In-Between Time from Prehype

In-Between Time from Prehype

By prehype | Henrik WerdelinBusinessTechnologyInvesting
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In-Between Time from Prehype episodes

  • They started before they had an idea - and built one of Europe’s leading fintechs | with Jeppe Rindom, Co-founder Pleo

    Jeppe Rindom, co-founder and CEO of Pleo, joins Henrik for a walk through Copenhagen — starting at the cheap shared office where it all began, ending at the restaurant where Jeppe first convinced his co-founder Nico to move back from California and build something together.

    It's a surprisingly unglamorous story. They incorporated a company called "The Company of February 3rd, 2015" before they had a name or an idea, spent a few weeks on payroll software before deciding it was the most boring thing in the world, and onboarded 70 customers in a single day before having to call most of them back and ask them to leave.

    They also cover:

    • Why you don't need the idea before you start
    • What it actually costs to build a company — financially and personally
    • How they expanded from Denmark to the UK, Germany and Sweden
    • Why Europe struggles to produce global companies and whether that's changing
    • What the first 15 employees meant to the culture Pleo has today
    • How Jeppe thinks about AI and the next generation of founders

      • Pleo: pleo.com

      Prehype: prehype.com

      00:00 Copenhagen & The Beginning of Pleo
      01:34 Starting Without an Idea
      03:33 The First Pivot
      04:53 Why Most People Never Start
      06:02 Raising Money Early
      07:42 When It Almost Ended
      10:18 Luck vs Momentum
      12:41 Finding the Real Problem
      15:45 Validating with Customers
      19:00 First Breakthrough
      21:03 Growth Feels Like Chaos
      26:06 Scaling & Expanding to London
      29:27 The Reality of Being a Founder
      35:14 Building & Scaling in Europe
      41:06 Culture, Co-Founders & Full Circle

      Read the full transcript: In-Between Time: Jeppe Rindom

      50 min
    • Should we be optimistic about how AI will affect the world economy? | Henrik Werdelin on Future Around & Find Out

      This episode originally appeared on Dan Blumberg’s podcast “Future Around & Find Out”, where Henrik joined as a guest.

      In this conversation, Henrik Werdelin and Dan Blumberg explore how AI could reshape entrepreneurship and the broader economy. Henrik shares a “pitch for positivity”, arguing that we also have a responsibility to focus on what could go right, not just what could go wrong.

      They discuss how AI can lower the barriers to starting a business, potentially leading to a more distributed form of value creation. A key theme is “relationship capital” — the idea that trust and connection between founders and customers will become an increasingly important competitive advantage.

      They also cover:

      • Why founders should start with problems, not ideas
      • The “it sucks that…” method for identifying meaningful problems
      • How AI can help entrepreneurs get unstuck
      • The idea of “minimum viable agents”
      • Lessons from past technologies and how they shaped work and society
      • Henrik also shares how he uses AI in his own workflows, from summarizing information to building personal tools, and reflects on the skills that matter most for future entrepreneurs.

        • Prehype:  prehype.com

        Audos: audos.com
        Future Around & Find Out: futurearound.com

        39 min
      • New research: Get better ideas with AI (with Kian Gohar, Jeremy Utley, David McRaney, Henrik Werdelin)

        Co-production with Beyond the Propmpt and the "You Are Not So Smart" podcast. David McRaney and Henrik Werdelin sit down to discuss the surprising results of a new study into what happens when groups of people work together to brainstorm solutions to problems with the help of ChatGPT.

        Based on their new research, Stanford's Jeremy Utley and best-selling author Kian Gohar have created a new paradigm for getting the most out of AI-assisted ideation, which they call FIXIT. In this episode, we dive into the research and explore how you can become better at getting good ideas with AI.

        1 hr 9 min
      • Starting Businesses and Entrepreneurial Resourcefulness with Founding Prehype Partner and BARK Co-Founder - Henrik Werdelin

        Henrik Werdelin is the co-founder of BARK (BarkBox) as well as Founding Partner of Prehype, a venture development firm headquartered in New York with offices in London and Copenhagen. His latest book is The Acorn Method - about how companies can grow in an ever-changing environment. Henrik has been part of the startup scene since 2005 as both an investor, founder, and advisor. 

        His experience ranges from being an Entrepreneur in Residence at Index Ventures to working with, advising or investing in start-ups like HotPotato (now Facebook), GoTryItOn (now Rent the Runway), ReadMill (now DropBox) and Sunrise (now Microsoft). Before being an entrepreneur/angel, Werdelin was Vice President of Product Development and Strategy for MTV Networks International spearheading the development of many of MTV's award-winning products. He is a frequent speaker at top-tier business schools and has been quoted in numerous publications and media outlets on subjects such as corporate innovation, product design and entrepreneurship. He is Danish but lives in the US with his family, where he was named among the Top 100 most Creative by the industry magazine Fast Company and Silicon Alley Insider’s '100 People in Tech’.
         

        29 min
      • Building a new business from within a large one: How Ryder built the Airbnb for commercial trucks.

        Building a new business from scratch is hard under any circumstance - adding the complexity of doing it inside a company can be daunting. Through our work at prehype we meet internal entrepreneurs who are attempting to build these new businesses from within a company -  this podcast series aims to capture what they did and what they learned. 

        In this episode, we sit down with Romain Rousseau who is one of the co-founders of COOP by Ryder. COOP is the attempt at creating an “Airbnb for trucks” - as in creating a marketplace for underutilized truck capacity. Romain is also the Group Director of Digital Innovation at Ryder, a Miami Heat (and Lakers) fan and based in Miami, Florida, although originally from France. 
         

        We discuss the origins of COOP by Ryder, what initially enabled Romain to start - and what were key factors for him and the team to test and scale the new business. Romain will share his thoughts in how he built the team from within, how they chose to validate their idea and how they approached the supply & demand dynamics of their marketplace.

        Produced by: Philip Petersen / twitter.com/pippipsi

        prehype:prehype.com & twitter.com/prehype

        41 min
      • Why new IA platform GPT3 is worth paying attention to for entrepreneurs and non techs. A blog post summery and discussion.

        Produced by: Henrik Werdelin

        Henrik: twitter.com/werdelin and hellohenrik.com

        Prehype: prehype.com

        Manuel Araoz: twitter.com/maraoz and maraoz.com/

        Nicholas Thorne: twitter.com/thorneny and medium.com/@thorneny
        Damion Janski Instagram: d.a.m.j.a.n.s.k.i and http://damjanski.com

        M.Araoz’s original article: OpenAI's GPT-3 may be the biggest thing since bitcoin 

        Click here to BUY Henrik’s book The Acorn Method 

        17 min
      • New format: Audio summeries of must read blog posts. First, how to be good at everything from Super Organizers

        While Henrik currently cannot walk and talk with people for the podcast, we are shaking things up with a new format.  For the next number of weeks, we will be sourcing and condensing interesting blog posts into audio format here, for your listening pleasure. 

        First up, we are taking a dive into Henrik’s 8+1 Method of moving through life with intention while managing two growing businesses and a family. Henrik first shared this system with Dan Shipper of Super Organizers, in October of 2019. 

         

        Henrik: twitter.com/werdelin and hellohenrik.com|
        Prehype: prehype.com
        Dan Shipper: twitter.com/danshipper and danshipper.com
        Super Organizers: https://superorganizers.substack.com/
        8 +1 System: https://medium.com/@werdelin/the-quest-to-be-good-at-everything-898524cfc3f3 

        Click here to BUY Henrik’s book The Acorn Method 

        5 min

      About In-Between Time from Prehype

      From the publisher's feed

      In-Between Time is a podcast about the phase of entrepreneurship nobody talks about — the time between ventures.