The European Startup Show: Recent Episodes
Anita Moorthy
To inspire technology entrepreneurs in Europe with stories and practical strategies from other successful entrepreneurs.
If you are a CEO, founder, or work in sales or marketing, and your company is based in Europe or is looking to expand into Europe, then this podcast is for you.
- [1:49] - Why not having domain expertise can sometimes help entrepreneurs
- [5:45] - Defining your ICP
- [8:31] - Determining your MVP
- [13:06] - Funding your seed and lessons learnt from raising too early.
- [22:48] - GTM
- [30:11] - Building a team and culture; it starts first with language.
- [40:20] - Culture first hiring tips
[2:16] - 20 years and starting a company in Estonia
[5:08] - Angel investing and what to look for?
[10:01] - First CIO of Estonia
[16:59] - Koos - what is it and why is it important
[29:04] - Advice for other entrepreneurs
[31:35] - ChatGPT and the future
[33:09] - HK Unicorn squad and
Links
Koos
Sponsors:
Chargebee
E-residency
[1:44] - About Remofirst and Nurasyl’s journey to starting Remofirst.
[6:49] - The three ingredients for not failing at a startup
[9:04] - Finding your ideal customer profile
[12:00] - Trends in remote hiring
[14:09] - Funding journey and tips
[21:50] - Making remote working work
Links
Remofirst
Delivering Happiness - Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos
[1:53] - Journey to becoming a venture partner at 29 years
[7:40] - Increasing the number of women in VC
[10:53] - Ideal startups for Sapphire and how they source deals
[21:29] - Common challenges, mistakes and advice for Series B companies
[30:14] - Series B valuation and trends in valuation
[33:51] - Work life balance as a VC
Links:
Sapphire Ventures
The Fearless Organization
[2:15] - Online dating market - is there space for one more?
[4:47] - Lessons learned from previous startups - retention, defensibility, product complexity, and proving pmf outside of your home market.
[16:39] - Never giving up
[20:52] - With 8 rounds of fundraising under his belt, David shares his secret for fundraising.
[29:00]- Seed stage valuation
[29:54] - Iceland as a growing entrepreneurial hub
Links
Smitten
Book Recommendation
Never Split the Difference
Rich dad, poor dad
- 1:55] - Journey to founding TERN
- [4:49] - Refugee problem is a global problem. By the numbers.
- [7:08] - Are refugees are burden to the host country?
- [9:85] - The Rwanda Refugee plan - will it work?
- [21:39] - UK’s support for refugees - asylum seekers vs resettlement
- [28:28] - TERN support for refugees
- [31:45] - Top three businesses started by refugee entrepreneurs and their main challenges
Links
Tern
Refugee market place, Anka
Ben and Jerry’s support page
- [1:53] - Safety in upbringing and why being outside can be a boon to an entrepreneur
- [8:29] - “Never look at the competition, know your customer instead”
- [10:58] - Focus on the product and avoid distractions
- [14:25] - On B2C marketing
- [19:20] - Building the company culture at Vivino
- [23:34] - When should a founder step down and bring in a new CEO
- [27:08] - Fundraising tips
- [30:35] - what Heini looks for in founders for angel investing
Links:
www.vivino.com
Raw Startup youtube channel - how to grow your app distribution
[1:51] - Irish startup scene
[7:41] - How to attract and incentivize talent at a macro level
[11:13] - The best startup ecosystems in Europe
[19:15] - Dogpatch
[24:12] - Norther Ireland/Southern Ireland collaboration
[27:21] - Funding for startups in Ireland
Links
Dogpatch
Changing World Order by Ray Dalio
Midnight’s children by Salman Rushdie
- [2:30] Idea development when you are not from the industry
- [14:52] - From idea to MVP - DIY or outsource?
- [21:16] - Funding journey pre-seed to seed
- [25:26] - Building your team
- [29:34] - Getting your first customers
- [31:58] - Niche down on a vertical or not
- [37:25] - Fundraising dos and don’ts
Links
Arx Alliance
1:45 - Your journey from operational role to VC
6:16 - Advice for others thinking of moving from operational to VC role.
12:33 - What makes Creandum different to other VC firms?
16:25 - Creandum’s process of finding and investing in companies
25:00 - Timing for approaching Creandum
27:48 - Metrics for investing
32:59 - Trends in Europe
Links
Creandum
- 2:00 - Founding YuLife - the journey
- 10:34 - Finding the right co-founders
- 17:49 - Initial customers
- 19:21 - Proving ROI
- 23:11 - From founder-led sales to systematic marketing and sales
- 27:28 - External branding
- 31:41 - Pivoting from B2C to B2B early on
- 34:33 - Internal culture and branding
Links
YuLife
7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Steven Covey
[1:57] - About Notion Capital
[4:04] - Notion’s go-to-market support and building the scaling engine
[9:09] - How to build a team for growth
[16:10] - When to bring in marketing; and determining the first hire
[20:13] - US Expansion: when and how you should expand to the US
[28:01] - How do you become a Notion Capital portfolio company
[40:35] - Big trends and areas of growth in Europe
Links
Notion Capital
The Circadian Code
- [2:08] Your career from currency trader to COO of Railsbank
- [6:50] Advice for women in FinTech on growing their careers
- [11:07] Building a high-performance sales team and hiring women after a career break
- [16:24] Current trends in embedded finance and fintech
- [25:46] Growing from 120 - 500 people
Links:
Railsbank
Little Women by Louisa Alcott
- [2:12] - Journey from consulting to founding Meatable
- [11:06] - Alternative protein market
- [14:35] - Biggest challenges facing Meatable and lab-grown meat
- [17:45] - Cost of Meatable burger vs a normal burger and target market
- [22:58] - Funding
- [24:45] - Go-to-market strategy: license technology or vertically integrate
- [28:00] - Messaging for different markets - Singapore, US, Europe
- [31:00] - US expansion
Links
Meatable.com
Books:
Der Prozess by Kafka
- [2:17] Your journey to founding HealthHero
- [11:54] Multi-pronged business model and prioritization
- [14:13] Brand strategy
- [16:49] Go-to-market strategy
- [20:58] Structuring for growth
- [25:24] US expansion plans
Links
HealthHero
Sponsors
Chargebee
E-residency
Book recommendation
Sapiens
- [1:55] Overview of Balderton
- [3:46] What do you think makes for a good VC?
- [5:32] Where are you making big bets going into 2022?
- [6:30] Why is there a difference in the US and Europe when it comes to web3?
- [7:52] What is your take on the NFT opportunity?
- [13:26] Opportunities in fintech
- [17:52] Team vs Idea - what is more important?
- [23:36] Organizational design from Series A to Series B
- [33:02] SaaS metrics for companies Balderton has invested in
- [35:39] If you could start a movement to change something or further a cause, what would it be and why?
Links
Balderton Capital
Rob Moffat (Medium)
Sponsors
Chargebee
E-residency
Book recommendation: Mandibles
- [2:10] What motivates you and what makes you keep going one startup after another?
- [13:36] What makes Inkitt different from all the other self-publishing platforms?
- [18:30] Who are your readers and what is trending?
- [20:53] What was the turning point where growth took off?
- [24:34] How did you manage the downturns in the business?
Books mentioned
Alchemist from Paulo Coelho
Maritime industry
- [1:34] Why did you start Deepsea? Why has the maritime industry been so late in modernizing?
- [6:53] Being two engineering founders, how did you supplement the business knowledge that was missing?
- [09:56] How did the pandemic affect your business? What did you need to do to adapt?
Startup advice
- [12:15] What are some of the challenges and lessons you learnt in the early stages?
- [14:43] What was the one change you made in your B2B selling process?
- [18:30] You were initially wary of taking VC money. What made you change your mind?
- [21:51] What did you do right when preparing for your fundraising?
- [26:23] What advice do you have for hiring and managing people who are older than you?
- [29:38] How do you reduce stress and startup burnout?
- [01:40] Why did you decide to focus on the travel industry?
- [04:10] What are some of the big trends you see in the travel industry? What do you think has changed permanently and what do you think will go back?
- [5:27] What are some of the opportunities you see for travel startups
- [8:16] Your leadership style
- [11:17] How do you hire? What questions do you ask in interviews?
- [19:33] How do you keep employees motivated when business is not doing well?
- [21:03] How did you determine your 30-60-90 day plan for Awaze, a PE-driven company?
- [24:44] How did you lead through Covid?
LINKS
Awaze
The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker
Gosta Berlings Saga by Selma Lagerlof
- [1:26] Early life and value of hard work
- [2:43] Experience and most memorable moments from your time at Google and Twitter as an early employee
- [7:15] Pivoting during the pandemic
- [21:50] Future of the workplace
Links:
Envoy
Book recommendation: The Cold Start Problem
- [01:53] What convinced you to begin yet another online fraud prevention company?
- [4:52] How did you structure your product, your team, and other aspects of your company to get quick time-to-value, your core promise to customers?
- [11:59] Could you tell us more about your hybrid model of sales?
- [15:15] How easy is it to start a tech company in Hungary? And what are the biggest challenges of setting up a company and running it from Hungary?
- [17:26] Beyond product and unit economics, what else do you think a startup needs to do for a successful fundraise?
- [19:52] Could you share your insights on some of the latest fraud trends?
- [24:34] Rapid round: Favourite book, productivity tool, city and quote
Links
Company: Seon
Book: 48 laws of power
- [2:10] - What was the initial concept with which you started Glovo?
- [7:44] - How has the tapering down of the pandemic affected your business?
- [10:17] - How do you deliver groceries in 10 minutes?
- [17:36] - How profitable is your q-commerce business?
- [20:50] - How do you build loyalty in this business?
- [23:23] - What is justifying the huge amounts of capital being invested in this space? What will determine who wins in this market?
- [25:49] - How do you as a management team and company keep your focus in this hyper-competitive market which has a lot of movement?
- [33:21] - What are some mistakes you made in building Glovo and what did you learn from it?
Links
Glovo
Healthtech and Healx
- [1:53] What inspired you to start focusing on rare diseases?
- [3:28] Could you define what rare disease means?
- [3:43] Why has what you’re doing never been done before? And how is your approach to drug discovery different from others?
- [5:53] What are the trends you’re seeing in this space? And what do you think is accelerating this high amount of investment in health tech?
Startup to Scaleup
- [8:16] Why did you bootstrap your company in the early stages and how did you execute with minimal resources?
- [10:18] Why did the inventor of Viagra - Dr. David Brown join Healx?
- [12:09] - What are some mistakes you made and what would you do differently now?
- [13:10] What should founders keep in mind while selecting investors for their startups?
- [14:57] Why did you raise series B so quickly after series A? Why did not just raise a larger Series A?
- [16:41] What adjustments did you have to make and how did you think about operating the company after going from bootstrapping to raising $ 70 million?
- [20:18] What has been the hardest thing about scaling?
- [21:46] How do you deal with making decisions in areas where you don’t have experience? And how do you manage the stress?
- [23:56] What are the future plans for Healx?
Links
Company: Healx
Book: The subtle art of not giving a fuck
- [1:42] How did you go from scuba instructor to insect farming?
- [4:24] I don’t see insect protein based food in the market, why so much funding in this space?
- [7:17] How do you actually do insect farming? What is the process of farming black soldier flies and creating proteins out of them?
- [10:31] With the recent Covid pandemic, do you think the perception against meat has shifted? What does this mean for the future of insect-based proteins?
- [13:30] What does it take to be successful in this market?
- [18:09] Funding journey: How does funding for deep tech ventures differ from SaaS funding?
- [21:24] Advice for other entrepreneurs
Links:
Entocycle
- [2:05] From where does your fascination for business and entrepreneurship stem from?
- [3:21] When you met Angela (co-founder), what fascinated you about her work and what made you think that this had commercial opportunities?
- [7:42] How did you determine which application to develop first?
- [10:42] If you had to redo the phase of trying to find your first application, how would you do it differently? And how would you go about looking for a market for your product?
- [11:45] Once you identified the skincare industry, what did you do next to deliver what was needed for that industry?
- [13:29] How did you balance your personal and business life?
- [19:23] Could you tell us about your hiring philosophy? What are some of the things that you have done well and what are some things that you would do differently?
- [22:14] What did you do to find the right investors in your early stages?
- [26:12] What stage are you in right now and what challenges are you working through?
- [27:10] - Where did you determine where to build your facility?
- [29:54] What is next for the Swedish Algae Factory?
Links
Swedish Algae Factory
- [1:59] How did you come to focus on women-led businesses?
- [3:20] What do you think Europe has done to encourage women-led businesses and what more can be done?
- [5:06] What are the main barriers women face in attracting investments?
- [7:32] From an investor perspective, how do you balance the business objectives of revenues and scale when the founder is considering starting or expanding their family?
- [9:08] Do you see more women-led businesses coming out of specific parts of Europe?
- [12:27] What do women founders and companies looking for VC money have to do differently in the current environment? What are you looking for as an investor?
- [15:38] Tell me about a case where you missed investing in something - what happened and what did you learn from it?
- [17:07] When should women look for angel investors?
- [20:36] How do you find angels who know your space?
- [23:01] How long does the due diligence stage take?
- [23:50] Do you feel angel investing for small ticket amounts and really early stages has decreased?
- [2:18] How did you come to joining Bramble as employee #1?
- [6:12] How did you organize yourselves with three founders, in terms of responsibilities, in the beginning, and how that has evolved now?
- [8:16] What is the right time for ideas coming out of research institutions and universities to spin out on their own?
- [11:01] What is the funding journey for deep tech look like? What are some lessons learned?
- [13:17] How did you operationalize your plans once the funding arrived?
- [17:50] Of all the things that you have accomplished with Bramble, what are you most proud of?
- [19:28] What did you do to build culture in your company that you are proud of?
- [20:06] On hiring
- [22:41] Are there things that happened as you grew Bramble that were challenging and now in hindsight you would handle them differently?
- [24:25] What’s next for Bramble?
Bramble
- [2:14] What does ESG really mean and where are we today?
- [10:27] What can startups do for ESG?
- [13:11] What triggered you to start Net Purpose?
- [20:11] How do you ensure businesses don’t make false claims about their environmental policies or make token gestures but have very little impact? How much can the data be trusted?
- [23:47] How did you figure out product-market fit?
- [33:39] How did you fund your initial journey?
- [38:06] What’s next for Net Purpose?
Links:
Net Purpose
- [1:21] Your journey from VC to accelerator head
- [3:02] What stage does Malmo focus on?
- [3:59] What trends are you seeing in the fundraising landscape - on what’s working and what is not?
- [12:36] The problem of pre-seed funding in Europe and what can be done to fix it
- [25:58] How can people find the right angels if they don't have the network?
- [2:02] What inspired you to start CLUBZERØ?
- [6:42] How did you determine the market opportunity and feasibility?
- [10:37] How has your background in architecture helped you become an entrepreneur?
- [15:16] How did you prioritize what to do in the early days?
- [24:35] In 2018 and 2019 you were raising money, but had also had a baby. How was that experience and what would you say to other women entrepreneurs?
- [30:38] I’ve heard you say that confidence is your superpower. Where do you get your confidence from?
Links:
Clubzero
Contact info: Hello@clubzero.co
Or download the ClubZero App
- [1:18] Why do you feel so strongly about this vision of creating friendships between customers and agents and where does this vision come from?
- [7:28] As a company, what was the process you undertook to define the category that you want to be in?
- [19:29] How do you convince your customers to switch from an established vendor?
- [24:27] What are some of the mistakes you have made in your early days? And what are your biggest learnings in this journey?
- [27:20] What strategies worked for you to get your first 10, 100 and 500 customers?
- [32:03] What advice would you give entrepreneurs on how to scale pre-series A?
- [33:08] What do you think of brand building and its effect on different aspects of the company in various stages?
Links:
Dixa
Books:
The Hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz
On Veriff
- [01:20] Could you tell a little about how and why you started Veriff?
- [03:53] What shortcoming did you notice in the current solution that made you think you could do something different and better than what existed?
- [6:42] How are fintech companies with their legacy systems able to use your new advanced verification system?
Growing your business
- [8:20]How did you go to your first ten to hundred customers? What did you prioritize in those initial stages?
- [12:38] How did you do employer branding to attract good talent from all over the world?
- [14:10] So far what are you most proud of doing in how you’ve built Veriff?
- [15:30] How do you hire at Veriff?
- [17:16] In hindsight, what would you do differently?
- [19:00] What helped you secure funding from people like the founder of TransferWise to tier 1 investors like Accel, beyond the basics?
- [23:11] What motivates you? Did you always have an entrepreneurial streak or did you fall into this?
Links:
Veriff
Books:
The Little Prince
- [2:02] - What led you to start Greyparrot and what did you do in your early stage?
- [10:47] - How did you figure out who your buyer in the value chain is?
- [12:17] - What was your process for validating the problem statement? What did you do well and what could you do better?
- [20:19] - How did you fund the venture in the early stages? What was your funding journey like?
- [25:39] - How did you find your first few customers, beyond your network?
- [29:28] - What are you most proud of accomplishing thus far?
- [30:33] - How did you deal with any self-doubt and overall stress?
- [33:00] - What are some steps you have taken to keep the business going as you take time to have a baby? What advice would you give to others
Links
Greyparrot.ai
Books:
Donut Economics by Kate Raworth
- [1:22] What is the pain that Outfunnel is trying to solve and who is your target market?
- [3:28] Can you tell me a little about your journey to starting Outfunnel?
- [4:30] How did you validate the problem you were solving?
- [8:03] How did you determine if the problem is a feature or something you can build a business around?
- [9:22] What are the challenges you’re facing in entering a mature market?
- [10:12] How did you get the first 500 customers?
- [15:51] From a sales perspective, what should founders do to help scale the pipeline and create a more scalable business?
- [18:53] What do you think are the key metrics to track for marketing and sales alignment?
- [25:13] How did you come up with pricing for Outfunnel?
- [26:11] How do you work with large platforms?
Links
Outfunnel
Book recommendation:
Alchemy by Rory Sutherland
- [1:40] What about your experience working in the Japanese geriatric residential made you start Farewill?
- [06:15] What is the current experience for consumers who want a Will, probate, or funeral service?
- [14:12] How did you build trust in this industry and get your first few customers?
- [17:46] What impact has Farewill made on customers?
- [22:20] How did Farewill manage to become the number 1 Will provider in UK?
- [26:43] How do you market a product for the death industry?
- [28:45] How has the pandemic changed the perception of death related services?
- [31:15] What do you look for in hiring and building culture at Farewill?
- [36:22] What are you most worried about in terms of risk to your growth?
Links
Book recommendation: Jonathan Livingston Seagull
- [1:34] - Why did you leave Oracle to join Celonis?
- [3:20]] What does Celonis do? And what is Execution Management System (EMS)?
- [8:00] How would you describe what it takes to be an ecosystem strategy officer?
- [9:35] When time is best to build a partner or ecosystem strategy? Is this something that you would recommend all companies to do?
- [14:13] What is the blueprint to building a successful ecosystem strategy that would scale?
- [19:26] When is the right time to think about embarking on a partnership and ecosystem strategy in the life of a startup?
- [23:21] What advice would you give founders and CEOs on how to measure, track and incentivize the ecosystem strategy role for it to be successful?
- [27:53] What are some of the innovative things that you and Celonis have done to create successful ecosystem strategies?
- [28:48] Do you worry that to get value out of Celonis, companies might have to spend more?
Links:
Celonis
- [1:10] Andy’s background and how he came to be known as ‘the growth guy’.
- [3:20] What does ‘growth’ actually mean these days? What is expected of a person when hired as VP of growth?
- [6:17] How should a growth team be structured in a startup for it to be set up for success?
- [9:56] Typically, what are a growth team’s responsibilities? What KPIs would one use to measure this team’s success?
- [13:54] When is the right time to hire someone that’s going to coordinate or lead this growth function? What should one look for when hiring such a person?
- [21:38] Are there differences in how startups in Europe think about growth versus startups in other parts of the world?
- [24:10] Is ‘growth’ a temporary function meant to fix something and leave? Or does it have the potential to build a sustainable growth loop?
- [28:18] What is Facebook’s philosophy on growth and how did they structure the growth function within the organisation?
- [31:55] Can someone be trained for growth marketing? What are your insights on recruiting a ‘growth person’?
- [35:21] - Advice on building a growth team and additional resources.
Resources on growth marketing
Reforge
Traction
Growth hacker marketing
- [01:05] Your journey to starting Pegafund
- [06:27] What problems do you solve for startups and scale-ups?
- [10:07] What are the key KPIs for SaaS companies in the early stages (zero to 1 million) and what does ‘good’ looks like at this stage.
- [18:07] What are some of the key metrics for the stage from two or five million to ten million? And also, what are some common mistakes that entrepreneurs make at this stage?
- [23:20] What are the systems that should be in place for tracking from zero to five million - and further - for entrepreneurs and founders to make decisions on?
- [25:46] When revenue operations should be brought in?
- [27:50] Are there specific metrics that help determine when expansion is right? What advice do you have for expanding within Europe versus expanding to the US based on metrics or best practices?
- [32:09] From a metrics perspective, how do VCs view European companies as opposed to US companies?
- [38:31] What are some of the biggest mistakes that start-ups make when they’re preparing for fundraising?
Links:
Pegafund
- [1:14] What is positioning? And how can you tell if a company needs to rethink its positioning?
- [5:12] How does company positioning and product positioning differ?
- [12:00] How does the “Obviously Awesome” positioning framework for B2B companies work?
- [21:08] - Who should be involved in positioning? April uses her framework to walk through a case study where she developed the positioning for a CRM product.
- [32:45 - How do you balance where you are today with the product against where you want to be? How do you position your product in that context?
- [34:23] When should you create a new category?
- [42:40] Where do companies and founders struggle the most when it comes to positioning and what is your advice for them?
- [01:13] - What is customer success and what is it not?
- [06:32] - How do you align an organization to make customer success everyone’s business?
- [19:20] - When is the right time to introduce usage telemetry and analytics in an organization?
- [20:58] - How do you hire the customer success leader?
- [25:13] - What should your customer success organization should be based upon? [26:55] - How do you set up Customer success metrics or incentive system?
- [31:33] - How do you structure CS teams to align with the farming/account expansion vs purely engagement and customer satisfaction?
- [37:15] - What are the common mistakes companies make when it comes to customer success?
Links:
Rav Dhaliwal
Rav’s blog on Medium
Resources recommended
The InSide Scoop - Podcast on tools and technology
Creating Customer Success - Podcast by Daniel Cattini and Alex Truman
Customer Success - Book by Dan Steinman, Nick Mehta and Lincoln Murphy
- [1:04] - What do you mean by creating demand and capturing demand? What should you do in the early stages of the startups when you don’t have a lot of money?
- [6:41] - How do you create content at scale, especially in the early stages?
- [15:10] - Can you give client examples of impact to demand gen in 30-60-90 days?
- [20:37] - How do you influence different personas in the buyer journey?
- [23:50] - How does demand generation strategy differ from SMB to enterprise segment?
- [28:13] - When should you use Linkedin vs Facebook ads as a paid channel?
- [30:46] - What is the difference in strategy for companies growing from $50 M to $100 M in revenues?
- [34:14] - What metric would you tell companies to look at?
- [35:37] - How do you see product-led growth model working together with the demand gen model?
- [37:13] - What are the common mistakes you have seen startups make when it comes to setting up demand gen?
- [39:26] - How important is demand gen experience in a VP Marketing hire?
- [41:32] - What should a founder expect in their 30-60-90 days from their VP of Marketing?
- [01:10] - What did you do in your first 30, 60, 90 days of joining Monzo given the timing of your joining (May 2020)
- [07:42] - How did you navigate the pandemic? What are some lessons learnt?
- [11:18] - How did you maintain the morale of the people in these turbulent times?
- [15:30] - Is there anything you would do differently if you had to do it again?
- [16:23] - How do you balance the need for structure with the need for agility and innovation?
- [18:45] - How do you hire for someone with the right balance of agility and structure?
- [20:42] - How do you define a path for success at Monzo?
- [24:16] - Why expand in the US knowing it is very competitive? Why not other emerging markets?
- [26:33] - How do you prioritize the conflicting goals of revenues, profits, market share and wallet share?
- [27:57] - Monzo’s framework or OKRs
- [30:54] - How can we change impact diversity in fintech sector?
Links:
Monzo
Other:
Favorite Book: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Productivity App: Strides
- [01:11] Brief overview of what Aiden did and timeline of going from idea to sale to Twitter.
- [06:43] Do companies still need to relocate to get traction or to be noticed by potential acquirers? Has this changed post-pandemic?
- [08:22] Reflecting on your journey so far, if you had to write a book, what would you write about?
- [10:51] Is there any practical advice on how to hire diversely despite inclinations to hire those similar to you?
- [13:50] Having been an entrepreneur and now an angel investor, what should entrepreneurs (especially women entrepreneurs) do and not do when trying to raise angel funding?
- [20:34] What are your thoughts on women founders in Europe? And what could we do to increase the number of women founders?
- [24:48] What is the next big thing for you?
- [29:18] How does the product that Twitter has acquired fit their overall roadmap? Has it been integrated or is it a standalone product?
- [30:25] Closing thoughts and advice for other entrepreneurs
Marie on Twitter:
@MarieOuttier
Links:
WHO - How to hire A players
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Her journey from invention to commercialization
- [01:19] How did you go from researching how visually impaired people use public transport to identifying the food expiry problem?
- [9:54] At what point does this go from being research to having commercialization potential?
- [13:28] Did you first get funded for your prototype by your grant and then raise a seed round of funding?
Hiring
- [17:54] How did you think about building and scaling your team?
- [22:39] Recap of the key points when it comes to hiring.
- [24:18] What led you to hire a CEO? And how did you go about doing that and what did you learn from that process?
- [32:42] How does your and the hired Ceo’s relationship work on a day-to-day basis?
Links
Mimica
Books
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
The business
- [01:00] What made you become an entrepreneur and how did you come up with this idea?
- [03:54] How is your product different from what other organic products are doing in the market?
- [05:00] Why aren’t any of the big FMCG brands doing anything like this?
The process
- [07:55] What was your process from concept to production?
- [10:27] Did you do market validation whilst testing the product?
- [13:23] Why did you choose to sell directly to customers?
The Insights
- [22:23] What has been the hardest part of the journey?
- [23:17] What were some of the biggest mistakes that you think you could have avoided?
- [24:26] What was your larger vision when you thought about creating this company?
- [29:06] - How did you go about building and engaging your early adopter community?
- [30:14] What stage is your company in right now?
- [31:46] How do you keep on top of what you need to do and ensure you don’t burn out?
Company: Planera
Books:
Traction
Caroline’s Journey
- [1:00] How did you go from founding a mobile development company to founding Apricity?
- [15:08] What were some of the challenges you faced when you started this company?
Apricity
- [16:34] Do you cover the entire fertility process or only parts of it?
- [17:08] How do you measure success in a company like yours?
- [18:51] Where all is Apricity available?
- [22:18] What trends do you foresee for fertility that are hopeful for those wanting to have kids?
- [26:31] How did you establish trust?
Being a women entrepreneur
- [28:30] What are some mistakes you’ve made and what have you learned from them?
- [31:43] Could you give some practical advice on how to balance being a CEO and having a family with kids?
- [33:53] How do you gain respect and equality when working with an older male colleague?
- [36:40] How did you bring about gender balance in your company?
Links
Apricity
Books:
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
Betty by Tiffany McDaniel
Intro to Product marketing
[1:26] What is product marketing?
[4:51] How can product marketing and product management work better together?
[6:57] What is the role of product marketing across the three stages of a company - early, growth and multi-product?
Product marketing during the stages
[10:15] Early Stage
[10:23] What should product marketing at that stage look like - how many product marketers and what key responsibilities should they have?
[13:20] Advice on how to create priority and focus
Content
[16:11] How do you organize content to be top, middle, or bottom of the funnel?
[19:15] Metrics on the average number of content pieces that need to be produced
Hiring
[20:40] What should you look for in a product marketing hire? How important is domain expertise?
[22:37] Can someone with only domain expertise be trained to become a product marketer? And how can that be done?
Product launches
[24:28] What is your playbook for product launches?
Customer reviews
[28:51] How do you get customer reviews on sites like G2, Capterra etc.
Lead generation
[31:45] What is the product marketing manager’s role in lead generation?
Advice for first-time founders and entrepreneurs
[34:00] Product marketing advice and insights for entrepreneurs and first-time founders.
Links:
https://www.theproductlaunchmasterclass.com/home
- [1:34] - Background of how they came up with the idea.
- [3:48] - What does Klaus do
- [6:30] - What are the trends in the market you are trying to capitalize on and why now?
- [12:53] - What is your advice to founders who are not technical and need to find a technical founder?
- [14:46] - How do hackathons work?
- [15:17] - How did you get your funding?
- [16:47] - What was your growth strategy in the early days?
- [19:31] - What did you focus on in your early days and how did you prioritize product, community building, and brand building?
- [23:06] - How did you recruit in the early days to ensure you built a certain type of culture and balance that with the need to also be diverse?
- [25:35] - How did you set up your initial system of leads and what advice would you give other entrepreneurs.
- [30:20] - What are the trends in customer support and what is the future of Klaus
Links
Company: Klaus
Books:
The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Principals by Ray Dalio
- [1:45] - What were the events or people that shaped your journey to starting Unreasonable Group.
- [15:44] - What is Unreasonable Group and what is it not?
- [18:15] - What do you provide the entrepreneurs that their investors can’t? Can you share some examples of companies in your portfolio and how do you find them
- [31:16] - How has covid impacted your portfolio of companies and what are you doing to support them?
- [36:12] - How can entrepreneurs get in touch with your team, what is the application process?
- [36:59] - 3-steps to building culture in any company
Company: Unreasonable Group
Other mentions
RiverSimple
80 Acres
Classcraft
1MG
Memphis Meats
Book: Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard
Human Layer Security
- [1:7] - What was your journey going from being a financial analyst with no background in security to founding Tessian?
- [6:50] - What does Tessian do, how is it protecting people in the remote working environment and what are some of the top security threats your customers are worried about?
- [13:05] - How does Tessian and what it does for email security differ from what big security companies like Symantec offer?
Go-To-Market
Category Creation
- [17:53] - How did you come up with this “human security layer” and do you see this as a new category in security?
- [21:09] - How did you create this new category and get the industry to recognize it?
- [23:17] - How do you constantly differentiate yourself in the marketplace when marketing and what you say can be copied easily?
Other questions
- [26:39] - What does Tessian stand for?
- [28:51] - Why wouldn’t security teams try to simplify their stack and go with the “good-enough” option from other big vendors?
- [32:08] - What was your customer acquisition channel in the beginning and how has that changed as you grew?
- [35:36] - How did you determine pricing for a new category product?
- [36:50] - Looking back at your go-to-market journey, what didn’t go so well and what did you learn from that?
What all Great Pitches have
- [42:07] - What was your funding journey like? How did you manage to get Accel, Sequoia and Balderton as investors?
Links
Company: Tessian
Book: On Tyranny by Timothy D Snyder
New Podcast: RE Human Layer Security
Back history of Einblick
- [1:28] - Your journey from professor to entrepreneurship
- [6:45] - At what point in your research did you feel you can commercialize your IP. What was the trigger for starting the company?
- [8:44] - What does Einblick’s product do? What need is it full filling in the market today?
Process of commercializing academic research
- [14:47] - How did you go about taking research from your academic field to commercialization? What was the process like?
- [17:55] - What should other entrepreneurs using research from their time at academia be mindful of? What advice would you give them?
- [21:53] - What is the timeline for taking academic research and setting up a business to exploit it commercially?
Future plans
- [25:58] - Future plans for Einblick
- [27:40] - How did you structure equity for your team?
- [29:48] - What are your personal goals? Do you think you will go back to academia?
Links:
Einblick
Me:)
Linkedin: Anita Moorthy
Twitter: @anitamirchi,
Email: anitam@alum.mit.edu
[1:18] - Overview of the Baltic startup scene
[10:14] - What are some of the interesting findings and highlights from the Baltic startup report that surprised you?
[14:18] - Given much of the funding for the Baltics startups came from UK or US, what does that say about the Baltics funding scene?
[16:21] - What are some of the trends or niches you see across the 3 countries?
[21:17] - Diversity and inclusion. What is the scene like for women founders and what is holding them back still? Is it similar to the rest of Europe?
[29:55] - How do you apply to the Startup Wise Guys Accelerator and what do you look for?
Links shared:
2020 Baltics Report: 2020 Baltics Startup Report
Startup Wise Guys website: Startup Wise Guys Accelerator
Upcoming event: Latitude 59
- [2:25] - What is leadership and how does it differ from management?
- [5:29] - How did you influence and get support for your ideas at Siebel where you were responsible for a product that made insignificant revenues compared to CRM, their flagship product?
- [12:02] - What is important - leadership or management for a founder?
- [16:25] - What is your philosophy on hiring and how do you hire for talent and cultural fit?
- [21:15] - You joined Qlik when it was a small unknown Swedish company and took it from that to a public company. Talk me through your journey there and how you evolved as a leader at different stages of the company.
- [32:20] - Having worked in different geos, is there a different leadership style in Europe vs America for example?
- [34:56] - What differentiates good leaders from bad leaders when it comes to performance management and nurturing talent?
- [38:30] - What advice on leadership would you give to entrepreneurs who are dealing with different needs of employees, customers, and businesses because of the pandemic?
- [40:28] - What advice would you give to your younger self on leadership?
Productivity tool: tryshift.com
Book: Power of One
- [0.49] - Your journey to founding Too Good To Go?
- [2:19] - Background on the food wastage problem
- [9:06] - How can businesses be more sustainable?
- [11:59] - What is a B Corp, who can get it, and what is its value?
- [12:58] - What are the trends you see from one city to another based on app downloads and transactions?
- [18:27] - How does Too Good To Go work?
- [22:14] - Why did you scale so fast and what were the challenges you faced?
- [25:11] - What are the specific challenges you faced from scaling so quickly?
- [28:32] - How did you address the impact to your organization when the pandemic disrupted your business significantly?
- [32:09] - How big is this opportunity for VCs and what is the VC landscape like?
- [33:38] - How does food waste innovation in Europe compare to other geos?
Links:
Too Good to Go
Book recommendation:
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
- [1:33] - Why did you get into music tech? Why are there so many music tech businesses coming out of Sweden?
- [5:05] - How has the transition from B2C to B2B business been for you given all your earlier startups were in the B2C space?
- [7:56] - What did you need to do to go from a field sales go-to-market model to a fully self serve model. What did you need to change in the organization or investment priorities?
- [17:21] - Some stores like M&S have stopped “piped music” completely in their stores. What are some trends you are seeing in the B2B streaming space?
- [25:55] - Is there any enforcement happening that educates businesses that streaming music from their personal accounts is illegal?
- [30:03] - How defensible is your technology and why can’t Spotify or Apple build this into their platform?
- [33:41] - Why did you decide to separate from Spotify and what advice would you give other entrepreneurs looking to partner with a large industry player in their space?
- [40:20] - How did the pandemic impact your business given you sell to businesses that were all shut down for months this year? How do you motivate yourself and your employees to keep going?
- [44:50] - How are you using the data collected on your platform? What are you doing with this data?
Links
Soundtrack your brand
Market
- [2:45] - Why did you decide to build an automation solution for crypto trading? Why that asset class?
- [4:47] - What is the current state of crypto trading?
- [8:12] - What is the maturity of crypto trading today?
- [11:37] -What is the geographical landscape for crypto trading?
On Coinrule
- [13:32] - Who is this platform for and what problem does it solve for them?
- [20:16] - Are you worried about the exchanges building the functionality you have?
- [22:24] - How do you make money? What fees does an investor incur?
- [24:02] - Can you comment on the state of legislation in regulating these virtual currencies?
On Scaling
- [27:18] - Why did you decide to raise money through a crowdfunding platform?
- [29:38] - How did you get your first 16000 users?
- [32:59] - Biggest mistakes and advice for other entrepreneurs
If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple or any other platform you listen too,
Links
Coinrule
Books
Traction by Gabriel Weinburg and Justin Mares
Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
On Crane
- [1:12] - What was the gap in the VC market you were addressing when you started Crane Venture Partners?
- [4:48] - Talk about a few of Crane’s portfolio of companies and why Crane invested in them.
GTM
- [10:28] - How would you go about helping a company with their go-to-market strategy?
- [15:30] - The 3 pillars of go-to-market: CS, Marketing and Product Marketing
- [22:24] - What are some common mistakes you see founders make?
- [26:33] - What is the difference between deep tech product vs non-deep-tech in terms of go-to-market strategy?
- [29:12] - What are the key metrics you track in the pre-Series A stage to know that they are on track.
- [31:25] - What key metrics do Series A investors look for?
- [34:31] - What are the checklist of items you need to have ready before you go for Series A funding?
Trends in European Tech
- [36:37] - What are the big trends you are seeing in Europe in enterprise tech?
On becoming an entrepreneur and Talkdesk
- [1:15] - What were some people or events that influenced you in your early days before Talkdesk to become an entrepreneur?
- [4:04] - What was the hardest growth stage of Talkdesk and why?
- [6:57] - What advice would you give founders who are thinking of stepping down from something they started?
Cleverly.ai
- [10:48] - On cleverly.ai - what does Cleverly.ai do?
- [11:48] - What is the gap in customer service management that Cleverly.ai is trying to solve?
- [16:42] - How has product development changed from your days at Talkdesk to now at Cleverly?
- Engineering and data science
- Design and UX
- Distributed teams
- AI embedded
- [26:32] - How do you make remote development work? Any advice or tips for entrepreneurs?
- [29:41] - Does product development differ if it is for DevOps vs a business user?
Go-to-Market
- [31:24] - How are you taking Cleverly to market?
- [33:46] - How are you determining pricing?
- [35:19] - How has the pandemic affected your strategy? What changes have you made to deal with it?
- [37:00] - What is your advice on seeking funding - when you should seek funding, how you should seek funding?
Book recommendation
Play Bigger
Big Picture - Market and Trends
- [1:11] - What is Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) and how does that differ from traditional identity and access management (IAM)?
- [4:21] - How did you go from the traditional open-source code of Sun’s IAM to this new consumer identity and access management. Can you give a quick history of ForgeRock.
- [6:40] - Can the ForgeRock solution help consumers have more control and visibilities over their identities?
- [12:00] - What are the top trends you and ForgeRock are seeing in the identity space and how will it impact consumers and businesses?
- [18:23] - What does the provider landscape of CIAM look like?
Building the company
- [23:26] - what was your main channel for customer acquisition and growth? In the beginning stages. And then as you grew, has that changed?
- [26:48] - How has the pandemic impacted your strategy and future plans?
- [28:55] - Forgerock believes in building a strong internal culture. How have you done that?
- [34:20] - Why are you considering going IPO? Why not a strategic exit? What factors did you consider?
- [36:42] - What market should you IPO in?
- [39:10] - Which stage of growth was the hardest - 1=10M, 10-50M, 50-100M?
- [40:44] - What are your future plans? What will you do with the funds raised from an IPO?
Book recommendation
The Long Earth Series by Terry Pratchett
- [0:58] - Intro and journey to starting Sustainbly.
- [6:15] - What does Sustainbly do?
- [8:34] - What changes have you seen in the donation patterns since the pandemic hit?
- [10:11] - How are charities leveraging digital to fundraise? Is your platform really making an impact to their bottom line?
- [12:19] - Why have you build Sustainbly as a for-profit rather than a non-profit company?
- [14:37] - What are some concerns consumers have in using such apps and how are you addressing that?
- [16:21] - How did you get help and resources from Virgin Startup, We Work, Founders Factory etc?
- [19:36] - What advice would you give to entrepreneurs on how to stretch their money in the early months?
- [22:31] - How do you work with a family member and what advice would you give others who are in the same situation?
- [25:56] - What did you do when funding was tight?
- [27:58] - What were some of the successful strategies you used to get funding?
Book recommendation:
Summer - Alley Smith
Traction - Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
Hooked - Nir Eyal
- [7.46] - How has blockchain space changed due to Bitcoin and what are the top trends you are seeing in blockchain technology?
- [12:47] - Where are the opportunities for blockchain for the corporate market?
- [14:48] - What problem does Minespider solve and for whom?
- [17:30] - Why is blockchain the best technology to solve the supply chain transparency problem and who is this valuable to?
- [20:30] - How did you identify the business model? Are customers willing to pay for this transparency?
- [23:40] - Where should entrepreneurs go to get funding for high-risk emerging tech?
- [28:21] - What does a European grant fund look for?
- [29:53] - How has covid impacted what you do?
- [31:54] - What metrics do you use to evaluate blockchain technology-based companies?
- [33:05] - Who else is solving this problem and how is Minespider different?
- [42:24] - Does including supply chain information add a significant cost to the final cost of the product?
- [43:24] - What are the applications of your current Minespider blockchain protocol?
- [1:12] - What are you responsible for at Hubspot?
- [2:08] - Why did they choose you to lead international expansion?
- [4:30] - What are the criteria Hubspot considered to determine the timing for expansion?
- [6:45] - How did you think about mapping and prioritizing different countries in Europe?
- [11:24] - What is the playbook for launching into a new country?
- [24:58] - How does hiring differ across Europe, Asia, Australia?
- [29:03] - How did sales differ from geo to geo?
- [31:39] - Advice to CEOs on international expansion and metrics to evaluate the progress.
- [37:59] - How did you budget for each new geo you went into?
- [45:27] - What would you do differently today? Will you change your strategy today because inbound and content creation is not novel anymore
- [53:05] - Determining pricing and packaging for different markets
- [54:28] - How have you handled Asia?
If you like the podcast, please leave a review!
And follow me on:
Linkedin: Anita Moorthy
Twitter: @anitamirchi,
About Next Matter
- [4:16] - What does Next Matter do? Can you share a few use cases?
- [6:45] - How does Next Matter differ from other project management tools?
Big Trends
- [9:08] - Are no coding tools realistic for large companies with complex and unique processes?
- [13:59] - What trends do you see for how the future of work will evolve?
Building your company
- [17:58] - How do you position Next Matter effectively in the prospect’s mind?
- [19:52] - How do you get people to actually pay for yet another tool that is going to help them with coordination and collaboration?
- [22:02] - How did you decide on the specific use cases to work on? How did you focus your team on the right manual processes to digitize?
- [24:43] - When raising funding, what was your approach to pitching investors?
- [32:00] - What is your advice on hiring your first 10 people?
Links:
Next Matter
Book recommendations:
Hard things about hard things by Ben Horowitz
The Swarm - A novel of the deep by Frank Schӓtzing
- [3:15] - What advice would you give other entrepreneurs looking to start a company with someone they are related to?
- [4:34] - How have you dealt with the fear and uncertainty of the current situation?
- [6:55] First for your employees
- [8:27] For your investors
- [9:41] Your customers - how have you dealt with angry frustrated customers?
- [13:40] - How are you and your brother managing the stress?
- [15:27] - How does the payment flow work if I am a customer and I just paid for a multi-tour?
- [17:56] - What is the current sentiment towards travel and does it vary by different segments (survey data: Tourradar]
- [23:22] - What is your long term strategy around remote working?
- [24:24] - What are your thoughts on Google and the legal action some travel companies are taking where they are blaming Google for unfairly taking their data to power their products?
- [27:52] - Advice for travel companies raising funds in this environment?
Links
TourRadar
Book recommendations:
Infinite Game
Power of Vulnerability
Who
- [1:28] - Which of the various roles you have had - consultant, entrepreneur, board member, CEO, investor, and now VC - have you enjoyed the most, and why?
- [4:14] - What is “Indico powered by Google Startups” initiative?
- [9:10] - How can European VCs get better at identifying the next big Airbnb or Uber in Europe?
- [14:50] What is the Portuguese startup scene like? Where are the opportunities in Portugal?
- [17:54] - What are some of the areas of opportunity Indico Capital is focusing on?
- [21:35] - How can Europe make its startup ecosystem better? What is still missing to produce more successful startups out of Europe?
- [29:30] - What do entrepreneurs need to have before they look for seed or Series A funding from your point of view
- [35:18] - What are the top 5 lessons or advice you would have for entrepreneurs?
Links
- Indico Capital Partners
- Google for Startups by Indico Capital Partners
Book Recommendation
- 1984 by Orson Wells
- Bad Blood
- MDB the Malaysian scandal
Follow me
Linkedin: Anita Moorthy
Twitter: anitamirchi
Instagram @european_podcast
- [1:52] - Why did you start Akoni? What pain does it solve?
- [8:00] - How did you achieve product-market fit?
- [11:18] - What are the key trends you are seeing in financial services and fintech?
- [15:13] - How has the pandemic changed the expectations and needs of the consumer and business user?
- [21:13] - How do you balance innovation from open banking and open finance with ensuring adequate protection of consumers?
- [26:19] - How do you see open banking evolve in Europe and what would you like to see happen in terms of regulations
- [28:18] - How does Europe compare with other regions like US in terms of fintech innovation?
- [31:15] - How are the different players - incumbents, middleware, fintech companies collaborating or working together to make the ecosystem work, (in the UK)?
- [34:39] - Go-to-market strategy - How did you build relationships with key banking players?
- [36:49] - What advice would you give to yourself, in your early years at Akoni - what would you do differently?
- [40:29] - How has the experience of being a female founder and CEO in Fintech been like?
- [[44:37] - What are your future goals?
Links
Akonihub
Hive Founders
Books
Fountainhead
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- [0:48] - What need does Trint solve beyond transcription?
- [2:45] - How does Trint differ from other transcription services?
- [6:14] - How did you go from being a war journalist to becoming an entrepreneur?
- [14:49] - What have you learned as a war correspondent that you were able to use to become the entrepreneur and CEO you are today?
- [21:09] - What advice would you give someone starting a company who has little experience in entrepreneurship and/or are starting this late in their life?
- [29:02] - How did you determine the average sale price of your platform given it is more than just transcription?
- [33:41] - What are some of the mistakes you made and what advice would you give others?
- [37:13] - Given your background in journalism and interviewing, what have you found to work for good interview questions - that allow you to get to the heart of someone’s motivation?
Links:
Trint
Book Recommendations:
Shackleton’s way - Lessons in Leadership
Show Notes:
- [0:43] - Why did you start Dashboard and what problem is it trying to solve?
- [5:06] - How did you refine your initial value proposition and find your focus?
- [6:54] - There are big companies with deep pockets in the energy space - why can’t they solve this problem on their own?
- [10:05] - Is there a VC arm inside most of these large energy companies and who are the right people to build relationships with?
- [13:02] - What does the funding look like for industrial tech and how was that process for you?
- [19:50] - How do you raise money in industrial tech? What advice would you give to other industrial tech entrepreneurs?
- [23:36] - How did you partner with big companies and still maintain non-exclusivity?
- [27:49] - What stage of TRL are you and how did the big companies react to your technology?
- [30:56] - What’s the next step after this?
- [33:38] - How did you find the right people for the team in the initial stages?
- [36:35] - How did you build the culture at Dashboard?
- [38:33] - What were some of the biggest mistakes you made in your entrepreneurial journey and what did you learn from that?
Links:
Dashboard.net
Book recommendations:
American Dirt;
Make, Think, Imagine: The Future of Civilizations by Lord Brown
Show Notes:
- [2:57] - How does Anote work?
- [6:32] - How do you convince investors to invest in music as an asset class where timeline and expected cash flows are unpredictable?
- [10:44] - What songs or artists make ideal suppliers in Anote?
- [16:37] - How do you value music and does it require a certain sophistication on the investors side?
- [18:40] - Since you launched the platform, what are you seeing as yields/returns for investors?
- [20:38] - How are you going to market? Finding investors and catalogs?
- [22:28] - Why have other marketplaces for music royalties failed and what are you doing differently?
- [25:57] - What factors are most important for the sustainability of marketplaces like Anote?
- [28:04] - What did you need to do to get regulatory approval for Anote?
- [32:51] - What were some of your biggest failures in your early days and what did you learn from it?
- [34:57] - What are the biggest challenges currently facing your company?
- [36:13] - Advice for other entrepreneurs and your future plans
Show notes:
[1:03] - Journey from documentary filmmaker to startup founder
[3:41] - What was your strategy as a first-time founder for attracting people who are really motivated and engaged to work with you?
[4:52] - What does Panion do and why is it called Panion?
[9:05] - How do you build engaged communities?
[14:53] - What are you seeing as successful monetization strategies for community-based platforms?
[17:22] - Advice on angel funding
[21:28] - How did you keep yourself motivated in your early days
[23:00] - How do you de-stress?
Show notes:
- [3:53] - Why is now the right time to have a carbon removal marketplace?
- [5:57] - How did you launch a marketplace from idea to first auction in 71 days?
- [11:21] - If I am a carbon emitter, why can’t I buy carbon offsets? Why do I need carbon removals?
- [12:47] - What regulations are needed for carbon removal to become mainstream?
- [13:59] - How do I as a carbon emitter verify the amount of carbon removal?
- [15:55] - What is the cost of removing 1 tonne of C02 from the atmosphere?
- [18:09] - Do you worry that the big polluters get the wrong incentive to go on polluting?
- [19:07] - Who are the main suppliers of carbon net negative technologies?
- [20:54] - How are you going to market to get buyers and suppliers to the marketplace?
- [21:56] - What is still a challenge?
- [23:00] - What are the big trends in the carbon removal space?
- [25:48] - How is your marketplace different from other carbon removal marketplaces? What is your differentiator?
- [27:23] - What are your future plans for Puro.Earth
Show notes:
[4:39] - What are the trends you see in the travel sector?
[7:20] - Will anything change fundamentally in the travel industry because of the pandemic? What will be its impact, long term?
[8:53] - Is there a difference in the way people consume online travel services in Africa vs Europe?
[11:56] - How did you build such a strong brand in Africa?
[16:10] - How do you recruit people that stay with you for a long time?
[18:26] - What are the most important highlights of your career?
Show notes:
- [1:05] - Childhood and background that contributed to your entrepreneurial drive
- [3:21] - What led you to see an opportunity in digital UX analytics?
- [5:06] - What does Contentsquare do?
- [6:39] - How is Contentsquare different from Hotjar, Google Analytics etc?
- [8:13] - How does consumer behaviour differ between regions based on the data you are seeing?
- [9:48] - What did you do in the early days that laid the foundation for future growth. And is there anything you would do differently?
- [11:57] - How did you determine your average sale price in your early days?
- [13:33] - What were some of the biggest failures in your early days and what did you learn from it?
- [15:22] - Journey of Contentsquare: What is your philosophy on funding? How did you decide when to raise money and how much?
- [20:59] - What advice would you give entrepreneurs looking to raise money?
- [22:13] - How do you determine the priority and sequencing of conflicting goals of maximizing revenue, maximizing profits, maximizing market share, maximizing wallet, share.
- [24:51] - How do you do your annual planning?
- [26:18] - How do you integrate companies successfully? What did you learn from your two integrations?
- [28:58] - What do we need to do in Europe to have more startups and unicorns come out of Europe?
- [31:10] - When should you go direct to US from your home country?
Links:
Book recommendation: The Hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz
Book recommendation: High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil
If you like the podcast, please leave a review!
And follow me on:
Linkedin: Anita Moorthy
Twitter: @anitamirchi,
Email: anitam@alum.mit.edu
Show Notes
- [0:50] - What does Garden.io do?
- [2:16] - How did you go from being technical to becoming an entrepreneur
- [3:45] - How do you balance your desire to be technical with the other aspects of running a business?
- [5:47] - How has software development changed since you started?
- [8:30] - When does it make sense to have an open source offering?
- [14:00] - Is selling to devops different in US vs Europe?
- [15:11] - How did you determine the pricing for your commercial offering?
- [17:03] - How did you raise your first million dollars?
- [19:18] - How did you determine focus in your early stages and what were some of the mistakes made?
- [22:13] - Where do you go for mentorship and advice?
- [23:47] - Challenges and strategies that have worked for you in the current pandemic in terms of growing your business
- [27:04] - Tell us about the latest Garden commercial offering you just launched
Links:
Book recommendation: Inventing the Future
Show notes:
- [2:35] - How has tech hiring been affected by covid and where are you seeing hiring picking up again?
- [5:50] - What is a typical hiring process like? How do you find the right hire for a role?
- [9:28] - When should founders be thinking of making the key commercial team hires?
- [11:12] - What is the toughest role to fill today?
- [13:23] - How do founders/CEO think of candidates with unconventional backgrounds and what is your view on it?
- [15:09] - How do you motivate a candidate to join a startup?
- [17:32] - How important is diversity and inclusion for startups? What are you hearing differently today?
- [20:04] - What are the differences in the hiring traits between the companies that are most successful and those that are less successful?
- [25:46] - Why do I need a recruiting agency? Why can’t I just use Linkedin? When do I need a recruiting agency?
- [29:38] - What should founders and CEOs know about finding the right recruiting firm?
- [31:57] - How are recruiting agencies compensated?
Show Notes:
- [ 2:46] - How do you think of the business of sustainability and the need to do good and make money?
- [6:37] - Why is education the biggest part of sustainability?
- [10:37] - Can you break down the landscape for online education?
- [17:07] - How do you keep children motivated and engaged with online education?
- [19:17] - What is Valenture institute and what is their educational offering?
- [21:18] - Why taking the traditional curriculum and moving it online doesn’t work?
- [23:59] - What’s your target market?
- [25:26] - What about students with learning disabilities? Can online education help those students?
- [26:08] - How do you get online high schools recognized by universities?
- [29:40] - What is your fee structure?
- [31:12] - What are the biggest challenges to online education?
- [32:35] - How are you attracting the best quality teachers?
- [34:43] - Is this online platform available for summer programs?
- [35:18] - What advice would you give to entrepreneurs in education technology
Links:
Valenture Institute
Book: Call Me Ted
Book: One From Many
London restaurant: Lucho
London restaurant: Noura
Show Notes
- [1:46] - Why BlueYard and the vision for the fund
- [3:33] - How the thesis received by the LPs and people you were trying to raise funds from?
- [5:10] - Is there a breakdown of where the current funds come from and does it impact your investments?
- [6:22] - Your investments by region
- [9:44] - What stage do you invest in and why are there no multi-stage VCs today?
- [12:06] - What kind of VC are you and how many investments do you make?
- [13:53] - How do you develop depth and expertise in niche areas you invest in?
- [16:40] - What kind of companies and entrepreneurs are you finding across Europe and Why?
- [18:58] - Why has entrepreneurship in Europe gone native and what is still missing?
- [25:00] - How has the crisis impacted your business? What are you doing differently now?
- [30:35] - Are US VC doing something different?
- [32:51] - In the short term will money from the US and Asia continue to flow into Europe or will European VCs have to come together more?
- [34:35] - Effect of Brexit
- [35:56] - As an entrepreneur looking for funding, does your pitch need to be different in today’s environment? What should entrepreneurs know?
- [37:46] - What should entrepreneurs look for in a VC?
- [40:56] - What are the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make when looking to raise money?
- [43:26] - Talk about 3 of the portfolio companies - protocol labs, Pitch.io, Bitbio
Links:
Book recommendation: The Road, Blindness
Show Notes:
- [1:15] - How Chris went from being the #1 employee at Hearsay to now being Chief Product Officer at Hearsay
- [4:22] - What does Hearsay do?
- [6:16] - How has the current pandemic affected Hearsay's business.
- [7:51] - What criteria did Hearsay consider when it decided to expand into Europe.
- [10:47] - How to prioritize different markets in Europe. How did you pick where to go?
- [12:40] - Was your strategy to go country by country or to all of Europe?
- [14:43] - How did you personally prepare before going to Europe?
- [18:36] - Given your product had a compliance element to it, how did you build awareness with the compliance community across different countries and different regulators?
- [26:33] - What do you wish you had known before moving to Europe/ What are some of the biggest mistakes companies people make when they move internationally?
- [29:19] - Is there a hiring plan you would recommend for businesses looking to expand into Europe?
- [30:44] - What did you personally learn from your time in Europe?
Recommendation and Links:
Business book: 7 powers by Hamilton Helmer
Jazz concert: Delfeayo Marsalis
Fiction: Mislaid by Nell Zink
In this episode, I sit down with Adrien Nussenbaum, co-founder and US CEO of Mirakl. Mirakl is part of France’s 40 most promising startups and widely seen as the next French “unicorn.” Their online marketplace technology today powers over $1.5B gross margin value (GMV). In our talk, Adrien discusses the big trends in eCommerce, how companies need to do to adapt, and how they built a $100M ARR business.
[1:00] - How you came about starting Mirakl and the significance of the name
[6:52] - How does Mirakl fit into the e-commerce landscape
[11:25] - How Mirakl helped the French government during the coronavirus crisis
[19:09] - What are the typical use cases for online marketplaces in B2B and B2C scenarios
[24:26] - Trends in e-commerce
[31:17] - Trends in buyer behavior
[35:27] - Who are the losers going to be in e-commerce?
[37:37] - How will online marketplace technology impact amazon?
[41:10] - How did you build your brand and get your first few customers?
[47:39] - As a coach to Harvard Business School, Rock Accelerator Program. What are the most common problems or questions you get from the startup founders?
Favorite book: The Sun Also Rises by Ernst Hemmingway
[1:53] - the personal journey from conservation scientist to founding Carto
[4:50] - what did you have when you went for VC funding
[6:24] - How Carto is helping governments map the spread of the coronavirus
[9:45] - Privacy and location data mapping. How do you deal with it?
[14:42] - How Carto built its brand and the importance of making your product accessible
[20:05] - Go-to-market - which channels have been most successful for Carto
[23:22] - How did Carto influence analysts like Gartner/Forrester and the importance of product marketing
[27:17] - When and how did you expand globally?
[32:24] - Should you go broad or should you go deep (remain a horizontal software or verticalize)
[35:03] - When did you open up your platform so others can build on top of it?
[36:41] - When to buy (acquire a company) vs build in house
Links mentioned:
Books: Crossing the Chasm
[5:29] - When hiring for Europe, is it better to hire natively or focus on expertise
[8:28] - 3 strategies for thinking about Europe expansion
[13:42] - How should European companies think about European expansion
[15:34] - How should you hire for European expansion
[21:40] - Who are the first core people we should hire for each region?
[23:28] - How long is reasonable to expect in establishing a region and seeing consistent sales
[24:29] - One strategy of developing Europe is to partner
[26:56] - When is local competition a problem?
Links:
Guest: Olivier Maire
[1.11] - How I became a serial entrepreneur.
[5.0] - Entrepreneurial nature of Icelandic people
[5.54] - Why did you move from Boston to Iceland for starting your latest venture
[7.52] - Story of Data Market (data-as-a-service): from a startup in Iceland to IPO in the US
[15:02] - what stage of the company was Data Market in when they moved to the US and why Boston
[18:40] - How did you get acquired by Qlik
[20:09] - What we didn't do right (looking back at the Data Market story
[20:56] - Advice for startups on thinking about commercialization early
[22:33] - Backstory on the inspiration for starting Grid
[25.36] - 3 experiments Hjalmar did before he started Grid
[31:19] - What is Grid?
[35:12] - How to take a product to market
[37.24] - How to determine price points
Companies mentioned:
Grid
Qlik
Books mentioned:
Oh, the places you you'll go by Dr Seuss
History of Everything by Bill Bryce
Thievery Corporation
Hey and welcome to the European Startup Show. This show is dedicated to helping you to become a better entrepreneur. Each week I will interview different startups from different regions in different stages of growth to understand the challenges they face and strategies that have helped them to grow and scale quickly. You will hear from CEOs, founders, heads of sales, and heads of marketing on how to create successful global businesses from Europe.