SPEED CHANGE REPEAT Podcast

Daniel Theobald is the founder and CEO of Vecna Robotics, which delivers Automated Material Handling, Hybrid Fulfillment, and Workflow Optimization solutions featuring self-driving vehicles. An MIT graduate, Daniel quickly started out as an entrepreneur after university.

He is also the Co-Founder and President of MassRobotics, a non-profit organization with the mission to help create and scale the next generation of successful robotics and connected device companies by providing entrepreneurs and innovative robotics/automation startups with the workspace and resources they need to develop, prototype, test, and commercialize their products and solutions.

Tune in as we speak on the status quo within robotics and A.I. and what it means to tackle difficult challenges and build deep tech products. 

On this episode of the SPEED CHANGE REPEAT Podcast we talk with Philipp Blome who is the CEO of METRO Markets. The company is wholly owned subsidiary of METRO, a leading personal specialist in the wholesale and food trade with an annual revenue of over 27 billion€.

Metro Markets is a B2B online marketplace aimed at HoReCa customers (hotel, restaurant, catering) and a perfect example for a successful corporate venturing initiative. 

Together with Philipp who has spend his time over the past years in various positions within the company as well as building out real.digital, we are talking about the different aspects to building out a digital marketplace within the B2B space. Furthermore we dive into the challenges when it comes to building a corporate venture from scratch and what it takes to do so. 

Natural Language Processing is a subfield of A.I where the main goal is to enable machines to analyze, understand and manipulate language. 

That is why the academic field of linguistics and especially computational linguistics has really gained massive attention both in the academia but also industry. Therefore we invited Michaela Mahlberg on to the show to talk about her perspective on the field and where she sees the field heading. Michaela has a very fresh perspective when it comes to the collaboration between academia and industry, which lead to multiple collaborations already with her team and multiple organizations. She currently works with 'The Times' digital archive to apply data science methods to all their digitised issues back to 18th century - to explore political trends and how they were reflected in the news

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Ralf brings a unique perspective on the telecommunications industry, which we did not have yet to this extend on the SPEED CHANGE REPEAT podcast. Working all over the world within the industry he gathered extensive experience at companies such as BCG, PwC, Capgemini, IBM and Ericsson. 

On this episode Ralf is giving an outlook on the telecommunications industry in regards to the impact of digital technologies and what it means for the shift between the different competitors.

We talk about the struggle of traditional players to meet demands for infrastructure and simultaneously create new products and services powered by digital technologies for the portfolio and many more interesting topics. 

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Carsten is somebody that we were looking forward to have on the show for quiet a while and that is because of his massive experience when it comes to guiding large organizations through their digital transformation journeys. 

In almost 20 years in executive roles focused on software-, data-, and digitally fueled growth, he has built-up several €100 million businesses and led company-wide transformation programs affecting more than 60,000 employees. His most recent capacities include Group Digital Officer at BASF, Business Development Officer at SAP and Global Head of the Center for Digital Leadership.

Besides that he hold various advisory board seats e.g. for the World Economic Forum and is an adjunct faculty member and teaches at Stanford Graduate School, University of St. Gallen and Mannheim Business School.

David Shrier is somebody that we finally had the chance to have on our show and talk about many interesting things among which are the field of corporate venture capital, innovation initiatives at large corporate and the future of education. David is involved in many things and is a particularly interesting guest as he combines both insights from the private sector working with some of the largest corporates and interesting start-ups as wells as the connection with leading academic institutions such as MIT and Oxford University. 

David specialises in helping established organisations to build new revenue, having developed $8.5 billion of growth opportunities with C-suite executives for D&B, Wolters Kluwer, EY, MIT, GE/NBC, Disney, AOL Verizon, and Starwood, as well as private equity and venture capital funds. He has led several private equity and venture capital-backed companies as chief executive officer, chief financial officer or chief operating officer.

Stefano is Partner at Redstone, leading the firm’s cutting-edge investment cases and in-house technological development. He holds a PhD in financial computing from University College London, and degrees in economics and security.

Stefano consulted the Italian Government and the European Commission on matters related to data, finance and security. Together with Stefano we are diving deep into data driven methods in approaching Venture Capital and the idea behind VC as a Service. We also talk about the dilemma in Start-Up and Corporate partnerships and the landscape of A.I start-ups in Europe. 

Building on the open source Robot Operating System (ROS), Apex.AI was founded in 2017 to enable developers to successfully implement complex, safety-critical software for autonomous mobility. Toyota's A.I Venture fund and Volvo are some of the big players that have invested into Apex. 

Jan has been active in the field of autonomous vehicles for over 20 years among which he has been working in several positions at Bosch, Faraday Future and teaching at Stanford University.

Fun fact: On one of the first DARPA autonomous vehicle challenges he was asked by a famous Silicon Valley investor to work for one of his recent portfolio companies: Tesla. 

Together with Jan we are talking in detail about the field of autonomous vehicles including the different players and the role of silicon valley in regards to the traditional players such as OEMs. We also go into detail about the different products of Apex and what the future holds for the company. 

On this episode of the SPEED CHANGE REPEAT Podcast I am hosting Alan Jacobson who currently is the Chief Data Officer at Alteryx one of the self-service Data Analytics platforms in the world. 

Prior to Alteryx, Alan spent 25 years at Ford Motor Company in multiple roles, among which his last role was being responsible for the entire Data Analytics and Data Science activities of the company. 

Together with Alan we are talking about his biggest learnings from accelerating Analytics capabilities at Ford , the importance of change management in the transformation towards data driven organizations as well as the status quo and future outlook for the Data Science space.