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

Hosted by Calin Fabri | Entrepreneur | Advisor

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Episodes

135

Latest episode

Nov 2026

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EN-US

About the show

personal conversations with the entrepreneurs and investors creating a future worth getting excited about

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60 recent

November 6, 202621 min

Sebastian Mallaby - Are we building a new God with AI?, Do founders need to have a Messiah complex, Is regulation of AI going to result in regulatory capture, What should Europe focus on

Sebastian is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the author of six books, including «More Money Than God» and «The Power Law». His latest, «The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence», comes from more than 30 hours with Demis and interviews with 100+ researchers. We spoke twice before, but this was our first time in person, on stage at Wave by Vento last month, where we went one layer deeper: ↳ The Nobel medal Demis pulled out of a backpack, and why its design was "the perfect image" for him ↳ If this would be a Marvel movie, who's the villain and who's the good guy among the AI leaders ↳ Why every AI leader quietly thinks "I am a good person, so I'd better be first" ↳ Why calling AI safety "regulatory capture" is, in his words, "crazy nonsense" ↳ The real risk: a Chernobyl moment, not the end of humanity His bet for Europe is our own data centres, open-weight models on European clouds, and cheaper energy. He put his own money into a European neocloud. ❤️ TO SUPPORT THE SHOW — PLEASE CHECK OUR SPONSORS Light: The Agentic ERP for multi-entity finance teams ➡️ ⁠⁠⁠https://light.inc/⁠⁠⁠ Leapsome: The Agentic HR Platform ➡️ ⁠⁠https://www.leapsome.com/

November 4, 202630 min

Casper Heningsen (Part II) - The future of agentic enterprise, Start with WHY, The future of synthetic data in consumer research

In this episode, Casper Henningsen, CEO of GetWhy, explains why companies can have more data than ever and still fail to truly understand their customers. We explore how AI is transforming consumer research, why understanding the “why” behind customer behavior creates a competitive advantage, and how agentic AI, synthetic consumers, and autonomous workflows could completely change how companies make decisions. Casper also breaks down why the winners of the AI era won’t just use AI to become 10% more efficient. They’ll use it to rethink how the business works entirely. ❤️ TO SUPPORT THE SHOW — PLEASE CHECK OUR SPONSORS Light: The Agentic ERP for multi-entity finance teams ➡️ ⁠⁠https://light.inc/⁠⁠ Leapsome: The Agentic HR Platform ➡️ ⁠https://www.leapsome.com/

November 3, 202640 min

James Cadwallader - Raising $180M from Sequoia during a walk, Dropping out of high-school, Trading Gold, AI Slop is a skill issue, Why he moved to New York

“AI Slop is a skill issue.” That’s James Cadwallader 's take. And he’s putting some serious backing behind it. His company, Profound , raised $180M from investors led by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins , at a $1.8B valuation. More than 2,500 brands use the platform. 👀 I sat down with James to ask: if AI is recommending products, comparing brands and making buying decisions… who are we actually marketing to? We got into: ↳ Why some marketers create slop while others create great work with the same tools. ↳ How to get your brand into AI’s answers. ↳ What changes when your next customer is an agent. This conversation was recorded at Wave by Vento . 🤍 ❤️ TO SUPPORT THE SHOW — PLEASE CHECK OUR SPONSORS Light: The Agentic ERP for multi-entity finance teams➡️ ⁠https://light.inc/⁠ Leapsome: The Agentic HR Platform➡️ https://www.leapsome.com/

October 22, 202620 min

Anish Acharya - GP at a16z, Will AI kill your startup?, How to raise your pre-seed, Shame and embarrassment as a founder, Don't pitch like a Canadian

Anish Acharya, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, joins the show to discuss the shifting landscape of modern business. We explore how AI advancements have lowered the barrier to entry for developers and founders, making it easier than ever to bring ideas to life.Subscribe for weekly conversations with the founders and investors building the next generation of businesses.❤️ TO SUPPORT THE SHOW PLEASE CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS:Leapsome: The Agentic HR Platform➡️ https://www.leapsome.com/ Light: The Agentic ERP for multi-entity finance teams➡️ https://light.inc/

September 14, 202636 min

Casper Henningsen (Part 1): Becoming a pro football player, Falling into addiction, Losing it all and starting from scratch

What gets you to the first level of success often won't get you to the second. Sometimes it does the opposite. It takes you down. You have to reinvent yourself. We flew to Copenhagen to sit down with Casper Henningsen, CEO of GetWhy to discuss: ➡️ How he became a professional footballer by 20 ➡️ Why the narrative behind his first success stopped working, and cost him everything ➡️ How he rebuilt himself into the youngest Senior Partner at Kunde & Co in three years ➡️ What's next after raising ~€60M and building the global leader in AI-moderated consumer research Part 1 of 3. Part 1 goes into the personal stuff, not the company deck.

September 10, 202652 min

Jonathan Sanders - Raising $43m to build an AI native ERP, Why Oracle ERP was used to build the pyramids, His experience as Head of Payments and scaling the team from 20 to 800 at Pleo

Jonathan Sanders - Scaled global payments from 20 to 800 employees at Pleo. Then he left to build what 9 out of 10 people told him was impossible. He went on to co-found Light, an AI-native accounting and finance platform that replaces the ERP and frankenstack of finance point solutions. Backed by Atomico, Balderton, Cherry Ventures, Seedcamp, and Entrée Capital, they count fast-growing businesses like Legora, Lovable and Fuse Energy as their customers. We got into the business side, but also the bigger ideas behind it: why fear is a terrible strategy, what AI-native companies actually look like, how software becomes autonomous, and why the next generation of finance teams may only need one or two people. 🤖

July 10, 202659 min

Aleksander Larsen - The asymmetric war with drones, Building a defense-tech company from Norway, Learnings from $620M North-Korea Hack

He co-founded a company that hit a $3B valuation, then watched hackers steal $620M from it. That experience changed how Aleksander Larsen thinks about security, and it sent him somewhere almost no crypto founder goes next: defence. In this episode I sit down with Aleksander Larsen, co-founder and CEO of Stendr, the Oslo company building AI-driven interception systems for a sovereign Europe. Before Stendr he spent seven years as COO of Sky Mavis, scaling Axie Infinity into one of the most-traded games in the world. We get into the full arc: what it takes to run infrastructure serving millions of users, why the Ronin hack became the turning point, and how a gaming founder ends up building hardware for the modern battlefield. We also talk about why Europe can no longer outsource its defence, and what it means to build a Nordic defence prime from a standing start. Norway shares one of NATO's longest borders with Russia. Aleksander thinks that geography is a feature, not a footnote.

June 11, 202650 min

Sebastian Mallaby - How did the AGI war start and who will win?

Sebastian Mallaby is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller: The Infinity Machine - Demis Hassabis , DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. He negotiated unprecedented access to DeepMind in November 2022 , a week before ChatGPT launched. He spent 30+ hours in a pub with Demis Hassabis. He interviewed Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Mustafa Suleyman and Geoffrey Hinton among 100 people in AI. He's the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A two-time Pulitzer finalist. The author of The Power Law and More Money Than God. In this episode we discuss: ⚔️ The moment ChatGPT launched and Demis told him “they parked the tanks on my lawn” 📉 Why OpenAI has a 50% chance of failing by the middle of next year 🇪🇺 Why Bezos is opening an AI office in King's Cross and why the time to bet on Europe is now 💰 The $1 billion offer from Reid Hoffman to spin DeepMind out of Google 🚪 The Elon Musk, LA closet Skype call, that almost stopped the Google sale 🔥 Who we should actually trust with superintelligence

May 7, 202643 min

Chaz Englander - 3x founder looking to build $1T company, FT Partners leading the $75m round, learnings and mistakes that others should learn from

Chaz Englander is the Co-founder of Model ML an agentic AI platform used by 8 of the top 10 European banks, 3 of the big 4 consultancies, and tier-1 asset managers across Europe and the US. He's previously built and exited two companies: Fat Lama (peer-to-peer rental marketplace) and Fancy (sold to goPuff). Model ML has raised $100M+ from Y Combinator, LocalGlobe and QED and the last round was led by by Steve McLaughlin of FT Partners - arguably the most influential dealmaker in fintech. Chaz Englander is the Co-founder of Model ML an agentic AI platform used by 8 of the top 10 European banks, 3 of the big 4 consultancies, and tier-1 asset managers across Europe and the US. He's previously built and exited two companies: Fat Lama (peer-to-peer rental marketplace) and Fancy (sold to goPuff). Model ML has raised $100M+ from Y Combinator, LocalGlobe and QED and the last round was led by by Steve McLaughlin of FT Partners — the most influential dealmaker in fintech. This conversation covers how AI is dismantling the analyst function in investment banking, why escape velocity is the only real moat in 2026 and why ARR is a vanity metric. Enjoy!

April 30, 202638 min

Diyala D'Aveni - Meeting John (Agneli Dynasty behind Fiat, Ferrari, Juventus), Investing in Italian Founders with an Idea, Organizing Wave 2026 with speakers like Dario Amodei and Jony Ive

🇮🇹 Dyiala D'Aveni is the CEO of Vento, the fund backing Italian founders worldwide. Vento is fully backed by Exor, the fund behind legendary companies like Ferrari, Juventus and The Economist. They are also the organisers of Wave, the event bringing world class speakers like Dario Amodei, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang and Jony Ive to Italy and transforming the Italian and European ecosystems more broadly.