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Tim Fung, Founder and CEO of Airtasker, leads one of the world's top local services marketplaces. Since launching in Sydney in 2012, it’s now a publicly listed company operating across Australia, the UK, and the US, facilitating over a billion dollars in jobs for flexible income. Tim is a prominent voice on the future of work and the gig economy. He experienced what most founders only theorize: raising $1.5M in 2012 when "startup" wasn't common in Sydney, and navigating many trials before success. He took Airtasker public and now, as a CEO, admits the company has fewer employees than four years ago, despite revenue growing five to six times. His insights are very relevant, especially for those building marketplaces, navigating IPOs, or integrating AI into non-software businesses. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. The origin story — How a friend with a truck and an apartment moved in 2012 turned into a marketplace that has now processed over a billion dollars in job opportunities. 
2. Solving the supply side first — Why Tim made the supply experience 10x better than Angie's, Thumbtack, and TaskRabbit, and how that one decision shaped everything that followed. 
3. Trust, payments, and the $20 fee — The escrow innovation that unlocked Series B, plus the small cancellation fee that cut cancellations by around 40%. 
4. Building rails, not blueprints — Why marketplace founders should stop trying to design every use case and start watching what users actually do — including the German bundtlet costume request. 
5. AI as enabler, not replacement — Tim's measured take on AI, the rise of the 10x employee, and why he thinks incentivizing token consumption is doing it backwards. 

Key Insights 

• The product is the network, not the app. A marketplace app with no users on it is genuinely useless. Liquidity comes first. Everything else — features, design, polish — only matters once the network exists. 
• Accountability needs both rewards and punishment. Most platforms only reward good behavior, and that's why they break. Free returns, no-cost cancellations, and frictionless agentic commerce all suffer from the same flaw: when there's no cost to bad behavior, the system fails. Tim's analogy — speed limits without fines change nothing. 
• AI's biggest impact on a non-software business is software velocity. Airtasker doesn't sell software, but it builds a lot of software to run the marketplace. AI has made that build cycle dramatically faster — which matters more than chasing AI features for their own sake. 

Links 

• Airtasker: https://www.airtasker.com/ 
• Tim Fung on LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/timjfung 
• Future Ventures: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 

About Tim Fung 

Tim is the Founder and CEO of Airtasker. He started the company in Sydney in 2012 with his co-founder Jono Lui, after the two of them caught the startup bug while working on the founding team at Amaysim, a mobile SIM card business. The idea came from something pretty ordinary — Tim asked a friend with a truck to help him move apartments, and started wondering why people defaulted to friends and family for that kind of work when there were so many people out there who actually wanted to earn income. 

More than a decade later, Airtasker is publicly listed, operating across Australia, the UK, and the US, and has facilitated over a billion dollars in job opportunities. Tim is one of the more grounded voices on marketplaces, the gig economy, and the future of work — partly because he's been at it long enough to be skeptical of easy answers. 

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Mike Feinman is the Managing Partner at Texas Business Brokers, a top M&A advisory firm for the lower mid-market and main street. His career began at PepsiCo's Taco Bell division and includes leadership at Yum! Brands across 16 countries. He has facilitated millions in sales across manufacturing, restaurants, services, and tech. He entered brokerage unexpectedly—an ex-Pizza Hut colleague asked him at Starbucks in 2014 what he'd do with the four and a half days a week he wouldn't be running his three restaurants. Mike works where founder vision meets buyer reality, often telling founders the truth before the market does. Many overestimate their business’s value and transferability. His role is to narrow that gap years before a sale. If you're 3-5 years from an exit or building without planning for one, this episode is essential before your accountant. 

Four Key Topics Covered 

1. The Origin Story Behind Texas Business Brokers — How a chance Pizza Hut connection, a mentor lost to mesothelioma, and a passed torch turned into a multi-state M&A advisory practice. 
2. The Current State of the M&A Market — Why we are in a buyer's market, why sellers are holding back, and how tariffs, energy costs, and onshoring are quietly reshaping multiples by industry. 
3. The Strategic Planning Framework Every Founder Should Run — Mike's full process from SWOT through five-year SMART vision, reverse success planning, one-year milestones, and the enabling culture that wraps it all together. 
4. The Three Risks Every Acquirer Underwrites — Key person risk, customer concentration risk, and the absence of scalable, repeatable systems — plus the "develegating" approach Mike used to get one founder out of the weeds before a $20M sale. 

Three Key Insights 

• Founders find time to do things over far more often than they find time to do them right the first time. A failed business is almost always failed planning — eyes wide shut instead of eyes wide open. The discipline to step back, run the SWOT, and build the vision is the discipline that protects valuation years later. 
• Potential, in Mike's words, is just something that ain't been done yet. And the moment a founder starts negotiating on what the business could be instead of what it actually is, the back goes against the wall. Buyers don't pay for the story. They pay for what's already on the page. A premium on outlook only shows up when the engine underneath it is already running — and even then, the buyer is doing the math on what they can do with it, not what you say they can. 
• A deal is a piece of clay that gets shaped, broken, and reshaped multiple times before close. Buyers and sellers sing Kumbaya, fall apart at the LOI, fall apart again at due diligence, and need to be brought back together at every stage. The job of a real M&A advisor is keeping every stakeholder on the same island long enough for the deal to actually happen. 

Links 

• Mike Feinman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikefeinman/ 
• Texas Business Brokers: https://texasbusinessbrokers.com/ 
• Connect with Maxim Atanassov: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov 

Guest Bio 

Mike Feinman is the Managing Partner at Texas Business Brokers, advising on lower-mid-market and Main Street deals across multiple states and industries. Previously, he held senior roles at PepsiCo and Yum! Brands, led restaurant operations, and built training and service organizations in 16 countries. He is a father of three, grandfather of four, active musician, and loves helping founders turn their businesses into their dreams. 

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Sarah Romanko, an investor at Geek Ventures, backs immigrant-founded AI and robotics startups. She entered venture without traditional credentials, relying on persistence like cold outreach, online events, and paying it forward. Her approach shapes how she evaluates and supports founders. This conversation reveals how an early-stage investor thinks—what prompts a "yes" or "no"—and how founders misprice opportunities. She questions the media narrative around fundraising, explains why some founders shouldn't raise venture capital, and discusses AI's new moat. 

For founders considering fundraising or rethinking it, this episode offers a tactical, straightforward guide from someone who reviews pitch decks daily and invests early. 

Topics Covered 

• Breaking into venture without the traditional background. Sarah talks through how she got in: cold outbound, online events at 10 pm her time, and showing up consistently when nobody was paying attention yet. 
• The Geek Ventures thesis — Why the firm backs immigrant founders building AI and robotics companies at pre-seed and seed, and how being hands-on at a small fund changes what value looks like. 
• The three things that win deals at pre-seed — Founder-market fit, founders who know how to sell, and a credible "why now" that grounds vision in the present. 
• When founders should not raise venture capital — The wrong reasons people chase a round, why a fundraise does not equal success, and how taking the wrong money can quietly kill a company. 
• Cold outreach, follow-ups, and the new moat — What makes an inbound message memorable, why Sarah responds to cold emails without warm intros, and why the go-to-market moat now matters as much as technical differentiation. 

Key Insights 

1. Time-to-value is the operating principle of a VC relationship. Founders who build durable investor relationships deliver value first — an introduction, an event assist, a useful insight — before they ever ask for a check. Reverse that order, and the conversation is already on the back foot. 
2. The biggest mispricing in early-stage fundraising is not valuation — it is misunderstanding the LP model. Founders price rounds against market comps without considering whether the math actually works for the fund. A round that is too high for the underlying business not only creates future down-round risk; it also removes investors from the table before the conversation even begins. 
3. The new moat in the AI era is go-to-market, not just technology. Technical defensibility still matters, but with AI lowering the cost to build, the durable edge is increasingly trust, distribution, and the ability to win and retain customers. Founders who can articulate a fact-based, evidence-backed differentiation — not opinion-based positioning — stand out immediately. 

Connect with Sarah 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahromanko/ 
• Pitch Geek Ventures: geek.vc/pitch 
• Geek Ventures website: https://geek.vc/ 

About the Guest 

Sarah Romanko invests at Geek Ventures, focused on pre-seed and seed AI and robotics companies founded by immigrants to the US. Her path into venture was unusual — no traditional banking or consulting background — and she credits sheer persistence, cold outbound, and a habit of paying it forward for getting her in the door. She speaks regularly at industry events, mentors founders through programs like Startup Grind and Founder Institute, and writes openly about democratizing access to capital.

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Nikola Borisov is CEO and co-founder of DeepInfra, offering open-source models like DeepSeek, Llama, Kimi, GLM, and GPT-OSS via APIs. He previously scaled IMO Messenger to over 200 million users, handling up to a million new users daily with cheaper self-built infrastructure. A Northwestern CS grad and Bulgarian programming veteran, he learned that distributed systems succeed at the margins. This conversation is crucial because AI inference—execution—is the silent battleground of the AI economy, yet few discuss the compute layer, which now limits access outside big labs. Nikola applies his hyperscale infrastructure knowledge to compute-intensive workloads. For those in AI, understanding this layer is vital. 

Topics Covered 

• From Sofia to scale — How Nikola progressed from Bulgarian programming contests to scaling IMO Messenger's backend to 200M+ monthly users, teaching him about doing more with less. 
• Why the bet is on open source — The strategic and structural case for hosting open-source models, why a startup like DeepInfra had no realistic alternative, and why the US has an open-source gap worth worrying about 
• The supply crunch nobody is pricing in — Demand for AI compute has roughly 4x'd in the last four months, driven mostly by coding agents finally crossing the line from "useful sometimes" to "useful always." Nikola explains why this is a GPU shortage now, not a demand problem. 
• How Nikola actually thinks about optimization — Cache token pricing is the key cost lever most teams overlook, especially on agentic workloads. We discuss why inference hardware is diverging from training hardware and Nikola's habit of the build-then-measure loop since IMO days. 

Key Insights 

1. AI's bottleneck is supply, not demand. Coding agents alone — Claude Code, Cursor, the rest — have driven token usage up roughly 4x in the last four months. There aren't enough GPUs to go around, and the big labs are eating most of the available capacity. Smaller buyers are getting priced out of the market entirely. 
2. Cache token pricing is the cost lever most teams overlook. Agentic workflows reuse massive amounts of context across tool-calling loops. Pricing — and architecting around — cached tokens separately is what separates teams that can afford to scale agents from those that can't. 
3. Open source vs. closed source won't end 100-to-zero. Nikola thinks we land at roughly 80/20 — the question is just which side gets the 80. His reasoning: information leaks, engineers move between labs, and the Anthropic GitHub commit that exposed model details earlier this year is exactly the kind of thing that's going to keep happening. You can't really isolate a model from the outside world for long.  

Links 

• DeepInfra: https://deepinfra.com/ 
• Nikola Borisov on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikola-borisov 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp 
• Maxim Atanassov on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/maxim-atanassov 

About the Guest 

Nikola Borisov is the CEO and co-founder of DeepInfra, an inference-only AI cloud that hosts open-source models like DeepSeek, Llama, and GPT-OSS for developers and enterprises. Before DeepInfra, he led backend infrastructure at IMO Messenger, scaling the platform past 200 million monthly users on infrastructure his team built and ran themselves — at a fraction of what comparable cloud-native competitors were spending. He's a computer science graduate of Northwestern University with over a decade of experience building distributed systems at scale. 

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Grant Blaisdell, CEO of Copernic Space, is developing space's financial infrastructure by tokenizing payloads, satellite data, computing, and lunar rights, turning space into a liquid market. A serial entrepreneur and blockchain pioneer, he cofounded Coinfirm, the first AML platform for crypto, and created the first AML solution for ERC tokens during the ICO era. His grandfather, a space pioneer, helped Poland reach space. The space economy exceeds $600 billion, mostly driven by private activity, yet many lack understanding of how value is created. 

Maxim and Grant discuss building standards, marketplaces, and liquidity for this future asset class. If space seemed outside your reach, this episode offers a reset. 

Key Topics Covered

1. The blockchain-meets-space thesis — Why this is the first asset class that can be built on-chain from day one, without decades of legacy infrastructure to overcome. 
2. Who actually owns space — The emerging standards for verified ownership of orbital assets, lunar infrastructure, and mining rights, and why the US-China dynamic is reshaping the race. 
3. Tokenization and fractional ownership in practice — How Copernic Space tokenizes payload capacity, external "billboard" surfaces, satellite data, and compute, with real examples from Moon Mission One and a top-10 European rocket company. 
4. The Copernic business model — Smart contract-embedded transaction fees, strategic acquisitions and fractionalization, and the future SAI ("Space Asset Intelligence") layer — an AI-powered Bloomberg terminal for space. 
5. The hidden Musk strategy — Why SpaceX, xAI, Tesla, and Boring Company aren't separate bets — they're components of a fully integrated space stack. 

Three Key Insights 

• Space isn't an escape — it's an upgrade for Earth. The most valuable applications aren't lunar colonies or Mars cities; they're pharmaceuticals, energy, data, compute, and agriculture (think satellite imagery for wildfire prevention) that solve problems on this planet. 
• Standards beat speed. Whoever defines what "verified ownership" means for space assets — payloads, data, compute, lunar rights — captures the long-term value, just as the Dutch East India Company captured the first era of exploration. 
• The private market is already leading regulators. The US still hasn't fully clarified the securities treatment of tokenized real-world assets. Still, private players are setting de facto standards that governments will eventually have to ratify, not the other way around. 

Links

• Copernic Space: https://www.copernicspace.com/ 
• Grant Blaisdell on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/grantblaisdell 
• Future Ventures: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp/  

About the Guest 

Grant Blaisdell is the Co-founder and CEO of Copernic Space, building the financial infrastructure and marketplace for the space economy. Previously, he cofounded Coinfirm, a leading analytics and compliance platform that pioneered AML for crypto and was the first to enable AML for ICO-era ERC tokens. A third-generation space entrepreneur and blockchain pioneer, Grant operates at the intersection of capital markets, digital assets, and one of the largest emerging asset classes of this century. 

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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 SaaS, including

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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.