This Much I Know - The Seedcamp Podcast

In this episode, Carlos was joined by Ernesto Suarez, CEO of Halo Insurance Services, and Nikolaus Sühr, CEO and Co-Founder of Seedcamp's own KASKO, to discuss the future of insurance tech. The insurance market, like the financial and property markets, is poised for startups to shake up the status quo - and they already are! In this conversation, the three discuss what is happening in the space, the key players emerging across the sector and what we can expect to see in the coming years.

In this second episode, Carlos and Tom from the Seedcamp team were joined by Seedcamp portfolio company, Spoke. Founder Ben Farren joined them to tell us about the story behind Spoke and the origins of building a UK men's brand from scratch. Spoke is an e-commerce model to give men exactly what they're looking for: properly made clothes that really fit, without the luxury markup. Its clothes are cut in more sizes, from the very best fabric and trim - then sold direct to the consumer, at a sane price. Prior to Founding Spoke in 2012 (and in 2011 with Spoke V1 - Ben is a great example of showing how to pivot!) he founded and launched Splash, West Africa's first Mobile Payments Platform, still one of just three on the continent to reach profitability.

This week we're sharing a short series for anyone who's ever wanted the inspiration, knowledge and insight into what it's like to build a retail business online. In this first episode, Carlos was joined by Julian Wilson, Co-Founder and CEO of Khunu, earlier this year to hear his story. Julian shares his experience in building a retail business in a fast-paced environment, with no prior experience. From the initial concept to finding product-market fit, and finding the talent to scale and the future of the business, you can find it all in this episode.

In this episode, Carlos was joined by Jonathan Moules, a long-standing journalist for the Financial Times. Jonathan imparts his wisdom having worked with entrepreneurs for over the last decade to deliver the best stories for the FT. He has worked through the first dot-com boom and switched focus in 2005 to focus fully on Founders. Jonathan provides great advice on how to tell the human element of a story, how best to create and build a relationship with a journalist, how to spot bad PR's and what stories work best for him.

In this episode, Carlos was joined by Dr. James Smith and Jonathan Heusser, for a look into Bitcoin - what it is, what it means for the industry and how the startups developing within this new space. If you want to get to grips with Bitcoin and the future of payments, this podcast is the best place to start. James Smith is CEO and Co-Founder of Seedcamp-backed startup, Elliptic. The company identifies illicit activity on the Bitcoin blockchain and provides services to the leading bitcoin companies and law enforcement agencies, globally. The team recently announced a $5M series A round to keep building out its blockchain forensics tool. Jonathan Heusser is Founder of Queueco, a market maker for digital currencies. They develop a scalable, automated trading platform and deploy it globally to trade on all major digital currency exchanges. Their strategies rely on the latest statistical and machine learning techniques and support the digital ecosystem by adding much-needed liquidity.

Stefan Klestil, Partner at Speedinvest, joins Carlos for our latest podcast. Alongside Seedcamp, Speedinvest invested in Holvi (acquired by BBVA) and in Curve, the fintech startup that consolidates all your payment cards into one. In this episode, Stefan and Carlos talk through his career, investments in the FinTech space and how investors can best support their founders. Stefan also gives an insight into what Speedinvest looks for in startups and which geographies are of key interest for new startups working in the FinTech space.

In this episode, Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, General Partner for leading VC Balderton Capital, joins Carlos to talk through his career working at giants such as Uber and Dropbox, and other players in the mobile landscape. The two discuss his first-hand experience of being acquired and his work in teams that very quickly scaled to include hundreds of employees. Carlos and Lars also look at the three key elements that have built global successes Dropbox, Whatsapp and Uber; the team, simplicity of product and monetization strategy.

In this episode, Carlos was joined by Damian Kimmelmann, Co-Founder and CEO of DueDil, a fintech company that provides accurate, comprehensive and up-to-date private company data. After talking through Damian's background as a serial entrepreneur and the idea that built DueDil, we switch focus and talk through sales, looking at how to find and scale a b2b sales team.

Dimitar Stanimiroff, Managing Director of Stack Overflow Developer Insights at Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for programmers with over 4 million members, joins Carlos and Dave for this deep dive into hiring. Discussing everything from the hiring process, how to overcome challenges, hiring from within, and how to recruit technical talent if you're not technical.

Will Herrmann, Head of Commercial Operations for Hassle.com, joins Seedcamp's Dave Haynes in this podcast which follows Hassle.com's recent exit, having been acquired by Helpling. Following a session with some of our startups, Will discusses everything from scaling company operations following Hassle.com's Series A round to valuations and M&A.