In this episode of Startup Garage, dive into the opulent world of luxury watches as we bring you an hour of wit, wisdom, and wrist candy magic with Khaled, the visionary founder of Timepiece360, and Ismail, a passionate luxury watch enthusiast and a friend of the brand.

Episode Highlights:

In this episode of Startup Garage, we dive into the world of venture capital and startup success with our guest Florent, a General Partner at Teampact Ventures. With 20 years of experience in entrepreneurship, product management, and executive leadership, Florent brings a unique perspective to the world of investing in startups that are tackling critical challenges in climate and health.

At Teampact, they're not just your typical venture capital firm. They're pioneers of a new kind of investing, one that's high-impact, operator-run, and founder-centric. But what sets them apart even more is their use of principles borrowed from elite sports to help their portfolio companies deliver exceptional results.

Florent shares insights into how the team building approach used in sports can be a game-changer for startups. We explore how the competitive spirit, discipline, and collaboration found in the world of sports can be applied to building and scaling successful businesses.

Additionally, Florent leads Tremplin Capital, a pre-seed vehicle that empowers French entrepreneurs from underrepresented and under-networked backgrounds. He also coaches and mentors CEOs and CPOs, helping them excel at product leadership.

Tune in to gain valuable perspectives on impact investing, the sports mindset in business, and the essential ingredients for startup success. If you're an entrepreneur or investor looking to make a real impact, this episode is a must-listen.

Co-hosted by Surabhi Verma

In 1958, Joe and Jeff left the Foster business to set up a new sports shoe company in an old brewery building in the UK and 30 years later it became the biggest sports brand in the world, Reebok, grossing over $4BN USD in revenues. 

This is a special episode where we had the honor of hosting the legendary, Joseph William Foster, the founder of Reebok (1958). Joe lives and breathes Reebok. His stories, anecdotes, the thrill and the lessons are timeless and wisdom in its purest form. Joe has recently also released his life story as a book, Shoe Maker, and is also doing university tours talking about his life. 

The episode is co-hosted by Pankaj Rai, Chief Data Analytics Officer, Aditya Birla Group who also is an athlete, a marathon runner and loves sports (and sports shoes!). In this episode, Pankaj and Joe talk about Joe's family, childhood, the beginning of Reebok, the scaling to a multi-billion dollar business and about the lessons to bring to the contemporary business. 

Recently, Aditya Birla Group acquired the distribution license for Reebok India and South East Asia and hence Joe is excited to impart history and love to the next generation carrying the legacy forward.  

After spending over 18 years in the corporate, leading large sales teams at HUL, Airtel and Vodafone, Harish Bali started experimenting with travel and food vlogging. At the age of 42! Used up his life-long savings to document his travels, barely breaking even and worked hard to understand his target audience. Today, Visa2Explore has over 1.2M subscribers and more than 300 videos. 

His story is simple yet truly inspiring, a story of sheer persistence! Listen to Harish Bali on this episode of Startup Garage, a first in our mini-series of Hinglish episodes. 

Karen Gabriel has had a fantastic career working with high impact teams across the world. She was a part of the team that launched the Windows phone at Microsoft, she lead program design, development and execution at Dubai Future Foundation, ran 7 cohorts with over 150 startups from around the globe with one of the most ambitious governments in the world, the UAE government. 

In this episode, Karin talks about why large organisations are moving towards innovation as the driving agenda for transformation, what should they consider before getting into these waters, how should they think about and work with startups and also talks about designing founder friendly innovation programs.