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Jan Poetsch spent almost twenty years working on some of the world's most complicated energy projects. He then realized that the biggest hidden opportunity in industrial energy was right on the income statement: the power bill. His career took him from a small town in Germany to offshore platforms with Shell, the Sakhalin II project in Russia, and the LNG Canada supply chain. These big projects taught him where the money often leaks out unnoticed. In late 2023, he started Arder Energy to target one of the biggest costs that most industrial companies still ignore. 

The timing of this conversation is hard to overstate. Alberta just logged 34 straight hours of $0.00/MWh power — a market record — while data centers alone are about to add a load equal to six years of normal demand growth. The operators still treating electricity as a passive flow-through cost are about to get caught flat-footed. Jan makes a sharp, practical case for why power is now a strategic lever rather than a line item, and what the smartest industrial players are already doing about it. 

Key topics covered 

• From Germany to the oil sands — Jan's journey through Shell, Sakhalin II, and LNG Canada, and the moment he realized power was the most under-managed cost in industry. 
• Inside Alberta's wild power market — 34 hours at zero, an "islanded" grid, and prices that swing from the floor to nearly $1,000/MWh. 
• How Arder finds the wins — a top-down "green/amber/red" screen that surfaces 5–10% savings before anyone touches capital. 
• Why industrial heat is so hard to decarbonize — and how brick "toasters," electrode boilers, and thermal storage rewrite the economics. 
• Canada's energy superpower question — what it actually takes, why Texas is the model, and where nuclear really fits. 

Key insights 

1. Power has quietly become strategic. Most firms run "set-and-forget" energy contracts while sweating far smaller costs — yet a single 15-minute window can drive half a month's transmission bill, and the levers to manage it are sitting right there unused. 
2. Speed beats perfection. Arder deliberately chases a high cadence of smaller, self-funding wins over a 200-page strategy report. The first project pays for the next, so clients carry almost no downside risk. 
3. Reward outcomes, not technologies. When policy picks winners, it distorts the market — cheaper, simpler decarbonization paths lose out to carbon capture on the subsidy structure rather than merit. 

Links 

• Arder Energy — https://www.linkedin.com/company/arder-energy/ 
• Jan Poetsch on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-poetsch-1206791a/ 
• Future Ventures Corp — https://linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the guest 

Jan Poetsch is the founder and CEO of Arder Energy. He helps industrial companies and investors turn their energy costs from a regular expense into a strategic advantage. Before starting Arder in 2023, he spent nearly 20 years working in global LNG and energy roles at Shell and PetroChina. He has experience working in Europe, Russia, and Canada on projects like Sakhalin II and LNG Canada. He combines business strategy with hands-on experience in industrial engineering, finance, and operations. 

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Jeremy Funk has spent more than two decades doing the one thing most people in tech were told to stop prioritizing: building real relationships. As founder and CEO of Funk Futures — a fractional sales, recruiting, and marketing firm rooted in the energy sector — he's earned a reputation as one of the industry's premier "super connectors." His value, as he puts it plainly, is the people in his phone who actually pick up when he calls. Based in Boulder County, Colorado, and a veteran of 85 cold calls a day early in his career, Jeremy built his business on a single non-negotiable pillar: authenticity. 

This conversation is important because Jeremy is using an innovative approach. As AI handles more outreach, skills like listening, curiosity, and real connection become the most valuable. For entrepreneurs trying to get big clients, build a sales process, or stand out in a world full of chatbots, Jeremy gives honest, simple advice on doing business the human way. It's part sales tips, part life lesson on building careers and raising kids in a tech-driven world. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. The relationship-first career — Why Jeremy bet on connection over coding, and how 85 cold calls a day became the foundation for everything that followed. 
2. Authenticity as a sales strategy — How telling clients the truth instead of what they want to hear became Funk Futures' number-one differentiator. 
3. Winning enterprise rapport — Doing the research, meeting buyers where they are, and turning transactional conversations into personal ones. 
4. AI as an opening, not a threat — Why mass automation has made cold calling and authentic outreach more valuable, not less. 
5. Raising connectors in a screen-first world — Phone-free summer camps, no-phone dinners, and a daughter's lawn-mowing hustle as a real lesson in selling. 

Key Insights 

• The best salespeople run on a "two big ears, one small mouth" rule — they ask and listen far more than they pitch, because understanding why someone would buy matters more than describing what you're selling. 
• AI removes friction and saves time, so buyers will increasingly expect it — but that same automation creates an opening, because the more robotic everything feels, the more people crave doing business with an actual human. 
• You're always investing in people, not products or technology; resilience forged through real adversity — getting fired, losing deals, persevering anyway — is the trait that most reliably separates great founders from the rest. 

Links 

• Funk Futures: https://www.funkfutures.com/ 
• Jeremy Funk on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfunk 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/ 

About the Guest 

Jeremy Funk is the founder and CEO of Funk Futures, a fractional sales, recruiting, and marketing firm that helps innovative companies — particularly in energy — accelerate sales, recruit top talent, and expand their market presence. A Brandeis University graduate with more than 20 years in technology and energy sales, he's recognized as one of the industry's premier connectors and a trusted advisor to founders and executives. He lives in Boulder County, Colorado, with his wife and three kids, where he's a die-hard Boston sports fan and host of multiple podcasts.

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Emilia de Stasio spent years working in finance at places like the European Central Bank and Moody's, but she later turned her focus to a market that has very little data. As a long-time art collector, she often found it hard to get reliable information to decide if a piece was a good buy. Frustrated by this, she co-founded Artscapy, a platform that aims to bring clarity, organization, and data to an industry that's usually known for being secretive and exclusive. 

This conversation is important because Emilia is in a unique position. She understands both how to build a portfolio and weigh risks versus rewards, but she also cares about art genuinely and refuses to let the financial side ignore the human aspect. Her approach offers a straightforward guide for anyone wondering if art has a place in a serious investment portfolio, how to include it without getting burned, and what it takes to shake up an industry that's been resistant to change for many years. For founders and investors, it also teaches how to create a strong data advantage and use AI to generate real value. 

Key topics covered 

• The origin story of Artscapy — how a personal frustration with the lack of honest data turned a side project for collector friends into a global platform with 15,000 members. 
• Building data in an opaque market — why clean, standardized data, not raw volume, is the hardest part of making the art market legible. 
• Art as an asset class — how diversification, thematic collecting, and uncorrelated returns make art a credible portfolio component without stripping out the passion. 
• Securitization and liquidity — how Artscapy lets collectors unlock capital from their art without being forced to sell at the wrong moment. 
• AI's real role in art — where AI transforms the art market and where it can never replace the human core of great work. 

Key insights 

1. Art is not a single, homogeneous asset. Treating a collection like a guaranteed appreciation play is a mistake; like equities, outcomes depend on research, diversification, and the discipline to walk away from most opportunities. 
2. The case for art is strongest when the financial and the personal coexist. Its low connection with other assets makes it a good fit for a modern portfolio, but its lasting value comes from owning something you truly want to keep for ten years or more. 
3. AI will never produce great art, but it has already changed how art is bought. Great art is fundamentally human, so AI struggles to create work with real depth; its true power is synthesizing millions of data points faster than any human, which is exactly where Artscapy applies it. 

Links 

• Emilia de Stasio: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilia-de-stasio/ 
• Artscapy: https://artscapy.com/home 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the guest 

Emilia de Stasio is the co-founder and COO of Artscapy, a platform that makes it easier for people to buy, manage, finance, and invest in art. She has experience working at the European Central Bank, Moody's, and family offices that invest in alternative assets. Emilia is passionate about collecting art and wants to make the art market more open, understandable, and based on data.

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Dave Guttman has spent more than three decades building, scaling, acquiring, and exiting businesses — racking up multiple 8- and 9-figure outcomes along the way. But the thing that shaped how he operates wasn't a deal. At 24, fresh off an acceptance to Wharton, three doctors misdiagnosed him and told him he had six months to live. He survived, and the experience rewired his definition of success from accumulation to impact. That shift is the throughline of this conversation. 

Why this one matters: Guttman is rare in that he speaks fluently in both registers founders actually need — the hard mechanics of raising capital, building budgets, and engineering an exit, and the harder questions of what you're scaling toward in the first place. He's blunt about where most founders go wrong (no financial model, raising too little money, mistaking confidence for competence), candid about AI as both a force multiplier and a genuine risk, and refreshingly unsentimental about legacy. If you're scaling a company and quietly wondering whether the climb is worth it, this is a conversation worth your time. 

Key Topics Covered 

• The misdiagnosis that reset everything — How a death sentence at 24 reframed his entire approach to work, relationships, and what he was building for. 
• Raising capital the right way — Why he argues raising $5M is easier than $500K, and the break-even math most founders get backwards. 
• AI as a creative force multiplier — How he built a 100-page business plan in three hours and is co-writing two books in months instead of years. 
• The coming collapse of traditional education — Why he begged his daughter not to go to college and where he thinks learning is actually headed. 
• Fortune vs. specialness — His case for radical humility, and the legacy question he poses that stops most people cold. 

Key Insights 

1. Self-awareness beats raw skill. Being weak in an area of your business is survivable; believing you're strong where you're actually weak is what kills companies. Knowing the difference is the founder's real edge. 
2. Capital needs come before valuation, not after. Most founders fixate on their valuation first, then back into a raise. Guttman flips it — figure out two to three times what you genuinely need to reach break-even, because running out of cash is the business equivalent of a plane running out of fuel. 
3. AI rewards people who already know the hard way. The tools are a multiplier on existing expertise and creativity, not a substitute for them, which is why those who learned to do the work the slow way may end up with the biggest advantage. 

Links & Resources 

• Full episode: https://youtu.be/DreXyifEPBs 
• Dave Guttman — https://www.linkedin.com/in/drguttman/ 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp

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Dr. Samir Musayev has built a career helping businesses think well beyond their home turf. As Commercial Account Director at Export Development Canada (EDC), he works hands-on with Canadian companies navigating the messy reality of global trade — financing, risk, and the practical mechanics most founders badly underestimate. Originally from Baku, Azerbaijan, and now based in Calgary, he brings an international lens shaped by years in finance and business development across borders. He also hosts the Global Nomads podcast, where he unpacks entrepreneurship, leadership, and the stories of people building companies across borders. 

This episode explains why many Canadian companies want to start exporting but often don't follow through. The reasons are usually different from what founders expect. Samir says the main challenges are not money, but lack of knowledge, paperwork problems, and thinking export is just a one-time effort instead of a long-term plan. With tariffs changing the Canada–US relationship and the need to diversify, this episode offers practical advice for any founder wanting to expand beyond Canada. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. The immigrant networking playbook — Why building a network from scratch takes double the effort, and how to actually stay top of mind once the event is over. 
2. Why Canadian companies stall on export — The knowledge gaps and unfamiliar trade mechanics (bills of lading, Incoterms, getting paid) that quietly kill international ambitions. 
3. Picking the right market — Why the "sexy" developed markets are often the wrong bet, and where real, under-penetrated demand actually hides. 
4. Getting paid across borders — The crucial difference between a buyer's inability and unwillingness to pay, and how AR insurance and documentary credits de-risk it. 
5. Tariffs, diversification, and the future of trade — What CUSMA renegotiation could mean, plus where AI does and doesn't help a still-paper-based industry. 

3 Key Insights 

1. Export holds up a mirror to your company. Cracks you can hide in a forgiving domestic market — sloppy paperwork, thin processes — get exposed the moment you go global. Build the company to export from the start; don't bolt it on later. 
2. More companies die from growth than from recessions. A $50 million contract can ruin a $10 million business if it can't handle the execution, cover the working capital, or manage the extra staff needed. Selling more doesn't help if you can't deliver—it's a liability, not a success. 
3. The cheapest risk to ignore is the one that ends you. A single unpaid six-figure invoice can take down an otherwise healthy exporter — and quotes for receivables insurance are usually free, so there's little excuse not to price it. 

Links & Resources 

• Connect with Dr. Samir Musayev on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/musayevs/ 
• Global Nomads Podcast (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@TheGlobalNomadsPodcast 
• Export Development Canada (EDC): https://www.edc.ca/ 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the Guest 

Dr. Samir Musayev is a Commercial Account Director at Export Development Canada. He helps Canadian companies get funding, reduce risks, and grow into international markets. Originally from Baku, Azerbaijan, now living in Calgary, he has experience in finance and trade, helping businesses expand across borders. He also hosts the Global Nomads podcast, where he talks with entrepreneurs and professionals who are building their lives and businesses around the world.

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Italy is known for sun, food, and culture. What it isn't known for — and should be — is being one of the top research nations on the planet. Nicola Redi has built his career on closing that gap. As Managing Partner at Obloo Ventures, one of Italy's leading deep tech VC firms, he spends his days translating breakthroughs in AI, quantum, aerospace, and computational science into companies that can actually scale. With nearly three decades spanning venture capital, corporate innovation, and research commercialization — including 15 years inside multinational corporations — Nicola sees the entire pipeline from lab bench to market in a way few investors can. 

This isn't just an Italian story. Europe and Canada both produce world-class research, then watch a lot of it get commercialized somewhere else — usually the US. Nicola is direct about why that keeps happening and what would actually have to change to stop it. He's also clear-eyed about where the real money in deep tech will be made next, and how to tell that apart from whatever everyone happens to be hyping this quarter. If you're building, operating, or investing, that filter alone makes this one worth your time. 

Key Topics Covered 

• Italy's hidden research strength — Why a country famous for tourism quietly ranks among the world's top research nations, and how that output is now becoming startups. 
• The technology-transfer model — How Obloo acts as a bridge between research labs and corporations, functioning almost like a third-party corporate venture arm. 
• Europe's single-market problem — Why fragmented rules across 27 member states hold back scaling, and what unifying the market would unlock. 
• The physical AI thesis — Where Nicola believes Europe can win even after losing the initial AI race, and why specificity beats hype. 
• What founders actually need — The skills, humility, and language scientists must learn to become operators who can build and lead companies. 

Key Insights 

Technology is a small part of the job. One of Nicola's founders — a top bio-robotics researcher — came back years after launching his company to admit the technology was only about 5% of the work. Market adoption, team-building, and execution are where companies actually win or lose. 

The real value is in the specifics. The categories everyone's talking about are usually overpriced just because everyone's talking about them. What Nicola actually gets excited about is deep tech aimed at narrow industrial problems — simulating new materials, running predictive maintenance through digital twins, and quantum built for one specific job. That's where the valuation reflects what a company can really do, not just the hype around it. 

Government's most powerful lever isn't incentives — it's buying. Nicola argues the biggest shift isn't more grants or funds-of-funds, but governments and corporations acting as launch customers for startups. As competitive pressure rises, the relationship between incumbents and early-stage companies is becoming a matter of survival: either you engage, or you get left behind. 

Links & Resources 

• Obloo Ventures: https://obloo.vc/ 
• Nicola Redi on LinkedIn: https://it.linkedin.com/in/nicolaredi 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the Guest 

Nicola Redi is Managing Partner at Obloo Ventures, one of Italy's leading deep tech venture capital firms focused on translating frontier science into scalable companies. He brings nearly three decades of experience across venture capital, corporate innovation, and research commercialization, with deep roots in scientific entrepreneurship and 15 years inside multinational corporations. His work sits at the intersection of advanced research, industrial transformation, and venture creation across AI, quantum computing, aerospace, biotech, and computational science. 

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Tom Milar has spent over a decade building infrastructure for private companies — first through incorporation services out of Hong Kong and Las Vegas, and now through Eqvista, a valuation and equity management platform serving 23,000 startups. After a successful acquisition, Tom took five of his most important team members and set out to fix a problem he kept running into himself: founders were managing ownership and valuation off static PDFs and Excel sheets, working from data that was already months out of date by the time it landed. Eqvista's answer is a real-time valuation engine that now values $4 trillion in assets and gives founders, employees, and investors a live look at what their company is actually worth — like a stock ticker for private companies. 

This conversation matters because valuation sits underneath almost every consequential decision a founder makes — raising, hiring, issuing equity, planning an exit — and most founders are working with a number that's stale, opaque, or both. Tom brings a rare combination of product obsession and financial discipline to the table, having bootstrapped Eqvista to scale on roughly half a million dollars rather than chasing rounds. For any founder thinking about their cap table, their next raise, or how to give their team real liquidity, this episode is a clear-eyed look at where private markets are heading. 

Key Topics Covered 

• The problem with PDF valuations — Why the months-long lag between financials and a finished valuation report leaves founders making decisions on outdated numbers. 
• Real-time valuation at scale — How Eqvista's engine continuously values 20,000+ companies and the data behind a $4 trillion valuation engine. 
• Controlled tender offers and liquidity — How company-led tender offers let founders set the price and structure liquidity for employees and investors on their own terms. 
• Bootstrapped, product-led growth — Why a free cap table, paid valuations, and relentless customer support drove scale without heavy fundraising. 
• The most common cap table mistakes — What early founders get wrong with paid-up capital, adjusted cost base, and overcrowded cap tables. 

Key Insights 

1. Valuation is a byproduct, not the prize. Tom and Maxim align on the idea that a strong valuation flows from belief in the founder, the idea, and the market size — not the other way around. Founders who chase the number rather than the fundamentals are optimizing for the wrong thing. 
2. De-risk before you raise. Tom's view is that founders should build a product that works, reaches real revenue, and approaches profitability before going to investors — so capital becomes fuel for acceleration rather than a bet on whether the business works at all. He's openly skeptical of early-stage bridge rounds as a sign that the original plan stalled. 
3. The story behind the price is the product. What separates a defensible valuation from a guess is the ability to explain why the number is what it is. Eqvista's edge isn't just the figure it produces — it's the pricing narrative built on hundreds of billions in valued assets that auditors and shareholders can actually rely on. 

Links 

• Eqvista: https://eqvista.com/ 
• Tom Milar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasmilar 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Tom Milar 

Tom Milar is the Founder and CEO of Eqvista, a platform for company valuation, equity management, and private-market liquidity serving 23,000 startups. Originally from the Czech Republic, he moved to Asia in 2009 and built incorporation-services businesses before launching Eqvista with a core team carried over from a prior successful exit. He is a product-first founder who scaled the company through bootstrapping, freemium adoption, and a real-time valuation engine that now values $4 trillion in assets. 

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Matthew Jackson is the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Alimentary Systems, a New Zealand company rethinking how the world handles organic waste and sewage. An Edmund Hillary Fellow with a track record of building and scaling high-growth ventures across global markets, Matthew has helped drive billions in market value creation — including bringing Netflix to New Zealand and triggering a wave of industry convergence that reshaped the local media landscape. But what makes this conversation matter isn't the resume. It's the way Matthew thinks about impact, risk, and the responsibility of building something that outlasts you. 

This episode switches between two styles, which makes it interesting. First, it honestly tells the personal story of the founder — his childhood, losing his father at 15, studying process philosophy, and the daily habits that help him stay steady during tough times. Then, it explains one of the smartest business ideas we've discussed: a system that turns sewage and industrial waste into fertilizer, energy, and carbon credits, all at a lower cost than landfills. If you want to see what real product-market fit looks like — where investors, cities, residents, and the environment all benefit — this is a good place to start. 

Some of the key topics covered in this episode were: 

• From media changes to climate projects — Matthew's first business helped Netflix start in New Zealand, increased its value by $2.1 billion, and led to a lawsuit that taught him what true commitment costs. 
• The Alimentary Systems model — Why combining two waste streams into one unlocks five distinct revenue lines and a 2.4x value multiplier over the traditional landfill. 
• The economics of impact — How the company hits roughly 30% IRR while saving municipalities money and lowering household costs, proving environmental gains and returns aren't a trade-off. 
• Carbon credits as arbitrage — The four-year effort to get onto compliance markets, and why the same credit can sell for $45 in New Zealand or $127 into the UK. 
• Founder psychology — Managing ego, mental health, and presence as the real infrastructure behind sustained execution. 

Key Insights 

1. Being right and being effective are two different things. Matthew argues that when you treat the person across the table as the obstacle, your ego takes over, and progress stalls. Real change comes from meeting people where they are and moving forward together — not winning the argument. 
2. The term "risk-taker" is often misunderstood. What seems like bold risk-taking from the outside is usually careful planning—trying different approaches to reduce risks before making a big move. Matthew knows exactly what his current risks are, how much they cost, and has a clear plan for how to back out if needed. 
3. Capital allocation is the number one risk every company faces. Working on the right things with the wrong people — or pointing capital at the wrong priorities — is what sinks ventures. Helping founders sharpen their capital allocation framework is the highest-leverage support you can offer. 

Links & Resources 

• Alimentary Systems: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alimentary-systems/ 
• Matthew Jackson on LinkedIn: https://nz.linkedin.com/in/matthewjackson 
• Future Ventures LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the Guest 

Matthew Jackson is the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Alimentary Systems, where he's building circular waste-to-energy infrastructure across global markets. A four-time founder and Edmund Hillary Fellow, he has helped generate billions in market value, from pioneering media access in New Zealand to advancing climate-positive sanitation technology. He works closely with Indigenous communities on water security and is driven by a single conviction: that the best ventures make an impact and return the same thing.

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Stanley Wei is the Founder and CEO of Pine AI, an autonomous agent platform that doesn't just answer questions — it picks up the phone, fills out the forms, and gets things done on behalf of consumers. Pine negotiates bills, cancels subscriptions, files complaints, resolves disputes, and navigates insurance claims autonomously. Before launching Pine, Stanley held leadership roles at Gore and invested in AI through Hillhouse Capital, watching the space evolve from the early deep learning era through the DALL-E inflection point that convinced him AGI was no longer a question of if, but when. 

This conversation is important because Stanley is developing a seldom-touched part of the AI stack: the unstructured, voice-based interface between agents and the physical world. Most AI products operate in digital spaces, like drafting or querying databases, but Pine trains proprietary voice models on real phone calls. This enables agents to interrupt naturally, manage silences, negotiate, and complete tasks. Understanding this reveals the future of consumer AI and how to compete against giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. The Matrix thesis for voice agents — Why the phone call is the channel that lets AI cross from the digital world into the physical one, and why this is fundamentally different from what ChatGPT or Copilot do. 
2. Building an AI company in 2024 vs. now — How model capability went from "100% hike to build an agent" to "everything is possible" in roughly twelve months, and what that means for product velocity. 
3. The unsustainable economics of AI customer acquisition — Why building product is now the easy part, why only Google and Meta own the demand side, and why hitting critical user mass has become survival-level urgent. 
4. Defending against the LLM giants — Why Pine trains its own voice model bottom-up on proprietary phone-call data instead of building on top of OpenAI or Anthropic, and where the foundation labs leave room for vertical specialists. 
5. Running a company without meetings — How Stanley designed Pine to be agent-friendly from the inside out: no code ownership, async by default, agents talking to other people's agents to coordinate work. 

Key Insights 

1. The biggest barrier to consumer AI adoption is not capability — it's trust and education. Most consumers don't yet know what AI can do, don't believe it can do it, and have to be walked through all three layers (pain, solution, proof) before they will pay. 
2. The structural shift in the AI economy has happened on the supply side, not the demand side. Coding agents made it cheap to build, but they did not create new distribution channels — so growth, not product, is now the binding constraint for almost every AI company. 
3. People have found some of the coolest ways to use Pine that the team never planned for. For example, one user who was laid off in 2025 used Pine to make money by buying rental cars cheaply and selling them for more, earning $3,000 on one deal. Another user used Pine to cut down a $5,000 credit card bill to $1,500. The product allows users to do things the creators never expected. 

Links 

Pine AI: https://www.19pine.ai/ 

Stanley Wei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanleywei 

Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Stanley Wei 

Stanley Wei is the Founder and CEO of Pine AI, an autonomous AI agent that takes action on behalf of consumers in the physical world — from negotiating bills to managing insurance disputes. Before Pine, he held leadership roles at Gore and was an AI investor at Hillhouse Capital, where he tracked the field through the deep learning era and the generative AI inflection point. He started Pine in 2024 out of personal frustration with the chores of being an international operator, splitting time between the US, Singapore, and the UK. 

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Stan Christiaens is the Cofounder and Chief Data Citizen of Collibra, one of the companies that helped define the modern data governance category. What began in 2008 as a spinoff from a semantics research lab at the Free University of Brussels has grown into a global platform used by some of the world's largest enterprises to manage data trust, lineage, governance, and increasingly, AI oversight. Eighteen years in, Stan has a vantage point most operators do not — he has watched governance get sidelined every 5 to 10 years by the next shiny technology, and he has watched the same data problems resurface every time. 

This conversation matters because AI has changed the math. Companies that treated data as exhaust instead of as an asset are now discovering that their AI ambitions are bottlenecked by foundations they never built. Stan and Maxim get specific about what those foundations actually look like, why the Chief Data Officer role is at an inflection point, and why the iceberg of unstructured data — roughly 80 to 90 percent of an organization's information — is suddenly the biggest question on every data leader's desk. If you are building, advising, or selling into enterprises right now, this is the conversation about why data discipline is no longer optional. 

Key topics covered 

1. Data as asset vs. data as exhaust — why most organizations are still "growing up" to treat data as an asset, and why fragmentation from every shiny new technology makes the problem worse. 
2. The foundations of governance done well — find it, understand it, trust it, with assigned responsibility, a repeatable process, and a system of record sitting underneath. 
3. The evolution of the Chief Data Officer role — Gartner's five versions from defensive posture to data products to "startup person," with version 6 due, and why the AI moment is the CDO's biggest opportunity. 
4. Data confidence and the AI brain — why five-nines reliability for agents is achievable but requires scaffolding around the model, and why asking an LLM not to hallucinate misses the point. 
5. Selling into enterprise as a founder — why enterprises are slow by design, why they are never greenfield, and how to find the innovation pockets that let you accelerate. 

Three key insights 

You cannot fix data after the fact. Organizations that treat data as a byproduct for years and then suddenly need AI cannot retroactively make that data useful — they have to start treating it as an asset first, which is a cultural shift before it is a technical one. 

The model is not the problem. No matter how smart the frontier LLM gets, it will not make the right decision without the right context at the right time. The work is building the harness around the model — the responsibility, processes, and curated context — not chasing the next model release. 

Patience is the entrepreneur's hardest skill. Plan for a 10-year journey, not a three-year sprint, and make sure your business ambitions and your life at home stay in harmony — because the overnight successes everyone admires were a decade in the making before they looked obvious. 

Links 

• Collibra: https://www.linkedin.com/company/collibra 
• Stan Christiaens on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stijnchristiaens/ 
• Future Ventures on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Stan Christiaens 

Stan Christiaens is the Cofounder and Chief Data Citizen of Collibra, which he helped spin out of a computer science research lab at the Free University of Brussels in 2008. Over 18 years, he has built Collibra into one of the defining companies in the data governance category, working with many of the world's largest enterprises on how they organize, trust, and use their data. He is a recognized voice on the intersection of data governance, AI, and enterprise transformation.