Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast

Oct 10 2024 110 ep. 30 mins 76

Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast artwork

From 2024 on we'll be bringing you monthly long-form interviews with the biggest names in European startups. We'll hear from the founders, operators and investors behind the continent's biggest tech companies, to learn what makes them tick and what they've learnt as they've built their businesses.

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General Catalyst’s Jeannette zu Fürstenberg on how to scale European moonshot ideas

Oct 10 2024 45 mins

This month we’re joined by Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, managing director at global VC firm General Catalyst and cofounder of La Famiglia VC — a Berlin-based early-stage investor which merged with General Catalyst last year.Jeannette’s investments include companies like HR platform Deel, logistics startup Forto, HR tech unicorn Personio, defence unicorn Helsing and AI unicorn M

Mistral, DeepL and Kry investor Avid Larizadeh Duggan on where AI is creating value

Sep 12 2024 45 mins

Avid Larizadeh Duggan, senior managing director at Ontario-HQed growth-stage investor Teachers’ Venture Growth, is one of Europe’s first operator-turned-VCs.Her career in tech began with stints as a product manager at places like eBay and Skype, and has switched between operational and investing roles ever since. In 2021 she joined TVG, which is part of the Ontario Teachers’

Programmable plants and neurotech devices: Inside the UK government’s £800m “inventions” agency

Aug 22 2024 38 mins

This month we’re joined by Ilan Gur, CEO of the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (or ARIA), a government body set up last year to fund ambitious, breakthrough innovations.Before joining Aria, Gur was a programme director at ARPA-E, the US government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which was established to develop new cutting-edge technologies to generate, stor

Climate tech’s growing pains with Pale Blue Dot’s Heidi Lindvall

Jul 25 2024 41 mins

She’s one of the three founders of Pale Blue Dot, a Malmö-based early-stage climate tech fund which launched in 2020 and backs pre-seed and seed-stage startups reducing and reversing the effects of climate change, in Europe and the US.Pale Blue Dot came along just ahead of the wave of climate tech funds which launched in Europe amid the tech boom. Its portfolio companies include

DeepL founder Jarek Kutylowski on how his AI startup took on Google Translate — and won

Jun 27 2024 32 mins

This week on the pod we’re joined by Jarek Kutylowski, founder and CEO of German AI startup DeepL. He’s built a profitable business in a field where he’s had to compete with the likes of Google, by developing cutting edge language translation technology.The company says it now has “a customer network of 100k+ businesses, governments and other organisations worldwide” incl

Index Ventures partner Martin Mignot on where Revolut should list

May 23 2024 47 mins

Name a big European tech company, and there’s a high chance Martin Mignot, partner at Index Ventures, invested in it. Martin’s portfolio includes some of the continent’s big winners, like car sharing platform BlaBlaCar, digital bank Revolut, digital health provider Kry, HR platform Personio and delivery company Deliveroo — and some of its big failures, including energy supp

Sophia Bendz on why Spotify's Daniel Ek hired people with "no track record"

Apr 18 2024 46 mins

This week on the podcast we are joined by Cherry Ventures general partner Sophia Bendz — formerly global marketing director at Spotify — who talks us through what she's seeing across the European early-stage startup ecosystem in a challenging market.She tells us about the AI effect on young companies launching today, how founders can look after their mental health in today's to

Why Andreessen Horowitz is betting big on crypto in Europe with Sriram Krishnan

Mar 25 2024 42 mins

Andreessen Horowitz is one of the world’s best known — and biggest — VC firms, with over $35bn in assets under management, over 500 employees and a portfolio including Airbnb, GitHub, Instacart, Instagram, Lyft, Slack and Wise.But for a long time it merely dabbled in investing in Europe.So it was big news last year when the firm announced it was opening a London office — it

Hussein Kanji from Hoxton Ventures on how just much he made from investing in Deliveroo and Darktrace

Feb 29 2024 57 mins

This week Sifted editor Amy Lewin is joined by one of London’s best-known VCs Hussein Kanji, founding partner at Hoxton Ventures. He reflects on the kinds of big returns he won, and missed out on, by making early bets on companies like Deliveroo, Darktrace and Babylon.

Glovo's Oscar Pierre on the gig economy and building scaleups in Southern Europe

Feb 15 2024 46 mins

Oscar Pierre is one of, if not the, best-known entrepreneurs in Spain. His delivery company Glovo — which was bought by its bigger, listed competitor Delivery Hero in 2022 — is one of the country’s big international success stories, and now Pierre is using his experience (and financial resources) to help Spain’s next generation of entrepreneurs.He’s also still running Glo