Venture Europe

Oliver Holle - co-founder, CEO and Managing Partner at SpeedInvest, a leading European early-stage VC.

Starting in 2011 as an angel fund, today Speedinvest became a 1B Eur European powerhouse investing in startups at the earliest phases. With their sector focused teams across Deeptech, Fintech, Marketplace and Consumer among others and operational teams, they deeply support founders in their journey.

During this episode we discuss about the similarities between the AI wave with the iPhone moment, how quitting sometimes is the best decision and the need to have a chip on the shoulder and intrinsically motivation to succeeded as a founder.

Enjoy!

Brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠uTopic⁠⁠⁠ - peers, not followers

Carmen Alfonso Rico - founder and GP of Cocoa VC.

Cocoa is a VC fund investing between $250k-$500k angel checks at pre-seed/seed and how they like to say it “they don’t give a damn about ownership stake”.

In less than 3 years she invested in some of the most talented founders from Arcane, Twirl and Plumery just to name a few, co-investing with some of the best investors in Europe and globally.

During this episode we talk about why they can win competitive deals and be on the same side of the table with founders, her preferred questions to ask founders and the challenges that women face when focusing on career.

Enjoy!

Brought to you by ⁠⁠uTopic⁠⁠ - peers, not followers

Bernt Øivind Børnich - co-founder and CEO of 1X, an AI and robotics company producing androids to benefit society and meet the world’s labor demand.

One of the most exciting companies in Europe that stands at the forefront of AI robotics. Their mission is to create androids that work among people and have a new approach to embodied learning for data collection.

They recently raised over 100 million euros from EQT Ventures, Sam Altmans' Open AI fund and other notable global investors to bring to market its second generation android called, NEO.

During this episode we discuss about the importance of building softness in order for androids to work and live among humans, the infinite demand curve for a useful droid and his advice for founders to go and build stuff that matters more specifically filling the gap for a future with energy abundance.

Enjoy!

Brought to you by ⁠uTopic⁠ - peers, not followers

Our guest today is Kaushik Subramanian, partner at EQT Ventures, investing primarily in product-led technology businesses.

From offices in Stockholm, London, Berlin, Paris and New York, EQT invests in and supports entrepreneurs building the next-generation of global winners from a 1.1B Euro fund.

Prior to joining EQT, Kaushik was at Stripe and Meta where he built and scaled several products to global reach and generating billions.

During this episode we discuss how to choose your design partners when building the early version of the product, why he decided to join EQT ventures and how he asses founders if they have a product first mindset.

Brought to you by uTopic - peers, not followers

Julius is a certified coach and has coached over 150 entrepreneurs backed by Atomico, a16z and Creandum among others, has trained over 100 venture investors and just recently released his first single on Spotify.

During this episode we discuss about the moment he decided to become a coach, the learnings along the coaching journey and what are the most common challenges founders and investors have, when they reach out to him.

Wanna join a peer-support community for founders? Join us at uTopic. :)

Dr. Nicole Paulk is the CEO and founder of the viral gene therapy startup Siren Biotechnology.

Prior to being a founder she was a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF in San Francisco, California where her lab worked at the forefront of developing and engineering enabling technologies to make viruses better medicines.

During this episode we discuss the evolution of modern medicine from ingesting medicinal leaves to gene therapy, we also discuss how she plans to use viruses to treat cancer and therapies for sleeping only 4h are closer than you think.

Enjoy!

Bharat Vasan, Partner and COO at The Production Board.

Bharat is overseeing the consumer technology portfolio and actively invests in, advises and serves on the boards of early-stage businesses.

He is one of Silicon Valley’s most battle-tested and proven CEOs and operators, with multiple successful exits and over $500M dollars raised.

During this episode we discuss about some trends in consumer tech around AI and food, how they asses founders when investing and how he struggled with weight loss and how Ozempic, the miracle drug made by Novo Nordisk changed his mind, body – and investment strategy.

Enjoy!

Bjarne Kveim Lie - Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Verdane.

Verdane invests in technology companies with equity tickets between 8 and 150m Euro, they have Eur 5B of committed capital and over 140 investments since 2003. They have a flexible mandate and can make both minority and majority investments. In addition to making individual investments they also act as a solution provider for GPs that seek liquidity and have completed over 50 so called ‘secondary directs’ over the years.

They have been named Best European PE Growth Fund all the years between 2019 and 2023 and Best European mid-market PE fund in 2022.

During this episode we discuss about the status of the growth stage as an asset class, the learnings from investing for over 20 years and the fun parallel between investing with an asymmetric risk reward ratio and Dr Alban. It’s my life!

James Currier - Founding Partner at NfX.

James is a five-time Founder, an angel investor in DoorDash, Lyft, and Patreon, and a Founding Partner at the venture capital firm, NfX.

Before becoming an investor, James was the co-founder and CEO of Tickle, one of the internet’s first successful user-generated-content companies. Tickle grew to the 18th largest website in the world with over 150 million registered users — before they were acquired in 2004 by Monster for $110 million. It was during this time that James realized the power of network effects as the core growth driver of both B2B and B2C successes across every vertical.

James then co-founded three other successful companies – Wonderhill (online video games, merged with Kabam in 2010 which then sold for $800M), IronPearl (growth analytics SaaS, acquired by PayPal in 2013), and Jiff (enterprise healthcare software, raised $68M from Venrock, GE, J&J, merged with Castlight in 2017 — NASDAQ: CSLT).

As a lifelong learner and developer of talent, James loves sharing wisdom among Founders. He speaks regularly at numerous industry conferences and has been featured in Forbes, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, TechCrunch, and Silicon Valley Business Journal.

During this episode we discuss about the importance of the founding team and learning velocity, we discuss about network effects and the white-hot center and touch upon some books recommendations across entrepreneurships, finding one self and marriage and relationships.

Enjoy!