EWOR Been There, Done That Podcast

In this episode, Ravi Teja Chadalavada, Co-founder and CEO of Sapios, talks with Petter Made about his newly-signed $5M US government contract most VCs told him would never happen. Ravi is a PhD robotics researcher who built the world's first fully automated driving test system – autonomous car technology squeezed into a phone with no examiner required. Getting there meant cold-calling 100+ driving schools to get one yes, then throwing out the entire sales strategy afterward.  It also meant turning down a 3 million Krona grant while unemployed, because accepting it risked losing his most important future customers. When visiting his sister in the US, he drove several hours to the DMV headquarters in Richmond, Virginia for a meeting that got rescheduled 10 minutes before he arrived. Ravi walked in anyway and waited 6 hours in the car park until they could fit him in before his flight back to Stockholm the next day.  That 30-minute meeting turned into a $300,000 pilot, 2+ year partnership, a $5M contract, and 27 states in the pipeline. In this episode, Ravi breaks down every step of how he proved the B2G skeptics wrong.

In this episode, Bjol Frenkenberger, co-founder and CEO of Sybilion, talks with Daniel Dippold about the structural decision at the heart of his $4.2M seed raise: whether to wait for EU Inc or flip to Delaware C Corp.  Bjol entered university at 12 and finished with an Oxford PhD on uncertainty and decision-making. He’s now building Sybilion – forecasting infrastructure that turns over a trillion data points into the signals decision-makers need – scaling from $17,500 to $500,000 ARR in twelve months with zero churn and no sales team.  When the seed round came, it forced a decision every European founder building for global markets will eventually face. Bjol makes the case for why EU Inc, however promising, was not ready – and why Delaware's consistency and reputation ultimately won out despite the political climate and the four months of confrontational shareholder negotiations it took to get there. He also opens up about the investor traps most founders only discover too late, and what it actually cost him to close a round while still being the only person selling: an emotional limit he did not see coming.

In this episode, Jan Löwer, Co-founder and CEO of deeplify, talks with Daniel Dippold about the unfiltered reality of pre-seed fundraising that never makes it to LinkedIn. Jan is one of the rare founders who successfully transitioned a service business into a product company – but the fundraise that followed was anything but smooth. 2 months after joining EWOR, his CTO became seriously ill and left overnight, forcing Jan back into engineering himself and bringing sales to a complete standstill. Four weeks of back-to-back investor meetings passed before he realised a single framing error had been making the market sound 80 times smaller than it was. Then, in the final week of signing, one investor dropped out having misread the term sheet for months. Jan tells the full story in this episode, every messy step of it.

In this episode, Josiah Senu, Co-founder and CEO of Zuba, shares the difficult decisions he had to make to go from being a Harvard law prodigy to building the payment infrastructure Africa’s never had. Together with Petter Made, Josiah discusses receiving hate mail after turning down a magic circle barristers' chambers in the UK, a failed business partnership that cost serious time and capital, the psychological whiplash of switching from crisis mode to investor pitch in five minutes, and why optimizing for hiring ‘nice’ people nearly cost him everything. Plus the fundraising insight that changed how Josiah sees the game entirely – there are no rules.

In this episode, Alfons Huber, Co-founder and CEO of REPS, talks with Daniel Dippold about what it actually took to protect his invention when the people he trusted most tried to steal it. Alfons invented energy harvesting technology 200x more efficient than anything on the market, with 90,000 trucks already driving over it at the Port of Hamburg. Getting there meant walking away from his degree after four university professors threatened to destroy his career if he didn't hand over his work. He left to start over in a 20 square meter lab with almost nothing on his bank account, ripped the motor out of his own washing machine to save €5,000 in research costs, and went two weeks without washing his clothes as a result. The people who tried to stop him were his role models. Succeeding required him telling them to fuck off in order to bring his invention to life.

In this episode, Julian Rothenbuchner, Co-founder and CEO of Tumbleweed, talks with Daniel Dippold about the real cost of rejection before you break through. Julian is a rocket scientist building the infrastructure that could make manufacturing in space as accessible as mailing a package, with a SpaceX partnership to show for it. He opens up about the mental breakdown that followed SpaceX's initial rejection, six co-founder splits including a romantic relationship that didn't survive the pressure, and getting rejected by EWOR twice before finally getting accepted. Getting to yes cost more than anyone saw, and in this episode, Julian doesn't spare the details.