Mostly Awesome

Joshua and Mehmet both studied Business Administration and Math in Munich. Together they founded Freeletics in 2013, which later rose to become a popular consumer internet company that offers personalized fitness plans and community support via a mobile application. After exiting from Freeletics in 2018 they waited no more than three weeks before they founded yet again! Their current venture is called Zavvy, a company that aspires to invent aspects of the “future of work”. During this episode, they talk about where the idea for Freeletics came from and the culture and community that Freeletics created for end users. Furthermore, Joshua and Mehmet tell us more about Zavvy, the differences from their previous experiences at Freeletics and how despite that they're both still able to draw on their past experiences to build an employee-enablement platform.

In today’s episode, our guest is Vlad Lata. Vlad is not only a serial entrepreneur with founding experience at KONUX and Avi Medical but also a CDTM alumnus. His first venture, KONUX, is active in the field of IoT/AI providing smart sensor systems and AI-based analytics. With AVI Medical he is now active in the optimization of the patient experience by leveraging technology. In the course of this episode, we learned why and how he decided to found a venture twice, what institutions impacted his journey most, and also how it is to operate a venture in regulated markets like the railway and healthcare industry.

In today’s episode we were delighted to have Hessam Lavi as our guest. Hessam is the CEO and Co-Founder of Climatiq, a company that engineers and develops a Carbon Footprint Intelligence Platform. During the course of this episode we spoke about several topics that make Hessam’s journey unique. We learnt about his voyage from war-torn Iran, to Sweden, and finally to Berlin. We also took deep dives into the learnings he drew from being a serial entrepreneur, how he built successful startups in the very competitive recruiting industry and what it means to be an entrepreneur in the climate-tech space today.

In this episode, we talk to Thomas Regier and Kivanc Semen - the founders of DataGuard. In 2017 they founded DataGuard together. And since then they help companies to manage their data privacy - an inviolable human right and key to a successful business in an increasingly digital world. We talk to them about their multi-cultural background and how they first met as teenagers in a workshop for basketball trainers. Covid-19 has been a major topic of discussion everywhere in the last months. However, this time we discuss it from the perspective of data privacy and information security. Moreover, we spoke about the future of data privacy, GDPR, and about annoying cookie banners on every website.

In this episode, we are talking to Sona Chandra, the co-founder of Terra Lumina - an AI-based drug discovery platform. Sona is a qualified Biomedical engineer who speaks passionately about drug discovery and healthcare. One can tell from her responses that she’s determined to make a dent in how we as a civilization discover and engineer medicines. We spoke to Sona about her cross-continental journey and understanding how a person of Indian origin, who is actually a citizen of Australia, gets educated in the US and eventually lands up in Berlin to become a two-time startup founder. Mind you, all of this happened in Sona’s life well before she turned 30, and that perhaps, explains how she ended up receiving the coveted Forbes 30-under-30 award in 2020.

In this episode, we spoke to Hung Dang- an inspiring CDTM alumnus and the founder of Y42 - the company that is on the mission to build the most powerful and simple to use data tool that allows everyone to work with their data efficiently and collaboratively. In October 2021, the company raised one of the biggest Series A funding rounds in Europe. But before founding Y42, Hung had his fair share of hardship and challenges - He was born in Vietnam and grew up with his grandparents while his parents laboured in Germany to make a mark for themselves. Later, when he was 8, he took a flight all alone from Vietnam to Germany to start a new chapter in his life. Imagine being uprooted from a culture so different at such a tender age, battling all the odds that are stacked against you in the next two decades, and then going on to found a company that is on the way to impact the lives of hundreds of employees and thousands, if not millions, of data users.

Arseniy Vershinin is a co-founder and CTO of Personio - Europe's leading one-stop HR platform for small and medium-sized businesses. It helps small businesses across Europe manage common HR tasks like onboarding, payroll, and attendance accounting. Coming originally from Russia, Arseniy moved to Munich in 2011. Here, at CDTM he met his future co-founders Hanno Renner, Ignaz Forstmeyer, and Roman Schumacher. And this is where the Personio story begins! Tune in to listen to Arseniy's personal journey and experiences with running Personio, a company that's growing and reaching new heights of success every day.

This time, we had a very exciting talk with Awais Shafique - the co-founder and CPO of a FashionTech startup presize.ai. After finishing his Bachelor's degree in his homeland Pakistan, Awais came to Germany to study Biomedical Computing at Technical University in Munich. As he was already very passionate about entrepreneurship at the time, Awais joined the Center for Digital Technologies and Management. And after just one year he founded presize.ai with two other Centerlings, Leon Szeli and Tomislav Tomov. Curious to hear about what we discussed with Awais? Then tune into our latest episode!

Dr. Sophie Chung is the CEO and Founder of Qunomedical - a digital health platform with a focus on medical travel that helps patients find the right doctor anywhere in the world. On the mission to empower patients worldwide, Qunomedical gives everyone the chance to access great healthcare - no matter who they are and where they are from. Sophie, who spent five years as a Consultant at McKinsey & Company told us about her career decisions and instances that proved to be inflection points along her journey. As a qualified Doctor of Medicine and a truly global citizen who has studied in 3 different continents, Sophie was able to give her expert opinions on the state of global healthcare. Sophie told us more about her involvement with the 2hearts Community and the problems that she and her team at Qunomedical are attempting to solve.

Welcome to Season 3 of Mostly Awesome with our new hosts Keke and Maria! We are again talking to inspiring innovators from the world of entrepreneurship and technology to give you unique insights into their personal journeys, motivation, and opinions. Listen to our teaser to meet our new hosts and get a sneak peek at our awesome lineup of guests. As usual, we will be launching new episodes bi-weekly, starting on Tuesday 19th of October. We are looking forward to your feedback to podcast@cdtm.de. Follow our channel to never miss an episode!