EWOR Been There, Done That Podcast

In this episode, Wiktor Stanislawek, Co-founder and CEO of Reactive AI, tells Daniel Dippold why European VCs called his pitch deck a red flag for naming OpenAI as a competitor, and why the angels he met in San Francisco called it ambition.

Wiktor's team are young founders from Poland who had never worked at an AI lab. YC passed on them twice. EWOR said yes after a one-minute demo: Reactive AI's token count stayed flat as other LLMs kept climbing. When Wiktor approached an OpenAI researcher to join the team, the researcher asked to invest, and the deal closed within 24 hours. The founder of Snowflake and a 5x unicorn founder followed. Now, Wiktor is challenging Silicon Valley's frontier labs from Poland with Reactive AI’s Large Awareness Models.

In this episode, Chris Fox, serial entrepreneur and Co-founder and CEO of Nimbus, talks with Daniel Dippold about treating profitability from day zero as a repeatable strategy rather than a milestone.

Chris does not start a company until he knows the one channel that will get him to profitability. For Nimbus, that was referrals, and it carried the business to millions in ARR. He explains why the old playbook of raising big and chasing product-market fit for years is gone, why that window has collapsed from 18 months to 30 days, and why he deliberately raised almost nothing when he could have raised far more.

In this episode, Fryderyk Sitnik, Co-founder and CEO of Margin, talks with Daniel Dippold about the radical frugality that kept his company alive long enough to find the idea that worked.

Fryderyk and his co-founders spent a year iterating and living on €300/month each in the Polish suburbs. Living on low burn meant that turning down money got easier, not harder. The team later said no to a €2M preempt offer over a single term, and to an acquisition offer, because neither fit the scale of what he wants Margin to become.

In this episode, Bragadeesh Suresh Babu, Founder and CEO of Tattvam AI, tells Daniel Dippold why he walked away from a role at Google to build his own startup. He decided the cost of not trying was higher than anything he was giving up, even risking his UK residency to do it.

Getting there took a year of thinking, running simulations, and hiring interns on his own money before the company existed. Now, Bragadeesh is building the intelligence layer for chip design to enable a Cambrian explosion of chips. He also shares why startup success is never luck, and why convincing yourself is harder than convincing any investor or customer.

In this episode, Moises Barbera Ramos, founder of CLARO Surgical, talks with Daniel Dippold about the investors who tried to steal his company. The day before signing, with a government grant on the line and nothing left in his bank account, they sent back a revised term sheet designed to take control from him. He chose to walk away.

What saved the company was a 15-minute conversation at a conference in Spain. From there, Moises shares how he mastered the art of storytelling in his investor updates, why he urges founders to think twice before dropping out of university, and why this Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree believes awards matter far less than the one thing that compounds: your progress.

In this episode, Emil Kostadinov, Co-founder and CEO of ManaMind, tells Daniel Dippold about the hardest weekend of his founder journey. On Friday, he closed the first big check of his round. On Sunday, he found out about his divorce. It completely decommissioned him, right when his fundraise depended on momentum.

What restarted his momentum was community. One EWOR Fellow flew from Zurich to London after Emil told him not to come. Another stayed up with him on the nights he could not sleep. And a single post in the EWOR Community Slack took him from a standstill to 15 hours of investor calls a day.

Emil also shares the three things every founder should get coached on and how eight months of co-founder interviews built the partnership ManaMind runs on today.

In this episode, Lukas Koestler, Co-founder and CEO of SE3 Labs, tells Daniel Dippold why he joined EWOR after Paul Graham called it "intellectually dishonest", and why it turned out to be one of his best decisions yet.

In this episode, Elias Malm, Co-founder and CEO of Epiminds, talks with Daniel Dippold about the craziest Friday of his life: a customer called to say he'd just been fired. That phone call was the moment Elias knew he’d found PMF.

Getting to that moment started with closing the first 15 customers using an animated Figma file and crafting an offer so good it felt stupid to say no to. Following a $6.6M raise with Lightspeed in just 10 weeks, the hard work began: months of shipping 30+ features only to kill a third of them, learning the hard way never to outsource hiring, and quietly rebuilding almost everything while customers kept using the product.

In this episode, Allegro Sprute, co-founder and CEO of Brio, talks with Petter Made about what it actually takes to lead an AI company as a non-technical CEO, including the moments when the co-founder wants to go in a different direction and every mentor in the room is suggesting something different.

Allegro started selling before the product existed, which led to early customers and enormous pressure to deliver. When the founding team's vision split in two, what followed was one of the rarest outcomes in startups: a co-founder breakup handled so professionally it didn't cost the company a single investor. He also opens up about hiring an engineer when what the company truly needed was a founding engineer, and why the difference matters more than most founders realise. When two people he deeply respected gave him completely opposite advice in the same week, Allegro had to find a third option: his own.

In this episode, Wael Abdelmalek, CEO and Co-Founder of Uthereal, gets brutally honest about what it takes to build a technical moat in the AI era – when anyone can ship a competing product over a weekend.

Together with Paul Müller, Wael discusses why vibe coding without understanding the architecture can kill a product at scale, selling before the UX existed, spending $12,000 on sales emails with zero replies, and an enterprise demo that collapsed when a manager handed it to the wrong users without context. Plus the mindset shift that keeps Wael building through guaranteed failures and painful execution – this is not a journey for someone optimizing for happiness.