In this episode of Unicorn Bakery, Mike Mahlkow sits down with Finn Murphy, General Partner at Nebular, to discuss how Finn identifies emerging trends and invests in founders building the future. Finn shares his philosophy of investing 12-18 months ahead of the market, focusing on areas like AI, robotics, space-based data centers, and quantum computing. Finn discusses the challenges of being a solo GP, how he balances managing his fund while supporting founders, and why curiosity and a deep unde...
Jun 13, 2025•55 min
In this episode of Unicorn Bakery, Nicolas Benady, co-founder and CEO of Swan, shares the journey of building one of Europe’s leading Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platforms. Nicolas takes us behind the scenes of how Swan started in 2019, spent two years building its infrastructure, and has now grown to process over €20 billion in payments annually. Nicolas discusses the challenges of creating a BaaS platform from scratch, the importance of conviction and timing, and how Swan is helping companies ...
May 30, 2025•1 hr 13 min
In this episode of Unicorn Bakery, Nir Eyal, bestselling author of "Hooked" and "Indistractable", joins Fabian Tausch to discuss how to design habit-forming products, balance personal focus, and build a life free from distractions. Nir shares his unique insights on the psychology of habits, why most people misunderstand distraction, and how founders can create meaningful, ethical products that improve users' lives. What You’ll Learn in This Episode: How to Build Habit-Forming Products: The Hook ...
Apr 25, 2025•54 min
Chris Merritt, former CRO of Cloudflare, shares how the company scaled from single-digit millions to $1 billion in ARR and built a foundation for long-term, sustainable growth. Chris unpacks the strategies behind scaling go-to-market teams, aligning product and sales for maximum impact, and creating strong customer relationships based on trust and value delivery. He also discusses the challenges of building a world-class organization, maintaining momentum through different growth phases, and nav...
Apr 11, 2025•1 hr 31 min
Clay is one of THE success stories of the last years. But in early 2022, after 5 years of building, Clay did close to 0 in revenue. Two years later, Clay did approximately 30 million in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue). Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay, shares the journey of building one of the most innovative AI-powered tools for go-to-market teams. From the early days of experimentation in 2017 to achieving hypergrowth and scaling to over $30 million ARR, Kareem dives deep into the challe...
Apr 01, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Stevie Case, CRO at Vanta, explains how the company surpassed $100 million in ARR in just five years by building a predictable and scalable revenue engine. From founder-led sales to structuring a global sales organization, Stevie shares actionable insights for designing a repeatable go-to-market strategy and scaling effectively. She breaks down the importance of discovery, identifying customer pain points, and building trust, along with tips on hiring and incentivizing your first sales team. Wha...
Mar 14, 2025•1 hr 23 min
w Strava started as a "virtual locker room" in 1995 and why it didn’t work The role of timing, technology, and social media in Strava’s eventual success Building a Community-Driven Platform: Why Strava focused on engagement over growth and how this approach led to organic scaling Creating joy and reducing friction for users is important to keep them active and engaged Key Lessons in Scaling: How Strava expanded from cyclists to runners and other sports while staying authentic to each audience Th...
Mar 07, 2025•1 hr 35 min
In this episode of Unicorn Bakery, Hunter Walk, co-founder of Homebrew, joins Fabian Tausch for an in-depth conversation about his journey from product management at Google and YouTube to building one of the most respected early-stage venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Hunter shares the story behind Homebrew’s evolution, why he and his co-founder Satya Patel decided to rethink the traditional VC model after nearly a decade, and how they now operate as a self-funded evergreen fund. What You...
Mar 06, 2025•51 min
In this episode, Harper Carroll, one of the most prominent voices in AI education, joins for a deep dive into the art of creating educational content, and how she built an impressive following of over 400,000 people in just one year. She reveals the behind-the-scenes strategies that helped her viral content stand out in a world dominated by flashy, fast-paced trends and why staying true to her calm, research-based teaching style has resonated with so many. What you’ll learn: The Art of Education...
Mar 05, 2025•1 hr
Fabrice Grinda, co-founder of FJ Labs and one of the world’s most prolific marketplace investors, joins the Unicorn Bakery podcast again to share his marketplace outlook for 2025. With more than 1,100 investments and 355 exits, Fabrice is uniquely positioned to discuss the trends shaping the future of startups, marketplaces, and venture capital. In this episode, he dives into the state of venture markets, the rise of B2B marketplaces, the impact of AI on startups, and why IPOs remain elusive for...
Jan 21, 2025•38 min
On March 5th, 2021, SAP acquired Signavio for a billion dollars – this marks one of the largest Tech Exits in the German market to date. How does a university side project become a billion-dollar acquisition? In this episode, Gero Decker, co-founder of Signavio, shares the incredible journey of building the company – from its roots as an open-source project to bootstrapping, scaling, and eventually being acquired by SAP for over a billion dollars. Learn about the pivotal moments, the role of tim...
Dec 20, 2024•1 hr 33 min
Kevin Hartz is not only one of the most influential seed investors in Silicon Valley, but also a successful founder. In addition to early-stage investments in PayPal, Uber, AirBnB and SpaceX, he founded Xoom (exit to PayPal for approx. 1 billion dollars) and Eventbrite (IPO). With his current startup Sauron, Kevin is in the process of developing new technologies for the home security market. Kevin talks about how he identifies outstanding founders and thinks about team building in young startups...
Jul 02, 2024•1 hr 12 min
Richard Socher, most recently Chief Scientist at Salesforce under Marc Benioff and one of the most renowned AI researchers in the world, has now founded you.com instead of joining one of the big AI companies. Richard believes that he can have a more positive impact on humanity. you.com now reaches millions of users and gives you as a user the opportunity to work based on the latest models. Richard talks about building an AI company that always has to work on the edge of innovation, how he would ...
Jun 28, 2024•1 hr 10 min
Dan Siroker built Optimizely to more than 120 million ARR before leaving the company. The company was sold and merged, and then launched, rewind.ai-now limitless.ai, a consumer product that, unlike Dan's previous company, has a software and hardware component. Dan gives deep insights into the transition from software to hardware development and the use of AI in modern startups. He explains how empathy and user research can improve the product development process and the strategies he uses to bui...
Jun 25, 2024•1 hr 12 min
Only 10% of start-ups are successful and yet 82% of founders think they will be successful. 78% of start-ups don't even manage to pay back their investors. Dave Hersh scaled a company with Jive to more than 10 million dollars in turnover, took a growth investor on board and Jive later went public. Through his other positions as a coach, board partner at a16z and also as a buyer of start-ups, he has a 360-degree perspective on the things that go wrong in the venture ecosystem. His book Reignition...
Jun 18, 2024•1 hr 9 min
Alexander Keesling researched quantum computers at Harvard and, together with a team, decided to found a company based on his research. Today, QuEra generates tens of millions in revenue, licenses its quantum computer via AWS and is building a new quantum computer in Japan for around 41 million dollars. In the podcast, we talk about the status quo of quantum computing, when quantum computers will be available to the general public, and also how difficult it is to go from researcher to CEO of a f...
May 28, 2024•1 hr 9 min
Fabrice Grinda, founder of FJ Labs and extreme athlete, explains how he has made over 1100 investments, primarily in marketplace and network-effect startups, generating an average 40% return over 26 years. Fabrice also likes to simplify a lot in his life by outsourcing things. Find out his recipe for a fulfilling life and managing virtual assistants in the podcast. What you will learn: Outsourcing: How to outsource more professionally and privately to increase your quality of life and output Mar...
May 07, 2024•1 hr 26 min
Tushar Ahluwalia founded the Razor Group together with his founding team in 2020. Since then, the Razor Group has received more than one billion dollars in investment and credit, acquired and consolidated many Amazon FBA businesses and most recently some Amazon aggregators, such as Perch. Today, the Razor Group is the largest remaining player on the market in terms of sales and serves a product catalog of around 40,000 SKUs. The vision: to revolutionize e-commerce and shine in front of consumers...
Apr 05, 2024•1 hr 6 min
Is the European climate for early-stage start-ups improving again? After the European fundraising ecosystem was somewhat more cautious in the years following the corona boom, the question is: how is it currently developing? Fabian meets George Robson, Partner at Sequoia Capital, probably the best-known venture capital fund in the world. Together they talk about financing start-ups with high capital requirements, the fine line between optimistic vision and realism when pitching and the right appr...
Mar 29, 2024•30 min
Monta has raised more than 120 million euros for its software platform for electric vehicles to improve the accessibility of charging infrastructure. Within 3 years, Monta has scaled to around 300 employees, is currently hiring 10-20 employees per month and is multiplying revenue annually. Previously, Monta founder Casper Rasmussen built 500+ mobile apps with his agency and bootstrapped the agency to 20 million in revenue. We talk about the differences between bootstrapping as an agency and the ...
Mar 22, 2024•48 min
Scott Chachon is one of the co-founders of GitHub, a developer platform that was sold to Microsoft for around 7.5 billion dollars. We talk about the moment he found out about the sale to Microsoft, how much money he made from the sale and whether it made him happy. He is now founding his third startup, Gitbutler, after investing 12 million of his own money in Chatterbug and has now decided to grow the company profitably without investment. We talk about founding in Germany and Europe as opposed ...
Mar 15, 2024•1 hr 18 min
David Heinemeier Hansson is the inventor of Ruby on Rails and founder of 37signals, a company that has developed products such as Basecamp, Hey.com and more over the last 20 years. However, apart from Jeff Bezos, David and his co-founder Jason Friedman didn't take any money and bootstrapped the company. We talk about the biggest cost drivers for companies, how 37signals managed to develop multiple products in parallel and how David thinks about the differences between Europe and the US when it c...
Mar 08, 2024•1 hr 9 min
What role does creativity play for entrepreneurs? And how is the understanding of creativity changing as a result of artificial intelligence? Scott Belsky founded Behance, sold the start-up to Adobe and is now Chief Product and Chief Strategy Officer there. Adobe is one of the 50 most valuable companies in the world. At Adobe, Scott oversees all new products and is deeply involved in what the future looks like for creatives. In this podcast episode of Unicorn Bakery, Scott Belsky and Fabian Taus...
Feb 27, 2024•38 min
Rahul Vohra sold his first company Rapportive to LinkedIn and then founded Superhuman. Superhuman is a premium email provider that is significantly faster to use than Gmail and other alternatives. Today, Superhuman has raised more than 100 million dollars and has tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of users. But how do you develop a premium product in an area where there is a lot of competition and, above all, free alternatives? In addition to Superhuman, Rahul has co-invested with T...
Feb 13, 2024•1 hr 6 min
Alex Finkelstein is a general partner at Spark Capital and has names like Twitter (X), Discord, Snap and Slack in his funds portfolio. But how does a fund like Spark Capital, and Alex in particular, invest? ALL ABOUT UNICORN BAKERY: https://zez.am/unicornbakery What you'll learn: Why is it sometimes useful as a founder:in to not just look at everything rationally? How far does Alex go to win deals and invest with founders? How does Alex shape his way of working and living to achieve as much succ...
Sep 26, 2023•36 min
In the last 4 years Job van der Voort has founded remote.com, raised about $500 million from investors like Sequoia, Accel, Index and General Catalyst, reached a valuation of $3 billion and turned the company profitable last year. Fabian talks to Job about structures that make hyper-growth possible, how remote.com managed to scale without a fixed HQ & what it took to do so, and personal growth as a founder. ALL ABOUT UNICORN BAKERY: https://zez.am/unicornbakery What you'll learn: What framew...
Aug 18, 2023•49 min
Why VCs shouldn't try to tick boxes & focus too much on pattern recognition | How to choose your Fund-Strategy | Importance of the German Market | Seedcamp's Investment Process after receiving a Pitchdeck - Reshma Sohoni & Kate McGinn, Seedcamp Seedcamp has been investing in startups for more than 15 years. A few of the investments include companies like Wise, UiPath, Revolut, Ramp and many more. Recently, Seedcamp announced their 6th fund and will increase their presence in Germany with...
Aug 11, 2023•51 min
Founder Collective is a New York based fund that has invested in Uber, Trade Desk, Stack Overflow and many more top startups. Fabian talks to Managing Partner Micah Rosenbloom about the risk of using money to magnify problems rather than solve them. "Too much capital at early stages quickly leads to bad habits and inefficiencies," says Micah - but why is that? Plus, find out why high valuations often hurt rather than help founders:in and what the thesis is all about. ALL ABOUT UNICORN BAKERY: ht...
Aug 04, 2023•1 hr
In this episode, I talk with Matt Turck General Partner at the New York based Venture firm Firstmark Capital about succeeding as a VC. Firstmark invests in a very focused way, primarily in Series A rounds. Matt himself has been focused on Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & Data for more than 10 years. AI Hype: What do companies and founders need to survive the hype? Growth Fundraising: Matt's portfolio companies Pigment and Synthesia just raised large growth roungs. Are growth finan...
Jul 07, 2023•55 min
Jonah Goodhart has had two exits with a total volume of more than $1.5 billion. He was a founding investor in Right Media (sold to Yahoo), but according to insiders, he was much more involved. He sold the advertising management platform MOAT to Oracle in 2017 for about $850 million. That's why we're talking about Jonah's company building for B2B SaaS startups. ALL ABOUT UNICORN BAKERY: https://zez.am/unicornbakery What you'll learn: -Validating ideas: What makes a really good SaaS idea? -How do ...
Jun 30, 2023•1 hr 9 min
