Slush

Ahead of Slush 2022, we sit down for a conversation that provides everyone who’s joining us in Helsinki with a bit of the backstory and context behind the event you’re about to attend. We'll cover: In the episode, you'll hear from: Hope you enjoy the conversation! See you November 17–18.

We bring you two sides of the German collaborative presentation company Pitch as its Co-founder and CEO Christian Reber is joined by board member and Lakestar partner Stephen Nundy to discuss product-driven companies. Christian and Stephen (as a CTO himself) discuss the various balancing acts companies can struggle with from both founder and board member perspectives: marketing and product team inputs, product-led CEOs and their CTOs, and even the emotional toll of such leadership positions.

Jeppe Rindom is the Co-founder and guiding hand of Pleo- The corporate card and expense claim company and the fastest to reach the €1bn valuation in Denmark. Jeppe dives deep with Mikko Mäntylä into the granular details of how to define your problem space, some key ways to create investor FOMO, and what he believes is a counterintuitive company-building truth.

Sonali de Rycker is a true icon of European venture. In her fourteen years with Accel, she has made early investments in success stories ranging from Spotify to Avito, Hopin to Kry and Monzo to Sennder. Together with Sonali, we explore everything that more than a decade of backing the greats of European tech has taught her about the formative choices that build legendary tech companies.

Cristina Cordova spent a decade leading partnerships at two of the most iconic tech success stories of the past decade – Stripe & Notion – before joining First Round Capital in March of 2022. Today, we discuss tactical company-building lessons that that her decade as an operator taught here.

Today, we speak to Des Traynor of Intercom about problem selection, pricing, using principles to scale yourself as a leader, and maintaining alignment as an organisation grows. Des is one of the most succinct communicators in European tech. He didn't disappoint on the episode. Throughout it, you'll come across surprising, unique principles and heuristics that have helped Des propel Intercom into €1B+ business it is today.

Today, we’re speaking to Brian O’Malley, Managing Partner at Forerunner Ventures – the famously consumer-savvy Silicon Valley firm – on everything it takes to build generational outcomes in the consumer space.

Guy Podjarny is Co-founder and President of Snyk – the €8B developer-first security platform. Together, we unpack tactical considerations that go into scaling a business – especially one with a product-led, freemium-based go-to-market. Guy started Snyk with his co-founders Assaf and Danny in 2015, spent four years as CEO, and migrated into his current role of President in 2019. Built dually in Tel-Aviv and London, and later in a distributed fashion around the world, Snyk is a platform that...

Today on the Soaked by Slush podcast, we're joined by Deena Shakir, Partner at Lux Capital – the notoriously frontier tech focused fund. We cover topics ranging from recognizing iconic entrepreneurs early to Deena’s efforts to write a children’s book about a young girl who starts a company. Deena herself has the most fascinating of backgrounds. She is a first-generation daughter of Iraqi immigrants and she self-funded her way through Harvard and Georgetown. After kicking off her career in...

When it comes to building legendary engineering and product organizations, there really aren’t many people more experienced than Quentin Clark. Having spent 20 years moving up the ranks at Microsoft, Quentin went on to become CTO at two legendary software companies in SAP and Dropbox. These days, Quentin looks for next-generation products at General Catalyst, and sits on the boards of some exceptional startups like Coda, Commure, Hopin, Minio, and Aviatrix. In this episode, we unpack what...

In just over three years, Alex Bouaziz has scaled Deel to more than €5B in valuation and 700 employees across 60+ different countries. In the episode, we discuss the principles, systems and choices that have put him and Deel on that trajectory of true hypergrowth. This episode marks the first in a new era for the Soaked by Slush podcast, in which we will laser focus on company-building advice, interviewing some of the most iconic founders and investors of our generation to uncover the first...

Hi folks. Slush 2021 happened, and we had the opportunity to record some fun and interesting episodes on location. This week’s guest is Robert Lacher, an entrepreneur and Founding Partner at the Berlin-based VC Visionaries Club. Robert is a central figure in the European VC-scene, and is an excellent brain to pick about what entrepreneurs should think about when shopping for investors nowadays. Being a recent former entrepreneur, he himself has sought out to build a VC from his perspective...

In this episode, recorded live at the Slush 2021 event in Helsinki, William and Isak talked to Gini and Eccie Newton from Karma Kitchen. Gini and Eccie are a pair of British siblings who decided to enter the catering business, and ended up finding a niche that they developed into Karma Kitchen. What was that niche? Buying warehouses and turning them into kitchens for restauranteurs. Oh, and their idea has raised over 300 million dollars to date. It sounds astounding, but the more you hear...

In this episode, we had the pleasure of talking to one of the absolute veterans of venture capital, the Managing General Partner of NEA, Scott Sandell. NEA has been around since the 1970’s, making it one of the oldest VC firms in history. That coupled with Scott’s personal track record and experience makes for a heap of knowledge and insights about investing, venture capital, entrepreneurship, technology and more. We hope you’ll enjoy listening to this as much as we enjoyed making...

How does one rebrand? Should you even rebrand? We were joined by Nicola McClafferty and James Clark, from the establishment formerly known as Draper Esprit. That’s right, Draper Esprit did what many people often advise against and rebranded themselves, to Molten Ventures. In fact, it’s probably not great that I’ve written Draper Esprit more times than Molten Ventures. In this episode we will talk to James and Nicola about the reasons behind the rebranding, the operational checklist for...

I don’t know about you, but there’s something special and even beautiful about trucking. About the seemingly simpler life on the highway, accompanied by demanding distances and fleeting views. It doesn’t immediately conjure up images of digital platforms and software, but that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be a good idea. Sennder is a Berlin-based digital freight logistics company that seeks to provide a platform that connects shippers with a unified fleet of trucks in Europe, and David...

When Softbank unveiled its first 100 billion dollar Vision Fund in 2017, the world had never seen investment funds of such magnitude. Two years later in 2019, Vision Fund 2 was announced, and in 2021, their combined fair value was estimated to be 154 billion dollars. In this episode, we talked to two representatives from SoftBank, Anthony Doeh and Nahoko Hoshino, about what this journey has been like from their perspective. What are some of the lessons taken from the first to the second...

Our guest this week, Edgeir Vårdal Aksnes, is reinventing how people buy electricity. I don’t know about you, but I don’t always even remember that I’ve bought electricity, I just know that I pay a bill. To Edgeir and his co-founder Daniel, this sounded like a transaction that was ready to be improved, to fit both the problems and opportunities that our ever-weird modern age has to offer. And not only does Tibber, the company Edgeir co-founded, already provide a much appreciated product to...

In some previous episodes, we have discussed the state of the European ecosystem and its future trajectory, everywhere from the projections of investors to what’s happening on the aisles of accelerators. In this episode, Philippe Botteri from Accel joins Isak and William to discuss the Accel 2021 Euroscape report, which outlines pretty much all you need to know about the state of the European cloud ecosystem. With Philippe we discussed data on the amount of public and private funding in...

No trace of darkness in this episode, where we talked to Emily Orton, Co-founder & CMO at the cybersecurity success-story Darktrace. Emily has been on board from the beginning, and shared some of her main learnings from the founding days to their recent IPO. In this fast-paced discussion, Emily and William discuss Darktrace’s early days in terms of customer acquisition and brand building, hiring and training people to become future leaders, scaling yourself as a founder in a rapidly growing...