Mostly Awesome

In today’s episode we were delighted to have Hessam Lavi as our guest.

Hessam is the CEO and Co-Founder of Climatiq, a company that engineers

and develops a Carbon Footprint Intelligence Platform.

During the course of this episode we spoke about several topics that make

Hessam’s journey unique. We learnt about his voyage from war-torn Iran,

to Sweden, and finally to Berlin. We also took deep dives into the

learnings he drew from being a serial entrepreneur, how he built

successful startups in the very competitive recruiting industry and what it

means to be an entrepreneur in the climate-tech space today.

In this episode, we talk to Thomas Regier and Kivanc Semen - the founders of DataGuard. In 2017 they founded DataGuard together. And since then they help companies to manage their data privacy - an inviolable human right and key to a successful business in an increasingly digital world.

We talk to them about their multi-cultural background and how they first met as teenagers in a workshop for basketball trainers. Covid-19 has been a major topic of discussion everywhere in the last months. However, this time we discuss it from the perspective of data privacy and information security. Moreover, we spoke about the future of data privacy, GDPR, and about annoying cookie banners on every website.

In this episode, we are talking to Sona Chandra, the co-founder of Terra Lumina - an AI-based drug discovery platform.

Sona is a qualified Biomedical engineer who speaks passionately about drug discovery and healthcare. One can tell from her responses that she’s determined to make a dent in how we as a civilization discover and engineer medicines. We spoke to Sona about her cross-continental journey and understanding how a person of Indian origin, who is actually a citizen of Australia, gets educated in the US and eventually lands up in Berlin to become a two-time startup founder. Mind you, all of this happened in Sona’s life well before she turned 30, and that perhaps, explains how she ended up receiving the coveted Forbes 30-under-30 award in 2020.

In this episode, we spoke to Hung Dang- an inspiring CDTM alumnus and the founder of Y42 - the company that is on the mission to build the most powerful and simple to use data tool that allows everyone to work with their data efficiently and collaboratively. In October 2021, the company raised one of the biggest Series A funding rounds in Europe.

But before founding Y42, Hung had his fair share of hardship and challenges - He was born in Vietnam and grew up with his grandparents while his parents laboured in Germany to make a mark for themselves. Later, when he was 8, he took a flight all alone from Vietnam to Germany to start a new chapter in his life. Imagine being uprooted from a culture so different at such a tender age, battling all the odds that are stacked against you in the next two decades, and then going on to found a company that is on the way to impact the lives of hundreds of employees and thousands, if not millions, of data users.

Arseniy Vershinin is a co-founder and CTO of Personio - Europe's leading one-stop HR platform for small and medium-sized businesses. It helps small businesses across Europe manage common HR tasks like onboarding, payroll, and attendance accounting.

Coming originally from Russia, Arseniy moved to Munich in 2011. Here, at CDTM he met his future co-founders Hanno Renner, Ignaz Forstmeyer, and Roman Schumacher. And this is where the Personio story begins!

Tune in to listen to Arseniy's personal journey and experiences with running Personio, a company that's growing and reaching new heights of success every day.

This time, we had a very exciting talk with Awais Shafique - the co-founder and CPO of a FashionTech startup presize.ai.

After finishing his Bachelor's degree in his homeland Pakistan, Awais came to Germany to study Biomedical Computing at Technical University in Munich. As he was already very passionate about entrepreneurship at the time, Awais joined the Center for Digital Technologies and Management. And after just one year he founded presize.ai with two other Centerlings, Leon Szeli and Tomislav Tomov. Curious to hear about what we discussed with Awais? Then tune into our latest episode!

Dr. Sophie Chung is the CEO and Founder of Qunomedical - a digital health platform with a focus on medical travel that helps patients find the right doctor anywhere in the world. On the mission to empower patients worldwide, Qunomedical gives everyone the chance to access great healthcare - no matter who they are and where they are from.

Sophie, who spent five years as a Consultant at McKinsey & Company told us about her career decisions and instances that proved to be inflection points along her journey. As a qualified Doctor of Medicine and a truly global citizen who has studied in 3 different continents, Sophie was able to give her expert opinions on the state of global healthcare. Sophie told us more about her involvement with the 2hearts Community and the problems that she and her team at Qunomedical are attempting to solve.

Welcome to Season 3 of Mostly Awesome with our new hosts Keke and Maria! We are again talking to inspiring innovators from the world of entrepreneurship and technology to give you unique insights into their personal journeys, motivation, and opinions. Listen to our teaser to meet our new hosts and get a sneak peek at our awesome lineup of guests. As usual, we will be launching new episodes bi-weekly, starting on Tuesday 19th of October. We are looking forward to your feedback to [email protected]. Follow our channel to never miss an episode!

Caroline Weimann is the founder and co-director of JoinPolitics. JoinPolitics aims to open unusual routes into politics by supporting and giving seed capital to political talent and applying the disruptive and innovative nature of entrepreneurship to politics. Caroline holds a Master’s degree in International Studies from SOAS - University of London and an Executive MPA from the Hertie School of Governance. Previously, she worked on building social ventures at Siemens Stiftung, at the EU Commission, in NGO consulting at actori and in impact investing at Ananda Impact Ventures.

2:27 Caroline's personal journey towards politics

Caroline explains the differences between social entrepreneurship and politics and why she chose politics. She also tells us what kind of work JoinPolitics is doing and how they are trying to bring the agile and fast-paced startup mentality to the political landscape.

22:56 Careers in politics

Caroline shares the challenges of a career in politics and why it might still be worth it. She also tells us what qualities make you a good fit for a career in politics.

Daniel Metzler is the co-founder and CEO of Isar Aerospace. Daniel studied mechanical engineering at TU Wien and aerospace engineering at TUM. During his studies in Munich, he joined the rocket technology initiative WARR, where he worked on special rocket engines and met his later co-founders - Josef Fleischmann and Markus Brandl. In 2018, they founded Isar Aerospace Technologies GmbH. Isar Aerospace builds satellite launch vehicles that are smaller, cheaper, and more sustainable than existing ones.

2:24 How it all started

Daniel tells us how he got into the aerospace industry and when and how he realized that he wanted to start a company in this field

08:10 Isar Aerospace: Aerospace technology made in Germany

Daniel shares what his founding experience was like and what fears and challenges he faced.

He also talks about what he learned from other companies and what the rocket prototyping process looks like.

24:08 The importance of space technologies

Daniel explains how space technology improves life on Earth and what functions satellites perform. He also tells us what the challenges and opportunities of a hardware start-up are.