Venture Europe: Entrepreneurship | Technology | Venture Capital | Eu/Acc

Sebastian Pollok is a founding Partner of Visionaries Club.

Visionaries Club is a Berlin-based early stage VC fund, backed by leading European digital founders and family business entrepreneurs.

They recently raised 400 million Euros of fresh capital across 3 funds. A seed fund, a growth fund, and a science-driven focused fund.

They have an excellent track record, having previously invested in Personio, Miro, Choco, Xentral, TrueLayer, Pigment, just to name a few, and they invested alongside top-tier VCs such as Sequoia, Accel, Index, Lightspeed and Bessemer.

Previously, Sebastian was the co-founder and co-CEO of AMORELIE, which he exited to ProSiebenSat.1 Media in 2018.

During this episode, we discuss why Europe has to wake up to compete in the global arena, how he asses founders, and why it’s all about the people.

Please enjoy this excellent conversation with Sebastian Pollok founding Partner at Visionaries Club.

Julien Codorniu is a partner and investor at Felix Capital, the 600m Euro fund investing in brands and related enabling technologies. 

At Felix he focuses on SaaS (Worktech in particular) and gaming investments.

Before joining Felix, Julien spent 11 years at Facebook, where he led the global platform partnerships team, helping Facebook partners build, grow and monetize their mobile apps and games. Also he has been serving as Vice President of Facebook Workplace. Under his leadership, Workplace went from 0 to 10 million paid subscribers at companies like Walmart, Nestlé, McDonald's, Chevron, Astrazeneca, Spotify and many others.

His angel portfolio include fantastic companies like TripleDot Studios, BeReal, Linktree, Bloom & Wild, Pigment, Xentral, and Bits, among others.

He grew up in France, and he loves croissants. Now he lives in London with his wife and their two boys.

During this episode, we discuss the crazy growth journey that he experienced with Facebook from 500m users to the IPO, how the best investments he made took 2 seconds to decide and why sometimes you should go slow and don’t break things.

Michel Traore - the co-founder and CEO of anotherblock, a Web3 platform democratizing music ownership through NFTs.

Anotherblock connects music rights to NFTs, and creates a smooth and easy way to both buy and sell music rights. With his cofounders, Michel plans to introduce music to a free and open market, increasing its value and solving the imbalance of power within the industry.

Before Anotherblock he spent several years at Schibsted, and in the European startup scene, building fintech products from scratch. Growing up between the pop-wonder of Sweden and Burkina Faso, where his father created its first modern label - Music has been a big part of his life. In 2021, Michel combined his fintech expertise and love of music to found Anotherblock.

During this episode, we discuss web3, NFTs, how they are fractionalizing music, and how the holders will earn royalties. Also, we discuss their latest drop coming October 20 for the song - Alone part II by Alan Walker and Eva Max - a song that has 400m streams only on Spotify today.

Without further ado, please enjoy this wonderful conversation with Michel Traore, co-founder and CEO of Anotherblock.

My guest today is Timmu Tõke - the founder and CEO of Ready Player Me.

Ready Player Me is a cross-game avatar platform for the metaverse and more than 4,000 companies use their avatars in their products.

They recently announced their series B of 56 million dollars led by a16z with participation from some iconic names like Roblox co-founder David Baszucki, King Games co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi, and Twitch cofounder - Justin Kan among many others.

Before building Ready Player Me the young team spent many years building avatar tech for enterprise customers like Tencent, HTC, Vodafone, Wargaming, H&M, and Huawei.

During this episode, we discuss about grit and persistence, why you should Play to win, and the importance of knowing your strengths.

Please enjoy this excellent conversation with Timmu Tõke - co-founder and CEO of Ready Player Me.

Daniel Bakh and Dorin Tarau are the founders of Fullview, a customer support suite that lets you instantly monitor, control, and analyze user sessions for faster real-time customer support.

The guys founded Fullview in 2021 and in record time they’ve raised 10 million Euros in just 10 months from top investors like Cherry, Seedcamp, and later on from Lightspeed.

During this episode we discuss about how to build momentum and create urgency when fundraising, how to hire player-coaches and how Anoushka from Lightspeed convinced the team to choose Lightspeed instead of another VC on a higher valuation.

Big thank you to Max from Cherry and Anoushka from Lightspeed for the input in the preparation for this episode.

Enjoy!

Xavier Collins is currently a Vice President of Turo, the American unicorn, facilitating car sharing. At Turo, he’s responsible for launching and building the UK business as well as leading their international expansion.

Prior to Turo, he held roles at Deliveroo and Uber and most recently founded one of the UK’s largest angel investment syndicates.

During this episode, we discuss why he left a secure career in law to join Uber, why you usually get what you measure and how he finally became a singer and a songwriter with an album published on Spotify.

Enjoy!

Tony Jamous is the founder and CEO of Oyster - a distributed HR platform that empowers companies to hire, pay, and care for talented teammates regardless of location.

Tony founded Oyster In January 2020 and since then they’ve raised around 220 million dollars, grew the team to approximately 600 FTE, and have reached unicorn status.

Prior to Oyster Tony founded Nexmo, a pioneer in the Communications Platform as a Service (“CPaaS”) category - the company went public via a merger with Vonage in 2016.

After a successful Nexmo exit, Tony took some time off to consider what to do next. He began to invest in “platform models that can change the world”, Tony’s investments include Hopin, Hyperloop, Graphcore, and DialPad.

During this episode we discuss about the challenges and learnings of starting, scaling, and exiting Nexmo, why removing the barriers of global recruiting is important and the mission of Oyster, and how he hired the executive team at Oyster to increase the chances of success.

Enjoy!

Judith Dada is a General Partner at La Famiglia.

La Famiglia is a European seed stage venture capital fund investing in B2B technology companies that enable or disrupt large industries.

At La Famiglia, Judith focuses on the future of work, as well as data and ML-driven business models and she has invested in companies like Personio, Graphy, y42, tagr, and uncut among others.

La Famiglia is backed by a selection of world-leading entrepreneurs from various industries that provide precious early market access, impactful partnerships, and deep expertise for La Famiglias’ portfolio companies.

During this episode we discuss the questions La Famiglia asks themselves to crystallize their mission, we discuss gut instinct, and talent vs hard work.

I had soo much fun talking with Judith and I am sure you will too.

Anthony Danon is a co-founder and general partner at Cocoa, the angel fund 100% backed by founders. Anthony has spent the last 7+ years as an early-stage VC focused on investing in what he calls "fintech is everything".

He started his career as an operator in fintech, building credit risk models for an invoice financing company.

As an investor, Anthony has been lucky to partner with companies such as TrueLayer, Primer, Wayflyer, and Ramp Network, to name a few.

Prior to Cocoa he was a Partner at Speedinvest leading their Seed fintech strategy across Europe and an investor at Anthemis Group before that.

All that, after a failed career as a graffiti artist and an attempt at becoming a professional soccer player.

During this episode, we discuss how Anthony become a partner in a relatively short time, the key elements that make a good investor, and the positioning and mission of Cocoa.

Before joining Index, Nina was a Financial planning and analysis Lead for Google’s AdSense team where she managed a multi-billion dollar book of business covering Amazon, Ebay, and IAC.

Nina started her career as a high yield bond trader at Citigroup and She also started HIVE Ventures, the first seed venture fund focusing on Armenian entrepreneurs, where she invested in over 30 companies.

At Index, Nina focuses on venture and growth investments in enterprise SaaS, vertical SaaS, and AI. She is excited by the combination of software and payments to help legacy industries transition from using pen and paper workflows to adopting more modern, vertical-specific solutions.

Nina works with transformational companies like ServiceTitan, Shopmonkey, Gong, and DeepScribe.

During this episode we discuss about vertical Saas, VC career advice and how to separate a great a pitch from a great founder.

Please enjoy this excellent conversion with Nina Achadjian Partner at Index.