Future Ventures: Scaling with Clarity

Send us Fan MailGrant 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 verified ownership of orbital assets, lunar infrastructure, and mining rights, and why the US-China dynamic is reshaping the race. Tokenization and fractional ownership in practice — How Copernic Space tokenizes payload capacity, external "billboard" surfaces, satellite data, and compute, with real examples from Moon Mission One and a top-10 European rocket company. The Copernic business model — Smart contract-embedded transaction fees, strategic acquisitions and fractionalization, and the future SAI ("Space Asset Intelligence") layer — an AI-powered Bloomberg terminal for space. The hidden Musk strategy — Why SpaceX, xAI, Tesla, and Boring Company aren't separate bets — they're components of a fully integrated space stack. Three Key Insights Space isn't an escape — it's an upgrade for Earth. The most valuable applications aren't lunar colonies or Mars cities; they're pharmaceuticals, energy, data, compute, and agriculture (think satellite imagery for wildfire prevention) that solve problems on this planet. Standards beat speed. Whoever defines what "verified ownership" means for space assets — payloads, data, compute, lunar rights — captures the long-term value, just as the Dutch East India Company captured the first era of exploration. The private market is already leading regulators. The US still hasn't fully clarified the securities treatment of tokenized real-world assets. Still, private players are setting de facto standards that governments will eventually have to ratify, not the other way around. LinksCopernic Space: https://www.copernicspace.com/ Grant Blaisdell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantblaisdell Future Ventures: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/  About the Guest Grant Blaisdell is the Co-founder and CEO of Copernic Space, building the financial infrastructure and marketplace for the space economy. Previously, he cofounded Coinfirm, a leading analytics and compliance platform that pioneered AML for crypto and was the first to enable AML for ICO-era ERC tokens. A third-generation space entrepreneur and blockchain pioneer, Grant operates at the intersection of capital markets, digital assets, and one of the largest emerging asset classes of this century. 

Send us Fan MailWhile most of private equity is chasing the same overheated deals with the same recycled playbook, Kurt Winter and Kevin Salquist are doing the opposite. As Partners at Big 7 Partners, they buy the industrial businesses nobody talks about at conferences — fasteners, gaskets, threaded rod, the components that quietly hold American infrastructure together. The companies are usually 30+ years old, founder-run, profitable, and operating in unmarked buildings you'd drive past a hundred times without noticing. That's the point. The contrarian discipline is what makes this episode worth your time. Kurt spent 30 years as a manufacturing operator. Kevin spent 30 years in capital markets — trading, market making, the works. They've built something that doesn't look like normal PE: hold periods of 10–15 years, little to no leverage, deal-by-deal instead of a blind pool fund, and they won't pay more than 4x EBITDA. With so much dumb money chasing the same deals right now, their approach is a real counterweight. Tangible businesses. Sleep-at-night returns. A playbook that just keeps compounding while the rest of the industry is sprinting for the exit. Topics covered The Big 7 thesis — why niche industrial manufacturing is one of the most overlooked sectors in private equity right now. Continuity-focused investing — how a 10–15 year hold and zero-leverage approach changes everything about how you run a deal. The operator playbook — flipping the pyramid upside down, creating owners on the shop floor, and why "quarter turns" beat blow-ups. Deal discipline — what kills a deal for Big 7, why they walk when bidding wars start, and the one that got away in Texas. Onshoring and the macro tailwind — how tariffs, reshoring, and the death of cheap China manufacturing are reshaping the runway for U.S. industrials. Key insights Make money on the buy, not the exit. Big 7 caps their EBITDA multiple around 4x and walks the moment a process turns competitive. The discipline isn't about being cheap — it's about protecting the math when the hold is measured in decades, not quarters. Founders don't underestimate their businesses by accident. After 25 years at the helm, the spotlight narrows. Kurt and Kevin's job is to widen it again — usually with basic, almost embarrassing questions like "why aren't we selling to GE?" The answers unlock revenue that was sitting in plain sight. Boring is a feature. Big 7 explicitly positions itself as the contra-SaaS investment. No 100x returns, no AI hype cycle, no crypto volatility. Just essential products, steady 15% returns, and businesses that will be making the same parts a decade from now. Links Big 7 Partners website: https://big7ventures.com/ Kurt Winter on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurtawinter/ Kevin Salquist on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinsalquist28/ Future Ventures: https://linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp About the guests Kurt Winter is a Partner at Big 7 Partners and a 30-year manufacturing executive who spent his career inside U.S. industrial businesses — proudly domestic at a time when most of the industry was offshoring. Kevin Salquist, also a Partner at Big 7, came up through capital markets over three decades, working as a market maker, sales trader, and in cap intro before moving into PE. The two of them run Big 7's acquisition and operating playbook across niche industrial manufacturers in the U.S. 

Send us Fan MailJuho Risku, after 30 years across different roles, founded Butterfly Ventures, a unique venture capital firm. Previously, he was a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, raising capital and nearly going bankrupt. Now, he leads a leading Nordics investor in deep tech and hardware with over 100 portfolio companies and multiple funding rounds since 2012.This conversation reveals Juho’s honesty about tough truths: why he doesn't support single founders, why deep tech teams face delays (not technical issues), and why the Nordics—17 times more startup value per person than Europe—are overlooked. It provides insights for deep tech founders, European investors, and due diligence. Topics Covered From bulletin board systems to Butterfly Ventures. Juho ran one of Finland's biggest BBSes as a teenager in the late 1980s. Three decades later, he's running a €50M deep tech fund. We trace the path. How Juho decides at pre-revenue. Tech first, then differentiation, then market size — in that order. Butterfly also uses a scoring system across the partnership, mostly to surface where partners see things differently so they can argue it out. What goes wrong with deep tech founders. The pattern Juho sees over and over: brilliant technical teams who won't show the product to a customer until it's polished. By the time they do, they've burned a year they didn't need to. How IP transfers work in the Nordics: Why Finland's university-to-startup model accelerates spinouts, and why Sweden's professor-owned IP creates friction. Why the Nordics punch above their weight: Small markets, English fluency, a problem-oriented culture, the rise and fall of Nokia, and Slush — "by far the best VC startup event in the world." Key Insights 1. Get the order right, not the decimal. Butterfly scores every company across the same dimensions, before investment, right after investment, and then every quarter. What Juho cares about isn't whether the market is $2.4B or $ 2.1 b. It's whether this deal sits in his top three or top five at any given moment. Most VCs spend their time on the wrong question. 2. No solo founders. Period. In 13+ years and 100+ deals, Butterfly has never written a check to a single founder. When a strong technical founder shows up alone, Juho's team will often help them find a commercial co-founder first, then come back to the deal. He treats team composition as data, not vibe. 3. Customers before polish. Juho's frustration with deep tech founders, particularly Finnish ones, comes back to the same point. They won't talk to customers until the product is "good enough," so they don't talk to customers. The honest version is that customers don't need polish; they need to know whether the product solves their problem. Founders who figure this out early hit revenue faster. The ones who don't, don't. Links 🌐 Butterfly Ventures: https://butterfly.vc/ 💼 Juho Risku on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrisku/ 🏢 Future Ventures Corp: https://futureventures.ca About the Guest Juho Risku co-founded Butterfly Ventures in 2012 and is a Partner. The fund invests in early-stage deep tech and hardware companies, mainly from Nordic and Baltic universities. Juho was an entrepreneur for years before becoming an investor, building a web tech company in the late 90s, filing a patent for browser modification, and running a Silicon Valley operation. He lives in Finland, has been involved in over 100 portfolio companies, and meets 300-400 founders annually.

Send us Fan MailMost founders try to scale revenue by adding tools. Scott Finkelstein argues they're solving the wrong problem. After four decades in sales, $6 billion in career deals, and a stint as Chief Revenue Officer at PeopleFax, Scott has seen the same pattern destroy growth-stage companies again and again: founders hit a million in revenue, panic, and hire a VP of Sales to fix what's actually a systems problem. The fix doesn't stick because there's no engine underneath — no repeatable cadence, no clear ICP, no honest read on what's working. In this conversation, Scott unpacks the engine metaphor that runs through everything he teaches at Sales Scalers, his Austin-based AI sales coaching platform. He and Maxim get into why most sales methodologies are 85% the same, why founders should bring go-to-market in on day one (not after the product is built), and how the best salespeople he's ever worked with treat selling as a listening exercise rather than a pitch. If you're a founder trying to move from founder-led sales to a scalable revenue engine — or you've already made the wrong hire and you're trying to figure out what broke — this one is for you. Topics Covered Why founders hire a VP of Sales too early — and what it costs when you bolt a senior leader onto an engine that doesn't exist yet. The ICP intimacy gap — most founders can name their ICP but can't describe them like a friend sitting next to them, which is where outreach falls apart. Goals vs. standards — the distinction Scott uses with every salesperson he coaches, illustrated through his own son's quota structure. Buying signals beyond the obvious — how the depth of what a prospect shares tells you whether you have a real deal or a polite stall. AI in the sales stack — Plaud, Whisper Flow, Replit, and the rule Scott never breaks: a human reviews anything going out to the world. Key Insights The engine beats the tool stack every time. A junky engine that only goes 10 miles an hour will still grow your business exponentially if you run it consistently and score yourself against it. Most founders don't have a junky engine — they have no engine at all, and they're trying to add fuel. Honesty in outreach beats warm-up. Three months ago, Scott rewrote his cold messages to lead with something like "Hey, I know you're busy, so let me get straight to it — yes, I'm selling something." He started getting more no's. He also started getting more actual replies, including a LinkedIn message on a Sunday from someone saying they were finally ready to talk. The people who said no said it because he respected their time enough to be direct, and a no with engagement is worth more than a yes you had to trick out of someone. Bring go-to-market in on day one. Scott told a story about being on a panel where someone asked when founders should start thinking about go-to-market, and he said day one. The tech guy on the panel pushed back. Scott's answer was that you're building because you think you know what the world wants, but you don't actually know — you have to go find out. Five conversations with the right people, before you write the spec, will save you from building two months in the wrong direction. Links Sales Scalers: https://salesscalers.com/ Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-finkelstein-08026914 Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp About Scott Finkelstein Scott Finkelstein is the founder of Sales Scalers, an AI-powered sales coaching platform built on the idea that systems should adapt to how each salesperson actually sells. He has spent more than four decades in sales across investment banking and

Send us Fan MailStan 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 capital and knowledge back home.The "engineering EU, go-to-market US" model — Why most regional companies build product in Europe but sell into US enterprises, the exceptions to the rule, and what it takes to make the transition work.Founder mistakes after a Series A — Overspending, premature US sales hires, selling too early, and the engineer-to-CEO transition that breaks more companies than founders admit.AI inside the venture model — How LAUNCHub is automating its own workflows, why founder productivity is changing the unit economics of early-stage companies, and the new credibility risk that comes with vibe-coding. Key Insights The first US sales leader hire is almost always wrong — plan for it. Stan has 15 years of venture data and cannot recall a single portfolio company that nailed its first US sales leader on the first try. Founders should budget for the second or third hire to be the one who actually moves the needle, and resist the pressure from US investors to skip that learning curve. Big exits don't just create wealth — they create ecosystems. Every major outcome in the region (Telerik in Bulgaria, UiPath in Romania, Rimac in Croatia, Skype in Estonia) has triggered a cascade of new founders, angels, and follow-on companies. The pattern mirrors Boulder and the PayPal mafia: it's not capital that builds startup ecosystems — it's recycled operators with skin in the game. The biggest gap in Central and Eastern Europe is no longer first-check capital — it's the seed lead. Angels can now fund the first $500K in most regional markets. What's missing is the institutional fund willing to lead a $500K to $3M round and bridge the founder to a credible Series A. That gap is precisely where LAUNCHub's Fund III is positioned. LinksLAUNCHub Ventures: https://launchub.com/ Stan Sirakov on LinkedIn: https://bg.linkedin.com/in/stanislavsirakov Maxim Atanassov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov/ Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/ Guest BioStan Sirakov is a General Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures, an early-stage fund in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. He founded a fintech marketplace in 2007, survived the 2008 crisis, and helped launch Bulgaria's first startup incubator in 2009. After fifteen years and 150+ investments, he's a leading seed investor in the region, focusing on diaspora founders, technical teams targeting US enterprise markets, and Series A funding critical for early-stage startups.

Send us Fan MailIvar Skårset, CTO of ENEnergy, is tackling the overlooked challenge of replacing fossil fuels in sectors that can't run on electricity. Coming from the Norwegian oil industry, he sought renewable fuels for heavy industry. Twenty years later, the issue persists: electricity makes up 20% of global energy, while 80% involves industries and vehicles that don't electrify quickly or cleanly. ENEnergy believes renewable fluids and lignin can help because they fit existing infrastructure. This discusses how the technology works, why Australia's Top End is ideal for testing, and why capital, not science, is now the main barrier. What we covered Drop-in fuels. Renewable alcohol-based fuels and lignin can run in engines and industrial kits that already exist, with only minor modifications. No fleet rebuild required. Lignin replacing coal. It's a plant material with energy content close to coal, and it can go straight into steel production and coal-fired power plants — even ones that have been shut down or mothballed. The Australia play. Arid land in the Top End, combined with cattle stations and saline irrigation, makes the whole thing work without taking food crops off the table. The carbon math. The full cycle, from growing the biomass to burning the fuel, is CO2-negative. Stack carbon credits on top, and the unit economics start to look very different. The capital and incumbent problem. Why oil and gas majors say "this is the future" in private, then route the conversation into renewables departments that go nowhere — and what it actually takes to fund a first plant. Three key insights Everyone's talking about electrification, and fair enough — it's where most of the money is going. But the timeline people throw around doesn't really hold up. You'd need to roughly five-x global electricity production, rebuild a huge chunk of the grid, and swap out something like 3 billion vehicles. That's decades of work, and probably more. Drop-in renewable fuels are interesting because they sidestep almost all of that. The pipes, the engines, the storage — it's all there already. You just put a different molecule through it. Steel is a problem on its own. You can't decarbonize it just by adding electricity, because steel is literally carbon plus iron. The carbon has to come from somewhere, and right now that somewhere is coal. Lignin can fill the same role from a renewable source, which is the thing that actually makes "green steel" mean something. Otherwise, it's just a label. In cleantech, the science usually works. The capital is what kills you. ENEnergy is a good example — they've got construction partners interested, project financiers interested, basically the whole downstream lined up once they hit the build phase. The problem is getting to the build phase. That stage in between, where you're doing the documentation and the engineering work and putting together the evidence package nobody wants to fund, is where most companies in this space quietly fall apart. Links ENEnergy: https://www.enenergy.net/ Connect with Ivar: [email protected] Future Ventures LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZgPPHfPBZz-r5NQLq_dWfA About Ivar Ivar Skårset, CTO and co-founder of ENEnergy, has nearly 20 years developing renewable fluid alternatives and lignin-based coal substitutes to decarbonize heavy industry. Starting in Norway's oil and gas sector, he believes energy solutions must work within existing systems. Based in Norway, he leads ENEnergy's technical strategy and partnerships with industrial offtakers and capital partners. 

Send us Fan MailMike 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 connects family offices with alcohol entrepreneurs who have different views.Competing with industry leaders: Why small brands succeed by focusing on a specific niche and positioning themselves as attractive acquisition targets, rather than competing directly with major players.The post-COVID reset: The impact of restocking, inflation, and an influx of new founders, and why the industry is contracting rather than declining.Valuation outlook for 2026: The transition from 10-15x revenue multiples to approximately 6x, the end of inflated exit comparisons, and the need for founders to demonstrate value through tangible results.Authenticity makes brands more appealing. Today’s consumers are selective—supporting certain celebrities, caring about charity work, and preferring founders to keep the core brand qualities in-house while only outsourcing specific tasks.Key InsightsThe era of unlimited marketing budgets is gone. Previously, brands could quickly grow by spending heavily on advertising. Now, investors want companies to be more careful with their money and to demonstrate steady progress toward profits. As a result, strategic buyers are adjusting how they value businesses to reflect these new priorities.Taking things slowly and growing steadily is usually better than jumping into many markets at once. Founders often overlook how expensive it can be to enter multiple areas. Successful brands concentrate on building a strong local presence, test their message in one area, and then carefully expand into nearby states.Authenticity should come from within the company. The founding team needs to own the brand’s values, message, and identity. Even if manufacturing, distribution, and execution are outsourced, relying on outside firms for brand storytelling can make the brand seem inauthentic, since consumers are very aware.LinksMike Solow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikesolow/99 Proof: https://www.linkedin.com/company/99-proof-partners/Future Ventures: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corpAbout Mike SolowMike Solow is the co-founder of 99 Proof, a boutique investment firm focused on backing and scaling emerging beverage alcohol brands through equity, debt, and real asset structures. He brings over two decades of experience across business development, sales leadership, and capital strategy, having advised more than 200 entrepreneurs in one of the consumer's most competitive categories. Mike operates at the intersection of operators and investors, helping founders not just raise capital — but deploy it in ways that actually drive growth.

Send us Fan MailSimon 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 these three concepts are often conflated and why treating them as distinct is the first step toward pricing climate correctly. The Four Forces Pricing Climate Into Markets — How financial regulators, corporate reporting, public policy, and consumer expectations combine to shape where capital flows. Country Case Studies in Adaptation Strategy — From France planning for a 4-degree world to Brazil's ecological industrial strategy to China's food self-sufficiency pivot to Gulf state water redundancy. The Food-Water-Energy Security Nexus — Why this intersection will be a defining growth area for private capital and why it matters as much in Switzerland as in Kenya. AI, Distributed Infrastructure, and the Adaptation Economy — How artificial intelligence and decentralized solutions can serve low- and middle-income households and the new dependencies they may create. 💡 Three Key Insights Climate risk remains systematically mispriced, driven by short-termism and policy gaps. As a result, many profitable adaptation-solution businesses face markets that don't yet reward what they deliver — creating a structural window for early capital. Private capital will have to lead the adaptation buildout because public balance sheets are overextended and blended finance is narrowing, shifting the burden decisively onto commercial investors and the policy levers that make adaptation solutions profitable. The fastest-growing adaptation markets will be among low- and middle-income households, not in the OECD, because that is where demand for affordable, distributed solutions in food, water, energy, and shelter is already accelerating. 🔗 Links and Resources Morphosis: https://www.morphosis.solutions/ The Rise of the Adaptation Economy Report: https://www.morphosis.solutions/adaptation-economy Simon Zadek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-zadek-b3024826/ Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/ 👤 About the Guest Dr. Simon Zadek is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Morphosis, a Swiss-based transformative adaptation solutions business that channels private capital into businesses serving low- and middle-income households in vulnerable regions. He is the founding CEO of NatureFinance, the founder of AccountAbility, a Senior Fellow at the Paulson Institute, a member of the Club of Rome, and a Senior Advisor to the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures. He has served as Sherpa for the G20 green finance work track under the Chinese, German, and Argentinian Presidencies and has held senior sustainable finance advisory roles in the Executive Office of the UN Secretary General.

Send us Fan MailBen Klepacki is the co-founder and CEO of WestGen Technologies, a Calgary-based hybrid power company that reduces up to 99% of methane venting at oil and gas sites while improving economics. A professional engineer, he started on Canada's largest wind farm but shifted focus from alternative energy to oil and gas after realizing fixing the existing system could have a greater climate impact. WestGen's flagship, the ePod, was sketched on a flight from Grande Prairie and now powers well sites across North America for clients like Painted Pony, Petronas, and Shell.Ben's journey was never easy. It began with a software startup that failed before he launched WestGen, and continued with a 2019 launch, funded entirely with his own money. The prototype from that launch was sold at cost to Painted Pony, but then oil prices plummeted into negative territory, and everything began to unravel. After a funding round, he was nearly out of cash by June 2024. And that’s when he made a decision: to return to WestGen, where he managed to turn a profit again.Topics coveredWhy Ben left alternative energy for oil and gas — the back-of-the-envelope math on embedded energy that reframed his view of the energy transition.From napkin sketch to first sale — how WestGen went from TRL1 to TRL8 in three months by selling the prototype at cost and learning in the field.Enterprise sales to oil and gas supermajors — the "three wide, three deep" approach to finding champions at Painted Pony, Petronas, and Shell.The Converge detour and the management buyout — what happens when founders chase scale without focus, and how Ben bought the company back.Governance as the fix, not the overhead — why Ben rebuilt the Board around domain diversity rather than capital source, and why he still reports to one as the majority owner.Key insightsPerfection is the enemy of revenue. Ben and his co-founder shipped their first ePod at cost, gathered real operator feedback across multiple sites simultaneously, and reached a production-grade product faster than if they had spent 18 months perfecting it in isolation — all while generating revenue the whole way.Your early-majority prospects will hand you your early adopters. Most of the rooms Ben pitched to didn't light up. But ending every lunch-and-learn with "who would you recommend we try this with?" turned the cautious middle of the market into a referral engine that unlocked the real risk-takers.Ego loses, wego wins. The turnaround at WestGen was not a product fix — it was a leadership fix. An executive coach, a structured 4 Disciplines of Execution rollout, and a "designated no-person" in every meeting took the company's eNPS from -44 to +81 in twelve months and realigned the leadership team.Follow WestGen and Future Ventures:WestGen Technologies: https://westgentech.com/Ben Klepacki on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-klepacki-p-eng-94727517/Maxim Atanassov on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassovFuture Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/About Ben KlepackiBen Klepacki is the co-founder and CEO of WestGen Technologies, a Calgary-based hybrid power generation company serving oil and gas producers across North America. A professional engineer by training, he spent his early career in wind and hydro before moving into oil and gas as a well pad design engineer, where the idea for WestGen's ePod was conceived. He led the company through near-bankruptcy, a management buyout, and a return to profitability. He now publishes weekly energy updates on LinkedIn every Friday.

Send us Fan MailAmit 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 entry — Why regulatory, cultural, product, and operating structure all matter, and which one founders consistently underestimate. Market selection by sector — How consumer tech, AI, and deep tech founders should each think differently about where to launch and scale. The AI application layer thesis — Why the core LLM layer is saturated, and where the real growth opportunity sits for founders building today. 3 Key Insights Most founders make a key mistake: they incorporate in a new market before validating its suitability, locking in costs and complexity. AI accelerates research, but not the need for a technical co-founder: deep tech cycles shrink from 18 to 3 months, but a founder with deep expertise remains essential. 'Deep tech capital' mostly targets AI, with patient funds for long-term cycles. Yet, most investors focus on agentic and generative AI, leaving funding for hard sciences narrower than it appears. Reach out to Amit on LinkedIn, or learn more about StartupBay and our work at the links below. StartupBay: https://www.startupbay.tech/ Amit Jain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitj00/ Future Ventures Corp: futureventures.ca Capital Intelligence Platform: capital.futureventures.caAmit Jain is Managing Partner at StartupBay, a Singapore-headquartered accelerator and venture studio he co-founded in 2016. StartupBay started as an early-stage accelerator, moved into venture studio work, and now runs a global market entry program for founders scaling into Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond. Before StartupBay, Amit spent years at Vodafone leading SME and global business strategy, with stints building and running his own ventures in between. He splits his time between Singapore and the Czech Republic, and spends a lot of it on planes, meeting founders in person. 

Send us Fan MailAt 16, Vincent Kuiper received a €50 brokerage account from his father for his birthday. He become interested in finance, studying quantitative finance and accounting. He then became an equity analyst at a private bank in Amsterdam, spent three years at H2 Equity Partners, where he explored 35 to 40 niche industries and managed a buy-and-build program. After earning an MBA at IE Business School in Madrid, he has a strong financial background for someone in early-stage food, focusing on unit economics before storytelling. Gota Ventures, co-founded by him and Cristina De Mendietta during their MBA, combines Cristina's industry expertise with a network of 56 angels, family offices, and businesses across 15 countries. They invest $150K to $500K in early-stage food tech and CPG companies, leveraging her family's international trading business of ingredients and retail products.What Vincent Unpacks Why did Vincent run a syndicate instead of a fund? The deal-by-deal model lets operators with real food industry experience get into early-stage rounds from 5,000 euros, and he argues the fee math actually works out cleaner than a standard 2-and-20. Gota's two very different bets on the future of chocolate. Win-Win, a UK company using carob and a patented fermentation process to build a drop-in alternative to cocoa, and Kokomodo, which recreates cocoa from a single DNA cell. Vincent talks through the technology risk, the market risk, and what he thinks is a five-year window before any of this hits mainstream shelves. Access beats capital. The real product of Gota's network isn't money — it's warm introductions to the distributors, retailers, and manufacturers that make or break an early-stage food company. Vincent explains how Cristina's family business and the international angel base actually open those doors. Three Key Insights The past decade has shown that sustainability alone doesn't move consumers. The food companies winning now are built on rational unit economics, capital efficiency, and a value proposition a buyer can understand in one sentence — usually a meaningful cost advantage or a cleaner version of a product people already buy. In an industry with thin margins, friction kills. An ingredient that forces a manufacturer to rebuild a production line is dead on arrival. The breakout startups solve for drop-in compatibility — Win-Win's alternative cocoa slots directly into the existing 12-step chocolate manufacturing process, and that matters more than most founders realize. Don't try to change consumer behavior — find a tired category and make it noticeably better. Chomps went from zero to $900M in revenue by taking a product that had existed for decades, cleaning up the ingredients, and targeting a segment (women) the incumbents ignored. Boring categories with no innovation for 15 years are where the next billion-dollar CPG brands are built. Links Gota Ventures: https://gotavc.com/ Vincent Kuiper on LinkedIn: https://es.linkedin.com/in/vhakuiper Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp Maxim Atanassov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov/ About the Guest Vincent Kuiper is the Founding Partner of Gota Ventures, an early-stage food tech and CPG investment syndicate supporting the next generation of food and consumer brands across Europe and beyond. Originally from Amsterdam and now based in Madrid, he has 13 years of investing experience, including public equity analysis and private equity at H2 Equity Partners, as well as angel investing through Gota. He publishes a weekly Substack exploring successful CPG exits and their patterns.

Send us Fan MailAnkit Anand doesn't fit the typical venture capital mold. He started his career as a physics teacher in India, moved to Europe to work on gravitational wave research at ETH Zurich, co-founded a medical technology company, and only then — after years of operating and angel investing — ended up as Founding Partner at Riceberg Ventures. Today, Riceberg backs breakthrough deep tech companies across space, cybersecurity, AI, life science, and frontier industries — often writing the first check before a company is even incorporated. This conversation matters because Ankit brings a rare lens to early-stage investing: the discipline of a trained scientist, the scar tissue of an operator, and a global perspective that spans Europe, India, and the United States. For founders raising capital — or investors thinking about how to back hard technology — he offers an unusually clear framework for how to separate breakthrough companies from noise, and why the VC game is fundamentally a trust business, not a finance one. Key Topics Covered From physics to venture — How Ankit's path through teaching, ETH Zurich, and a medtech spinout shaped the way Riceberg evaluates founders and builds conviction. The four pillars of a breakthrough investment — Value chain optimization, bottom-up market sizing, real defensibility, and founder-market fit. Value-based vs. cost-based pricing for deep tech — A practical framework founders can use to price technology that has no direct comparable in the market. Why trust is the real currency of venture capital — How consistency, transparency, and early engagement beat polished decks every time. Cross-cultural founder underwriting — What motivates a European scientist-founder vs. an Indian one, and why the evaluation lens has to change accordingly. Three Key Insights Slowness is a feature, not a bug. Riceberg deliberately takes its time with founders, engaging long before they're raising — sometimes before a company even exists. The filter isn't a pitch deck; it's observing how a founder converts a small favor (like a single customer intro) into meaningful momentum. If they can turn one dollar of value into ten, that's the signal. Your first customer is your investor. Deep tech founders often dismiss themselves as "bad at sales." But if a scientist can captivate an investor with a vision and walk away with a check, that's already proof of selling ability. The same holds for hiring underpaid, world-class talent — selling the vision is the job, whether the buyer is an LP, an employee, or a future enterprise customer. Ankit's pricing framework has two sides that have to meet in the middle. Start from what customers pay today, drop it 5X, then add premiums for the extra safety, speed, or efficacy you're delivering — that's your value-based price. Then work bottom-up from your unit economics with at least a 60% margin — that's your cost-based price. If value-based sits above cost-based, you're in a good spot. If not, you're building something unsustainable. Links Riceberg Ventures: https://riceberg.vc/ Ankit Anand on LinkedIn: https://ch.linkedin.com/in/anandvankit Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/futureventures About Ankit Anand Ankit is Founding Partner at Riceberg Ventures. He came to venture the long way — teaching physics in India, then doing gravitational wave research at ETH Zurich on the LIGO project, then co-founding a medical technology company in Europe. Riceberg writes first checks into deep tech founders, often before the company is even registered, and invests globally out of offices across Europe, India, and the U.S. 

Send us Fan MailDebneel Mukherjee is the kind of investor most founders never get access to — a former CPA turned self-taught coder turned operator turned venture capitalist, now running Decacorn.VC from Singapore, with roughly 85% of his portfolio deployed in the United States. His career spans nearly three decades across banking, fintech operations, and global private tech investing, and he's built a track record that includes early bets on companies such as Palantir, Mapbox, ThoughtSpot, BioCatch, and SpaceX — well before most of those names became consensus trades. He currently holds two portfolio companies in the S&P 500. The reason we wanted Debneel on the show is simple — he doesn't invest the way most VCs do, and he'll tell you exactly why. He won't touch institutional money. He doesn't limit himself to what's within driving distance. And he's not interested in markets that already exist. His whole thesis is built on first principles: find the bottleneck, find the founder crazy enough to solve it, and then get out of their way. Most investors talk about being contrarian. Debneel actually built a fund around it — from Singapore, into the US, with the patience to hold through the storms that shake everyone else out. Key Topics Covered From CPA to Coder to Investor — How a forced career pivot into programming at a fintech bank shaped a three-decade-long investing philosophy rooted in technology-led innovation. Contrarian Investing Done Right — Why "obvious has no value" and how Decacorn.VC identifies opportunities for new market creation instead of chasing crowded spaces. The AI Pragmatist's View — A middle-ground take on AI that rejects both doomsday and utopian narratives, arguing that technology has never destroyed jobs — only created affluence. Founder Selection and the "Great Question" Test — How Debneel evaluates founders on conviction, domain competence, and mission — and why the quality of the investor's questions matters more than the size of the check. Building a Patient, Unconstrained Fund — Why Decacorn.VC refuses institutional capital, democratizes access for accredited individuals, and structures for evergreen, long-horizon capital deployment. Key Insights Track record alone doesn't win deals — the conversation does. Debneel measures the quality of a founder meeting by how often the founder responds with "that's a great question." Founders don't want another passive check-writer; they want an investor who understands their problem space well enough to challenge them on the issues that keep them up at night. The best opportunities come from breaking bottlenecks, not from following trends. Rather than chasing whatever sector is hot, Decacorn.VC identifies first-principles constraints — such as off-grid power for data centers or a lack of cybersecurity infrastructure — and backs founders who solve those structural problems before the market catches up. Patient capital changes the game. Debneel only takes money from people who can genuinely forget about it — accredited individuals who care more about having a ringside seat to what's coming than about quarterly returns. That's not a constraint. It's what lets him hold through the storms. His example? Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla's IPO, sold a few years later at $480 million, and thought they won. Tesla has since returned roughly 400x. You don't get that outcome if your fund has a seven-year expiry date. Links Decacorn.VC Website: https://www.decacorn.vc/ Debneel Mukherjee on LinkedIn: https://sg.linkedin.com/in/debneel Future Ventures Corp: https://www.futureventures.ca/ Guest Bio Debneel Mukherjee fo

Send us Fan MailRobin Smith, a 20-year enterprise software veteran, has worked through all ownership models—bootstrapped, venture-backed, private equity, and public. Most recently, as COO of a PE-backed portco with 1,000+ employees, he led over €200 million in acquisitions during an 18-month roll-up. Now in his mid-40s, he left that world to pursue entrepreneurship through acquisition and found that AI is rewriting the playbook for buying mission-critical software businesses. What makes this conversation worth your time is where Robin is standing right now. He knows how PE deals actually work — from the inside, not from a pitch deck. He watched AI gut the economics of traditional SaaS in real time. And he's acting on it, building Stayd as a B Corp roll-up of holiday home agencies in the UK with a thesis that most of the market is still sleeping on. He doesn't sugarcoat the deal that fell apart, he's blunt about where software valuations are headed, and his thinking on outcome-based pricing is ahead of the curve. This is one of the more honest conversations we've had on the show. 5 Key Topics Covered Failed Acquisition, Real Lessons — Robin walks through a competitive sell-side process for a bootstrapped vertical SaaS business, where he lost on valuation and perceived execution risk as an independent sponsor. Independent Sponsors vs. Traditional PE — Why sell-side advisors remain skeptical of independent sponsors, what the funding gap actually looks like, and how Robin structured capital for family offices. AI's Impact on Software Valuations — How running a financial model through Anthropic's tools turned Robin, an AI skeptic, into a believer, compressing a week of analyst work into hours. The Software Commoditization Thesis — Robin's argument that any UI-to-database application has lost its intrinsic value and that real value now resides only where software works autonomously. Stayd: Rolling Up Short-Term Rental Agencies — The three-pillar strategy behind Robin's new venture — revenue optimization, agentic workflow automation, and ethical acquisition of holiday home agencies, with a partnership model for founders. 3 Key Insights Buy-side advisors are worth far more than deal execution. Robin expected his buy-side advisor to run the transaction. What he didn't expect was the depth of market intelligence they brought — competitive deal color, LP and GP behavior patterns, and valuation triangulation that validated his bottom-up analysis to within half a turn of revenue. The moat in software isn't the interface anymore — it's whether the tool actually does the work. Robin puts it simply: if someone still has to sit at a keyboard and punch data into your system, that software is basically free. The value shows up when technology takes over the labor itself. And if that's true, charging a flat license fee makes no sense. You charge for what the tool delivers. Having zero technical debt right now might be the most underrated advantage in the market. Incumbent software businesses are trapped — they have paying customers on legacy systems, finite engineering teams, and AI rewriting the rules around them in real time. Robin bets that starting clean, with no organizational baggage or codebase to maintain, lets you build at a pace that no legacy player can keep up with. Links Robin Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinsmithgl7/ Corinium Capital: https://www.coriniumcapital.co.uk/ Future Ventures Corp: www.futureventures.ca Guest BioRobin Smith is the Managing Partner of Corinium Capital and the Founder of Stayd,

Send us Fan MailKim Anders Odhner is the Managing Partner for Europe and Asia at Unovis Asset Management, a leading alternative protein investment fund. Before relocating to Amsterdam, Kim spent 25 years in Southeast Asia, developing expertise in emerging-markets private equity — backing early-stage companies, staying involved post-investment, and understanding food systems across diverse economies. He co-founded the New Crop Capital Trust with Chris Kerr and has been investing in food tech since the sector's early days, with investments in Beyond Meat, Oatly, Mosa Meat, and Aleph Farms. This conversation is important because the food tech investment scene has changed significantly. The 2021–2022 hype has cooled, early-stage funding is scarce, and the idea that "build it and they will come" has been tested — often unsuccessfully. Kim combines frontier-market investing discipline with deep food-system knowledge that cuts through the noise. Whether you're a food tech founder, an investor, or just wondering how we'll feed 10 billion people by 2050, this episode provides clarity. These are some of the key topics covered: The real economics of alternative protein — Why price, convenience, and supply-chain gatekeepers drive consumer behavior far more than values or sustainability messaging. Lessons from Beyond Meat — How the IPO ignited global excitement for food tech while also exposing a dangerous gap between market valuations and actual consumer adoption. Strategic ingredients over center-of-plate — Why the next wave of food tech innovation is in B2B blended products, pre-textured ingredients, and food service channels rather than in retail-facing meat replacements. The bioavailability gap — How the Green Revolution's push for scale stripped our food supply of nutrient density and flavor, and why GLP-1 companion foods and active aging nutrition are creating new investable categories. Navigating food tech regulation across markets — The sharp contrast between Europe's precautionary approach and America's self-declared GRAS system, and what it means for founders trying to scale globally. Some of the insights from our talk were: People eat what's in front of them. Food choices are impulsive and price-driven, so the real unlock for alternative protein isn't convincing consumers to change — it's getting food service operators like Sodexo and Compass to put these products on the plate in the first place. The subsidy argument against animal agriculture gets a lot of airtime, but Kim pushed back on that. The real bottleneck is scale. And for something like cultured meat, getting to a meaningful scale could be an intergenerational effort. Forget center-of-plate steak replacements. The near-term opportunity is in blended products — think beef mince mixed with soy protein — where the plant-based ingredient works as part of the dish, not a substitute for it. Links & Resources: Learn more about Kim and the organizations mentioned in this episode: Unovis Asset Management — unovis.vc Good Food Institute — gfi.org Kim Anders Odhner — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-anders-odhner/ Wageningen University — wur.nl About the Guest Kim Anders Odhner runs Unovis Asset Management's Europe and Asia practice. He backed companies like Beyond Meat, Oatly, and Mosa Meat before most investors knew alternative protein was a category. Before Amsterdam, he spent 25 years doing private equity deals across Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Singapore — and he's now raising Unovis's third fund to back food tech companies at the growth stage. 

Send us Fan MailDr. Henry Erdlei is a physician-scientist pushing the boundaries of cancer immunotherapy. An alumnus of Charité Medical School and a researcher at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Henry has dedicated years to engineering immune cells to hunt and destroy tumors — and he is now applying that expertise to GoCART Therapeutics, a biotech startup developing a modular CAR-T cell platform that could revolutionize cancer treatment. His work sits at the crossroads of biology, engineering, and AI-driven drug design. This conversation highlights CAR-T therapy, a highly effective cancer treatment not yet available for 70% of cancer types. Targeting antigens on vital tissues like the brain and bone marrow is risky, but GoCART's 'AND gate' system requires two antigens for activation, enabling it to target 'undruggable' cancers. Henry discusses the science, business plan, funding, and his views on drug regulation in straightforward language.KEY TOPICS COVERED 1. The Undruggable Antigen Problem: Why 70% of cancer types can't be treated with current CAR-T therapy — and how the best tumor markers are also found on tissues you can't afford to destroy. 2. GoCART's AND Gate: Dual-Antigen Recognition. How GoCART's modular system needs two antigens on a cell for activation, allowing precise tumor targeting without collateral damage. 3. AI-Driven Peptide Engineering at Scale: How machine learning enabled GoCART to analyze 180,000 trimeric sequences computationally — a process that would have cost over €200M in laboratory work — and reduce it to 20 validated candidates. 4. The Platform Business Model: Why GoCART is building the "operating system" for CAR-T therapy — a single universal cell product with swappable binders — and how partners can develop and sell binders on the platform. 5. Rethinking Drug Regulation: Henry's argument that the orphan approval pathway should become the standard: provide treatments to patients after Phase II with informed consent, conduct Phase IV surveillance on the market, and significantly reduce costs.KEY INSIGHTS 1. The real challenge in cancer immunotherapy isn't whether CAR-T cells are effective — it's that most of the best targets for treatment are also found on healthy tissue, meaning the therapy could destroy vital organs along with the tumor. GoCART's dual-recognition system eliminates this limitation. 2. Personalized medicine doesn't have to mean creating a new drug for each patient. By modularizing the system — one universal CAR-T cell, many interchangeable binders — GoCART provides patient-specific treatment on an industrial scale, with the potential to reduce costs from $800K to just a few thousand over time. 3. The current Phase III clinical trial requirement adds hundreds of millions in costs and years of delay before patients can access treatments that are already proven effective after Phase II. Moving to a market-while-monitoring model could deliver effective therapies to patients more quickly, generate more comprehensive real-world data, and lower drug prices overall.LINKS GoCART Therapeutics website: gokarttherapeutics.com Henry Erdlei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-erdlei-1a83b42b9/?locale=de Contact: [email protected] BIO Dr. Henry Erdlei is the Co-Founder of GoCART Therapeutics, a Berlin-based biotech startup developing a modular CAR-T cell platform to advance precision cancer immunotherapy. He is a physician-scientist trained at the Charité Medical School and the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (Helmholtz), where his research focused on engineering immune cells for tumor targeting.

Send us Fan MailOded 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 trajectory, and what founders consistently get wrong in a pitch. Whether you're raising capital or refining your investment thesis, this is a masterclass in disciplined deep tech investing from someone who has sat on both sides of the table.Key Topics CoveredFrom Intel strategist to venture founder — How leading Intel's Strategic Technologies Group and building internal startups shaped Oded's investment thesis at NextLeap.The Intel AI miss of 2012–2014 — The inside story of a $300M AI proposal that, if approved, could have positioned Intel — not NVIDIA — as the dominant force in AI.The "wisdom of the intelligent crowd" — NextLeap's process of filtering \~1,000 startups to three investments per cycle using a panel of 100+ Fortune 500 executives.Five dimensions of investability — Team, problem, deep tech moat, business potential with exit strategy, and traction through prototypes and design partners.Architecting an innovation ecosystem — The five pillars behind Israel's per-capita startup dominance — and why they're replicable anywhere with the right intent.Key InsightsDeep tech is a moat — but only a temporary one. Oded introduced the concept of "transient sustainable strategic advantage" — no competitive moat holds forever. Founders need to build one and immediately start building the next. Speed of execution matters as much as the IP itself.The best founding teams complement each other, not duplicate each other. NextLeap looks for two to three co-founders from different disciplines who have pre-existing relationship capital. When the inevitable hard moments hit, teams that know each other's rough edges survive. Teams of strangers often don't.An ecosystem isn't built on startups alone. Israel's innovation engine runs on five pillars: world-class research universities, compulsory military service that accelerates technical learning, multinational R\&D centers providing talent and exit paths, a culture that accepts failure, and government programs that fill market gaps.LinksNextLeap Ventures website: https://nextleapventures.com/Oded Agam on LinkedIn: https://il.linkedin.com/in/oded-agam-4b840Contact Oded: [email protected] BioOded Agam is the Managing Partner and Founder of NextLeap Ventures, an Israeli-based early-stage deep tech venture fund with 26 portfolio companies and three successful exits — including acquisitions by Synopsys, Nano Dimension, and Dell. Before founding NextLeap in 2017, he spent over 11 years at Intel, leading strategic planning for product lines generating more than 80% of Intel's global revenue and heading the Strategic Technologies Group. 

Send us Fan MailEP004 — Charles Cormier on Systems, Cold Email, and Why Most Founders Get Fundraising Wrong Charles Cormier is a founder who doesn’t wait for permission. As CEO of RaasRocket and founder of GTM Ventures and the Podbuyer podcast network, he’s learned that fundraising today is just as much about the systems you build as the people you know. In this episode, he sits down with Maxim Atanassov to unpack why traditional approaches like warm intros and VC lunches often fall flat—and what to do instead. His take is simple, practical, and grounded in real outcomes, all shaped by a first-principles, energy-efficient way of working. We dig into how capital markets have shifted: hype alone is no longer enough to get you funded, and a lot of founders haven’t caught up. Charles has worked with hundreds of founders on fundraising and go-to-market strategy and keeps seeing the same patterns show up again and again. Here are a few of the most interesting things we cover: Systems-Based Fundraising: Charles explains why a well-built cold email outreach system—something you can turn on, measure, and keep improving—often beats traditional networking for most founders who don’t already have decades of relationships. What Makes a Company Investible: At the end of the day, investors want proof—not just a polished pitch deck. They’re looking for traction, real revenue, and a financial model that clearly shows meaningful upside, plus risks they can understand and live with. Podcasting as a Strategic Weapon: A podcast isn’t just about downloads or exposure. When you treat it like a system, it becomes a source of data, a credibility signal, and a structured way to regularly earn 30 minutes with investors who might never otherwise take a meeting with you. Why Founders Shouldn’t Romanticize Fundraising: Raising capital is a milestone—not the finish line. The real win is building a profitable, durable company, but lots of founders still confuse raising money with actually succeeding. AGI and the Future of Entrepreneurship: After surveying more than 2,000 founders, Charles found that only about 1% have a solid grip on what’s coming with AI. He calls this a “fundamental sin” for anyone serious about building a company today. 3 Key Insights These are some of the key insights from our talk: Put your energy where it actually counts. Systems—like email campaigns, podcast workflows, or AI tools— help turn effort into real and repeatable results. Burnout usually shows up when you’re stuck doing high-effort, low-reward work without enough support or leverage. Investor fit is harder than most founders think. It's not about check size — it's about understanding what actually drives someone to write that check. Sometimes it's pure thesis alignment. Sometimes it's personal. Charles talked about biotech investors who got involved because they lost someone to cancer. You don't find that out from a CRM. You find it out by doing the work — conversations, follow-ups, actually paying attention to what people tell you. And on the AI front, Charles is blunt about where this is heading. Agents are already handling chunks of the work inside their company. The founders who'll thrive aren't the ones doing more. They're the ones figuring out what only they can do: closing, setting direction, making the calls that machines can't. Everything else is getting automated, whether you're ready or not. About Charles Cormier Charles Cormier is a serial entrepreneur, CEO of RaasRocket, and founder of GTM Ventures and the Podbuyer podcast network. He helps founders raise capital and speed up their go-to-market efforts through systems-driven cold outreach, strategic podcasting, and first-principles thinking.

Send us Fan MailFrom 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 understand what they're building, why they're raising, and whether venture capital is even the right tool for their business — a conversation most of the industry is still too afraid to have.Key Topics CoveredFrom the Marine Corps to venture capital — how four combat tours, a father who was a drill instructor, and six years of corporate volatility shaped Paul's worldview as an investor and operator.What investors actually seek — and what destroys deals — Paul's three Ds framework: data rooms, diligence, and disclosure, and why most founders fail before the conversation even begins.The issue with how founders approach fundraising — Why creating a pitch deck and jumping straight to VCs is the wrong first step, and what founders should know about capital markets before raising any money.The SAFE note — what it gets wrong — A direct critique of the industry's most popular early-stage instrument, including why the absence of a valuation floor signals what Paul interprets as a lack of founder conviction.The Reloadable Note — Paul's proprietary financing instrument designed to protect founders from early dilution while providing early-stage investors with real-time liquidity options at specified trigger events.Key Insights:1. Mental toughness is the true competitive advantage. The Marine Corps taught Paul that the toughest challenges are conquered brick by brick — with speed, intensity, and relentless focus on the smallest details. That same approach guides how he evaluates founders today.2. Venture capital is not the default answer. Many founders assume that starting a company requires raising VC. Paul argues that understanding the complete capital stack — debt, ARR financing, venture debt, angel investment — and knowing why you're choosing VC is one of the most crucial hard skills a founder can develop.3. AI is in its foundation-building phase — and most of what's out there won't survive it. Paul's view: the companies being built between now and roughly 2030 will serve as the foundational layer of the AI era — the next Googles and PayPals. Everything else driven by hype, lacking genuine utility or real-world impact, will fade away.Links & ResourcesPaul Anthony Claxton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/businessmanathletemarinePaul's website: https://www.paulclaxton.io/Digerati Investments: https://www.digeratiinvestments.com/Future Ventures Corp:

Send us Fan MailRay Fitzpatrick, Founder & CEO, Profitual Ray Fitzpatrick spent ten years writing checks to startups as Director of Investments at NBIF — New Brunswick's pre-seed venture capital fund — and observed the same issue recurring across hundreds of companies. Founders excelled at developing products but struggled to grasp their own finances. This wasn’t due to laziness, but because no accessible tool existed for non-finance professionals to use effectively. That's the challenge Profitual aims to address. This discussion extends far beyond the product itself. Ray is a CPA and a serial entrepreneur managing three businesses at once, with firsthand experience on both sides of the investor table. His insights into fundraising, co-founder relationships, cap table design, and what financial literacy truly means for a scaling founder are rooted in real-world experience — not just theory. If you're building a company and have ever felt nervous when your investor asked about burn rate or runway, this is for you. Key Topics Covered The origin of Profitual — how a decade of observing non-finance founders grapple with investor reporting inspired Ray to create the "Canva for finance." Fundraising in Canada — Ray's honest breakdown of what works, what doesn't, and why building a snowball of early validation beats chasing a big lead investor. Cap table philosophy — Why Ray intentionally maintains conservative valuations, prefers common stock over preferred shares, and emphasizes timeliness of returns over headline valuation. 3 Key Insights A financial forecast that your founders can't explain is worthless. Ray's entire product philosophy revolves around this idea: it's not enough to produce impressive numbers; the business owner must understand what drives them. A polished AI-generated report filled with unsupported assumptions, especially one that can't be defended in an investor meeting, is worse than having no model at all. Begin with validation rather than a pitch deck. During Ray’s time at NBIF, less than 2% of the companies that participated had any revenue or signed letters of intent. That small group immediately caught our attention. Securing written commitments from even one person — whether a customer, investor, or grant provider — can change the entire conversation. The co-founder you rush into partnering with is the one who could cause your downfall. Ray lost his original Profitual co-founder early on because their visions weren't aligned. Since then, every successful partnership he's formed has been with someone he's worked closely with for years before ever considering going into business together. Links & Resources Profitual website: https://profitual.ai/Ray Fitzpatrick on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/raymond-fitzpatrick-66761263 Devil's Keep Distillery NBIF (New Brunswick Innovation Foundation) About Ray Fitzpatrick Ray Fitzpatrick is the Founder and CEO of Profitual, a financial forecasting and reporting platform for startup founders and SME operators without a finance background. A CPA, Ray spent a decade as Director of Investments at NBIF, participating in over 200 financings and helping build a portfolio of 75 startups in New Brunswick. He's also a co-founder of Quantified Accounting and Devil's Keep Distillery, dedicating his time to developing Profitual and mentoring future founders. 

Send us Fan MailFrom EdTech Exit to AI Agents: Scaling on Your Own Terms with David Kofoed Wind Guest: David Kofoed Wind ·(Founder of Agentwork) David Kofoed Wind has accomplished what most founders only talk about — building two companies from scratch, taking them through Y Combinator, scaling them responsibly without overextending on headcount, and selling one of them. He's a mathematician with a PhD in machine learning, a former CERN collaborator, and someone who has been seriously considering AI since he was thirteen. Now he's back in the game with Agentwork, a company rethinking how work gets done when AI and humans work together side by side. This conversation is valuable for founders trying to understand where AI genuinely fits into their operations — not just the hype, but the real substance. David speaks plainly about what has changed, what stays the same, and why pursuing headcount growth was never a smart move. He has been working at the forefront of this shift longer than most, and his insights on distribution, moats, and the future of digital work are based on hard-earned experience rather than speculation. Topics covered Engineering is no longer the bottleneck — building has become cheap and fast, which means the real constraint has shifted entirely to distribution. The audience moat — in a world where anyone can build a product overnight, founders who already own an audience have a structural advantage that compounds. What actually survives as a moat — features are dead as a competitive advantage; brand, switching costs, data, and network effects are what hold. How Agentwork works — a human-in-the-loop model that handles complex, open-ended work tasks for non-technical business teams, with tiered assurance levels built in. The future of work — David's honest take — a techno-optimist view on why this shift is different from the Industrial Revolution, and what it means for labor, hiring, and unit economics. Key insights from the Episode Niche down until you can genuinely be the best in the world at something — not just the best book on negotiation, but the top resource on selling electric cars in a specific market. A smaller scope means less competition and a real chance to own the category. The SaaS disruption will appear slow at first, then suddenly accelerate. Established players won't collapse overnight, but lean new entrants who build with AI and avoid hiring will slowly outperform them on unit economics until the gap becomes impossible to bridge. Zero hallucinations are impossible philosophically, not just a product feature — humans hallucinate too. The smarter approach is to build systems where AI and human verification work together, because that combo is truly best-in-class. About David Kofoed Wind David Kofoed Wind is the founder of Agentwork, a human-in-the-loop AI platform designed for business teams that need complex work done reliably and at scale. He previously co-founded Peergrade and Eduflow, both Y Combinator companies that grew through product-led growth and were ultimately acquired by Mountiverse. David holds a PhD in machine learning and brings a rare combination of deep technical fluency and operator experience to every problem he addresses.