SPEAK LIKE A CEO

How do you know what kind of business has huge potential? It’s easy to connect the dots looking back. It’s way harder is to recognise trends in society before they become obvious, and use that insight to build a business that develops a new market. That’s exactly what Jannes Fischer did. He is the CEO and founder of Vermietet.de, the market leader in digital solutions for private landlords. Helping his grandparents administrating their flats in Hanover, he realised that the younger landlords of the future would not accept paper or Excel sheets like previous generations to look after their most valuable investments. So he built a better a solution and in the process a fast-growing venture that was acquired by Scout24 Group in 2021. A born entrepreneur, if there is such a thing, Jannes shares in our 150th episode: Whether anyone can have a passion for dry cleaning (his first business) Why owning a category is so powerful, and how it can be achieved How he discovered the power of communications and how he applies it day-to-day Why the CEO is the chief storyteller, and what that means for leaders Enjoy the episode and support the podcast by sharing it and posting your review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/speak-like-a-ceo/id1441419535 

„If you want people to buy in to who you are, then you have to have a really, really great story behind it.“ Freda Katunda Olsen Born in Kinshasa, raised in the USA and currently living in Germany, our guest today is on a mission to create lasting change globally. Freda Katunda Olsen cofounded LEAP in 2020, an ed-tech startup that provides healthcare education across Africa. In partnership with UNICEF, the London School of Economics, international universities and African organisations, among others, the platform provides better, faster and cheaper healthcare training to more people and reduce brain drain. Freda recently won the Social Hero Award from Global Digital Women. She is passionate about leadership and storytelling, and has lots to share about how impact-driven ventures can pitch to investors. Tune in to #149: Pitching for Impact where we discuss: How to build a strong company culture for remote multinational team Why storytelling is crucial for building a successful venture (and what to avoid) Whether all exposure is good exposure Enjoy the episode and support the podcast by sharing it and posting your review on Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dvyxVVtt

What is the foundation for everything you do in business? It’s communications. But developing communications skills is hard and time-consuming, unless …. .. you find a way to blitzscale them. We know you are in a rush, so how can you speed this up? The key is to break down communications into a number micro-skills and learn the techniques that help you make progress fast. That way every founder can become a master communicator, and turn their company into a message machine that gets results. In this episode of Speak like a CEO, Oliver Aust highlights three micro-skills that have the potential to catapult anyone into the Top 10% of communicators in business - for more impact, better leadership and higher returns. Tune in to #148 "Blitzscaling your Communications Skills“ where we discuss: 🗞 Why fact-telling is obsolete ❤️‍🔥 How to speak and present with impact 🎸 How you can lead difficult conversations to positive outcomes Enjoy the episode and support the podcast by sharing it and posting your review on Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dvyxVVtt 🙌🏼 🎬 This episode is brought to you by HeyViz, your rapid content creation studio in Berlin. 🎬 www.heyviz.com

Our guest today is passionate about enabling the next generation of entrepreneurs to build high-growth businesses. He believes they are more important than ever to create innovation, jobs and to keep Europe competitive. And there is nothing more powerful for a new business than to find its North Star and ensure that everybody can recite it in their sleep. Martin Schilling is the Managing Director of Techstars Berlin. As an angel investor, startup builder and scale-up executive, Martin co-founded and scaled a number of successful companies over the past 15 years. Together with Thomas Klugkist, he recently published "The Builder's Guide to the Tech Galaxy!“ (https://buildersguide.org): a blueprint in which Martin and others reveal their most important learnings from scaling - among others - N26 to unicorn status in less than two years. Tune in to find out Why finding and defining your North Star is the most essential step to scaling Strategies to follow when the inevitable crisis hits What common mistakes founders make when scaling and when pitching to investors Enjoy the episode and support the podcast by sharing it and posting your review on Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dvyxVVtt 🙌🏼 🎬 This episode is brought to you by HeyViz, your rapid content creation studio in Berlin. 🎬 www.heyviz.com

When it comes to Web3, “messaging is the biggest challenge” said investor Chris Dixon. “There are a lot of misunderstandings around it, some of it is self-inflicted by the community. You have a lot of people who react negatively to crypto, which can lead to over zealous regulatory behaviour.” Our guest today is working to change all this with transparency, great storytelling and an exciting new venture: Unstoppable Finance. Peter Grosskopf is one of Germany’s top fintech innovators and co-founder of several ventures including Solarisbank. His new startup Unstoppable Finance is coming out of stealth mode to democratise decentralised finance. Peter is one of the most thoughtful thinkers in the world of DeFi, blockchain and crypto and is regularly invited to speak to politicians and regulators. Tune in to find out 🗻  Why the success of Web3 depends on communications and messaging 🪢 How to build trust among the general public for a new technology ❌ How Peter answers critics of crypto and DeFi 🙏🏽 The difference between employer branding and employer being 🤷🏼‍♀️ Who Satoshi Nakamoto is (purely speculative) 😇 Enjoy the episode and  support the podcast by sharing it and posting your review on Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dvyxVVtt 🙌🏼 🎬 This episode is brought to you by HeyViz, your rapid content creation studio in Berlin. 🎬

The scarcest resource today is #talent. And finding it is often stressful for both sides. Zenjob co-founder Fritz Trott, our guest today, experienced first hand how difficult it was to find a suitable part-time job as a student. Together with his co-founders Cihan Aksakal and Frederik Fahning, he made it his mission to solve that problem. Today Zenjob offers a state-of-the-art tech solution that finds the best candidates for each job within seconds. After 7 years on the market, Zenjob is a fast-growing company with almost 500 employees, currently matching over 12k jobs with talents every month. The founders recently raised an additional €45 million to boost the expansion across Europe, starting in the Netherlands last year and now in the UK.  The purpose of Zenjob is bigger than providing on-demand staffing on short notice. It is to improve the world of work so that people can decide for themselves when and how often they work. To achieve this vision, the company has its own Zenjob Code. Tune in to this episode to find out what that exactly is, as well as 🪜 The stepping stones to building a thriving platform business 🧩 Why a niche of a niche is the key to success if you want to outperform existing players on the market 👇🏽 Why you need to exactly define the monster you want to kill before getting big investors on board Enjoy the episode and please support the podcast by sharing it and posting your review on Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dvyxVVtt 🙌🏼 🎬 This episode is brought to you by HeyViz, your one-stop video creation studio in Berlin. 🎬

Today’s guest is one of the most influential women in tech. Nicole Büttner is the founder and CEO of Merantix Momentum, a leading AI solutions firm, and a board member of Merantix, one of Germany's top investors and company builders for artificial intelligence applications. A tech-optimist through and through, she is pushing Europe to become a global leader in AI. Her impressive background in business and econometrics, academia and politics (she was even running to become a candidate for the European Parliament) has equipped her well to tackle the dual PhD problem, translating between highly specialised talents to make innovation happen. As in the case of Vara - a business that aims to make data-driven breast cancer screening accessible to everyone. Tune into the episode to find out more about 🎨 What’s behind the recent rebranding from Merantix Labs to Merantix Momentum 🪐 Nicole's journey from academia to politics to deep tech 🎤 Why she values having a political voice and how it has shaped her personal leadership style 🤖 The state and future of AI (we take a closer look at Natural Language Processing) 🏗 What’s needed for highly specialised experts from different fields to build something great together Enjoy the episode! Please support the podcast by sharing it and posting your review on Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dvyxVVtt 🙌🏼 🎬 This episode is brought to you by HeyViz, your rapid content creation studio in Berlin. 🎬

Ten years ago, the founders of the London-based fintech unicorn SumUp went from door to door to convince merchants to trust them with their money. It’s been an incredible journey since. We have all used SumUp paying for coffee or shopping at independent retailers and now take convenient payment options for granted. But that wasn’t always the case. The historically slow-moving payment industry has gone through a complete revolution over the past decade, and SumUp has been one of the key players in this. Payment used to be a luxury product, exclusive to big retailers. The long tail of small merchants was left behind. In 2012, Marc-Alexander Christ and his co-founders decided to challenge that. The company started out with one product - the white card reader you probably know from your local coffee shop. Today, SumUp offers a range of payments and solutions that give millions of businesses access to crucial financial services. The company has expanded to 31 countries so far and has 2600+ employees. Their goal: turn transactions into interactions. Tune into the episode, get inspired and find out more about: 📚 Why you need to master storytelling as a founder ❄️ How you find the two sentences that get the snowball rolling 🚀 How to win multiple markets and become a global brand in a decade 🥊 The communication challenges of becoming a multi-product company and how to tackle them successfully Enjoy the episode and please support the podcast by sharing it and posting your review on Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dvyxVVtt 🙌🏼 🎬 This episode is brought to you by HeyViz, your rapid content creation studio in Berlin. 🎬

Our guest today is the CEO of Nuri (formerly Bitwala) and a digital thought leader. Nuri enables customers to invest in cryptocurrency directly from their bank account. As Kristina Walcker-Mayer puts it: it is banking without the bankers. Kristina is rapidely becoming the chief storyteller of neobanking, shaping topics around investing, blockchain, cryptocurrency and modern leadership. In this episode she pulls back the curtain on how she leads Germany's third-largest neobank with her honest and transparent communication, and how a trip to Asia influenced her leadership style. Kristina joined Nuri in 2020 as CPO after previous senior roles at N26 and Zalando. Before taking over as CEO, she repositioned and scaled the product and design team, drove Nuri’s successful fundraising efforts together with Ben Jones and defined the future direction of the product. In this episode we take a deep dive into: ☎️ Why CEOS don’t have to have all the answers and what else matters in modern leadership 🧨 The learnings, challenges and benefits of rebranding Bitwala to Nuri 🎇 How to attract employees and retain talent even if a competitor offers twice the salary And: How this year’s summer party will solve Kristina's biggest communication challenge?! Enjoy the episode and please support the podcast by sharing it and posting your review on Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/dvyxVVtt 🚀 This episode is brought to you by HeyViz, your rapid content creation studio in Berlin. 🎬

Jerome Lange went from trying and failing to build a babysitting business as a student (no founder-market-fit) to building an operating system for construction sites (founder-market-fit). It’s badly needed: construction is pretty much the only sector that has become less efficient in the last 40 years. This has become untenable, as we need to build faster, better and more sustainably in light of climate change. A team of young entrepreneurs decided to tackle this and founded Koppla as a spin-off of the Hasso Plattner Institute in April 2020. They raised funding, now employ more than 25 people and work with some of the biggest construction companies in the region. But the sector is tough to change as construction companies are conservative and profitable, even if their methods are inefficient. In such a situation, messaging becomes even more important than usual as Jerome and colleagues have to convince a reluctant audience. In this episode we tackle: 🙌🏼 How to get your message across to an unreceptive audience 🔑 Why the brand name is key to sales and how to stress test it  🧨 How a first investor term sheet can trigger an avalanche  And much more!  Enjoy the episode and support the podcast by sharing it and posting your review on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/speak-like-a-ceo/id1441419535 🚀 This episode is brought to you by HeyViz, your rapid content creation studio in Berlin. 🎬