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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.

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Ankit Anand doesn't fit the typical venture capital mold. He started his career as a physics teacher in India, moved to Europe to work on gravitational wave research at ETH Zurich, co-founded a medical technology company, and only then — after years of operating and angel investing — ended up as Founding Partner at Riceberg Ventures. Today, Riceberg backs breakthrough deep tech companies across space, cybersecurity, AI, life science, and frontier industries — often writing the first check before a company is even incorporated. 

This conversation matters because Ankit brings a rare lens to early-stage investing: the discipline of a trained scientist, the scar tissue of an operator, and a global perspective that spans Europe, India, and the United States. For founders raising capital — or investors thinking about how to back hard technology — he offers an unusually clear framework for how to separate breakthrough companies from noise, and why the VC game is fundamentally a trust business, not a finance one. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. From physics to venture — How Ankit's path through teaching, ETH Zurich, and a medtech spinout shaped the way Riceberg evaluates founders and builds conviction. 
2. The four pillars of a breakthrough investment — Value chain optimization, bottom-up market sizing, real defensibility, and founder-market fit. 
3. Value-based vs. cost-based pricing for deep tech — A practical framework founders can use to price technology that has no direct comparable in the market. 
4. Why trust is the real currency of venture capital — How consistency, transparency, and early engagement beat polished decks every time. 
5. Cross-cultural founder underwriting — What motivates a European scientist-founder vs. an Indian one, and why the evaluation lens has to change accordingly. 

Three Key Insights 

• Slowness is a feature, not a bug. Riceberg deliberately takes its time with founders, engaging long before they're raising — sometimes before a company even exists. The filter isn't a pitch deck; it's observing how a founder converts a small favor (like a single customer intro) into meaningful momentum. If they can turn one dollar of value into ten, that's the signal. 
• Your first customer is your investor. Deep tech founders often dismiss themselves as "bad at sales." But if a scientist can captivate an investor with a vision and walk away with a check, that's already proof of selling ability. The same holds for hiring underpaid, world-class talent — selling the vision is the job, whether the buyer is an LP, an employee, or a future enterprise customer. 
• Ankit's pricing framework has two sides that have to meet in the middle. Start from what customers pay today, drop it 5X, then add premiums for the extra safety, speed, or efficacy you're delivering — that's your value-based price. Then work bottom-up from your unit economics with at least a 60% margin — that's your cost-based price. If value-based sits above cost-based, you're in a good spot. If not, you're building something unsustainable. 

Links 

• Riceberg Ventures: https://riceberg.vc/ 
• Ankit Anand on LinkedIn: https://ch.linkedin.com/in/anandvankit 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/futureventures 

About Ankit Anand 

Ankit is Founding Partner at Riceberg Ventures. He came to venture the long way — teaching physics in India, then doing gravitational wave research at ETH Zurich on the LIGO project, then co-founding a medical technology company in Europe. Riceberg writes first checks into deep tech founders, often before the company is even registered, and invests globally out of offices across Europe, India, and the U.S. 

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Debneel Mukherjee is the kind of investor most founders never get access to — a former CPA turned self-taught coder turned operator turned venture capitalist, now running Decacorn.VC from Singapore, with roughly 85% of his portfolio deployed in the United States. His career spans nearly three decades across banking, fintech operations, and global private tech investing, and he's built a track record that includes early bets on companies such as Palantir, Mapbox, ThoughtSpot, BioCatch, and SpaceX — well before most of those names became consensus trades. He currently holds two portfolio companies in the S&P 500. 

The reason we wanted Debneel on the show is simple — he doesn't invest the way most VCs do, and he'll tell you exactly why. He won't touch institutional money. He doesn't limit himself to what's within driving distance. And he's not interested in markets that already exist. His whole thesis is built on first principles: find the bottleneck, find the founder crazy enough to solve it, and then get out of their way. Most investors talk about being contrarian. Debneel actually built a fund around it — from Singapore, into the US, with the patience to hold through the storms that shake everyone else out. 

Key Topics Covered 

1. From CPA to Coder to Investor — How a forced career pivot into programming at a fintech bank shaped a three-decade-long investing philosophy rooted in technology-led innovation. 
2. Contrarian Investing Done Right — Why "obvious has no value" and how Decacorn.VC identifies opportunities for new market creation instead of chasing crowded spaces. 
3. The AI Pragmatist's View — A middle-ground take on AI that rejects both doomsday and utopian narratives, arguing that technology has never destroyed jobs — only created affluence. 
4. Founder Selection and the "Great Question" Test — How Debneel evaluates founders on conviction, domain competence, and mission — and why the quality of the investor's questions matters more than the size of the check. 
5. Building a Patient, Unconstrained Fund — Why Decacorn.VC refuses institutional capital, democratizes access for accredited individuals, and structures for evergreen, long-horizon capital deployment. 

Key Insights 

1. Track record alone doesn't win deals — the conversation does. Debneel measures the quality of a founder meeting by how often the founder responds with "that's a great question." Founders don't want another passive check-writer; they want an investor who understands their problem space well enough to challenge them on the issues that keep them up at night. 
2. The best opportunities come from breaking bottlenecks, not from following trends. Rather than chasing whatever sector is hot, Decacorn.VC identifies first-principles constraints — such as off-grid power for data centers or a lack of cybersecurity infrastructure — and backs founders who solve those structural problems before the market catches up. 
3. Patient capital changes the game. Debneel only takes money from people who can genuinely forget about it — accredited individuals who care more about having a ringside seat to what's coming than about quarterly returns. That's not a constraint. It's what lets him hold through the storms. His example? Toyota invested $50 million in Tesla's IPO, sold a few years later at $480 million, and thought they won. Tesla has since returned roughly 400x. You don't get that outcome if your fund has a seven-year expiry date. 

Links 

• Decacorn.VC Website: https://www.decacorn.vc/ 
• Debneel Mukherjee on LinkedIn: https://sg.linkedin.com/in/debneel 
• Future Ventures Corp: https://www.futureventures.ca/ 

Guest Bio 

Debneel Mukherjee founded Decaco

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Robin Smith, a 20-year enterprise software veteran, has worked through all ownership models—bootstrapped, venture-backed, private equity, and public. Most recently, as COO of a PE-backed portco with 1,000+ employees, he led over €200 million in acquisitions during an 18-month roll-up. Now in his mid-40s, he left that world to pursue entrepreneurship through acquisition and found that AI is rewriting the playbook for buying mission-critical software businesses. 

What makes this conversation worth your time is where Robin is standing right now. He knows how PE deals actually work — from the inside, not from a pitch deck. He watched AI gut the economics of traditional SaaS in real time. And he's acting on it, building Stayd as a B Corp roll-up of holiday home agencies in the UK with a thesis that most of the market is still sleeping on. He doesn't sugarcoat the deal that fell apart, he's blunt about where software valuations are headed, and his thinking on outcome-based pricing is ahead of the curve. This is one of the more honest conversations we've had on the show. 

5 Key Topics Covered 

1. Failed Acquisition, Real Lessons — Robin walks through a competitive sell-side process for a bootstrapped vertical SaaS business, where he lost on valuation and perceived execution risk as an independent sponsor. 
2. Independent Sponsors vs. Traditional PE — Why sell-side advisors remain skeptical of independent sponsors, what the funding gap actually looks like, and how Robin structured capital for family offices. 
3. AI's Impact on Software Valuations — How running a financial model through Anthropic's tools turned Robin, an AI skeptic, into a believer, compressing a week of analyst work into hours. 
4. The Software Commoditization Thesis — Robin's argument that any UI-to-database application has lost its intrinsic value and that real value now resides only where software works autonomously. 
5. Stayd: Rolling Up Short-Term Rental Agencies — The three-pillar strategy behind Robin's new venture — revenue optimization, agentic workflow automation, and ethical acquisition of holiday home agencies, with a partnership model for founders. 

3 Key Insights 

1. Buy-side advisors are worth far more than deal execution. Robin expected his buy-side advisor to run the transaction. What he didn't expect was the depth of market intelligence they brought — competitive deal color, LP and GP behavior patterns, and valuation triangulation that validated his bottom-up analysis to within half a turn of revenue. 
2. The moat in software isn't the interface anymore — it's whether the tool actually does the work. Robin puts it simply: if someone still has to sit at a keyboard and punch data into your system, that software is basically free. The value shows up when technology takes over the labor itself. And if that's true, charging a flat license fee makes no sense. You charge for what the tool delivers. 
3. Having zero technical debt right now might be the most underrated advantage in the market. Incumbent software businesses are trapped — they have paying customers on legacy systems, finite engineering teams, and AI rewriting the rules around them in real time. Robin bets that starting clean, with no organizational baggage or codebase to maintain, lets you build at a pace that no legacy player can keep up with. 

Links 

• Robin Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinsmithgl7/ 
• Corinium Capital: https://www.coriniumcapital.co.uk/ 
• Future Ventures Corp: www.futureventures.ca 

Guest Bio

Robin Smith is the Managing Partner of Corinium Capital and the Founder of Stayd, a B Corp roll-up of

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Kim Anders Odhner is the Managing Partner for Europe and Asia at Unovis Asset Management, a leading alternative protein investment fund. Before relocating to Amsterdam, Kim spent 25 years in Southeast Asia, developing expertise in emerging-markets private equity — backing early-stage companies, staying involved post-investment, and understanding food systems across diverse economies. He co-founded the New Crop Capital Trust with Chris Kerr and has been investing in food tech since the sector's early days, with investments in Beyond Meat, Oatly, Mosa Meat, and Aleph Farms. 

This conversation is important because the food tech investment scene has changed significantly. The 2021–2022 hype has cooled, early-stage funding is scarce, and the idea that "build it and they will come" has been tested — often unsuccessfully. Kim combines frontier-market investing discipline with deep food-system knowledge that cuts through the noise. Whether you're a food tech founder, an investor, or just wondering how we'll feed 10 billion people by 2050, this episode provides clarity. 

These are some of the key topics covered: 

1. The real economics of alternative protein — Why price, convenience, and supply-chain gatekeepers drive consumer behavior far more than values or sustainability messaging. 
2. Lessons from Beyond Meat — How the IPO ignited global excitement for food tech while also exposing a dangerous gap between market valuations and actual consumer adoption. 
3. Strategic ingredients over center-of-plate — Why the next wave of food tech innovation is in B2B blended products, pre-textured ingredients, and food service channels rather than in retail-facing meat replacements. 
4. The bioavailability gap — How the Green Revolution's push for scale stripped our food supply of nutrient density and flavor, and why GLP-1 companion foods and active aging nutrition are creating new investable categories. 
5. Navigating food tech regulation across markets — The sharp contrast between Europe's precautionary approach and America's self-declared GRAS system, and what it means for founders trying to scale globally. 

Some of the insights from our talk were: 

1. People eat what's in front of them. Food choices are impulsive and price-driven, so the real unlock for alternative protein isn't convincing consumers to change — it's getting food service operators like Sodexo and Compass to put these products on the plate in the first place. 
2. The subsidy argument against animal agriculture gets a lot of airtime, but Kim pushed back on that. The real bottleneck is scale. And for something like cultured meat, getting to a meaningful scale could be an intergenerational effort. 
3. Forget center-of-plate steak replacements. The near-term opportunity is in blended products — think beef mince mixed with soy protein — where the plant-based ingredient works as part of the dish, not a substitute for it. 

Links & Resources: 

Learn more about Kim and the organizations mentioned in this episode: 

• Unovis Asset Management — unovis.vc 
• Good Food Institute — gfi.org 
• Kim Anders Odhner — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kim-anders-odhner/ 
• Wageningen University — wur.nl 

About the Guest 

Kim Anders Odhner runs Unovis Asset Management's Europe and Asia practice. He backed companies like Beyond Meat, Oatly, and Mosa Meat before most investors knew alternative protein was a category. Before Amsterdam, he spent 25 years doing private equity deals across Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Singapore — and he's now raising Unovis's third fund to back food tech companies at the growth stage. 

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Dr. Henry Erdlei is a physician-scientist pushing the boundaries of cancer immunotherapy. An alumnus of Charité Medical School and a researcher at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Henry has dedicated years to engineering immune cells to hunt and destroy tumors — and he is now applying that expertise to GoCART Therapeutics, a biotech startup developing a modular CAR-T cell platform that could revolutionize cancer treatment. His work sits at the crossroads of biology, engineering, and AI-driven drug design. 

This conversation highlights CAR-T therapy, a highly effective cancer treatment not yet available for 70% of cancer types. Targeting antigens on vital tissues like the brain and bone marrow is risky, but GoCART's 'AND gate' system requires two antigens for activation, enabling it to target 'undruggable' cancers. Henry discusses the science, business plan, funding, and his views on drug regulation in straightforward language.

KEY TOPICS COVERED 

1. The Undruggable Antigen Problem: Why 70% of cancer types can't be treated with current CAR-T therapy — and how the best tumor markers are also found on tissues you can't afford to destroy. 

2. GoCART's AND Gate: Dual-Antigen Recognition. How GoCART's modular system needs two antigens on a cell for activation, allowing precise tumor targeting without collateral damage. 

3. AI-Driven Peptide Engineering at Scale: How machine learning enabled GoCART to analyze 180,000 trimeric sequences computationally — a process that would have cost over €200M in laboratory work — and reduce it to 20 validated candidates. 

4. The Platform Business Model: Why GoCART is building the "operating system" for CAR-T therapy — a single universal cell product with swappable binders — and how partners can develop and sell binders on the platform. 

5. Rethinking Drug Regulation: Henry's argument that the orphan approval pathway should become the standard: provide treatments to patients after Phase II with informed consent, conduct Phase IV surveillance on the market, and significantly reduce costs.

KEY INSIGHTS 

1. The real challenge in cancer immunotherapy isn't whether CAR-T cells are effective — it's that most of the best targets for treatment are also found on healthy tissue, meaning the therapy could destroy vital organs along with the tumor. GoCART's dual-recognition system eliminates this limitation. 

2. Personalized medicine doesn't have to mean creating a new drug for each patient. By modularizing the system — one universal CAR-T cell, many interchangeable binders — GoCART provides patient-specific treatment on an industrial scale, with the potential to reduce costs from $800K to just a few thousand over time. 

3. The current Phase III clinical trial requirement adds hundreds of millions in costs and years of delay before patients can access treatments that are already proven effective after Phase II. Moving to a market-while-monitoring model could deliver effective therapies to patients more quickly, generate more comprehensive real-world data, and lower drug prices overall.

LINKS 

• GoCART Therapeutics website: https://gocarttherapeutics.com/
• Henry Erdlei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-erdlei-1a83b42b9/
• Contact: [email protected]

GUEST BIO 

Dr. Henry Erdlei is the Co-Founder of GoCART Therapeutics, a Berlin-based biotech startup developing a modular CAR-T cell platform to advance precision cancer immunotherapy. He is a physician-scientist trained at the Charité Medical School and the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (Helmholtz), where his research focused on engineering immune cells for tumor targeting.

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Oded Agam | NextLeap Ventures — Deep Tech Investing, the Intel AI Miss, and Building Innovation Ecosystems

Oded Agam is one of those rare investors who has actually built what he now funds. With 35 years spanning Israeli startups, Fortune 50 strategic planning at Intel, and early-stage deep tech investing through NextLeap Ventures, Oded brings an operator's lens to every deal. He led Intel's Strategic Technologies Group — the unit responsible for identifying and incubating transformational technologies — and drove strategic planning for product lines generating over $30 billion in revenue. When he left Intel in 2017, he called four former colleagues and started a venture fund.

This conversation matters because Oded doesn't deal in theory. He walks through how NextLeap narrows nearly 1,000 startups down to three investments per cycle, why he pitched a $300 million AI program to Intel leadership in 2014 that could have changed the chip industry's trajectory, and what founders consistently get wrong in a pitch. Whether you're raising capital or refining your investment thesis, this is a masterclass in disciplined deep tech investing from someone who has sat on both sides of the table.

Key Topics Covered

1. From Intel strategist to venture founder — How leading Intel's Strategic Technologies Group and building internal startups shaped Oded's investment thesis at NextLeap.
2. The Intel AI miss of 2012–2014 — The inside story of a $300M AI proposal that, if approved, could have positioned Intel — not NVIDIA — as the dominant force in AI.
3. The "wisdom of the intelligent crowd" — NextLeap's process of filtering \~1,000 startups to three investments per cycle using a panel of 100+ Fortune 500 executives.
4. Five dimensions of investability — Team, problem, deep tech moat, business potential with exit strategy, and traction through prototypes and design partners.
5. Architecting an innovation ecosystem — The five pillars behind Israel's per-capita startup dominance — and why they're replicable anywhere with the right intent.

Key Insights

1. Deep tech is a moat — but only a temporary one. Oded introduced the concept of "transient sustainable strategic advantage" — no competitive moat holds forever. Founders need to build one and immediately start building the next. Speed of execution matters as much as the IP itself.
2. The best founding teams complement each other, not duplicate each other. NextLeap looks for two to three co-founders from different disciplines who have pre-existing relationship capital. When the inevitable hard moments hit, teams that know each other's rough edges survive. Teams of strangers often don't.
3. An ecosystem isn't built on startups alone. Israel's innovation engine runs on five pillars: world-class research universities, compulsory military service that accelerates technical learning, multinational R\&D centers providing talent and exit paths, a culture that accepts failure, and government programs that fill market gaps.

Links

• NextLeap Ventures website: https://nextleapventures.com/
• Oded Agam on LinkedIn: https://il.linkedin.com/in/oded-agam-4b840
• Contact Oded: [email protected]

Guest Bio

Oded Agam is the Managing Partner and Founder of NextLeap Ventures, an Israeli-based early-stage deep tech venture fund with 26 portfolio companies and three successful exits — including acquisitions by Synopsys, Nano Dimension, and Dell. Before founding NextLeap in 2017, he spent over 11 years at Intel, leading strategic planning for product lines generating more than 80% of Intel's global revenue and heading the Strategic Technologies Group.