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While most of private equity is chasing the same overheated deals with the same recycled playbook, Kurt Winter and Kevin Salquist are doing the opposite. As Partners at Big 7 Partners, they buy the industrial businesses nobody talks about at conferences — fasteners, gaskets, threaded rod, the components that quietly hold American infrastructure together. The companies are usually 30+ years old, founder-run, profitable, and operating in unmarked buildings you'd drive past a hundred times without noticing. That's the point. 

The contrarian discipline is what makes this episode worth your time. Kurt spent 30 years as a manufacturing operator. Kevin spent 30 years in capital markets — trading, market making, the works. They've built something that doesn't look like normal PE: hold periods of 10–15 years, little to no leverage, deal-by-deal instead of a blind pool fund, and they won't pay more than 4x EBITDA. With so much dumb money chasing the same deals right now, their approach is a real counterweight. Tangible businesses. Sleep-at-night returns. A playbook that just keeps compounding while the rest of the industry is sprinting for the exit. 

Topics covered 

1. The Big 7 thesis — why niche industrial manufacturing is one of the most overlooked sectors in private equity right now. 
2. Continuity-focused investing — how a 10–15 year hold and zero-leverage approach changes everything about how you run a deal. 
3. The operator playbook — flipping the pyramid upside down, creating owners on the shop floor, and why "quarter turns" beat blow-ups. 
4. Deal discipline — what kills a deal for Big 7, why they walk when bidding wars start, and the one that got away in Texas. 
5. Onshoring and the macro tailwind — how tariffs, reshoring, and the death of cheap China manufacturing are reshaping the runway for U.S. industrials. 

Key insights 

• Make money on the buy, not the exit. Big 7 caps their EBITDA multiple around 4x and walks the moment a process turns competitive. The discipline isn't about being cheap — it's about protecting the math when the hold is measured in decades, not quarters. 
• Founders don't underestimate their businesses by accident. After 25 years at the helm, the spotlight narrows. Kurt and Kevin's job is to widen it again — usually with basic, almost embarrassing questions like "why aren't we selling to GE?" The answers unlock revenue that was sitting in plain sight. 
• Boring is a feature. Big 7 explicitly positions itself as the contra-SaaS investment. No 100x returns, no AI hype cycle, no crypto volatility. Just essential products, steady 15% returns, and businesses that will be making the same parts a decade from now. 

Links 

• Big 7 Partners website: https://big7ventures.com/ 
• Kurt Winter on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/kurtawinter/ 
• Kevin Salquist on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinsalquist28/ 
• Future Ventures: https://linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About the guests 

Kurt Winter is a Partner at Big 7 Partners and a 30-year manufacturing executive who spent his career inside U.S. industrial businesses — proudly domestic at a time when most of the industry was offshoring. Kevin Salquist, also a Partner at Big 7, came up through capital markets over three decades, working as a market maker, sales trader, and in cap intro before moving into PE. The two of them run Big 7's acquisition and operating playbook across niche industrial manufacturers in the U.S. 

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Juho Risku, after 30 years across different roles, founded Butterfly Ventures, a unique venture capital firm. Previously, he was a serial entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, raising capital and nearly going bankrupt. Now, he leads a leading Nordics investor in deep tech and hardware with over 100 portfolio companies and multiple funding rounds since 2012.

This conversation reveals Juho’s honesty about tough truths: why he doesn't support single founders, why deep tech teams face delays (not technical issues), and why the Nordics—17 times more startup value per person than Europe—are overlooked. It provides insights for deep tech founders, European investors, and due diligence. 

Topics Covered 

• From bulletin board systems to Butterfly Ventures. Juho ran one of Finland's biggest BBSes as a teenager in the late 1980s. Three decades later, he's running a €50M deep tech fund. We trace the path. 
• How Juho decides at pre-revenue. Tech first, then differentiation, then market size — in that order. Butterfly also uses a scoring system across the partnership, mostly to surface where partners see things differently so they can argue it out. 
• What goes wrong with deep tech founders. The pattern Juho sees over and over: brilliant technical teams who won't show the product to a customer until it's polished. By the time they do, they've burned a year they didn't need to. 
• How IP transfers work in the Nordics: Why Finland's university-to-startup model accelerates spinouts, and why Sweden's professor-owned IP creates friction. 
• Why the Nordics punch above their weight: Small markets, English fluency, a problem-oriented culture, the rise and fall of Nokia, and Slush — "by far the best VC startup event in the world." 

Key Insights 

1. Get the order right, not the decimal. 

Butterfly scores every company across the same dimensions, before investment, right after investment, and then every quarter. What Juho cares about isn't whether the market is $2.4B or $ 2.1 b. It's whether this deal sits in his top three or top five at any given moment. Most VCs spend their time on the wrong question. 

2. No solo founders. Period. 

In 13+ years and 100+ deals, Butterfly has never written a check to a single founder. When a strong technical founder shows up alone, Juho's team will often help them find a commercial co-founder first, then come back to the deal. He treats team composition as data, not vibe. 

3. Customers before polish. 

Juho's frustration with deep tech founders, particularly Finnish ones, comes back to the same point. They won't talk to customers until the product is "good enough," so they don't talk to customers. The honest version is that customers don't need polish; they need to know whether the product solves their problem. Founders who figure this out early hit revenue faster. The ones who don't, don't. 

Links 

• 🌐 Butterfly Ventures: https://butterfly.vc/ 
• 💼 Juho Risku on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrisku/ 
• 🏢 Future Ventures Corp: https://futureventures.ca 

About the Guest 

Juho Risku co-founded Butterfly Ventures in 2012 and is a Partner. The fund invests in early-stage deep tech and hardware companies, mainly from Nordic and Baltic universities. Juho was an entrepreneur for years before becoming an investor, building a web tech company in the late 90s, filing a patent for browser modification, and running a Silicon Valley operation. He lives in Finland, has been involved in over 100 portfolio companies, and meets 300-400 founders annually.

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Most founders try to scale revenue by adding tools. Scott Finkelstein argues they're solving the wrong problem. After four decades in sales, $6 billion in career deals, and a stint as Chief Revenue Officer at PeopleFax, Scott has seen the same pattern destroy growth-stage companies again and again: founders hit a million in revenue, panic, and hire a VP of Sales to fix what's actually a systems problem. The fix doesn't stick because there's no engine underneath — no repeatable cadence, no clear ICP, no honest read on what's working. 

In this conversation, Scott unpacks the engine metaphor that runs through everything he teaches at Sales Scalers, his Austin-based AI sales coaching platform. He and Maxim get into why most sales methodologies are 85% the same, why founders should bring go-to-market in on day one (not after the product is built), and how the best salespeople he's ever worked with treat selling as a listening exercise rather than a pitch. If you're a founder trying to move from founder-led sales to a scalable revenue engine — or you've already made the wrong hire and you're trying to figure out what broke — this one is for you. 

Topics Covered 

1. Why founders hire a VP of Sales too early — and what it costs when you bolt a senior leader onto an engine that doesn't exist yet. 
2. The ICP intimacy gap — most founders can name their ICP but can't describe them like a friend sitting next to them, which is where outreach falls apart. 
3. Goals vs. standards — the distinction Scott uses with every salesperson he coaches, illustrated through his own son's quota structure. 
4. Buying signals beyond the obvious — how the depth of what a prospect shares tells you whether you have a real deal or a polite stall. 
5. AI in the sales stack — Plaud, Whisper Flow, Replit, and the rule Scott never breaks: a human reviews anything going out to the world. 

Key Insights 

The engine beats the tool stack every time. A junky engine that only goes 10 miles an hour will still grow your business exponentially if you run it consistently and score yourself against it. Most founders don't have a junky engine — they have no engine at all, and they're trying to add fuel. 

Honesty in outreach beats warm-up. Three months ago, Scott rewrote his cold messages to lead with something like "Hey, I know you're busy, so let me get straight to it — yes, I'm selling something." He started getting more no's. He also started getting more actual replies, including a LinkedIn message on a Sunday from someone saying they were finally ready to talk. The people who said no said it because he respected their time enough to be direct, and a no with engagement is worth more than a yes you had to trick out of someone. 

Bring go-to-market in on day one. Scott told a story about being on a panel where someone asked when founders should start thinking about go-to-market, and he said day one. The tech guy on the panel pushed back. Scott's answer was that you're building because you think you know what the world wants, but you don't actually know — you have to go find out. Five conversations with the right people, before you write the spec, will save you from building two months in the wrong direction. 

Links 

• Sales Scalers: https://salesscalers.com/ 
• Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-finkelstein-08026914 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Scott Finkelstein 

Scott Finkelstein is the founder of Sales Scalers, an AI-powered sales coaching platform built on the idea that systems should adapt to how each salesperson actually sells. He has spent more than four decades in sales across investment banking and

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Stan Sirakov, a General Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures with 15+ years of venture experience, has invested in 150+ startups since 2012, mainly in regions with limited institutional VC. He founded a fintech marketplace in 2007 and helped launch Bulgaria's first incubator in 2009. His expertise covers Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Poland, and more. This conversation is vital as the venture landscape shifts: the US-only focus fades, and overlooked regions produce global winners like UiPath, Wise, Rimac, Eleven Labs, Telerik, and Outfit7. 

Topics Covered 

1. From zero VC to a thriving ecosystem — How Central and Eastern Europe evolved from a single risk-averse fund in 2007 to billion-dollar exits, and the micro-cycles that drive each country's emergence.
2. The diaspora investment thesis — Why LAUNCHub actively backs founders connected to the region's global tech network, and how alums from Telerik, UiPath, Skype, and similar companies are recycling capital and knowledge back home.
3. The "engineering EU, go-to-market US" model — Why most regional companies build product in Europe but sell into US enterprises, the exceptions to the rule, and what it takes to make the transition work.
4. Founder mistakes after a Series A — Overspending, premature US sales hires, selling too early, and the engineer-to-CEO transition that breaks more companies than founders admit.
5. AI inside the venture model — How LAUNCHub is automating its own workflows, why founder productivity is changing the unit economics of early-stage companies, and the new credibility risk that comes with vibe-coding. 

Key Insights 

• The first US sales leader hire is almost always wrong — plan for it. Stan has 15 years of venture data and cannot recall a single portfolio company that nailed its first US sales leader on the first try. Founders should budget for the second or third hire to be the one who actually moves the needle, and resist the pressure from US investors to skip that learning curve. 
• Big exits don't just create wealth — they create ecosystems. Every major outcome in the region (Telerik in Bulgaria, UiPath in Romania, Rimac in Croatia, Skype in Estonia) has triggered a cascade of new founders, angels, and follow-on companies. The pattern mirrors Boulder and the PayPal mafia: it's not capital that builds startup ecosystems — it's recycled operators with skin in the game. 
• The biggest gap in Central and Eastern Europe is no longer first-check capital — it's the seed lead. Angels can now fund the first $500K in most regional markets. What's missing is the institutional fund willing to lead a $500K to $3M round and bridge the founder to a credible Series A. That gap is precisely where LAUNCHub's Fund III is positioned. 

Links

• LAUNCHub Ventures: https://launchub.com/ 
• Stan Sirakov on LinkedIn: https://bg.linkedin.com/in/stanislavsirakov 
• Maxim Atanassov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov/ 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/ 

Guest Bio

Stan Sirakov is a General Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures, an early-stage fund in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. He founded a fintech marketplace in 2007, survived the 2008 crisis, and helped launch Bulgaria's first startup incubator in 2009. After fifteen years and 150+ investments, he's a leading seed investor in the region, focusing on diaspora founders, technical teams targeting US enterprise markets, and Series A funding critical for early-stage startups.

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Ivar Skårset, CTO of ENEnergy, is tackling the overlooked challenge of replacing fossil fuels in sectors that can't run on electricity. Coming from the Norwegian oil industry, he sought renewable fuels for heavy industry. 

Twenty years later, the issue persists: electricity makes up 20% of global energy, while 80% involves industries and vehicles that don't electrify quickly or cleanly. ENEnergy believes renewable fluids and lignin can help because they fit existing infrastructure. This discusses how the technology works, why Australia's Top End is ideal for testing, and why capital, not science, is now the main barrier. 

What we covered 

• Drop-in fuels. Renewable alcohol-based fuels and lignin can run in engines and industrial kits that already exist, with only minor modifications. No fleet rebuild required. 
• Lignin replacing coal. It's a plant material with energy content close to coal, and it can go straight into steel production and coal-fired power plants — even ones that have been shut down or mothballed. 
• The Australia play. Arid land in the Top End, combined with cattle stations and saline irrigation, makes the whole thing work without taking food crops off the table. 
• The carbon math. The full cycle, from growing the biomass to burning the fuel, is CO2-negative. Stack carbon credits on top, and the unit economics start to look very different. 
• The capital and incumbent problem. Why oil and gas majors say "this is the future" in private, then route the conversation into renewables departments that go nowhere — and what it actually takes to fund a first plant. 

Three key insights 

1. Everyone's talking about electrification, and fair enough — it's where most of the money is going. But the timeline people throw around doesn't really hold up. You'd need to roughly five-x global electricity production, rebuild a huge chunk of the grid, and swap out something like 3 billion vehicles. That's decades of work, and probably more. Drop-in renewable fuels are interesting because they sidestep almost all of that. The pipes, the engines, the storage — it's all there already. You just put a different molecule through it. 
2. Steel is a problem on its own. You can't decarbonize it just by adding electricity, because steel is literally carbon plus iron. The carbon has to come from somewhere, and right now that somewhere is coal. Lignin can fill the same role from a renewable source, which is the thing that actually makes "green steel" mean something. Otherwise, it's just a label. 
3. In cleantech, the science usually works. The capital is what kills you. ENEnergy is a good example — they've got construction partners interested, project financiers interested, basically the whole downstream lined up once they hit the build phase. The problem is getting to the build phase. That stage in between, where you're doing the documentation and the engineering work and putting together the evidence package nobody wants to fund, is where most companies in this space quietly fall apart. 

Links 

• ENEnergy: https://www.enenergy.net/ 
• Connect with Ivar: [email protected] 
• Future Ventures LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZgPPHfPBZz-r5NQLq_dWfA 

About Ivar 

Ivar Skårset, CTO and co-founder of ENEnergy, has nearly 20 years developing renewable fluid alternatives and lignin-based coal substitutes to decarbonize heavy industry. Starting in Norway's oil and gas sector, he believes energy solutions must work within existing systems. Based in Norway, he leads ENEnergy's technical strategy and partnerships with industrial offtakers and capital partners. 

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Mike Solow is the co-founder of 99 Proof, a boutique investment firm supporting and scaling emerging beverage alcohol brands. With over two decades of experience, he has advised more than 200 entrepreneurs in business development, sales leadership, and capital strategy. Mike works at the intersection of operators and investors within one of the most competitive and often misunderstood consumer categories.

This is a good time to look at the beverage alcohol industry because it's going through big changes. Private equity investment has dropped for the first time in ten years, and revenue values have fallen from double digits to around six. Things like new health treatments, rising food costs, and catching up after COVID-19 have shifted the industry. For those starting or investing in consumer brands, Mike’s tips for handling these changes are very helpful.

Topics Covered

The story of 99 Proof: Mike’s path from a stressful sales job to creating a company that connects family offices with alcohol entrepreneurs who have different views.

Competing with industry leaders: Why small brands succeed by focusing on a specific niche and positioning themselves as attractive acquisition targets, rather than competing directly with major players.

The post-COVID reset: The impact of restocking, inflation, and an influx of new founders, and why the industry is contracting rather than declining.

Valuation outlook for 2026: The transition from 10-15x revenue multiples to approximately 6x, the end of inflated exit comparisons, and the need for founders to demonstrate value through tangible results.

Authenticity makes brands more appealing. Today’s consumers are selective—supporting certain celebrities, caring about charity work, and preferring founders to keep the core brand qualities in-house while only outsourcing specific tasks.

Key Insights

The era of unlimited marketing budgets is gone. Previously, brands could quickly grow by spending heavily on advertising. Now, investors want companies to be more careful with their money and to demonstrate steady progress toward profits. As a result, strategic buyers are adjusting how they value businesses to reflect these new priorities.

Taking things slowly and growing steadily is usually better than jumping into many markets at once. Founders often overlook how expensive it can be to enter multiple areas. Successful brands concentrate on building a strong local presence, test their message in one area, and then carefully expand into nearby states.

Authenticity should come from within the company. The founding team needs to own the brand’s values, message, and identity. Even if manufacturing, distribution, and execution are outsourced, relying on outside firms for brand storytelling can make the brand seem inauthentic, since consumers are very aware.

Links

• Mike Solow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikesolow/
• 99 Proof: https://www.linkedin.com/company/99-proof-partners/
• Future Ventures: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp

About Mike Solow

Mike Solow is the co-founder of 99 Proof, a boutique investment firm focused on backing and scaling emerging beverage alcohol brands through equity, debt, and real asset structures. He brings over two decades of experience across business development, sales leadership, and capital strategy, having advised more than 200 entrepreneurs in one of the consumer's most competitive categories. Mike operates at the intersection of operators and investors, helping founders not just raise capital — but deploy it in ways that actually drive growth.

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Simon Zadek has over four decades shaping sustainability in capital, policy, and markets, from the 1992 Rio Summit to ethical businesses like Ben & Jerry's and The Body Shop, battles over global supply chains, advising Chinese regulators, and senior roles at the UN and G20. He founded AccountAbility and NatureFinance to measure corporate accountability and how markets view nature. Now, as Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Morphosis, he focuses on adaptation as the key capital question of the next decade. 
Simon's conversation is valuable because he clarifies key differences between decarbonization, resilience, and adaptation, which many confuse, causing misallocated capital. He redefines adaptation as an innovation driver, not a cost, vital for markets reshaping globally. This discussion is crucial for climate-focused founders and investors aiming beyond 1.5 °c. 

🎯 Key Topics Covered 

1. Defining Adaptation, Resilience, and Decarbonization — Why these three concepts are often conflated and why treating them as distinct is the first step toward pricing climate correctly. 
2. The Four Forces Pricing Climate Into Markets — How financial regulators, corporate reporting, public policy, and consumer expectations combine to shape where capital flows. 
3. Country Case Studies in Adaptation Strategy — From France planning for a 4-degree world to Brazil's ecological industrial strategy to China's food self-sufficiency pivot to Gulf state water redundancy. 
4. The Food-Water-Energy Security Nexus — Why this intersection will be a defining growth area for private capital and why it matters as much in Switzerland as in Kenya. 
5. AI, Distributed Infrastructure, and the Adaptation Economy — How artificial intelligence and decentralized solutions can serve low- and middle-income households and the new dependencies they may create. 

💡 Three Key Insights 

• Climate risk remains systematically mispriced, driven by short-termism and policy gaps. As a result, many profitable adaptation-solution businesses face markets that don't yet reward what they deliver — creating a structural window for early capital. 
• Private capital will have to lead the adaptation buildout because public balance sheets are overextended and blended finance is narrowing, shifting the burden decisively onto commercial investors and the policy levers that make adaptation solutions profitable. 
• The fastest-growing adaptation markets will be among low- and middle-income households, not in the OECD, because that is where demand for affordable, distributed solutions in food, water, energy, and shelter is already accelerating. 

🔗 Links and Resources 

• Morphosis: https://www.morphosis.solutions/ 
• The Rise of the Adaptation Economy Report: https://www.morphosis.solutions/adaptation-economy 
• Simon Zadek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-zadek-b3024826/ 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/ 

👤 About the Guest 

Dr. Simon Zadek is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Morphosis, a Swiss-based transformative adaptation solutions business that channels private capital into businesses serving low- and middle-income households in vulnerable regions. He is the founding CEO of NatureFinance, the founder of AccountAbility, a Senior Fellow at the Paulson Institute, a member of the Club of Rome, and a Senior Advisor to the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures. He has served as Sherpa for the G20 green finance work track under the Chinese, German, and Argentinian Presidencies and has held senior sustainable finance advisory roles in the Executive Office of the UN Secretary General.

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Ben Klepacki is the co-founder and CEO of WestGen Technologies, a Calgary-based hybrid power company that reduces up to 99% of methane venting at oil and gas sites while improving economics. A professional engineer, he started on Canada's largest wind farm but shifted focus from alternative energy to oil and gas after realizing fixing the existing system could have a greater climate impact. WestGen's flagship, the ePod, was sketched on a flight from Grande Prairie and now powers well sites across North America for clients like Painted Pony, Petronas, and Shell.

Ben's journey was never easy. It began with a software startup that failed before he launched WestGen, and continued with a 2019 launch, funded entirely with his own money. The prototype from that launch was sold at cost to Painted Pony, but then oil prices plummeted into negative territory, and everything began to unravel. After a funding round, he was nearly out of cash by June 2024. And that’s when he made a decision: to return to WestGen, where he managed to turn a profit again.

Topics covered

1. Why Ben left alternative energy for oil and gas — the back-of-the-envelope math on embedded energy that reframed his view of the energy transition.
2. From napkin sketch to first sale — how WestGen went from TRL1 to TRL8 in three months by selling the prototype at cost and learning in the field.
3. Enterprise sales to oil and gas supermajors — the "three wide, three deep" approach to finding champions at Painted Pony, Petronas, and Shell.
4. The Converge detour and the management buyout — what happens when founders chase scale without focus, and how Ben bought the company back.
5. Governance as the fix, not the overhead — why Ben rebuilt the Board around domain diversity rather than capital source, and why he still reports to one as the majority owner.

Key insights

• Perfection is the enemy of revenue. Ben and his co-founder shipped their first ePod at cost, gathered real operator feedback across multiple sites simultaneously, and reached a production-grade product faster than if they had spent 18 months perfecting it in isolation — all while generating revenue the whole way.
• Your early-majority prospects will hand you your early adopters. Most of the rooms Ben pitched to didn't light up. But ending every lunch-and-learn with "who would you recommend we try this with?" turned the cautious middle of the market into a referral engine that unlocked the real risk-takers.
• Ego loses, wego wins. The turnaround at WestGen was not a product fix — it was a leadership fix. An executive coach, a structured 4 Disciplines of Execution rollout, and a "designated no-person" in every meeting took the company's eNPS from -44 to +81 in twelve months and realigned the leadership team.

Follow WestGen and Future Ventures:

• WestGen Technologies: https://westgentech.com/
• Ben Klepacki on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-klepacki-p-eng-94727517/
• Maxim Atanassov on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/

About Ben Klepacki

Ben Klepacki is the co-founder and CEO of WestGen Technologies, a Calgary-based hybrid power generation company serving oil and gas producers across North America. A professional engineer by training, he spent his early career in wind and hydro before moving into oil and gas as a well pad design engineer, where the idea for WestGen's ePod was conceived. He led the company through near-bankruptcy, a management buyout, and a return to profitability. He now publishes weekly energy updates on LinkedIn every Friday.

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Amit Jain has 20 years of experience building and scaling companies across Europe, Southeast Asia, India, and beyond. As Managing Partner at StartupBay, a Singapore-based accelerator with a presence in the Czech Republic, he has helped many founders enter global markets. He previously held leadership roles at Vodafone, developing SME and global strategies and founding ventures. His corporate and operator experience shape his view on building internationally competitive companies. 

This conversation is key because most founder advice on 'going global' is too abstract or US-centric. Amit covers common mistakes, capital flow in 2026, the regulatory gap between Europe and Southeast Asia, and 'deep tech' investment realities. If you're a founder, deep tech developer, or investor reconsidering your approach, this episode offers a practical, operator perspective from someone active across four continents. 

3 Key Topics Covered 

1. The four pillars of global market entry — Why regulatory, cultural, product, and operating structure all matter, and which one founders consistently underestimate. 
2. Market selection by sector — How consumer tech, AI, and deep tech founders should each think differently about where to launch and scale. 
3. The AI application layer thesis — Why the core LLM layer is saturated, and where the real growth opportunity sits for founders building today. 

3 Key Insights 

1. Most founders make a key mistake: they incorporate in a new market before validating its suitability, locking in costs and complexity. 
2. AI accelerates research, but not the need for a technical co-founder: deep tech cycles shrink from 18 to 3 months, but a founder with deep expertise remains essential. 
3. 'Deep tech capital' mostly targets AI, with patient funds for long-term cycles. Yet, most investors focus on agentic and generative AI, leaving funding for hard sciences narrower than it appears. 

Reach out to Amit on LinkedIn, or learn more about StartupBay and our work at the links below. 

StartupBay: https://www.startupbay.tech/ 

Amit Jain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitj00/ 

Future Ventures Corp: futureventures.ca 

Capital Intelligence Platform: capital.futureventures.ca

Amit Jain is Managing Partner at StartupBay, a Singapore-headquartered accelerator and venture studio he co-founded in 2016. StartupBay started as an early-stage accelerator, moved into venture studio work, and now runs a global market entry program for founders scaling into Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond. Before StartupBay, Amit spent years at Vodafone leading SME and global business strategy, with stints building and running his own ventures in between. He splits his time between Singapore and the Czech Republic, and spends a lot of it on planes, meeting founders in person. 

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At 16, Vincent Kuiper received a €50 brokerage account from his father for his birthday. He become interested in finance, studying quantitative finance and accounting. He then became an equity analyst at a private bank in Amsterdam, spent three years at H2 Equity Partners, where he explored 35 to 40 niche industries and managed a buy-and-build program. After earning an MBA at IE Business School in Madrid, he has a strong financial background for someone in early-stage food, focusing on unit economics before storytelling. 

Gota Ventures, co-founded by him and Cristina De Mendietta during their MBA, combines Cristina's industry expertise with a network of 56 angels, family offices, and businesses across 15 countries. They invest $150K to $500K in early-stage food tech and CPG companies, leveraging her family's international trading business of ingredients and retail products.

What Vincent Unpacks 

• Why did Vincent run a syndicate instead of a fund? The deal-by-deal model lets operators with real food industry experience get into early-stage rounds from 5,000 euros, and he argues the fee math actually works out cleaner than a standard 2-and-20. 
• Gota's two very different bets on the future of chocolate. Win-Win, a UK company using carob and a patented fermentation process to build a drop-in alternative to cocoa, and Kokomodo, which recreates cocoa from a single DNA cell. Vincent talks through the technology risk, the market risk, and what he thinks is a five-year window before any of this hits mainstream shelves. 
• Access beats capital. The real product of Gota's network isn't money — it's warm introductions to the distributors, retailers, and manufacturers that make or break an early-stage food company. Vincent explains how Cristina's family business and the international angel base actually open those doors. 

Three Key Insights 

1. The past decade has shown that sustainability alone doesn't move consumers. The food companies winning now are built on rational unit economics, capital efficiency, and a value proposition a buyer can understand in one sentence — usually a meaningful cost advantage or a cleaner version of a product people already buy. 
2. In an industry with thin margins, friction kills. An ingredient that forces a manufacturer to rebuild a production line is dead on arrival. The breakout startups solve for drop-in compatibility — Win-Win's alternative cocoa slots directly into the existing 12-step chocolate manufacturing process, and that matters more than most founders realize. 
3. Don't try to change consumer behavior — find a tired category and make it noticeably better. Chomps went from zero to $900M in revenue by taking a product that had existed for decades, cleaning up the ingredients, and targeting a segment (women) the incumbents ignored. Boring categories with no innovation for 15 years are where the next billion-dollar CPG brands are built. 

Links 

• Gota Ventures: https://gotavc.com/ 
• Vincent Kuiper on LinkedIn: https://es.linkedin.com/in/vhakuiper 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 
• Maxim Atanassov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov/ 

About the Guest 

Vincent Kuiper is the Founding Partner of Gota Ventures, an early-stage food tech and CPG investment syndicate supporting the next generation of food and consumer brands across Europe and beyond. Originally from Amsterdam and now based in Madrid, he has 13 years of investing experience, including public equity analysis and private equity at H2 Equity Partners, as well as angel investing through Gota. He publishes a weekly Substack exploring successful CPG exits and their patterns.