Entrepreneurial Realities

Hosted by TUM Venture Labs

BusinessInterviews guests

Website RSS feed LinkedIn

Episodes

Latest episode

Jun 2026

Language

About the show

Entrepreneurial Realities is everything about Entrepreneurship that you absolutely need to know but you cannot learn at any university. Entrepreneurial Realities is a TUM Venture Lab Podcast. Presenting interesting stories from leading and promising entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and other thought leaders within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. tum-venture-labs.de

Listen to episodes

60 recent

June 16, 202628 min

# 99 - A Conversation with Adrian Locher, Co-Founder and General Partner of Merantix Capital

Adrian Locher co-founded Merantix Capital in Berlin in 2016 with machine-learning researcher Rasmus Rothe. What started as an AI studio has become one of Europe's most distinctive AI organisations: a venture studio that incubates companies from scratch, a campus hosting an entire ecosystem, and — as of June 2026 — a €100 million plus fund backing AI ventures across the continent.In this conversation, Adrian traces his path from founding his first company at fourteen and selling the Swiss flash-sale platform DeinDeal to Ringier in 2012, to building Merantix's combined studio-fund-campus model. We discuss what it actually means to build AI-native companies in Europe, where the structural obstacles remain, how to evaluate teams when technology moves faster than any due diligence, and what a thriving European AI ecosystem could look like by 2031.

June 10, 202624 min

# 98 - Tech at War: Lessons from Ukraine for the Next Generation of Defense Entrepreneurs — with Dimko Zhluktenko, Soldier, Founder, Entrepreneur

Defense tech is being rewritten in real time — not in labs or conference rooms, but on the frontlines of Ukraine.Join me in my conversation with with Dimko Zhluktenko — soldier, drone pilot , founder of Dzyga's Paw ($6M raised, 70+ countries), analyst at Ukraine's 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment RAID, and now founder of Hasta, a DefTech VC fund.Dimko has lived every dimension of defense tech at once: as a soldier who uses the technology, as a founder who sources and funds it, and as an analyst who extracts lessons from it. What he shares about drone warfare, and what actually matters on the battlefield, his analysis of Ukraine, Europe, ... is something no conference panel can replicate and a must for all defenders of liberty and democracy.

June 8, 202629 min

# 97 - 200 new Shopfloor Apps in Six Months — A Conversation with Eden Chabanet and Johannes Mohren of Arctory

Meet Eden Chabanet and Johannes Moran, Co-Founder of Arctory.Arctory is a platform for shopfloor vibe coding which, since its inception, has been used in hundreds of applications. Join me as we discuss topics such as the role of vibe coding in demanding professional environments, positioning focused platforms versus generalist ones, the role of IT in a changing world, ... and how a German startups focusing on the mid market is experience significant growth.

May 18, 202620 min

# 96 - Meet Simon Wilhelm, CEO & Co-Founder of Scaile and learn how to be visible in the age of Gen AI

Join me in my conversation with Simon Wilhelm, CEO & Co-Founder of Scaile.Simon understood that classic SEO techniques no longer works. His startup helps companies get visibility. After a mere 6 months, he has secured 40 plus customers from multiple countries and shares learnings with us.

May 14, 202633 min

# 95 - Vibe coding for founders with Edgar Kussberg, Director of Product Management at Sonar

Do join the discussion I had with Edgar Kussberg about Vibe coding.Edgar is a former entrepreneur where he focused on product development and gradually turned in applying his market focused approach to code development.He is currently in charge of Product development at SonarSource, a Swiss scale up which is the leader in code validation tool. We discuss on what is the phenomenon of vibe coding, who are the typical use cases and how to make the most of this new technology.

May 12, 202631 min

# 94 - Interview with Christine Carville and Marc Goldberg co-founders of Resilience Labs

Do join our conversation with Christine Carville and Marc Goldberg, co-founders of Resilience labs, now Cerebral, a this podcast first married couple.Both started Resilience labs in 2019 to bridge a gap in the American healthcare market by training new clinicians while providing accessible care to patients. By integrating proprietary education with AI-powered clinical tools, they professionalised a fragmented industry and achieved a significant acquisition by the platform Cerebral.

April 15, 202630 min

# 93 - A conversation with Sebastian Mallaby, author of "The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence"

The latest episode of Entrepreneurial Realities welcomes back Sebastian Mallaby, who joined the podcast once before to discuss The Power Law, his landmark account of the venture capital industry. This time, Sebastian returns with The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence — the result of three years of unprecedented access to Demis Hassabis and his inner circle.The Infinity Machine traces the journey of a chess prodigy from North London — Nobel Prize winner, founding CEO of Google DeepMind — whose singular goal was never money or power, but the scientific dream of artificial superintelligence.The conversation covers the story of DeepMind itself, the lessons European deep tech startups can draw from its trajectory, the very real risks of AGI, and many of the other defining questions that sit at the frontier of AI today.

March 24, 202626 min

# 92 - AI, Startups and Sports. A conversation with Michael Brand and Jonas Dunkel

In this episode, I speak with Michael Brand, CEO of TraxSurf and Jonas Dunkel, CEO of DeepGolf, two German entrepreneurs applying AI to elite sport performance. Different sports but same ambition: replace guesswork with data, and help athletes improve with precision. A conversation about technology, entrepreneurship, and building something new far from the traditional hubs of surf and golf culture.

March 18, 202626 min

# 91 - AI and Ethics with Rabbi Mois Navon

Rabbi Mois Navon is one of the founder engineer of MobilEye. He is also an advisor to the Israeli Government on the theme of AI and Ethics and a lecturer at ben Gourion University.Join us on our discussion on why ethical considerations profoundly matter for AI entrepreneurs and how to take these into considerations for your AI startups.

March 11, 202622 min

# 90 - What if waste could replace fossil resources?

Sebastian Bastek, co-founder of Valoron, takes you on a journey of transforming mixed waste into virgin-quality fuels and chemicals, scaling a bold climate tech vision from the lab to industry and literally turning trash into treasure.Dive into the breakthroughs, the entrepreneurial journey, and how Valoron is turning circular economy ideas into reality. Hosted by Lucia Lara from the Climate & Circular Lab.