Scaling with Clarity
The Future Ventures Podcast
Welcome to Scaling with Clarity
The Future Ventures Podcast
Where founders share the real stories behind scaling their companies — and how they are applying AI.
Each episode features candid conversations with company builders across industries, exploring the strategies, setbacks, and breakthroughs that shape their journeys. We delve into how they're integrating artificial intelligence into their operations, products, and decision-making — not as a buzzword, but as a practical tool for growth.
New episodes are dropped regularly
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Episodes
Kevin Ertell — The Strategy Trap: Why Great Plans Fail in Execution | FV Podcast Ep. 71
Kevin Ertell is the founder of Mistere Advisory and author of The Strategy Trap, bringing more than 30 years of leadership experience across companies including Nike, Borders, Tower Records, and other major brands. Throughout his career, he has seen organizations invest heavily in developing ambitious strategies, only to struggle when it comes time to execute them. His central argument is that strategy and execution cannot be treated as separate activities. A strategy that has not been designed for execution is already at risk of failure. In this episode of Scaling with Clarity, Kevin talks with Maxim Atanassov about why execution often falls apart and what founders can do to fix it. They discuss the value of bringing the right people in early, setting clear ownership, building team capacity, and giving teams room to make decisions. Using Kevin's Six Cs framework and leadership experience, the conversation encourages founders to rethink how they set strategy, share
Salvatore Manzi — The Founder’s Message: Communicating Through Every Stage of Scale | FV Podcast Ep. 70
Salvatore Manzi is a leadership communications coach, speaker, and author who helps founders and executives communicate with clarity, confidence, and influence. With more than 20 years of experience coaching leaders, including Y Combinator founders and executives in technical fields, Salvatore specializes in helping analytical, data-driven thinkers connect with their audiences. His book, Clear and Compelling, explores how leaders can translate complex ideas into messages that resonate, build trust, and inspire action. This conversation looks at why communication becomes such a big leadership challenge as a company grows. What works for five employees may not work for 50 or 500. Salvatore and Maxim discuss how founders can adapt their message for different audiences, get attention without relying on charisma, and build trust through honest communication. They also talk about the power of silence, the role of body language, and how AI can help leaders improve their c
Mark Francis — Scaling Beyond the Founder: How to Build a Team You Can Trust | FV Podcast Ep. 69
Mark Francis has spent nearly two decades working at the intersection of executive search, entrepreneurship, fintech, and HR technology across Asia-Pacific. As CEO of Preferrd, he is now applying that experience to a fundamental problem for scaling companies: how to find the right people, assess them well, and build teams that can grow without losing the trust, judgment, and culture that made the company work in the first place. This conversation goes well beyond recruitment. Mark and Maxim explore what happens as a founder-led business moves from its first tightly aligned group of employees into larger, distributed teams; why early-stage companies need a different kind of leader; and how founders can surround themselves with people who will challenge their thinking rather than execute instructions. They also discuss the role of AI in recruitment, equity as an alignment mechanism, choosing co-founders, building relationships before you need them, and finding a sust
Dave Irvine — Why Founders Must Scale Themselves Before They Scale Their Companies | FV Podcast Ep. 68
Dave Irvine, known as The Leader’s Navigator, has spent decades helping leaders understand a deceptively simple idea: leadership is not primarily about title, authority, or technique. It starts with who you are. His work focuses on authenticity, self-awareness, trust, accountability, and the inner work required to lead others with clarity and conviction. For founders, that conversation becomes especially important as a company scales. Growth changes the business, but it also changes what the founder is being asked to become. In this deeply personal conversation, Dave and Maxim explore the difference between building an impressive company and building a meaningful life, why founders need to scale themselves before scaling their organizations, and how to remain human in a business environment increasingly shaped by speed, pressure, automation, and AI. 5 Key Topics Covered The Outer Everest and the inner journey — Dave explains why achievement, r
Jae Hwang — Why Experience May Be the Founder’s Greatest Edge | FV Podcast Ep. 67
Jae Hwang is the co-founder of Former, where he is challenging a deeply embedded assumption in venture capital: that the best founders are young, technical, and built for hypergrowth at all costs. His own career followed a different path. Jae began in brand consulting and strategy in New York, worked across North America, Asia, and the Middle East, and eventually became a Chief Strategy Officer within a Dubai government asset management organization, gaining firsthand exposure to strategy, operations, venture capital, private equity, and large-scale economic development. This conversation matters because Jae makes the case for a different kind of entrepreneurship—one built around experience, domain knowledge, disciplined capital, and profitability by design. Maxim and Jae explore why experienced founders may have an advantage in finding product-market fit, why a successful $10 million or $50 million company does not need to become a unicorn, and why founders
Linda Carlisle— Scaling Culture, Trust and Communication | FV Podcast Ep. 65
Linda Carlisle founded Comm-ext and is a certified change management professional. Her work focuses on communication, culture, and organizational change. With years of experience, she has helped organizations through growth, transformation, mergers and acquisitions, workforce changes, and other important moments when leadership communication can build trust or slowly wear it down. Her view is simple: communication is not just what leaders say. It is how people experience strategy, change, and culture as the organization grows and evolves. When a company is small, communication is usually easy. The founder is easy to reach, information travels quickly, and the culture mostly reflects their personality. But as the company grows, those informal habits are no longer enough. Linda and Maxim explain that founders then need clearer communication systems, a culture that is built on purpose, stronger messages for stakeholders, better ways to listen, and leadership com
Manuj Aggarwal— Turning AI Into a Business That Runs Without You | FV Podcast Ep. 66
Manuj Aggarwal is the founder of TetraNoodle Technologies, a technologist and entrepreneur with nearly three decades of experience across technology and artificial intelligence. His path has been anything but conventional: from learning to program on early computers after dropping out of college, to working with companies including Microsoft, IBM, and T-Mobile, earning four AI patents, and eventually combining technology with neuroscience, psychology, meditation, and human performance. That combination has shaped how he thinks about a problem every founder eventually faces: how do you continue growing when the person who built the company becomes one of its biggest constraints? This conversation goes well beyond AI tools. Manuj and Maxim explore the internal operating system behind a founder-led business—purpose, identity, ego, relationships, decision-making, and the willingness to give up control. They also examine where AI can genuinely create leverage and
James Chalmers— Crossing the Climate-Tech Commercialization Gap | FV Podcast Ep. 64
James Chalmers is the CEO of NovoPower, a Canadian deep-tech company developing systems that convert low-temperature waste heat into usable electricity. A five-time CEO with experience supporting more than 1,500 startups and 2,800 products, James has spent his career working alongside engineering teams to move complex technologies from research and development into commercial markets. This conversation matters because energy demand is rising faster than grids and new generation capacity can be built. James and Maxim examine how industrial companies can recover more value from energy they already consume—and what founders must do to turn technically strong ideas into products that customers can adopt, finance, integrate, and scale. The discussion moves from data-center economics and behind-the-meter power to customer discovery, risk reduction, partnership design, leadership, and trust. 5 Key Topics Covered Recovering value from low-temperature waste
Peter Boolkah— Building a Business That Can Scale Without You | FV Podcast Ep. 63
Peter Boolkah, known as “The Transition Guy,” is a business coach who helps founders build companies that can grow without remaining permanently dependent on them. After starting at McDonald’s at 16 and spending 15 years inside one of the world’s most disciplined operating systems, Peter moved into entrepreneurship and discovered how rare that level of structure was in founder-led businesses. For more than two decades, he has helped owners strengthen leadership, install operational discipline, and prepare their companies to scale, step back, or eventually exit. This conversation looks at why founders often end up stuck in the middle of everything. It is usually not because they are not working hard, but because they have spent so long selling, delivering, deciding, hiring, and fixing problems themselves. Peter and Maxim discuss how to break that pattern by bringing in the right leaders, putting better systems in place, facing hard truths, an
Shane Wilson— How founders must rethink value, pricing and defensibility | FV Podcast Ep. 62
Shane Wilson is Managing Partner at Citta Capital, where he focuses on early-stage investing and helping build companies, especially in B2B AI, deep technology, and robotics. He started his career in go-to-market roles at New York startups, where he learned how sales, marketing, and product need to work together for a company to grow. Today, he brings that operator’s perspective to venture investing, helping portfolio companies shape their strategies, systems, and business models for an AI-driven market. This conversation matters because AI is changing more than how software gets built. It is changing what customers buy, how companies price value, where defensibility comes from, and which capabilities founders must continue developing themselves. Shane and Maxim examine what happens when software begins performing the work rather than simply helping employees complete it—and why the winners will combine automation with strong distribution, proprietary i
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Peter Dorfner— Turning Climate Innovation into Commercial Reality | FV Podcast Ep. 61
Peter Dorfner is a Partner at Green Generation Fund (GGF), a Berlin-based venture capital firm investing in early-stage companies across agri-food and energy technology. He helped launch the fund in 2021 after years of investing in food and consumer innovation, bringing experience from both corporate venture capital and specialist investing. Since then, GGF’s thesis has evolved from consumer-led climate trends toward the technologies, infrastructure, and business models that can make food and energy systems more efficient, reliable, and commercially viable. This conversation shows that deep-tech founders need more than great science to grow. Peter and Maxim talk through the real challenges of turning a technology into a business: how investors judge whether it is ready, why timing can make even a strong company hard to fund, how founders can build a solid capital stack, and why trust matters after the deal closes. In the end, it is a practical look at how dif
Boris Besner— Turning Field Execution into a Repeatable Operating System | FV Podcast Ep. 60
Boris Besner is the Founder and CEO of Okos AI, a technology-enabled field services company built to deliver security and low-voltage installations across distributed physical locations. What began as a smart-home and energy-efficiency business evolved into an enterprise deployment platform that now coordinates hundreds of certified technicians and has supported the installation of more than 60,000 devices across North America and parts of Europe. This conversation shows that having a strong product is not enough — companies also need a reliable way to deliver it in the real world. Boris and Maxim talk about how Okos built a repeatable system for field work through remote project management, clear workflows, a contractor network, AI-assisted quality checks, and a focused market strategy. In this space, growth depends on people, process, cash flow, and solid execution on site. 5 Key Topics Covered Turning field service into a repeatable operating sys
Etinosa Agbonlahor— Why Customers Hesitate, Buy and Stay | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 59
Etinosa Agbonlahor is a behavioral economist and the CEO of Decision Alpha, where she helps companies make sharper decisions about pricing, customer value, and growth. Her work sits at the intersection of economics, psychology, and commercial strategy—an important combination for founders trying to understand not only what customers say they want, but how they actually choose, compare, hesitate, and buy. Pricing is about more than just numbers. It affects profit, how customers see the product, trust, product design, and whether a company can stay healthy. Etinosa and Maxim explain why founders often rely on gut instinct, copy competitors too closely, or assume lower prices mean better value—and how they can replace that guesswork with evidence, testing, and a better understanding of how people really decide to buy. 5 Key Topics Covered Building a defensible pricing framework — Etinosa explains how founders can think about pricing through
Dr. Nisha Kohli— When ESG Stops Being a Report and Starts Running the Business | FV Podcast Ep. 58
Dr. Nisha Kohli is the Founder and CEO of Corpstage, a chartered accountant, and a corporate governance specialist with a PhD focused on the relationship between governance and company valuation. For more than two decades, she has worked across finance, governance, sustainability, risk, and technology, helping organizations move beyond policies and disclosures towards systems that influence how the business is actually managed. This conversation matters because ESG often gets stuck between two extremes: it is either treated like a reporting task or dismissed as an added cost. Nisha and Maxim take a more practical view—governance, environmental performance, and stakeholder responsibility as everyday business practices that improve resilience, support better decisions, strengthen access to capital, and create real business value. 5 Key Topics Covered Governance and enterprise value — Nisha explains the governance factors she studied, from Board
Craig Teggart— Beyond the Qubit: Building and Backing the Next Era of Computing | FV Podcast Ep. 56
Craig Taggart is a Venture Partner at Qubits Ventures, where he works at the intersection of venture capital, family office capital, and emerging technologies moving from scientific research into commercial markets. His background spans UBS, investment banking, wealth management, capital advisory, and venture-backed technology and healthcare companies — experience that gives him a practical lens on a sector often dominated by technical theory. This conversation matters because quantum is starting to run into real business needs. Traditional computing is reaching physical and energy limits, cyber systems are preparing for post-quantum threats, and AI is driving huge demand for computing power. Craig and Maxim discuss why quantum is moving beyond the lab, where investors see real opportunity, and what deep-tech founders need to show before institutional capital will back them. 5 Key Topics Covered Why quantum is moving from R&D to commercial marke
Dr. Lyle Oberg — Liquid Biopsies and the Future of Early Detection | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 57
Dr. Lyle Oberg is a physician, former Alberta Cabinet Minister, former board chair of Alberta Health Services, and now CEO and Chief Medical Officer of Exocellular Diagnostics Inc. He has worked across medicine, public policy, healthcare leadership, and biotechnology, giving him a unique perspective on what it really takes to turn a promising health innovation into patient care. This conversation is about more than cancer detection as a medical issue. It is also about systems, costs, adoption, and how healthcare dollars are spent. Lyle and Maxim talk about whether a blood test that measures membrane HSP70 could give doctors a clearer signal sooner, cut down on unnecessary tests, better track cancer recurrence, and help use limited healthcare resources more wisely. 5 Key Topics Covered Why prostate cancer diagnostics need a clearer signal — Lyle explains why a higher PSA can lead to extra tests, more biopsies, added cost, and more patient worry, and
Steve Walsh — The 10X Leap: How Founders Move From Income to Enterprise Value | FV Podcast Ep. 55
Steve Walsh is the founder of Bison International Group and the author of Make the 10X Leap. He has spent decades around entrepreneurship, capital, private equity, and business building, helping founders answer one of the hardest questions in scaling: is the company actually built to grow, attract capital, and survive beyond the founder? This conversation matters because many founders want growth, but not every business is ready for it. Steve and Maxim unpack what separates a company that is simply busy from one that is truly scalable: founder mindset, smart capital, customer clarity, culture, team design, and the discipline to reverse engineer the business from where it wants to go. 5 Key Topics Covered Smart capital versus dumb capital — Steve explains why the best investors do more than write cheques; they open doors, bring relationships, help solve problems, and act like ambassadors for the company. Why founders become the bottleneck
Emanuele Pizzatti — The Future of Capital Is Structured, Strategic and Global | FV Podcast Ep. 54
Emanuele Pizzatti is the Founding Partner of Futurewave AG, a Switzerland-based investment and advisory platform focused on private markets, asset management, and cross-border capital opportunities. Futurewave operates across a highly connected network that includes Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Malta, and Saudi Arabia, with a model built around flexibility, trust, and access rather than a traditional fund-only structure. This conversation matters because private markets are changing. The old venture model — raise a fund, chase power-law outcomes, wait ten years, hope for liquidity — no longer fits every investor, founder, or market cycle. Maxim and Emanuele explore why the next generation of asset management may look less like a rigid product and more like an adaptive platform: part advisory, part investment engine, part relationship infrastructure. 5 Key Topics Covered ● The Futurewave model — Emanuele explains how Futurewave is building
Yarin Gaon — Why $1–20M Companies Stall and How Strategy Unlocks the Next Multiple | FV Podcast Ep. 53
Yarin Gaon is the Managing Partner of Fractional Partners, a growth advisory firm built for post-product-market-fit companies that are not yet ready to scale cleanly. He is an entrepreneur-turned-investor who started building companies as a teenager, created and sold Israel’s largest e-commerce platform for military goods, and later worked with hundreds of founders through a venture capital firm. This conversation is important because most companies making between $1 million and $20 million don’t go under due to market issues. Instead, they often fail because they become too complicated, the founder keeps saying yes to everything, and the leadership team confuses busywork with real progress. Maxim and Yarin discuss the planning gap: when founders should stop adding more products, channels, and projects and instead focus on making clear choices about the kind of company they want to build. 5 Key Topics CoveredYarin’s founder-to-investor journe
Joerg Erlemeier — Reinventing Leadership in the AI Era | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 52
Joerg Erlemeier is the cofounder and COO of QUCOXX, a platform powered by AI that helps small and medium businesses improve their operations, sales, and finances. With over 30 years of experience working in big organizations, during times of change, and in consulting, Joerg decided to start his own business. He believes that small and medium-sized enterprises form the backbone of the economy, but they often don’t have the same strategic guidance, tools, or support to execute their plans as big companies do. This conversation is important because growth isn’t just about getting bigger; it’s often about making things clearer. Maxim and Joerg talk about why small companies find it hard to switch from just working hard to developing steady, repeatable processes. They also explain how AI can help with better decision-making and why future growth requires founders to put systems in place instead of working harder. The talk is simple and helpful, especia
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Esra Kaygin — Building the AI Infrastructure Behind Better Hiring | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 51
Esra Kaygin is the founder and CEO of Hirize, an AI company building infrastructure for how organizations process, understand, and structure document-based data. Before Hirize, Esra worked as a headhunter, built and exited an early AI scheduling tool, and spent seven years on the venture capital side investing across marketplaces, fintech, deep tech, semiconductors, lab-grown diamonds, and defense. She brings the rare founder-investor perspective: she has seen the startup game from both sides of the table, and she is now back in the arena building again. This conversation is important because AI is only as good as the data it uses. People talk about agents, copilots, and automation for businesses, but most companies still deal with messy documents, broken processes, and unreliable tools for extracting data. Max and Esra explore the behind-the-scenes technology that makes AI work, like understanding documents, rating confidence levels, ensuring data accuracy, and re
Alan McLaren — How CEOs Build Trust in High-Stakes Moments | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 50
Alan McLaren is the co-founder of Strata Originals, where he helps CEOs, founders, and executive teams understand one of the most overlooked forces in leadership: how they are actually experienced by other people. His work sits at the intersection of leadership, storytelling, trust, brand, and high-stakes communication. In these rooms, investors, boards, teams, and buyers often make decisions before anyone says the quiet part out loud. This conversation is important because most leaders think they're judged by their strategy, intelligence, or words. Alan explains that people can often tell who you are even before you speak. Max and Alan talk about how pressure can show hidden leadership problems, why trust can break in small moments, and how founders trying to raise money, lead teams, or sell their businesses should be aware of the signals they send when things get tense. 5 Key Topics Covered Leadership Signal — why the way a founder lands in the ro
Dennis Bruce — Building AI-Ready Enterprises in an Era of Uncertainty | FV Podcast Ep. 49
In a moment where everyone is racing to build with AI, Dennis Bruce is the voice telling founders to slow down enough to know where they're going. With more than three decades navigating large-scale technology transformations — from integrating minicomputers and mainframes at the UN in the 1980s, to rebuilding the privatized Entel (now Telecom Argentina) during Latin America's privatization wave, to turnarounds across airports, retail, and property management — Dennis has seen every flavor of ambitious tech project. In 2007, he founded Tangonet Solutions, which today collaborates with 200+ technology professionals across the Americas, pairing North American companies with deep Argentine engineering talent to close the gap between business strategy and technical execution. This conversation matters because it punctures the hype without dismissing the technology. Dennis is bullish on AI — but he's blunt about what it can't do. You can generate 30,00
Damian Roller — Why Many European Startups Think Too Small | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 48
Damian Roller is a Partner at Inovexus, a community-backed founders club that invests in and supports early-stage European startups across the DACH region — Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Before backing founders, he was one: born in Poland, raised in Germany, he built and sold an e-commerce company at university, spent a couple of years day trading and in real estate, then joined the founding team of a Munich B2B SaaS company in 2016. Eight years, one pandemic, and one exit later, he came out the other side with a hard-won operator's view of what scaling actually takes. Today, he helps run a network of 2,500+ investors and roughly 500 mentors — people who have already done the thing the founder in front of them is trying to do. This conversation is important because Damian is at the point where most founders get stuck: the difference between building a product and scaling a business. His main point is direct and timely — AI has made building c
Robert Stanley — Why Home Is the Next Healthcare Infrastructure Layer | FV Podcast Ep. 47
Robert Stanley isn't a healthcare lifer. He spent most of his career in technology — running IT projects for big banks, telcos, and airlines — before moving into home care about a decade ago and building one of Ontario's established providers. That outsider's vantage point is exactly what makes this conversation worth your time. Where insiders see a system to optimize, Robert sees one that's structurally broken: wired to reward visits, procedures, and ambulance rides, with almost nothing that pays anyone to prevent the crisis in the first place. The math behind his urgency is hard to argue with — Canada's population of 82-year-olds peaks around 2051, and demand only climbs from here. His idea is called Comprehensive Healthcare at Home: continuously monitor at-risk seniors and send a nurse or therapist when something seems wrong — often weeks before it would lead to an emergency room visit. But what makes CHA different isn't just the technolo
Greg Miles — Why Women's Health Has Been Ignored for Too Long | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 46
Greg Miles is the founder and CEO of Milestone Gyno-Mics, a biotech company developing the first AI-powered, non-invasive blood test for endometriosis. He is one of the first bioinformatics PhDs in the U.S., with over 15 years of experience in genomics, diagnostics, and AI. He left a 10-year job at Agilent to focus on this project. His motivation is personal: he lost both grandparents to leukemia that was diagnosed too late, and he watched a loved one struggle for 12 years seeing many doctors before finally being diagnosed with endometriosis by a surgeon. This conversation matters because endometriosis affects more than 1 in 10 women, is the leading cause of infertility, and is invisible on imaging more than 95% of the time — leaving most women on a decade-long diagnostic odyssey. Greg's thesis is blunt: endometriosis behaves like cancer (a recent paper found it shares all eight hallmarks), so we should detect it like cancer. The result is a clear-eyed look a
Jan Poetsch — Turning Power Into Profitability | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 45
Jan Poetsch spent almost twenty years working on some of the world's most complicated energy projects. He then realized that the biggest hidden opportunity in industrial energy was right on the income statement: the power bill. His career took him from a small town in Germany to offshore platforms with Shell, the Sakhalin II project in Russia, and the LNG Canada supply chain. These big projects taught him where the money often leaks out unnoticed. In late 2023, he started Arder Energy to target one of the biggest costs that most industrial companies still ignore. The timing of this conversation is hard to overstate. Alberta just logged 34 straight hours of $0.00/MWh power — a market record — while data centers alone are about to add a load equal to six years of normal demand growth. The operators still treating electricity as a passive flow-through cost are about to get caught flat-footed. Jan makes a sharp, practical case for why power is now a strateg
Jeremy Funk — The New Rules of Growth in the AI Era | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 44
Jeremy Funk has spent more than two decades doing the one thing most people in tech were told to stop prioritizing: building real relationships. As founder and CEO of Funk Futures — a fractional sales, recruiting, and marketing firm rooted in the energy sector — he's earned a reputation as one of the industry's premier "super connectors." His value, as he puts it plainly, is the people in his phone who actually pick up when he calls. Based in Boulder County, Colorado, and a veteran of 85 cold calls a day early in his career, Jeremy built his business on a single non-negotiable pillar: authenticity. This conversation is important because Jeremy is using an innovative approach. As AI handles more outreach, skills like listening, curiosity, and real connection become the most valuable. For entrepreneurs trying to get big clients, build a sales process, or stand out in a world full of chatbots, Jeremy gives honest, simple advice on doing business
Emilia De Stasio - The Democratization of Wealth Through Art | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 43
Emilia de Stasio spent years working in finance at places like the European Central Bank and Moody's, but she later turned her focus to a market that has very little data. As a long-time art collector, she often found it hard to get reliable information to decide if a piece was a good buy. Frustrated by this, she co-founded Artscapy, a platform that aims to bring clarity, organization, and data to an industry that's usually known for being secretive and exclusive. This conversation is important because Emilia is in a unique position. She understands both how to build a portfolio and weigh risks versus rewards, but she also cares about art genuinely and refuses to let the financial side ignore the human aspect. Her approach offers a straightforward guide for anyone wondering if art has a place in a serious investment portfolio, how to include it without getting burned, and what it takes to shake up an industry that's been resistant to change for many years. For foun
Dave Guttman — From Terminal Diagnosis to 9-Figure Exits | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 42
Dave Guttman has spent more than three decades building, scaling, acquiring, and exiting businesses — racking up multiple 8- and 9-figure outcomes along the way. But the thing that shaped how he operates wasn't a deal. At 24, fresh off an acceptance to Wharton, three doctors misdiagnosed him and told him he had six months to live. He survived, and the experience rewired his definition of success from accumulation to impact. That shift is the throughline of this conversation. Why this one matters: Guttman is rare in that he speaks fluently in both registers founders actually need — the hard mechanics of raising capital, building budgets, and engineering an exit, and the harder questions of what you're scaling toward in the first place. He's blunt about where most founders go wrong (no financial model, raising too little money, mistaking confidence for competence), candid about AI as both a force multiplier and a genuine risk, and refreshingly unsentiment
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Samir Musayev — How Inmigrants Drive Canada's Entrepreneurial Future | FV Podcast Ep. 41
Dr. Samir Musayev has built a career helping businesses think well beyond their home turf. As Commercial Account Director at Export Development Canada (EDC), he works hands-on with Canadian companies navigating the messy reality of global trade — financing, risk, and the practical mechanics most founders badly underestimate. Originally from Baku, Azerbaijan, and now based in Calgary, he brings an international lens shaped by years in finance and business development across borders. He also hosts the Global Nomads podcast, where he unpacks entrepreneurship, leadership, and the stories of people building companies across borders. This episode explains why many Canadian companies want to start exporting but often don't follow through. The reasons are usually different from what founders expect. Samir says the main challenges are not money, but lack of knowledge, paperwork problems, and thinking export is just a one-time effort instead of a long-term plan. With t
Nicola Redi — Why Europe’s Deep Tech Moment Is Just Beginning | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 40
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
Tom Milar — The Infrastructure Behind Startup Ownership | FV Podcast Ep. 39
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
Mathew Jackson — Building Circular Systems That Scale | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 12
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 d
Stanley Wei — AI That Actually Gets Things Done: The Future of Autonomous Agents | FV Podcast E. 37
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 sil
Stan Christiaens — The Billion-Dollar Problem Behind AI | Future Ventures Podcast Episode 37
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,
Neeraj Singh — Building Sustainable Software in the Age of AI | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 36
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
Hubertus Hofkirchner — The Future of Money and Trade Infraestructure | FV Podcast Ep. 35
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 ou
Dave Hertig — High Tech, High Touch: The Future of CEO Performance | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 34
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
Omar Sahyoun — AI-Powered Commerce and the Reinvention of Main Street | FV Podcast Ep. 33
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 numb
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Andrew Ackerman — Where Venture Capital is actually Betting | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 32
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
John Cowan — Founder-Aligned Capital in the Era of Autonomy | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 031
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 mo
Sam Hasty — Building Venture-Scale Returns While Solving Planet-Scale Problems | FV Podcast Ep. 030
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. Ho
Joyce Shin— Why AI Will Make Leadership More Human, Not Less | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 29
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 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. Why leading indicators beat lagging ones — The signals that tell you a team
Shahin Nabavian — The Future of Mobility, Operations & Intelligent Infrastructure | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 028
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 ado
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois — Inflation, Supply Chains, and the Reinvention of Grocery | FV Podcast Ep 27
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 Grocery theft as a $10 billion problem — The rise of organized retail crime, the urban food deserts it creates, and who ultimately pays. Why Canadian food c
Tim Fung — Why Human Skills Still Win in an AI World | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 025
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 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 do
Michael Allen Feinman — Selling the American Dream | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 026
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 The Origin Story Behind Texas Business Brokers — How a chance Piz
Sarah Romanko — How Grit, Brand, and Deal Flow Win | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 024
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 p
Nikola Borisov — Why the Real AI Battle Isn’t Training—It’s Deployment | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 023
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 — T
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Grant Blaisdell — Turning Space into an Investable Asset Class | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 022
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 CoveredThe 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. Who actually owns space — The emerging standards for
Kurt Winter and Kevin Salquist — Why Essential Businesses Win in a Volatile World | FV Podcast Ep. 021
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 dea
Juho Risku— From Founder to VC: How to Win at the Seed Stage | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 020
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
Scott Finkelstein — Why Personalized Sales Will Kill the Sales Playbook | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 019
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
Stan Sirakov — From Underdog to Alpha | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 018
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 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.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
Ivar Skårset — The Rise of Renewable Fuels | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 017
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 p
Mike Solow — Rethinking How Beverage Brands Scale | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 016
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 CoveredThe story of 99 Proof: Mike’s path from a stressful sales job to creating a company that conn
Simon Zadek — Why Climate Risk Is the Next Trillion-Dollar Market | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 015
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 Defining Adaptation, Resilience, and Decarbonization — Why
Ben Klepacki — The Business Case for Fixing Methane at Scale | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 014
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 mad
Amit Jain — Building Startups That Survive the Global Market | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 013
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 The four pillars of global market ent
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Vincent Kuiper— Scaling Foodtech Beyond the Pilot | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 011
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-
Ankit Anand — Investing Before the Market Understands It | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 010
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
Debneel Mukherjee — Inside a Global VC Playbook | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 009
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 bottlen
Robin Smith — Moving from B2B SaaS to Tech Enabled Services | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 008
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 thinkin
Kim Anders Odhner — Where the Smart Money in Food-Tech Is Going | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 007
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
Dr. Henry Erdley — Turning "Undruggable" Cancer Targets into Precision Therapies | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 006
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 langua
Oded Agam — The NextLeap Ventures Model for Deep Tech Investing | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 005
Oded Agam | NextLeap Ventures — Deep Tech Investing, the Intel AI Miss, and Building Innovation EcosystemsOded 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 trajector
Charles Cormier — Inside the New Founder Playbook | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 004
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
Paul Claxton — From Combat Tours to Term Sheets: Paul Claxton on Founders, Capital, and AI | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 003
From Combat Tours to Term Sheets: Paul Claxton on Founders, Capital, and AIGuest: Paul Anthony Claxton, Managing Partner, Digerati InvestmentsAbout This EpisodePaul 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
Ray Fitzpatrick — Why Most Startups Don't Get Funded (And What to Do About It) | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 002
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 wh
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David Kofoed Wind- From EdTech Exit to AI Agents: Scaling on Your Own Terms | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 001
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 for