Mostly Awesome

When you think about trees, what comes to mind? In most of our heads, they are probably the prime example of “something good for the environment”. Even though it is by far not the only way to capture carbon, there is an increasing trend to quantify and enhance the environmental benefit of sustainable forestry. We are happy to have Gesa Biermann as our guest today. Gesa is a Co-Founder of Pina, a startup that quantifies and rewards sustainable forestry.  Before founding Pina she was a Center Assistant at CDTM, did her Ph.D. in the area of sustainable food consumption, and co-founded the Munich Branch of 180 Degrees Consulting. Over the course of the episode, we will dive deeper into Gesa's journey in the field of sustainability and social impact. We will hear how the CDTM shaped her and also how both the idea and founding team for Pina were impacted by the Center. Finally, we will deep dive into Gesa's view on the future of sustainability and the voluntary carbon market. As always, we end the episode by getting insights into Gesa's personal toolbox.

Today we welcome Johannes Hussak in our podcast, one of the co-founders of Kertos, a platform that automates data privacy operations. Always fascinated by technology, Johannes did his bachelor and master at Technical University of Munich in Energy and Process Technology and went to an abroad semester at Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. It was during his studies when one of his friends drew Johannes attention to Manage and More - an entrepreneurship scholarship by UnternehmerTUM in Munich. At Manage and more Johannes discovered his passion to build products and teams around them. Together with Kilian Schmidt on the legal side and Alexander Prams on the tech side, he found a perfect team match for Kertos. Over the course of the episode, we speak to Johannes about his experience of founding a company in the middle of the pandemic, the story of how the Kertos founding team came to be, Johannes's take on the future of the compliance industry, and his personal advise on maintaining work-life balance. As always, at the end of episode, you will hear Johannes's prompt answers and recommendations to our toolbox.

This week we are excited to welcome Eva Spannagl, head of Strategy & Business Development at Moss, founder of Femstory, business angel, and personal inspiration to both of us. Eva studied at ESCP Business school and the Universidad Carlos tercero de Madrid. She held a variety of internships during her studies and ultimately joined McKinsey full time when she graduated from her masters. During that time, Eva founded Femstory, a nonprofit focused on connecting women to professional mentors. For the past 2 years, Femstory has empowered a variety of women to make impactful career moves. I'm personally happy to be part of the last Femstory batch and am already getting a lot of insights from my mentor and the network. After spending 3 years with McKinsey Eva joined Moss, a fintech startup focused on smart corporate credit cards, digital invoice management, and automated accounting. Over the course of the episode, we speak to Eva about her early career trajectory, her experience at Moss, her experience with founding Femstory and angel investing, and finally, we ask her about work-life balance & managing multiple projects without burnout. Needless to say, Eva is a pro – the following episode is full of game-changing career and time management tips. As always, to finish out the podcast, we are also thrilled to add Eva's personal toolbox to our resources for the innovators of tomorrow.

How do you found a VC firm, really? Today we will talk to Claudius Jablonka, a former CDTM Centerling and Center assistant who co-founded 10x Founders. Claudius co-founded and led the Munich office of Plug and Play Ventures, one of the most active early-stage investors in the world. In 2020, he and 6 other partners co-founded 10x founders, now a €160m early-stage fund which is backed also by CDTM alumni. Over the course of the episode, we speak to Claudius about his academic and professional background, the experience of founding 10x, Claudius' take on diversity in VC, and some tips on maintaining work-life balance.

Some people say the entrepreneurial spirit is something you are born with. This is something that could be true for our guest in today’s episode, Vanessa Westphal. As a very young child she already started selling stones in front of her house to top up pocket money. And she kept the entrepreneurial spirit ever since. Having spent more than 10 years building a corporate career at Siemens, last year Vanessa founded Choosy, which offers AI-optimized nutrition plans that suit both your taste and your health. Choosy aims not only to improve our individual nutrition habits, but also to make planetary health available to everyone. Over the course of the episode we will dive deeper into Vanessas journey. We will learn what she took from her experience of being an innovation driver within corporate Siemens and what made her switch to entrepreneurship again. Furthermore, we learn about her founding experience with Choosy and what her expert view on the importance of health and nutrition is.

The startup ecosystem has seen many software startups over the last years, but how about a software startup that aims to ease the development of new electronic hardware products? Our guest in todays episode, Sebastian Schaal, is diving into exactly this area. He is the co-founder of Luminovo, a company that speeds up the process of electronic hardware development, leveraging software and machine learning. Over the course of the episode you will learn about the Luminovo's transition into a pure SaaS business, Sebastian's take on the current supply chain crisis, being a founder and the future of AI in Europe.

Welcome to the new season of the Mostly Awesome podcast! Our first episode will drop on October 4, but before that we wanted to give you all a sneak preview of what season 4 is all about. Over this season, we will be chatting with 6 different changemakers and innovators – we can’t wait for you to hear! We’re also stoked to have Julia Kozlovskaia and Jaclyn Hovsmith as our fearless hosts.

In this week’s episode, we welcome Vidya Madhavan, Founder and CEO of Schmooze, the dating app where you swipe memes instead of people. Coming from Engineering and Business Background, Vidya will tell us how she did not build “just another dating app” but rather the fastest growing one. During this episode, we will get to hear Vidya's thoughts on how an MBA and Entrepreneurship complement each other, where the idea of a meme-based dating app even came from and how the online dating market might develop in the years to come.

For this week’s episode Passionfroot is on the menu! The co-founders Jennifer Phan and Michelle Tian combine backgrounds in venture capital at Rocket Internet and tech development at AirBnB and Shopify. In 2021 they co-founded Passionfroot with the aim to empower independent businesses of tomorrow. With this passion in mind, they are developing a back-office tool tailored to creator businesses. Tune in to learn more about Passionfroot and the future of the creator economy!

If we hear about living an almost nomadic life, we typically have a picture of a backpacker in mind, traveling the world. Our guest for today's episode, Maya Hari, however, would probably describe this as how she spent her 20s working in India, the U.S., France as well as Singapore. Maya is not your run-of-the-mill backpacker though - she studied engineering and did an MBA at INSEAD before she worked at the likes of Cisco, Google, and Microsoft before becoming the VP of Global Strategy and Operations at Twitter. In this episode, Maya tells us more about her personal and truly international journey, founding an eCommerce start-up while being a mother, working for Twitter, and sharing her thoughts about the current state of online media.