, he believes energy solutions must work within existing systems. Based in Norway, he leads ENEnergy's technical strategy and partnerships with industrial offtakers and capital partners. 

Mike Solow is the co-founder of 99 Proof, a boutique investment firm supporting and scaling emerging beverage alcohol brands. With over two decades of experience, he has advised more than 200 entrepreneurs in business development, sales leadership, and capital strategy. Mike works at the intersection of operators and investors within one of the most competitive and often misunderstood consumer categories.

This is a good time to look at the beverage alcohol industry because it's going through big changes. Private equity investment has dropped for the first time in ten years, and revenue values have fallen from double digits to around six. Things like new health treatments, rising food costs, and catching up after COVID-19 have shifted the industry. For those starting or investing in consumer brands, Mike’s tips for handling these changes are very helpful.

Topics Covered

The story of 99 Proof: Mike’s path from a stressful sales job to creating a company that connects family offices with alcohol entrepreneurs who have different views.

Competing with industry leaders: Why small brands succeed by focusing on a specific niche and positioning themselves as attractive acquisition targets, rather than competing directly with major players.

The post-COVID reset: The impact of restocking, inflation, and an influx of new founders, and why the industry is contracting rather than declining.

Valuation outlook for 2026: The transition from 10-15x revenue multiples to approximately 6x, the end of inflated exit comparisons, and the need for founders to demonstrate value through tangible results.

Authenticity makes brands more appealing. Today’s consumers are selective—supporting certain celebrities, caring about charity work, and preferring founders to keep the core brand qualities in-house while only outsourcing specific tasks.

Key Insights

The era of unlimited marketing budgets is gone. Previously, brands could quickly grow by spending heavily on advertising. Now, investors want companies to be more careful with their money and to demonstrate steady progress toward profits. As a result, strategic buyers are adjusting how they value businesses to reflect these new priorities.

Taking things slowly and growing steadily is usually better than jumping into many markets at once. Founders often overlook how expensive it can be to enter multiple areas. Successful brands concentrate on building a strong local presence, test their message in one area, and then carefully expand into nearby states.

Authenticity should come from within the company. The founding team needs to own the brand’s values, message, and identity. Even if manufacturing, distribution, and execution are outsourced, relying on outside firms for brand storytelling can make the brand seem inauthentic, since consumers are very aware.

Links

• Mike Solow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikesolow/
• 99 Proof: https://www.linkedin.com/company/99-proof-partners/
• Future Ventures: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp

About Mike Solow

Mike Solow is the co-founder of 99 Proof, a boutique investment firm focused on backing and scaling emerging beverage alcohol brands through equity, debt, and real asset structures. He brings over two decades of experience across business development, sales leadership, and capital strategy, having advised more than 200 entrepreneurs in one of the consumer's most competitive categories. Mike operates at the intersection of operators and investors, helping founders not just raise capital — but deploy it in ways that actually drive growth.

Simon Zadek has over four decades shaping sustainability in capital, policy, and markets, from the 1992 Rio Summit to ethical businesses like Ben & Jerry's and The Body Shop, battles over global supply chains, advising Chinese regulators, and senior roles at the UN and G20. He founded AccountAbility and NatureFinance to measure corporate accountability and how markets view nature. Now, as Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Morphosis, he focuses on adaptation as the key capital question of the next decade. 
Simon's conversation is valuable because he clarifies key differences between decarbonization, resilience, and adaptation, which many confuse, causing misallocated capital. He redefines adaptation as an innovation driver, not a cost, vital for markets reshaping globally. This discussion is crucial for climate-focused founders and investors aiming beyond 1.5 °c. 

🎯 Key Topics Covered 

1. Defining Adaptation, Resilience, and Decarbonization — Why these three concepts are often conflated and why treating them as distinct is the first step toward pricing climate correctly. 
2. The Four Forces Pricing Climate Into Markets — How financial regulators, corporate reporting, public policy, and consumer expectations combine to shape where capital flows. 
3. Country Case Studies in Adaptation Strategy — From France planning for a 4-degree world to Brazil's ecological industrial strategy to China's food self-sufficiency pivot to Gulf state water redundancy. 
4. The Food-Water-Energy Security Nexus — Why this intersection will be a defining growth area for private capital and why it matters as much in Switzerland as in Kenya. 
5. AI, Distributed Infrastructure, and the Adaptation Economy — How artificial intelligence and decentralized solutions can serve low- and middle-income households and the new dependencies they may create. 

💡 Three Key Insights 

• Climate risk remains systematically mispriced, driven by short-termism and policy gaps. As a result, many profitable adaptation-solution businesses face markets that don't yet reward what they deliver — creating a structural window for early capital. 
• Private capital will have to lead the adaptation buildout because public balance sheets are overextended and blended finance is narrowing, shifting the burden decisively onto commercial investors and the policy levers that make adaptation solutions profitable. 
• The fastest-growing adaptation markets will be among low- and middle-income households, not in the OECD, because that is where demand for affordable, distributed solutions in food, water, energy, and shelter is already accelerating. 

🔗 Links and Resources 

• Morphosis: https://www.morphosis.solutions/ 
• The Rise of the Adaptation Economy Report: https://www.morphosis.solutions/adaptation-economy 
• Simon Zadek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-zadek-b3024826/ 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/ 

👤 About the Guest 

Dr. Simon Zadek is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Morphosis, a Swiss-based transformative adaptation solutions business that channels private capital into businesses serving low- and middle-income households in vulnerable regions. He is the founding CEO of NatureFinance, the founder of AccountAbility, a Senior Fellow at the Paulson Institute, a member of the Club of Rome, and a Senior Advisor to the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures. He has served as Sherpa for the G20 green finance work track under the Chinese, German, and Argentinian Presidencies and has held senior sustainable finance advisory roles in the Executive Office of the UN Secretary General.

Ben Klepacki is the co-founder and CEO of WestGen Technologies, a Calgary-based hybrid power company that reduces up to 99% of methane venting at oil and gas sites while improving economics. A professional engineer, he started on Canada's largest wind farm but shifted focus from alternative energy to oil and gas after realizing fixing the existing system could have a greater climate impact. WestGen's flagship, the ePod, was sketched on a flight from Grande Prairie and now powers well sites across North America for clients like Painted Pony, Petronas, and Shell.

Ben's journey was never easy. It began with a software startup that failed before he launched WestGen, and continued with a 2019 launch, funded entirely with his own money. The prototype from that launch was sold at cost to Painted Pony, but then oil prices plummeted into negative territory, and everything began to unravel. After a funding round, he was nearly out of cash by June 2024. And that’s when he made a decision: to return to WestGen, where he managed to turn a profit again.

Topics covered

1. Why Ben left alternative energy for oil and gas — the back-of-the-envelope math on embedded energy that reframed his view of the energy transition.
2. From napkin sketch to first sale — how WestGen went from TRL1 to TRL8 in three months by selling the prototype at cost and learning in the field.
3. Enterprise sales to oil and gas supermajors — the "three wide, three deep" approach to finding champions at Painted Pony, Petronas, and Shell.
4. The Converge detour and the management buyout — what happens when founders chase scale without focus, and how Ben bought the company back.
5. Governance as the fix, not the overhead — why Ben rebuilt the Board around domain diversity rather than capital source, and why he still reports to one as the majority owner.

Key insights

• Perfection is the enemy of revenue. Ben and his co-founder shipped their first ePod at cost, gathered real operator feedback across multiple sites simultaneously, and reached a production-grade product faster than if they had spent 18 months perfecting it in isolation — all while generating revenue the whole way.
• Your early-majority prospects will hand you your early adopters. Most of the rooms Ben pitched to didn't light up. But ending every lunch-and-learn with "who would you recommend we try this with?" turned the cautious middle of the market into a referral engine that unlocked the real risk-takers.
• Ego loses, wego wins. The turnaround at WestGen was not a product fix — it was a leadership fix. An executive coach, a structured 4 Disciplines of Execution rollout, and a "designated no-person" in every meeting took the company's eNPS from -44 to +81 in twelve months and realigned the leadership team.

Follow WestGen and Future Ventures:

• WestGen Technologies: https://westgentech.com/
• Ben Klepacki on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-klepacki-p-eng-94727517/
• Maxim Atanassov on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/

About Ben Klepacki

Ben Klepacki is the co-founder and CEO of WestGen Technologies, a Calgary-based hybrid power generation company serving oil and gas producers across North America. A professional engineer by training, he spent his early career in wind and hydro before moving into oil and gas as a well pad design engineer, where the idea for WestGen's ePod was conceived. He led the company through near-bankruptcy, a management buyout, and a return to profitability. He now publishes weekly energy updates on LinkedIn every Friday.

Amit Jain has 20 years of experience building and scaling companies across Europe, Southeast Asia, India, and beyond. As Managing Partner at StartupBay, a Singapore-based accelerator with a presence in the Czech Republic, he has helped many founders enter global markets. He previously held leadership roles at Vodafone, developing SME and global strategies and founding ventures. His corporate and operator experience shape his view on building internationally competitive companies. 

This conversation is key because most founder advice on 'going global' is too abstract or US-centric. Amit covers common mistakes, capital flow in 2026, the regulatory gap between Europe and Southeast Asia, and 'deep tech' investment realities. If you're a founder, deep tech developer, or investor reconsidering your approach, this episode offers a practical, operator perspective from someone active across four continents. 

3 Key Topics Covered 

1. The four pillars of global market entry — Why regulatory, cultural, product, and operating structure all matter, and which one founders consistently underestimate. 
2. Market selection by sector — How consumer tech, AI, and deep tech founders should each think differently about where to launch and scale. 
3. The AI application layer thesis — Why the core LLM layer is saturated, and where the real growth opportunity sits for founders building today. 

3 Key Insights 

1. Most founders make a key mistake: they incorporate in a new market before validating its suitability, locking in costs and complexity. 
2. AI accelerates research, but not the need for a technical co-founder: deep tech cycles shrink from 18 to 3 months, but a founder with deep expertise remains essential. 
3. 'Deep tech capital' mostly targets AI, with patient funds for long-term cycles. Yet, most investors focus on agentic and generative AI, leaving funding for hard sciences narrower than it appears. 

Reach out to Amit on LinkedIn, or learn more about StartupBay and our work at the links below. 

StartupBay: https://www.startupbay.tech/ 

Amit Jain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitj00/ 

Future Ventures Corp: futureventures.ca 

Capital Intelligence Platform: capital.futureventures.ca

Amit Jain is Managing Partner at StartupBay, a Singapore-headquartered accelerator and venture studio he co-founded in 2016. StartupBay started as an early-stage accelerator, moved into venture studio work, and now runs a global market entry program for founders scaling into Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond. Before StartupBay, Amit spent years at Vodafone leading SME and global business strategy, with stints building and running his own ventures in between. He splits his time between Singapore and the Czech Republic, and spends a lot of it on planes, meeting founders in person. 

At 16, Vincent Kuiper received a €50 brokerage account from his father for his birthday. He become interested in finance, studying quantitative finance and accounting. He then became an equity analyst at a private bank in Amsterdam, spent three years at H2 Equity Partners, where he explored 35 to 40 niche industries and managed a buy-and-build program. After earning an MBA at IE Business School in Madrid, he has a strong financial background for someone in early-stage food, focusing on unit economics before storytelling. 

Gota Ventures, co-founded by him and Cristina De Mendietta during their MBA, combines Cristina's industry expertise with a network of 56 angels, family offices, and businesses across 15 countries. They invest $150K to $500K in early-stage food tech and CPG companies, leveraging her family's international trading business of ingredients and retail products.

What Vincent Unpacks 

• Why did Vincent run a syndicate instead of a fund? The deal-by-deal model lets operators with real food industry experience get into early-stage rounds from 5,000 euros, and he argues the fee math actually works out cleaner than a standard 2-and-20. 
• Gota's two very different bets on the future of chocolate. Win-Win, a UK company using carob and a patented fermentation process to build a drop-in alternative to cocoa, and Kokomodo, which recreates cocoa from a single DNA cell. Vincent talks through the technology risk, the market risk, and what he thinks is a five-year window before any of this hits mainstream shelves. 
• Access beats capital. The real product of Gota's network isn't money — it's warm introductions to the distributors, retailers, and manufacturers that make or break an early-stage food company. Vincent explains how Cristina's family business and the international angel base actually open those doors. 

Three Key Insights 

1. The past decade has shown that sustainability alone doesn't move consumers. The food companies winning now are built on rational unit economics, capital efficiency, and a value proposition a buyer can understand in one sentence — usually a meaningful cost advantage or a cleaner version of a product people already buy. 
2. In an industry with thin margins, friction kills. An ingredient that forces a manufacturer to rebuild a production line is dead on arrival. The breakout startups solve for drop-in compatibility — Win-Win's alternative cocoa slots directly into the existing 12-step chocolate manufacturing process, and that matters more than most founders realize. 
3. Don't try to change consumer behavior — find a tired category and make it noticeably better. Chomps went from zero to $900M in revenue by taking a product that had existed for decades, cleaning up the ingredients, and targeting a segment (women) the incumbents ignored. Boring categories with no innovation for 15 years are where the next billion-dollar CPG brands are built. 

Links 

• Gota Ventures: https://gotavc.com/ 
• Vincent Kuiper on LinkedIn: https://es.linkedin.com/in/vhakuiper 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 
• Maxim Atanassov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov/ 

About the Guest 

Vincent Kuiper is the Founding Partner of Gota Ventures, an early-stage food tech and CPG investment syndicate supporting the next generation of food and consumer brands across Europe and beyond. Originally from Amsterdam and now based in Madrid, he has 13 years of investing experience, including public equity analysis and private equity at H2 Equity Partners, as well as angel investing through Gota. He publishes a weekly Substack exploring successful CPG exits and their patterns.

Ankit Anand doesn't fit the typical venture capital mold. He started his career as a physics teacher in India, moved to Europe to work on gravitational wave research at ETH Zurich, co-founded a medical technology company, and only then — after years of operating and angel investing — ended up as Founding Partner at Riceberg Ventures. Today, Riceberg backs breakthrough deep tech companies across space, cybersecurity, AI, life science, and frontier industries — often writing the first check before a company is even incorporated. 

This conversation matters because Ankit brings a rare lens to early-stage investing: the discipline of a trained scientist, the scar tissue of an operator, and a global perspective that spans Europe, India, and the United States. For founders raising capital — or investors thinking about how to back hard technology — he offers an unusually clear framework for how to separate breakthrough companies from noise, and why the VC game is fundamentally a trust business, not a finance one. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. From physics to venture — How Ankit's path through teaching, ETH Zurich, and a medtech spinout shaped the way Riceberg evaluates founders and builds conviction. 
2. The four pillars of a breakthrough investment — Value chain optimization, bottom-up market sizing, real defensibility, and founder-market fit. 
3. Value-based vs. cost-based pricing for deep tech — A practical framework founders can use to price technology that has no direct comparable in the market. 
4. Why trust is the real currency of venture capital — How consistency, transparency, and early engagement beat polished decks every time. 
5. Cross-cultural founder underwriting — What motivates a European scientist-founder vs. an Indian one, and why the evaluation lens has to change accordingly. 

Three Key Insights 

• Slowness is a feature, not a bug. Riceberg deliberately takes its time with founders, engaging long before they're raising — sometimes before a company even exists. The filter isn't a pitch deck; it's observing how a founder converts a small favor (like a single customer intro) into meaningful momentum. If they can turn one dollar of value into ten, that's the signal. 
• Your first customer is your investor. Deep tech founders often dismiss themselves as "bad at sales." But if a scientist can captivate an investor with a vision and walk away with a check, that's already proof of selling ability. The same holds for hiring underpaid, world-class talent — selling the vision is the job, whether the buyer is an LP, an employee, or a future enterprise customer. 
• Ankit's pricing framework has two sides that have to meet in the middle. Start from what customers pay today, drop it 5X, then add premiums for the extra safety, speed, or efficacy you're delivering — that's your value-based price. Then work bottom-up from your unit economics with at least a 60% margin — that's your cost-based price. If value-based sits above cost-based, you're in a good spot. If not, you're building something unsustainable. 

Links 

• Riceberg Ventures: https://riceberg.vc/ 
• Ankit Anand on LinkedIn: https://ch.linkedin.com/in/anandvankit 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/futureventures 

About Ankit Anand 

Ankit is Founding Partner at Riceberg Ventures. He came to venture the long way — teaching physics in India, then doing gravitational wave research at ETH Zurich on the LIGO project, then co-founding a medical technology company in Europe. Riceberg writes first checks into deep tech founders, often before the company is even registered, and invests globally out of offices across Europe, India, and the U.S. 

Debneel Mukherjee is the kind of investor most founders never get access to — a former CPA turned self-taught coder turned operator turned venture capitalist, now running Decacorn.VC from Singapore, with roughly 85% of his portfolio deployed in the United States. His career spans nearly three decades across banking, fintech operations, and global private tech investing, and he's built a track record that includes early bets on companies such as Palantir, Mapbox, ThoughtSpot, BioCatch, and SpaceX — well before most of those names became consensus trades. He currently holds two portfolio companies in the S&P 500. 

The reason we wanted Debneel on the show is simple — he doesn't invest the way most VCs do, and he'll tell you exactly why. He won't touch institutional money. He doesn't limit himself to what's within driving distance. And he's not interested in markets that already exist. His whole thesis is built on first principles: find the bottleneck, find the founder crazy enough to solve it, and then get out of their way. Most investors talk about being contrarian. Debneel actually built a fund around it — from Singapore, into the US, with the patience to hold through the storms that shake everyone else out. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. From CPA to Coder to Investor — How a forced career pivot into programming at a fintech bank shaped a three-decade-long investing philosophy rooted in technology-led innovation. 
2. Contrarian Investing Done Right — Why "obvious has no value" and how Decacorn.VC identifies opportunities for new market creation instead of chasing crowded spaces. 
3. The AI Pragmatist's View — A middle-ground take on AI that rejects both doomsday and utopian narratives, arguing that technology has never destroyed jobs — only created affluence. 
4. Founder Selection and the "Great Question" Test — How Debneel evaluates founders on conviction, domain competence, and mission — and why the quality of the investor's questions matters more than the size of the check. 
5. Building a Patient, Unconstrained Fund — Why Decacorn.VC refuses institutional capital, democratizes access for accredited individuals, and structures for evergreen, long-horizon capital deployment. 

Key Insights 

1. Track record alone doesn't win deals — the conversation does. Debneel measures the quality of a founder meeting by how often the founder responds with "that's a great question." Founders don't want another passive check-writer; they want an investor who understands their problem space well enough to challenge them on the issues that keep them up at night. 
2. The best opportunities come from breaking bottlenecks, not from following trends. Rather than chasing whatever sector is hot, Decacorn.VC identifies first-principles constraints — such as off-grid power for data centers or a lack of cybersecurity infrastructure — and backs founders who solve those structural problems before the market catches up. 
3. Patient capital changes the game. Debneel only takes money from people who can genuinely forget about it — accredited individuals who care more about having a ringside seat to what's coming than about quarterly returns. That's not a constraint. It's what lets him hold through the storms. His example? Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla's IPO, sold a few years later at $480 million, and thought they won. Tesla has since returned roughly 400x. You don't get that outcome if your fund has a seven-year expiry date. 

Links 

• Decacorn.VC Website: https://www.decacorn.vc/ 
• Debneel Mukherjee on LinkedIn: https://sg.linkedin.com/in/debneel 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.futureventures.ca/ 

Guest Bio 

Debneel Mukherjee fo

Robin Smith, a 20-year enterprise software veteran, has worked through all ownership models—bootstrapped, venture-backed, private equity, and public. Most recently, as COO of a PE-backed portco with 1,000+ employees, he led over €200 million in acquisitions during an 18-month roll-up. Now in his mid-40s, he left that world to pursue entrepreneurship through acquisition and found that AI is rewriting the playbook for buying mission-critical software businesses. 

What makes this conversation worth your time is where Robin is standing right now. He knows how PE deals actually work — from the inside, not from a pitch deck. He watched AI gut the economics of traditional SaaS in real time. And he's acting on it, building Stayd as a B Corp roll-up of holiday home agencies in the UK with a thesis that most of the market is still sleeping on. He doesn't sugarcoat the deal that fell apart, he's blunt about where software valuations are headed, and his thinking on outcome-based pricing is ahead of the curve. This is one of the more honest conversations we've had on the show. 

5 Key Topics Covered 

1. Failed Acquisition, Real Lessons — Robin walks through a competitive sell-side process for a bootstrapped vertical SaaS business, where he lost on valuation and perceived execution risk as an independent sponsor. 
2. Independent Sponsors vs. Traditional PE — Why sell-side advisors remain skeptical of independent sponsors, what the funding gap actually looks like, and how Robin structured capital for family offices. 
3. AI's Impact on Software Valuations — How running a financial model through Anthropic's tools turned Robin, an AI skeptic, into a believer, compressing a week of analyst work into hours. 
4. The Software Commoditization Thesis — Robin's argument that any UI-to-database application has lost its intrinsic value and that real value now resides only where software works autonomously. 
5. Stayd: Rolling Up Short-Term Rental Agencies — The three-pillar strategy behind Robin's new venture — revenue optimization, agentic workflow automation, and ethical acquisition of holiday home agencies, with a partnership model for founders. 

3 Key Insights 

1. Buy-side advisors are worth far more than deal execution. Robin expected his buy-side advisor to run the transaction. What he didn't expect was the depth of market intelligence they brought — competitive deal color, LP and GP behavior patterns, and valuation triangulation that validated his bottom-up analysis to within half a turn of revenue. 
2. The moat in software isn't the interface anymore — it's whether the tool actually does the work. Robin puts it simply: if someone still has to sit at a keyboard and punch data into your system, that software is basically free. The value shows up when technology takes over the labor itself. And if that's true, charging a flat license fee makes no sense. You charge for what the tool delivers. 
3. Having zero technical debt right now might be the most underrated advantage in the market. Incumbent software businesses are trapped — they have paying customers on legacy systems, finite engineering teams, and AI rewriting the rules around them in real time. Robin bets that starting clean, with no organizational baggage or codebase to maintain, lets you build at a pace that no legacy player can keep up with. 

Links 

• Robin Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinsmithgl7/ 
• Corinium Capital: https://www.coriniumcapital.co.uk/ 
• Future Ventures Corp: www.futureventures.ca 

Guest Bio

Robin Smith is the Managing Partner of Corinium Capital and the Founder of Stayd,

Kim Anders Odhner is the Managing Partner for Europe and Asia at Unovis Asset Management, a leading alternative protein investment fund. Before relocating to Amsterdam, Kim spent 25 years in Southeast Asia, developing expertise in emerging-markets private equity — backing early-stage companies, staying involved post-investment, and understanding food systems across diverse economies. He co-founded the New Crop Capital Trust with Chris Kerr and has been investing in food tech since the sector's early days, with investments in Beyond Meat, Oatly, Mosa Meat, and Aleph Farms. 

This conversation is important because the food tech investment scene has changed significantly. The 2021–2022 hype has cooled, early-stage funding is scarce, and the idea that "build it and they will come" has been tested — often unsuccessfully. Kim combines frontier-market investing discipline with deep food-system knowledge that cuts through the noise. Whether you're a food tech founder, an investor, or just wondering how we'll feed 10 billion people by 2050, this episode provides clarity. 

These are some of the key topics covered: 

1. The real economics of alternative protein — Why price, convenience, and supply-chain gatekeepers drive consumer behavior far more than values or sustainability messaging. 
2. Lessons from Beyond Meat — How the IPO ignited global excitement for food tech while also exposing a dangerous gap between market valuations and actual consumer adoption. 
3. Strategic ingredients over center-of-plate — Why the next wave of food tech innovation is in B2B blended products, pre-textured ingredients, and food service channels rather than in retail-facing meat replacements. 
4. The bioavailability gap — How the Green Revolution's push for scale stripped our food supply of nutrient density and flavor, and why GLP-1 companion foods and active aging nutrition are creating new investable categories. 
5. Navigating food tech regulation across markets — The sharp contrast between Europe's precautionary approach and America's self-declared GRAS system, and what it means for founders trying to scale globally. 

Some of the insights from our talk were: 

1. People eat what's in front of them. Food choices are impulsive and price-driven, so the real unlock for alternative protein isn't convincing consumers to change — it's getting food service operators like Sodexo and Compass to put these products on the plate in the first place. 
2. The subsidy argument against animal agriculture gets a lot of airtime, but Kim pushed back on that. The real bottleneck is scale. And for something like cultured meat, getting to a meaningful scale could be an intergenerational effort. 
3. Forget center-of-plate steak replacements. The near-term opportunity is in blended products — think beef mince mixed with soy protein — where the plant-based ingredient works as part of the dish, not a substitute for it. 

Links & Resources: 

Learn more about Kim and the organizations mentioned in this episode: 

• Unovis Asset Management — unovis.vc 
• Good Food Institute — gfi.org 
• Kim Anders Odhner — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-anders-odhner/ 
• Wageningen University — wur.nl 

About the Guest 

Kim Anders Odhner runs Unovis Asset Management's Europe and Asia practice. He backed companies like Beyond Meat, Oatly, and Mosa Meat before most investors knew alternative protein was a category. Before Amsterdam, he spent 25 years doing private equity deals across Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Singapore — and he's now raising Unovis's third fund to back food tech companies at the growth stage. 

Dr. Henry Erdlei is a physician-scientist pushing the boundaries of cancer immunotherapy. An alumnus of Charité Medical School and a researcher at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Henry has dedicated years to engineering immune cells to hunt and destroy tumors — and he is now applying that expertise to GoCART Therapeutics, a biotech startup developing a modular CAR-T cell platform that could revolutionize cancer treatment. His work sits at the crossroads of biology, engineering, and AI-driven drug design. 

This conversation highlights CAR-T therapy, a highly effective cancer treatment not yet available for 70% of cancer types. Targeting antigens on vital tissues like the brain and bone marrow is risky, but GoCART's 'AND gate' system requires two antigens for activation, enabling it to target 'undruggable' cancers. Henry discusses the science, business plan, funding, and his views on drug regulation in straightforward language.

KEY TOPICS COVERED 

1. The Undruggable Antigen Problem: Why 70% of cancer types can't be treated with current CAR-T therapy — and how the best tumor markers are also found on tissues you can't afford to destroy. 

2. GoCART's AND Gate: Dual-Antigen Recognition. How GoCART's modular system needs two antigens on a cell for activation, allowing precise tumor targeting without collateral damage. 

3. AI-Driven Peptide Engineering at Scale: How machine learning enabled GoCART to analyze 180,000 trimeric sequences computationally — a process that would have cost over €200M in laboratory work — and reduce it to 20 validated candidates. 

4. The Platform Business Model: Why GoCART is building the "operating system" for CAR-T therapy — a single universal cell product with swappable binders — and how partners can develop and sell binders on the platform. 

5. Rethinking Drug Regulation: Henry's argument that the orphan approval pathway should become the standard: provide treatments to patients after Phase II with informed consent, conduct Phase IV surveillance on the market, and significantly reduce costs.

KEY INSIGHTS 

1. The real challenge in cancer immunotherapy isn't whether CAR-T cells are effective — it's that most of the best targets for treatment are also found on healthy tissue, meaning the therapy could destroy vital organs along with the tumor. GoCART's dual-recognition system eliminates this limitation. 

2. Personalized medicine doesn't have to mean creating a new drug for each patient. By modularizing the system — one universal CAR-T cell, many interchangeable binders — GoCART provides patient-specific treatment on an industrial scale, with the potential to reduce costs from $800K to just a few thousand over time. 

3. The current Phase III clinical trial requirement adds hundreds of millions in costs and years of delay before patients can access treatments that are already proven effective after Phase II. Moving to a market-while-monitoring model could deliver effective therapies to patients more quickly, generate more comprehensive real-world data, and lower drug prices overall.

LINKS 

• GoCART Therapeutics website: gokarttherapeutics.com 
• Henry Erdlei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-erdlei-1a83b42b9/?locale=de 
• Contact: info@gokarttherapeutics.com

GUEST BIO 

Dr. Henry Erdlei is the Co-Founder of GoCART Therapeutics, a Berlin-based biotech startup developing a modular CAR-T cell platform to advance precision cancer immunotherapy. He is a physician-scientist trained at the Charité Medical School and the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (Helmholtz), where his research focused on engineering immune cells for tumor targeting.

Oded Agam | NextLeap Ventures — Deep Tech Investing, the Intel AI Miss, and Building Innovation Ecosystems

Oded Agam is one of those rare investors who has actually built what he now funds. With 35 years spanning Israeli startups, Fortune 50 strategic planning at Intel, and early-stage deep tech investing through NextLeap Ventures, Oded brings an operator's lens to every deal. He led Intel's Strategic Technologies Group — the unit responsible for identifying and incubating transformational technologies — and drove strategic planning for product lines generating over $30 billion in revenue. When he left Intel in 2017, he called four former colleagues and started a venture fund.

This conversation matters because Oded doesn't deal in theory. He walks through how NextLeap narrows nearly 1,000 startups down to three investments per cycle, why he pitched a $300 million AI program to Intel leadership in 2014 that could have changed the chip industry's trajectory, and what founders consistently get wrong in a pitch. Whether you're raising capital or refining your investment thesis, this is a masterclass in disciplined deep tech investing from someone who has sat on both sides of the table.

Key Topics Covered

1. From Intel strategist to venture founder — How leading Intel's Strategic Technologies Group and building internal startups shaped Oded's investment thesis at NextLeap.
2. The Intel AI miss of 2012–2014 — The inside story of a $300M AI proposal that, if approved, could have positioned Intel — not NVIDIA — as the dominant force in AI.
3. The "wisdom of the intelligent crowd" — NextLeap's process of filtering \~1,000 startups to three investments per cycle using a panel of 100+ Fortune 500 executives.
4. Five dimensions of investability — Team, problem, deep tech moat, business potential with exit strategy, and traction through prototypes and design partners.
5. Architecting an innovation ecosystem — The five pillars behind Israel's per-capita startup dominance — and why they're replicable anywhere with the right intent.

Key Insights

1. Deep tech is a moat — but only a temporary one. Oded introduced the concept of "transient sustainable strategic advantage" — no competitive moat holds forever. Founders need to build one and immediately start building the next. Speed of execution matters as much as the IP itself.
2. The best founding teams complement each other, not duplicate each other. NextLeap looks for two to three co-founders from different disciplines who have pre-existing relationship capital. When the inevitable hard moments hit, teams that know each other's rough edges survive. Teams of strangers often don't.
3. An ecosystem isn't built on startups alone. Israel's innovation engine runs on five pillars: world-class research universities, compulsory military service that accelerates technical learning, multinational R\&D centers providing talent and exit paths, a culture that accepts failure, and government programs that fill market gaps.

Links

• NextLeap Ventures website: https://nextleapventures.com/
• Oded Agam on LinkedIn: https://il.linkedin.com/in/oded-agam-4b840
• Contact Oded: oded@nextleapventures.com

Guest Bio

Oded Agam is the Managing Partner and Founder of NextLeap Ventures, an Israeli-based early-stage deep tech venture fund with 26 portfolio companies and three successful exits — including acquisitions by Synopsys, Nano Dimension, and Dell. Before founding NextLeap in 2017, he spent over 11 years at Intel, leading strategic planning for product lines generating more than 80% of Intel's global revenue and heading the Strategic Technologies Group. 

EP004 — Charles Cormier on Systems, Cold Email, and Why Most Founders Get Fundraising Wrong 

Charles Cormier is a founder who doesn’t wait for permission. As CEO of RaasRocket and founder of GTM Ventures and the Podbuyer podcast network, he’s learned that fundraising today is just as much about the systems you build as the people you know. In this episode, he sits down with Maxim Atanassov to unpack why traditional approaches like warm intros and VC lunches often fall flat—and what to do instead. His take is simple, practical, and grounded in real outcomes, all shaped by a first-principles, energy-efficient way of working. 

We dig into how capital markets have shifted: hype alone is no longer enough to get you funded, and a lot of founders haven’t caught up. Charles has worked with hundreds of founders on fundraising and go-to-market strategy and keeps seeing the same patterns show up again and again. 

Here are a few of the most interesting things we cover: 

1. Systems-Based Fundraising: Charles explains why a well-built cold email outreach system—something you can turn on, measure, and keep improving—often beats traditional networking for most founders who don’t already have decades of relationships. 
2. What Makes a Company Investible: At the end of the day, investors want proof—not just a polished pitch deck. They’re looking for traction, real revenue, and a financial model that clearly shows meaningful upside, plus risks they can understand and live with. 
3. Podcasting as a Strategic Weapon: A podcast isn’t just about downloads or exposure. When you treat it like a system, it becomes a source of data, a credibility signal, and a structured way to regularly earn 30 minutes with investors who might never otherwise take a meeting with you. 
4. Why Founders Shouldn’t Romanticize Fundraising: Raising capital is a milestone—not the finish line. The real win is building a profitable, durable company, but lots of founders still confuse raising money with actually succeeding. 
5. AGI and the Future of Entrepreneurship: After surveying more than 2,000 founders, Charles found that only about 1% have a solid grip on what’s coming with AI. He calls this a “fundamental sin” for anyone serious about building a company today. 

3 Key Insights 

These are some of the key insights from our talk: 

1. Put your energy where it actually counts. Systems—like email campaigns, podcast workflows, or AI tools— help turn effort into real and repeatable results. Burnout usually shows up when you’re stuck doing high-effort, low-reward work without enough support or leverage. 
2. Investor fit is harder than most founders think. It's not about check size — it's about understanding what actually drives someone to write that check. Sometimes it's pure thesis alignment. Sometimes it's personal. Charles talked about biotech investors who got involved because they lost someone to cancer. You don't find that out from a CRM. You find it out by doing the work — conversations, follow-ups, actually paying attention to what people tell you. 
3. And on the AI front, Charles is blunt about where this is heading. Agents are already handling chunks of the work inside their company. The founders who'll thrive aren't the ones doing more. They're the ones figuring out what only they can do: closing, setting direction, making the calls that machines can't. Everything else is getting automated, whether you're ready or not. 

About Charles Cormier 

Charles Cormier is a serial entrepreneur, CEO of RaasRocket, and founder of GTM Ventures and the Podbuyer podcast network. He helps founders raise capital and speed up their go-to-market efforts through systems-driven cold outreach, strategic podcasting, and first-principles thinking. 

From Combat Tours to Term Sheets: Paul Claxton on Founders, Capital, and AI

Guest: Paul Anthony Claxton, Managing Partner, Digerati Investments

About This Episode

Paul Anthony Claxton didn't follow the usual route into venture capital. He served four combat tours in Iraq as a United States Marine — including leading a command intelligence center where he observed the early days of drone warfare — before enduring six years of corporate layoffs, building a bootstrapped company to $20K MRR in three months, and eventually moving into early-stage investing. Today, he manages Digerati Investments, a $60 million AI-focused seed and Series A fund based in Southern California.

This conversation is worth your time because Paul operates at a rare intersection: operator empathy, military-grade discipline, and a genuine sophistication around capital strategy that most early-stage investors don't bring to the table. He's not interested in hype. He's interested in founders who understand what they're building, why they're raising, and whether venture capital is even the right tool for their business — a conversation most of the industry is still too afraid to have.

Key Topics Covered

1. From the Marine Corps to venture capital — how four combat tours, a father who was a drill instructor, and six years of corporate volatility shaped Paul's worldview as an investor and operator.
2. What investors actually seek — and what destroys deals — Paul's three Ds framework: data rooms, diligence, and disclosure, and why most founders fail before the conversation even begins.
3. The issue with how founders approach fundraising — Why creating a pitch deck and jumping straight to VCs is the wrong first step, and what founders should know about capital markets before raising any money.
4. The SAFE note — what it gets wrong — A direct critique of the industry's most popular early-stage instrument, including why the absence of a valuation floor signals what Paul interprets as a lack of founder conviction.
5. The Reloadable Note — Paul's proprietary financing instrument designed to protect founders from early dilution while providing early-stage investors with real-time liquidity options at specified trigger events.

Key Insights:

1. Mental toughness is the true competitive advantage. The Marine Corps taught Paul that the toughest challenges are conquered brick by brick — with speed, intensity, and relentless focus on the smallest details. That same approach guides how he evaluates founders today.

2. Venture capital is not the default answer. Many founders assume that starting a company requires raising VC. Paul argues that understanding the complete capital stack — debt, ARR financing, venture debt, angel investment — and knowing why you're choosing VC is one of the most crucial hard skills a founder can develop.

3. AI is in its foundation-building phase — and most of what's out there won't survive it. Paul's view: the companies being built between now and roughly 2030 will serve as the foundational layer of the AI era — the next Googles and PayPals. Everything else driven by hype, lacking genuine utility or real-world impact, will fade away.

Links & Resources

• Paul Anthony Claxton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/businessmanathletemarine
• Paul's website: https://www.paulclaxton.io/
• Digerati Investments: https://www.digeratiinvestments.com/
• Future Ventures Corp:

Ray Fitzpatrick, Founder & CEO, Profitual 

Ray Fitzpatrick spent ten years writing checks to startups as Director of Investments at NBIF — New Brunswick's pre-seed venture capital fund — and observed the same issue recurring across hundreds of companies. Founders excelled at developing products but struggled to grasp their own finances. This wasn’t due to laziness, but because no accessible tool existed for non-finance professionals to use effectively. That's the challenge Profitual aims to address. 

This discussion extends far beyond the product itself. Ray is a CPA and a serial entrepreneur managing three businesses at once, with firsthand experience on both sides of the investor table. His insights into fundraising, co-founder relationships, cap table design, and what financial literacy truly means for a scaling founder are rooted in real-world experience — not just theory. If you're building a company and have ever felt nervous when your investor asked about burn rate or runway, this is for you. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. The origin of Profitual — how a decade of observing non-finance founders grapple with investor reporting inspired Ray to create the "Canva for finance." 
2. Fundraising in Canada — Ray's honest breakdown of what works, what doesn't, and why building a snowball of early validation beats chasing a big lead investor. 
3. Cap table philosophy — Why Ray intentionally maintains conservative valuations, prefers common stock over preferred shares, and emphasizes timeliness of returns over headline valuation. 

3 Key Insights 

• A financial forecast that your founders can't explain is worthless. Ray's entire product philosophy revolves around this idea: it's not enough to produce impressive numbers; the business owner must understand what drives them. A polished AI-generated report filled with unsupported assumptions, especially one that can't be defended in an investor meeting, is worse than having no model at all. 
• Begin with validation rather than a pitch deck. During Ray’s time at NBIF, less than 2% of the companies that participated had any revenue or signed letters of intent. That small group immediately caught our attention. Securing written commitments from even one person — whether a customer, investor, or grant provider — can change the entire conversation. 
• The co-founder you rush into partnering with is the one who could cause your downfall. Ray lost his original Profitual co-founder early on because their visions weren't aligned. Since then, every successful partnership he's formed has been with someone he's worked closely with for years before ever considering going into business together. 

Links & Resources 

• Profitual website: https://profitual.ai/
• Ray Fitzpatrick on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/raymond-fitzpatrick-66761263 
• Devil's Keep Distillery 
• NBIF (New Brunswick Innovation Foundation) 

About Ray Fitzpatrick 

Ray Fitzpatrick is the Founder and CEO of Profitual, a financial forecasting and reporting platform for startup founders and SME operators without a finance background. A CPA, Ray spent a decade as Director of Investments at NBIF, participating in over 200 financings and helping build a portfolio of 75 startups in New Brunswick. He's also a co-founder of Quantified Accounting and Devil's Keep Distillery, dedicating his time to developing Profitual and mentoring future founders. 

From EdTech Exit to AI Agents: Scaling on Your Own Terms with David Kofoed Wind 

Guest: David Kofoed Wind ·(Founder of Agentwork) 

David Kofoed Wind has accomplished what most founders only talk about — building two companies from scratch, taking them through Y Combinator, scaling them responsibly without overextending on headcount, and selling one of them. He's a mathematician with a PhD in machine learning, a former CERN collaborator, and someone who has been seriously considering AI since he was thirteen. Now he's back in the game with Agentwork, a company rethinking how work gets done when AI and humans work together side by side. 

This conversation is valuable for founders trying to understand where AI genuinely fits into their operations — not just the hype, but the real substance. David speaks plainly about what has changed, what stays the same, and why pursuing headcount growth was never a smart move. He has been working at the forefront of this shift longer than most, and his insights on distribution, moats, and the future of digital work are based on hard-earned experience rather than speculation. 

Topics covered 

1. Engineering is no longer the bottleneck — building has become cheap and fast, which means the real constraint has shifted entirely to distribution. 
2. The audience moat — in a world where anyone can build a product overnight, founders who already own an audience have a structural advantage that compounds. 
3. What actually survives as a moat — features are dead as a competitive advantage; brand, switching costs, data, and network effects are what hold. 
4. How Agentwork works — a human-in-the-loop model that handles complex, open-ended work tasks for non-technical business teams, with tiered assurance levels built in. 
5. The future of work — David's honest take — a techno-optimist view on why this shift is different from the Industrial Revolution, and what it means for labor, hiring, and unit economics. 

Key insights from the Episode 

• Niche down until you can genuinely be the best in the world at something — not just the best book on negotiation, but the top resource on selling electric cars in a specific market. A smaller scope means less competition and a real chance to own the category. 
• The SaaS disruption will appear slow at first, then suddenly accelerate. Established players won't collapse overnight, but lean new entrants who build with AI and avoid hiring will slowly outperform them on unit economics until the gap becomes impossible to bridge. 
• Zero hallucinations are impossible philosophically, not just a product feature — humans hallucinate too. The smarter approach is to build systems where AI and human verification work together, because that combo is truly best-in-class. 

About David Kofoed Wind 

David Kofoed Wind is the founder of Agentwork, a human-in-the-loop AI platform designed for business teams that need complex work done reliably and at scale. He previously co-founded Peergrade and Eduflow, both Y Combinator companies that grew through product-led growth and were ultimately acquired by Mountiverse. David holds a PhD in machine learning and brings a rare combination of deep technical fluency and operator experience to every problem he addresses.