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What gets you to the first level of success often won't get you to the second. Sometimes it does the opposite. It takes you down. You have to reinvent yourself. We flew to Copenhagen to sit down with Casper Henningsen, CEO of GetWhy to discuss: ➡️ How he became a professional footballer by 20 ➡️ Why the narrative behind his first success stopped working, and cost him everything ➡️ How he rebuilt himself into the youngest Senior Partner at Kunde & Co in three years ➡️ What's next after raising ~€60M and building the global leader in AI-moderated consumer research Part 1 of 3. Part 1 goes into the personal stuff, not the company deck.

Jonathan Sanders - Scaled global payments from 20 to 800 employees at Pleo. Then he left to build what 9 out of 10 people told him was impossible. He went on to co-found Light, an AI-native accounting and finance platform that replaces the ERP and frankenstack of finance point solutions. Backed by Atomico, Balderton, Cherry Ventures, Seedcamp, and Entrée Capital, they count fast-growing businesses like Legora, Lovable and Fuse Energy as their customers. We got into the business side, but also the bigger ideas behind it: why fear is a terrible strategy, what AI-native companies actually look like, how software becomes autonomous, and why the next generation of finance teams may only need one or two people. 🤖

He co-founded a company that hit a $3B valuation, then watched hackers steal $620M from it. That experience changed how Aleksander Larsen thinks about security, and it sent him somewhere almost no crypto founder goes next: defence. In this episode I sit down with Aleksander Larsen, co-founder and CEO of Stendr, the Oslo company building AI-driven interception systems for a sovereign Europe. Before Stendr he spent seven years as COO of Sky Mavis, scaling Axie Infinity into one of the most-traded games in the world. We get into the full arc: what it takes to run infrastructure serving millions of users, why the Ronin hack became the turning point, and how a gaming founder ends up building hardware for the modern battlefield. We also talk about why Europe can no longer outsource its defence, and what it means to build a Nordic defence prime from a standing start. Norway shares one of NATO's longest borders with Russia. Aleksander thinks that geography is a feature, not a footnote.

Sebastian Mallaby is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller: The Infinity Machine - Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence.He negotiated unprecedented access to DeepMind in November 2022 , a week before ChatGPT launched. He spent 30+ hours in a pub with Demis Hassabis. He interviewed Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Mustafa Suleyman and Geoffrey Hinton among 100 people in AI. He's the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A two-time Pulitzer finalist. The author of The Power Law and More Money Than God.In this episode we discuss:⚔️ The moment ChatGPT launched and Demis told him “they parked the tanks on my lawn”📉 Why OpenAI has a 50% chance of failing by the middle of next year🇪🇺 Why Bezos is opening an AI office in King's Cross and why the time to bet on Europe is now💰 The $1 billion offer from Reid Hoffman to spin DeepMind out of Google🚪 The Elon Musk, LA closet Skype call, that almost stopped the Google sale🔥 Who we should actually trust with superintelligence

Chaz Englander is the Co-founder of Model ML an agentic AI platform used by 8 of the top 10 European banks, 3 of the big 4 consultancies, and tier-1 asset managers across Europe and the US. He's previously built and exited two companies: Fat Lama (peer-to-peer rental marketplace) and Fancy (sold to goPuff). Model ML has raised $100M+ from Y Combinator, LocalGlobe and QED and the last round was led by by Steve McLaughlin of FT Partners - arguably the most influential dealmaker in fintech. Chaz Englander is the Co-founder of Model ML an agentic AI platform used by 8 of the top 10 European banks, 3 of the big 4 consultancies, and tier-1 asset managers across Europe and the US. He's previously built and exited two companies: Fat Lama (peer-to-peer rental marketplace) and Fancy (sold to goPuff). Model ML has raised $100M+ from Y Combinator, LocalGlobe and QED and the last round was led by by Steve McLaughlin of FT Partners — the most influential dealmaker in fintech. This conversation covers how AI is dismantling the analyst function in investment banking, why escape velocity is the only real moat in 2026 and why ARR is a vanity metric. Enjoy!

🇮🇹 Dyiala D'Aveni is the CEO of Vento, the fund backing Italian founders worldwide. Vento is fully backed by Exor, the fund behind legendary companies like Ferrari, Juventus and The Economist. They are also the organisers of Wave, the event bringing world class speakers like Dario Amodei, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang and Jony Ive to Italy and transforming the Italian and European ecosystems more broadly.

Thomas Cuvelier is a Partner at RTP Global, the $1B early-stage fund investing globally across Europe, US, and India. RTP Global was built on the back of one outsized bet: Datadog — a few million dollars turned into a fund-defining outcome. Thomas has invested in Lovable (pre-seed), Next Insurance, Creative Fabrica, and Stoic, among others. In this episode we discuss: Why SaaS is not dead — but mediocrity isWhy first-mover advantage is gone and what actually creates a moat in 2026How to assess founder quality before there's a productThe buy vs build equation in the age of AIWhere Thomas is placing his bets in the next 5 years: robotics, pharma, industrialsEnjoy!

Paul Murphy - Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. For over twenty years Lightspeed has been the first investor and an early backer of some of the most innovative companies in the world like: Stripe, Anthropic, Neko Health and Mistral among many others. They invest in bold founders with big ideas, from Seed to Series F and beyond. Prior to Lightspeed, Paul was an investor with Northzone, a product lead at Microsoft and a co-founder of the gaming studio Dots - best known for developing popular puzzle games like Dots and Two Dots, which achieved over 100 million downloads worldwide. During this episode we discuss how Europe has woken up and it was never a problem of talent but one of confidence and mindset of dreaming big, we discuss about the differences of building at the plaform layer vs application layer and his learnings from Microsoft looking at the similarities with whats happening right now in the market. At the end we end up by getting slightly philosophical and agree that for founders building nowadays: "The obstacle is the way”!

Bryan Kim is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz which is arguably the most influential venture firm in the world right now, and they are practically defining the 'Application Layer' of AI. Based in San Francisco, Bryan invests invest in Consumer and AI where he led the pivotal rounds in category-defining companies like ElevenLabs, Function Health, and Slinghot AI among others. Bryan is known for his 'Momentum is the Moat' philosophy—the idea that in the age of AI, speed and product velocity is the most important defensibility During this episode we discuss the legendary story of how he boarded a flight to London in under 90 minutes to sign ElevenLabs, the importance of storytelling for founders and the form factor for AI in the near future. Enjoy!

In this essay, Dario Amodei characterizes the current state of artificial intelligence as a "technological adolescence," representing a pivotal rite of passage that will determine humanity's future survival. He outlines a "country of geniuses" scenario to illustrate how autonomous, superintelligent systems could emerge by 2027, bringing both immense benefits and existential threats. The text categorizes these risks into five critical areas: AI autonomy and misalignment, the democratization of destructive tools like bioweapons, the potential for high-tech totalitarianism, massive labor market displacement, and unpredictable indirect societal shifts. Amodei argues that while the path forward is daunting, a combination of rigorous technical safety, legislative transparency, and international cooperation can steer society toward a positive outcome. He emphasizes that the sheer speed of progress makes immediate global preparation essential to ensure that unimaginable power is wielded with maturity and compassion. Despite the gravity of these dangers, the author maintains a realistic optimism, believing that humanity's noble spirit can overcome this civilizational test.

Sara Rywe is a General Partner at byFounders. byFounders is one of Europe's best performing venture funds and focused on early-stage across the Nordics and Baltics. Based in Stockholm, she's in the heart of "Silicon Valhalla" and she lead the first round in companies like Lovable, Corti, Digitail, Skye and many more. Sara is known for her human and "all-in" approach to venture capital which is making founders rave about her. During this episode we discuss the first days of GPT Engineer which is today Lovable and how they convinced the team to partner up, we also discuss how she asses founders at the before there is proof, and how byFounders leads through transparency on the term-sheet and full based meritocracy internally, that i think more European VC funds should learn from. Enjoy!

Today, we step into the quantum frontier with Jan Goetz — co-founder and CEO of IQM Quantum Computers. From quantum physicist to deep-tech founder, Jan has built one of Europe’s most ambitious hardware companies — raising nearly $600 million to turn quantum theory into reality. We talk about what it takes to scale science into business, how IQM is the leading company selling quantum computers, and the first use probable uses case to be deploy first in only a couple of years. Enjoy!

Maximilian Kufner - co-founder and CEO of Again.Bio. At Again they are using a millennia-old bacteria to turn CO2 emissions into clean sustainable products. Last year they’ve raised ~ Eur 40m led by HV Capital and Google Ventures bringing the total raise to ~Eur 100m. They are building bioreactors that capture harmful CO2 emissions at the point source, thus producing carbon negative chemicals in an energetically efficient process. During this episode we discuss about his journey from being a venture capitalist investing in Again to joining as a co-founder, The differences between chemocatalysis and biocatalysys and why optimism and attitude is sometimes more important than skills. Enjoy!

Mati Staniszewski, is the co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs. He shares how a pre-seed idea turned into a $6.6B AI company powering the future of voice. We talk about how they cracked adding emotion to speech, real-time dubbing, watermarking for trust, and building one of the most influential startups in AI. He also gives some info on behind the scenes of Lex Fridman’s interview with India’s PM and how ElevenLabs is giving thousands their voices back. We recorded this exceptional episode at the Italian Tech Week in Torino. Sponsored by ⁠ValueAdd⁠ - AI enrichment and search on your professional network.

Tom Wilson is a Partner at Seedcamp - the legendary seed fund, started in 2007 in Europe that has backed companies like Revolut, UiPath, Wise and wefox to name a few. During this episode we discuss about the common traits of founders that have created multibillion eur in value, his learnings as he matured as an investor over the last 10 years, and the value proposition of Seedcamp to early stage founders. Enjoy!