Feed Your Brain Podcast

Everyone's talking about it.

The economy has not been looking good.

Max and Mike discuss the current macro situation and what it means for startups, employees, and society as a whole.

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Andreesen Horowitz:

"There was so much pain that just went into this and so much blood, sweat, and tears, personal commitment, you know, working really for three, four years, not sleeping, not having a personal life in that sense. And suddenly this whole thing, that's to fall apart."

It didn't take long for founder and entrepreneur Stephan Heller to move on and start something new after selling his previous company. In this episode, Stephan reflects on his experiences working with startups over the years and shares the lessons he's learned. We also learn about his current project, AlphaQ, which was founded with the goal of creating an innovative, unique fund of funds structure that has the vision of being listed on the stock exchange and thus democratizing access to venture capital.

As the population grows exponentially and the demand for meat grows, producing meat has become increasingly unsustainable.

Hungry to change that, Planted Foods has been revolutionizing the food chain. Pascal Bieri, one of its founders, joins us today and inspires us to rethink what we eat as he shares with us the whys and hows of producing meat from alternative proteins.

Be part of the food revolution:

Is getting a novel published comparable to getting a startup funded?

Saket Kumar answers this question in this week’s episode. He freely takes us on an unexpected journey, from creating a novel to founding his current company. We also find out why he went from being a venture capitalist to becoming a founder and why he intends to stay for the long haul.

Saket is the co-founder and CEO of Vitt, a company that provides fast and non-diluted funding for growing SaaS businesses. For three years, he worked as an early-stage venture capitalist.

Learn more about Vitt:

“I can now focus on things that I'm more uniquely suited to and that I'm just way better at that bring me more joy.”

That is one thing that effective energy management can do for you. This week, Max and Mike talk about energy management. They talk about what they do, including how they structure their day to be the most productive. In this episode, they also let us take a peek at some of their favorite gadgets!

Jay Rosenkrantz is using the Web3 world to build a playground for writers, artists,s and collectors. With his company Heroic Story, Jay and his brother are creating a new game, where players build stories and fantasy worlds together.

Before, Jay was one of the leading online poker players in the world, coached poker player all over the world, created the most popular comedy series about poker which was featured on ESPN, and built the largest online poker training platform. 

Our guest today tries to prevent the climate crisis using the power of Green Hydrogen. Vaitea is a co-founder of Enapter, an award-winning company that is productizing the usage of hydrogen. 

Enapter is hiring. If you want to help save the world and work with amazing people like Vaitea, apply here: https://www.enapter.com/careers

Other things that were mentioned during the call:

- The Earth Shot Prize: https://earthshotprize.org/

- The Wise Heart: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1920089.The_Wise_Heart

We have Albert Gajsak as a guest on the podcast today. Albert is a young founder who combines hardware and software with a team of 20 to develop electronic devices. Essentially with the purpose of teaching kids more about technology.

Since its launch in 2017, Circuitmess has sold over 50,000 products to over 30000 customers - all over the world. Currently, they are working with Warner Bros on a special launch of a Batmobile toy, called CircuitMess Batmobile™. The product raised over $100,000 on Kickstarter in just a few hours. 

Their products give kids the opportunity to learn about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) in a fun way.

Together, Mike, Max, and Albert talked about the following topics: 

• about CircuitMess' early beginnings and its passion for combining software and hardware.
• the joint project to develop a hardware product with Warner Bros and what it was like for him to work with a big corporate as a small startup
• Current challenges in the supply chain by Corona
• His first steps in VC fundraising

We look forward to hearing from you. Feel free to get in touch with us on any channel. 

Everyone knows finding product market fit. But what about the Language? There's a concept which was presented by OpenView about Language-Market Fit - we found it inspiring and shared it with you through this way here.

Furthermore, we talk about first insights into Web3 and our viewpoint on it.

The nest guest is on board - Michael Bervell. MIchael is a Ghanaian-American angel-investor, entrepreneur, and author. He's the author of "Unlocking Unicorns", a book about the stories and habits of leading entrepreneurs in Asia, Africa and the Middle East (e.g. he personally interviewed Jack Ma for the book). 

In 2007, he co-founded the non-profit "Hugs for" where he funraised over 500,000 $ in materials and monetary donations and impacted over 300,000 youths around the world. Because of his work, Bervell was awarded the National Caring Award in 2015 (alongside Pope Francis, Dikembe Mutombo, and 7 others).

He became the youngest President of the Harvard Club of Seattle and a former member of the Harvard Alumni Association after he studied in Harvard himself. 

His various efforts led to a diverse set of awards, such as the GE-Lloyd Trotter Scholar (2018), World Internet Conference Wuzhen Scholar (2017), Walter C. Klein Scholar (2017), United Health Foundation Scholar (2016), Deutsche Bank Rise Into Success Scholar (2016), Blacks at Microsoft Scholar (2016) and many more. 

We talked about this new book "Unlocking Unicorns", African's tech ecosystem, angel investing and many more topics. 

We had the chance to interview another Founder again, namely the Founder and current CTO of Passbase, Mathias Klenk. Passbase's goal is to "empower the world with a digital identity system that puts you, the individual, first".

Mathias and we talked about the role of a human identitity, the importance of it in today's world, winning the first investors and the differences between studying at Stanford vs. studying in a German university.

In this episode, we talked about asynchronous working with our teams and which tools we use, learnings from hiring people and books that we've recently read. 

Feel free to connect via Linkedin (leave a message) 

I haven't been here for while, however, I thought of publishing this episode to keep you up to date on what's happening.

128 - ULTRALEARNING (focusing on entrepreneurs) with Scott Young

Carl Kronika is the 19-year-old founder of Copus. Copus is a leading PR agency, specialized on startups, in the Nordics and in Europe. Copus has around 10 employees and helps startups from all over to build up their PR strategy. 

Carl and I talk about 

• the upsides of PR 
• when to start PR as a general topic in a company
• how and when you can approach journalists for PR 
• how to build relationships with journalists and PR people 

Did you enjoy the show? Leave us a comment on the socials, give a review or share it on your platforms! Would mean a lot :) 

SHOWNOTES

Nir Eyal is a known face in the tech- and entrepreneurship scene. He is a Wallstreet-Bestselling Author of the book 'Hooked - How To Build Habit Performing Products', a long-time entrepreneur and an angel investor in different tech startups like Anchor, Eventbrite or ProductHunt. In addition to that, he has been teaching at Stanford Graduate School of Business and has helped different tech companies take their way around building products. 

Besides all that, he has just published a new book a couple of days ago called 'Indistractable - How To Control Your Attention And Choose Your Life'. It's all about understanding the psychology of us not doing the right things and clear ideas on how we can become more productive and more focused in what we do every single day. I have had the chance to read it and I was blown away by the way he breaks down distraction to major concepts and helps with definite methods to bring more traction in life when it comes to doing the right tasks. 

Enjoy the ride! 

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