Project A Podcast

We chat with Reshma Sohoni (@rsohoni) and Tom Wilson (@tom_wils) from Seedcamp (@seedcamp). We discuss building Seedcamp into Europe's most prominent first cheque venture investor, the evolution of the European technology ecosystem and talent clusters. Reshma also sheds light on investing early in UiPath and their journey to their recent IPO.

Recently, our CTO Stephan talked about how to handle a critical incident in production. But what do you do after the emergency is over? This week we talk about how to pick up the pieces and learn from the experience. And it's not just about process. We also cover the emotional, human aspect of post-mortems and how to foster psychological safety.

Merlin talks to our CTO Stephan Schulze about how he handles critical incidents. This week, Fastly had an outage that made headlines across the world. One could only imagine what their SRE team went through to resolve it. In this discussion, we go through the key decisions you need to make and what to do after you've resolved the incident.

Teresa Torres is an international author, speaker, and coach. She taught over 7000 product people discovery skills with her product talk academy. Companies like Spotify or Tesco are among her clients. She is the author of the book "Continuous Discovery Habits". In this episode we discuss how to overcome barriers of discovery, how to get started and develop habits to continuously talk to customers.

Starting in the cloud is a no-brainer if you're a small fish. It's cheap and convenient. But it might not stay that way when you get bigger. At least, those were the findings of a recent article by a16z. Merlin talks to Project A CTO Stephan Schulze about the implications of this article and whether earlier-stage startups need to plan for when they outgrow the cloud.

Uwe welcomes Jack Wang to Project A as investment principal focusing on enterprise deep tech and gaming. Jack talks a bit about his background, what he is excited about and the exciting times for founders starting companies in Europe. Uwe and Jack also deep dive into Project A's view on seed investing, what they look for and how they help amazing founders challenging the status quo.

David Nothacker is co-founder and CEO of sennder, Europe's leading digital road freight carrier and Germany's unicorn No. 14. Together with Simon, our Chief Brand Officer, he talks about how branding must evolve when the company enters hyper growth and how the brand can help drive this growth - internally and externally.

A behind the scenes look at the investment process at Project A. Whilst the investment process is opaque at most venture capital firms, we'd like to expose ours. An unbridled insight into what it's like to go from first contact to term sheet.

What does it take for a European scale-up to nail go-to-market in the US? Charlotte, our Head of Venture Development, picked the brain of Scott Sinatra who is Chief Revenue Officer at Dixa, the customer engagement platform and Project A portfolio company.

As a global sales leader with experience at Glassdoor and Glint, Scott truly understands what it takes to internationalise from a commercial perspective. He shares his best practices, who to look for as your first hire on the ground, how to find a strong sales leader like himself and what you need to have in place as a company before you make the leap across the pond.

Fausto Maglia is CPO in Italy's fastest growing #proptech startup Casavo. In this episode we talk about communication. We discuss problems companies face when they grow fast and when business and tech needs get in sync. We'll show some ideas on how to design communication so it becomes a tool of growth.