Mostly Awesome

This week we are excited to welcome Eva Spannagl, head of Strategy & Business Development at Moss, founder of Femstory, business angel, and personal inspiration to both of us.

Eva studied at ESCP Business school and the Universidad Carlos tercero de Madrid. She held a variety of internships during her studies and ultimately joined McKinsey full time when she graduated from her masters.

During that time, Eva founded Femstory, a nonprofit focused on connecting women to professional mentors. For the past 2 years, Femstory has empowered a variety of women to make impactful career moves. I'm personally happy to be part of the last Femstory batch and am already getting a lot of insights from my mentor and the network.

After spending 3 years with McKinsey Eva joined Moss, a fintech startup focused on smart corporate credit cards, digital invoice management, and automated accounting.

Over the course of the episode, we speak to Eva about her early career trajectory, her experience at Moss, her experience with founding Femstory and angel investing, and finally, we ask her about work-life balance & managing multiple projects without burnout. Needless to say, Eva is a pro – the following episode is full of game-changing career and time management tips.

As always, to finish out the podcast, we are also thrilled to add Eva's personal toolbox to our resources for the innovators of tomorrow.

How do you found a VC firm, really? Today we will talk to Claudius Jablonka, a former CDTM Centerling and Center assistant who co-founded 10x Founders.

Claudius co-founded and led the Munich office of Plug and Play Ventures, one of the most active early-stage investors in the world. In 2020, he and 6 other partners co-founded 10x founders, now a €160m early-stage fund which is backed also by CDTM alumni.

Over the course of the episode, we speak to Claudius about his academic and professional background, the experience of founding 10x, Claudius' take on diversity in VC, and some tips on maintaining work-life balance.

Some people say the entrepreneurial spirit is something you are born with. This is something that could be true for our guest in today’s episode, Vanessa Westphal. As a very young child she already started selling stones in front of her house to top up pocket money. And she kept the entrepreneurial spirit ever since.

Having spent more than 10 years building a corporate career at Siemens, last year Vanessa founded Choosy, which offers AI-optimized nutrition plans that suit both your taste and your health. Choosy aims not only to improve our individual nutrition habits, but also to make planetary health available to everyone.

Over the course of the episode we will dive deeper into Vanessas journey. We will learn what she took from her experience of being an innovation driver within corporate Siemens and what made her switch to entrepreneurship again. Furthermore, we learn about her founding experience with Choosy and what her expert view on the importance of health and nutrition is.

The startup ecosystem has seen many software startups over the last years, but how about a software startup that aims to ease the development of new electronic hardware products? Our guest in todays episode, Sebastian Schaal, is diving into exactly this area. He is the co-founder of Luminovo, a company that speeds up the process of electronic hardware development, leveraging software and machine learning.

Over the course of the episode you will learn about the Luminovo's transition into a pure SaaS business, Sebastian's take on the current supply chain crisis, being a founder and the future of AI in Europe.

Welcome to the new season of the Mostly Awesome podcast!

Our first episode will drop on October 4, but before that we wanted to give you all a sneak preview of what season 4 is all about. Over this season, we will be chatting with 6 different changemakers and innovators – we can’t wait for you to hear! We’re also stoked to have Julia Kozlovskaia and Jaclyn Hovsmith as our fearless hosts.

In this week’s episode, we welcome Vidya Madhavan, Founder and CEO of Schmooze, the dating app where you swipe memes instead of people. Coming from Engineering and Business Background, Vidya will tell us how she did not build “just another dating app” but rather the fastest growing one. During this episode, we will get to hear Vidya's thoughts on how an MBA and Entrepreneurship complement each other, where the idea of a meme-based dating app even came from and how the online dating market might develop in the years to come.

For this week’s episode Passionfroot is on the menu! The co-founders Jennifer Phan and Michelle Tian combine backgrounds in venture capital at Rocket Internet and tech development at AirBnB and Shopify. In 2021 they co-founded Passionfroot with the aim to empower independent businesses of tomorrow. With this passion in mind, they are developing a back-office tool tailored to creator businesses. Tune in to learn more about Passionfroot and the future of the creator economy!

If we hear about living an almost nomadic life, we typically have a picture of a backpacker in mind, traveling the world. Our guest for today's episode, Maya Hari, however, would probably describe this as how she spent her 20s working in India, the U.S., France as well as Singapore. Maya is not your run-of-the-mill backpacker though - she studied engineering and did an MBA at INSEAD before she worked at the likes of Cisco, Google, and Microsoft before becoming the VP of Global Strategy and Operations at Twitter.

In this episode, Maya tells us more about her personal and truly international journey, founding an eCommerce start-up while being a mother, working for Twitter, and sharing her thoughts about the current state of online media.

Joshua and Mehmet both studied Business Administration and Math in Munich. Together they founded Freeletics in 2013, which later rose to become a popular consumer internet company that offers personalized fitness plans and community support via a mobile application. After exiting from Freeletics in 2018 they waited no more than three weeks before they founded yet again! Their current venture is called Zavvy, a company that aspires to invent aspects of the “future of work”.

During this episode, they talk about where the idea for Freeletics came from and the culture and community that Freeletics created for end users. Furthermore, Joshua and Mehmet tell us more about Zavvy, the differences from their previous experiences at Freeletics and how despite that they're both still able to draw on their past experiences to build an employee-enablement platform.

In today’s episode, our guest is Vlad Lata. Vlad is not only a serial entrepreneur with founding experience at KONUX and Avi Medical but also a CDTM alumnus.

His first venture, KONUX, is active in the field of IoT/AI providing smart sensor systems and AI-based analytics. With AVI Medical he is now active in the optimization of the patient experience by leveraging technology.

In the course of this episode, we learned why and how he decided to found a venture twice, what institutions impacted his journey most, and also how it is to operate a venture in regulated markets like the railway and healthcare industry.