Shows
Leap TakersEpisode 26: Anjali Raja Beharelle - Path from academia into entrepreneurship, and how Collabree helps people to make lasting habit changes thanks to behavioral economicsDr. Anjali Raja Beharelle is the CSO (Chief Science Officer) and one of the founders of collabree.com. Collabree is a Swiss eHealth / digital adherence start-up focusing on improving therapy compliance of chronically ill patients by applying behavioural economics principles. Collabree is helping patients to make lasting behavioral changes and stick to their therapy regimen by combining human engagement with scalable algorithms and using the most relevant gamification factors: fun, friends and feedback.
Anjali is responsible for the clinical track and integrating insights from behavioral economics and neuroscience into the app. Before founding Collabree, Anjali worked as...2021-10-0847 min
Leap TakersEpisode 25: Hugo Amsellem - The creator economy tsunami and “The Family” - building a leading fellowship for founders in EuropeHugo Amsellem [@HugoAmsellem] is a thought leader covering the world of the creator economy and writes the blog “Arm the Creators”. The Creator Economy enables an entire generation to bypass traditional gatekeepers for the 1st time in history. Anyone can learn anything online, build something new and distribute it all over the world—without asking anyone's permission
In 2013 he jumped the fence and joined The Family as part of the founding team. The Family is one of the world’s leading fellowship programs for founders. Twice a year, The Family selects 50 startups from around the world. In exchange...2021-06-2855 min
Leap TakersEpisode 24: Patrick Gobonya - Building a sustainable eSports organization with Ovation eSports to deliver the next-generation fan experiencePatrick Gobonya is one of the co-founders of Ovation eSports. Ovation was founded in Zurich / Switzerland in February 2020, and is the first sustainable eSports organization. Ovation is "a lit, young & dynamic pioneer which combines professionalism and fun in one team. A network platform of champs and eSports enthusiasts."
Ovation accompanies and develops athletes on their journey to become leading eSports players. The company is committed to provide their athletes with support to protect their mental and physical well-being and offers an environment to master a successful future following a career in eSports. Ovation eSports AG is a...2021-04-2241 min
Leap TakersEpisode 23: Arman Anatürk - Food trends and the founding story of FoodHack - a global platform for the FoodTech industryArman Anatürk [@ArmanAnaturk] is the founder and CEO of FoodHack. FoodHack is a community-driven platform that inspires, highlights and connects food entrepreneurs and innovators. With FoodHack Arman is is building the 21st century media / events company for the foodtech industry. The platform's offering includes a weekly food & food tech newsletter, ambassador run meet-ups, an annual FoodHack Summit, as well as a newly launched Food Discovery board (think of the “Product Hunt of Food”) where innovative food tech startups are featured.
Arman’s goal with FoodHack is to make it easier for impact driven food founders to access...2021-02-1543 min
Leap TakersEpisode 22: Job van der Voort - From first employee at GitLab to founding Remote.com and shaping the future of workJob van der Voort (@Jobvo) is the CEO and one of the founders of Remote.com.
Remote makes it possible to employ anyone, anywhere in the world. Their mission is to simplify how companies employ the best talent globally and to help remote organizations do their best work. They offer services such as international payroll, benefits, taxes, and compliance for businesses big and small - so that they can hire anyone in the world - while outsourcing all the admin & legal work to Remote. Remote's vision is to become the "stripe for (remote) work".
Remote...2021-01-1047 min
Leap TakersEpisode 21: Christmas Giveaway & Best Startup BooksMerry Christmas everyone! 🎄
This episode is going to be a small experiment. In this Christmas special, I'm introducing you to 5 of my personal and my podcast guests favorite business & startup books. Hence, I give you a crowd-sourced reading list from some of Europe's top up-and-coming entrepreneurs and VCs. I'm convinced that these books can help you to bring your business / startup to the next level, or to get motivated to "take the leap" yourself! It's also the perfect activity to read on a cold wintery day at home.
Since it’s Christmas, I'm also doing a lit...2020-12-2514 min
Leap TakersEpisode 20: Alina Bassi - How Kleiderly creates sustainable plastics made from textile wasteAlina Bassi (@alinabassi1) is the founder and CEO of Kleiderly. Originally from London, she founded Kleiderly in 2019 in Berlin with the goal of solving the problem of fashion industry waste. She has developed a patent-pending technology to recycle waste clothing into a new and sustainable material, diverting clothing waste away from landfills and incinerators. Her mission is to lower the carbon footprint of fashion and eliminate tons of CO2 emissions.
Alina is a Google for Startups Female Founder alumna and a member of the Forbes 30 under 30 class of 2020.
In this episode you will learn about:2020-11-2037 min
Leap TakersEpisode 19: Tobias Gunzenhauser - How to build a D2C company & the story of yamo - fresh organic baby foodTobias Gunzenhauser (@TobGunzenhauser) is the CEO and one of the three co-founders of yamo.
yamo is Europe's first digital native vertical brand that produces fresh organic baby and children food. The company launched in 2017 in Switzerland with their first product of baby purees. In the meantime, yamo is also sold in "Coop", one of Switzerland's largest retailers.
All of yamo’s products are 100% organic, natural and free from additives. They developed every recipe together with dozens of helpful moms, dads, their little ones, nutritionists and pediatricians.
In the summer of 2020, yamo raised a €10M Se...2020-10-0639 min
Leap TakersEpisode 18: Heidi Lindvall - From documentary filmmaker to investing in ClimateTech startups with Pale Blue Dot VCHeidi Lindvall (@HeidiLindvall) is one of the founders and a general partner at Pale Blue Dot. Pale Blue Dot is a seed stage ClimateTech VC investing in reducing and reversing the effects of climate change and preparing for a new world. They invest tickets of €200k - €2M, in pre-seed and seed-stage companies based in Europe and US.
Heidi Lindvall previously co-founded Storygami, an online video company that increases viewers engagement & helped monetize content. She also founded CODOC, an award winning video production company. She has a background in Media and Human Rights and has studied for two...2020-09-1138 min
Leap TakersEpisode 17: Anne-Laure Le Cunff - Mindful productivity - How Ness Labs became the leading learning platform that empowers makers to do their best work while keeping their sanityAnne-Laure Le Cunff (@anthilemoon) is the Founder of Ness Labs, an award-winning productivity & learning community and venture studio building products that focus on mindful productivity, wellness, creativity, and culture. She is an ex-Googler, MSc of Applied Neuroscience candidate at King's College, member of the Society for Neuroscience, and certified Mental Health First Aider accredited by the Royal Society for Public Health.
Her work has been featured in WIRED, Forbes, FT, Rolling Stone, and more. Every week, she sends a newsletter to thousands of mindful makers with practical content at the intersection of neuroscience and entrepreneurship.
...2020-07-2740 min
Leap TakersEpisode 16: Ville Vesterinen - Lessons from a nordic serial entrepreneur - Slush, Grey Area, Swappie - becoming an Atomico angel investor & moreVille Vesterinen (@vesterinen) is a serial entrepreneur from Finland. He is one of the original founders of Slush - one of the world’s leading startup & tech conferences, that attracts around 25'000 attendees every year to Helsinki. He also founded Grey Area - a gaming company that was backed by Index Ventures, LVP, Lifeline Ventures.
Ville also serves as the chairman of Swappie, an ambitious young company selling refurbished mobile phones, which just raised $40M in June 2020. He is also on the boards of Maria 01, a 70 000 m² campus for tech companies in the heart of Helsinki as well as...2020-06-2436 min
Leap TakersEpisode 15: Gonzalo Sanchez - Origin story of Seedtable, impact of COVID-19 on the startup ecosystem, and tips for remote workGonzalo (@gonsanchezs) runs and writes Seedtable, one of the leading newsletters focused on European tech. Seedtable is read by tens of thousands every week, and his work has been featured in Wired and Sifted. Gonzalo's writing always provides unique perspectives of developments in technology in Europe and its impact on society. Seedtable is one of my all-time favorite newsletters and I'm super excited that Gonzalo decided to come on the LeapTakers Podcast.
In addition to Seedtable, Gonzalo is Head of Growth at Jobbatical, an Estonian Relocation Service for Tech companies, and he is mentoring startups. His previous...2020-04-3047 min
Leap TakersEpisode 14: Christian Jantzen - Path to becoming one of the youngest VCs in Europe, starting an eSports team, and Futuristic VCChristian (@chrjantzen) is the founder of Futuristic.vc, a micro-fund investing in Nordic pre-seed companies. He made his first investment at age fourteen when he bought shares in his favorite football club. He later started his first company, a real estate company, in 2011, which he grew while studying at university. Following his masters degree in Finance from Aarhus University , he co-founded another startup “Reunited Esports", which was a player-owned Esports organisation with teams competing in Overwatch and Rocket League.
In 2017 he founded Futuristic VC, an early-stage VC fund investing initial capital into the next generation of Nordic fo...2020-04-0741 min
Leap TakersEpisode 13: Mathias Ockenfels - How to start a career in Venture Capital, from Analyst to Partner at a leading VC firm, Online Marketplaces, and SpeedinvestMathias (@ockenrock) eats and breathes marketplaces. He is a partner at Speedinvest, one of Europe’s leading Venture Capital funds. The fund has it’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria and just recently raised its latest fund of €190m. Mathias runs Speedinvest x, a focus fund investing into network effects and marketplaces.
Previously he was a General Manager for the German market at Uniplaces, an international marketplace for student accommodation. Before that, Mathias built out the marketplace-practice at Berlin-based Point Nine Capital, an early stage fund focusing on SaaS and marketplaces, where he was a Principal for 4 years. Previo...2020-03-1540 min
Leap TakersEpisode 12: Vedika Jain - Hustle your way into VC, picking your boss, from Stripe to Weekend Fund, and MoreVedika Jain (@vedikaja_in) is an investor and Chief of staff at Weekend Fund, an early stage venture capital fund that is backing your next favorite thing. Previously she worked for high profile startups like Stripe and True Layer.
Weekend Fund was started in 2017 by Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt (an amazing site to discover new products. Product Hunt was acquired in 2016 by AngelList). While Ryan and Vedika invest broadly, they are particularly excited about distributed/remote working, audio/voice technology, and tools for creators/makers. The fund invests in early stage startups with check...2020-02-1135 min
Leap TakersEpisode 11: Sebastian Wahl & Carl-Philipp von Polheim - The story of mybacs and how to start a direct-to-consumer companySebastian Wahl and Carl-Philipp von Polheim are the founders of mybacs.
Mybacs is a direct-to-consumer (D2C), research driven, biotechnology company for gut-health products based in Zug (Switzerland) and Munich (Germany). Their goal is to revolutionize the healthcare market around the human microbiome and thus make a decisive contribution to the health and daily well-being of everyday customers. Mybacs is specialized on the development of innovative and high-dose synbiotic dietary supplements
They have two types of products - a Travel and Daily well-being probiotic product.
Sebastian holds a Master's degree with distinction in Pharmacy from...2019-12-3135 min
Leap TakersEpisode 10: Holger Seim - The origin story of Blinkist, growing to 11 million users, and creating a unique company cultureHolger Seim (@hlgrsm) is the founder and CEO of Blinkist.
Blinkist is a book summary app that lets you get the key insights from 3'000+ bestselling non-fiction books that cover leadership, history, psychology and more in 15 minute summaries in text or audio format. Blinkist has over 11million users globally and the book-summarising startup has won positive reviews from the likes of Forbes (“This may be the greatest app you download in 2018”) and The New York Times.
In this episode we talk about how Holger and his co-founders came up with the idea for Blinkist, how they took...2019-11-1848 min
Leap TakersEpisode 9: Alisée de Tonnac - Leaving the corporate world to travel the globe and run startup competitions in emerging marketsAlisée (@aliseedt) is one of the founders of Seedstars, a global group of companies with a mission to impact people's lives in emerging markets through technology and entrepreneurship. The groups' activities cover over 85 cities with emerging startup ecosystems through a variety of activities, such as hosting one of the world’s largest startup competition “Seedstars World”, organizing training and acceleration programs, offering physical hubs called Seedspace, and doing venture capital investments & company building activities.
Alisée is a board member of the School of Management of Fribourg and a member of the Swiss National Innovation Council. She was...2019-10-1629 min
Leap TakersEpisode 8: Andri Silberschmidt - The 25 year old that sells poké bowls, manages an equity fund, and runs for national parliamentAndri Silberschmidt (@andrisilbi) is a 25 years old rising star here in Switzerland. He is a food entrepreneur, equity investor, and politician. At the age of fifteen, he began his banking education and is now responsible at Swisscanto Invest for the management of all quantitative equity funds investing in developing countries. In the summer of 2017, Andri and some of his friends founded kaisin. , a Poké Bowl restaurant and catering chain.
He has been politically active since 2011 and became president of the "Jungfreisinnige Partei" of Switzerland in 2016. Recently he was elected to the Parliament of the City of Zurich for t...2019-10-0247 min
Leap TakersEpisode 7: Andreas Schwarzinger - Lessons from building Switzerland's leading student platformAndreas Schwarzinger (@a_schwarzinger) is the founder and managing partner of uniboard AG, one of Switzerland’s largest student platforms with over 72k users. Andreas is one of the most down-to-earth people I know and with his work at Uniboard helped thousands of students to successfully pass their degrees. His motto is "Studying together is better"!
In our conversation we talk about how Andreas and his co-founder Malte grew uniboard to its current size, community building, winning customers, favorite movies, smelling car waxes and other fun stuff.
Please follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and my Website, wh...2019-09-1051 min
Leap TakersEpisode 6: Stefano Bernardi - Taking the leap to Silicon Valley & How crypto governs organizations of the futureStefano Bernardi (@stefanobernardi) is an active italian angel investor on AngelList and at “Mission and Market”, a silicon valley startup founder of a Y Combinator alumni (Kickpay), and employee nr. 1 of Betable (backed by Greylock, Founders Fund). More recently he is also a part of Atomico's angel programme, where he focuses exclusively on investing in "planet+" companies, with teams that are trying to save the planet from the imminent climate crisis.
Furthermore, he is strongly involved in the crypto community as the executive director of AragonProject, as well as an author for the popular token economy newsletter.
2019-07-2635 min
Leap TakersEpisode 5: Nilson Kufus - From figure skating champion to building a digital mirror worldNilson Kufus (@NilsonKufus) is one of the co-founders of Nomoko, a technology company that is building photorealistic 3D models of entire cities. Their technology enables applications for various industries like self-driving cars, gaming, or urban planning. Nilson obtained a degree in Liberal Arts & Sciences from the University College Maastricht and is also a former Swiss figure skating champion.
Please follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and my Website, where I post new episodes, share cool stuff & interesting articles I found, blog occasionally, and provide glimpses into my life!
Show notes:
02:24 -- Who is Nilson Kufus2019-07-1546 min
Leap TakersEpisode 4: David Lu - Learnings from starting a venture fundDavid Lu (@davidjlu) is an up & coming venture capitalist based in Sydney and Singapore, who is constantly traveling the world on the hunt for great investments. He is a Partner @256 Ventures, a global cryptocurrency VC fund, investing in a portfolio of diversified digital assets.
Previously, David founded Australia’s first student VC called, Textbook ventures. He also regularly writes academic papers around the topics of entrepreneurial ecosystems, startup roadmaps and early-stage fundraising. Forbes wrote an article about David with the title “Why Being A Young Investment Partner Isn't Always A Good Thing”.
Please follow me on Ins...2019-07-0242 min
Leap TakersEpisode 3: Estefanía Tapias - Empowering entrepreneurship among women & How to get featured on Forbes 30 under 30Estefanía Tapias (@este_tapias) is a researcher on the topic of the future of cities and entrepreneur that was listed on Forbes reputable 30 under 30 list. She is from Colombia but has been living in Switzerland for the past few years, where she co-founded WeSpace. WeSpace is a community, co-workspace and digital platform inspired by women in Zurich, where she invited me to to record this interview.
She obtained her Ph.D. at ETH Zurich and worked as a researcher and lecturer on the topic of smart Cities in Zurich and Singapore (Future Cities Laboratory).
We’ll...2019-06-1741 min
Leap TakersEpisode 2: Pascal Kaufmann - Experimenting with Cyborgs and Lessons of building an AI startupPascal Kaufmann (@PascalKaufmann) is a neuroscientist-turned-entrepreneur, who founded Starmind - one of Europe’s leading artificial intelligence technology companies - and Mindfire - a foundation created to incentivize collaboration in AI research. Inc magazine mentioned Pascal in the same sentence with no other than Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking.
In this episode we’ll talk about how Pascal became fascinated with artificial intelligence research, some of the experiments he worked on, what advice he has for aspiring entrepreneurs, and unique insights into Starmind.
Please follow me on Instagram, Twitter, and my Website, where I post new epis...2019-06-1724 min
Leap TakersEpisode 1: Daniel Naeff - Disrupting Venture Capital & How to make better decisions as a founderDaniel Naeff is the founder of Oakura, a platform where curated startups and vetted experts engage to create next generation businesses. We’ll get into what this actually means in the episode. He also served as the COO of Teralytics, one of Switzerland’s leading data analytics startups. He is also on the board of directors of the ETH Alumni - one of the world’s top 10 universities.
We’ll take about bootstrapping vs. funding your company via venture capital, how to make smarter decisions as a founder, hiring the best team, favorite books, and much more.
Please...2019-06-171h 02
Leap TakersEpisode 0: Remo Kyburz - Introduction to The Leap Takers PodcastShort introductory episode where Remo (@TheRemoKyburz) is introducing the podcast and what led him to start the LeapTakers podcast.
In short: In each episode I’m interviewing unique founders, shapers, and makers that work on building the future, as well as other fascinating personalities that push boundaries in various areas, such as investing, traveling, gaming, exploring new foods, and much more. In addition to being a source of knowledge & entertainment, I want to inspire people like you with this podcast to start your own endeavour and essentially become a Leap Taker.
You’ll learn:
What this...2019-06-1705 min