He was a teenager when his family lost their home and the bakery it sat above. He calls what came next revenge.

Josef Brunner joins Tobi to trace that path: dropping out of school as a teenager to teach himself cybersecurity, building jouleX into a $100M exit to Cisco, then relayr into a $300M sale to Munich Re, and discovering along the way that neither number changed how he felt. He shares why he now calls his childhood the source of the resilience that keeps him working, why he found retirement unbearable, and how that same restlessness led him to NutriUnited: buying up family-owned German food producers as a deliberate alternative to private equity, and to the kind of market consolidation that once cost his own family their business.

A candid conversation about money, meaning, and why the hardest chapter of Josef's life became the engine for everything he built after it.

Guest: Josef Brunner, Founder & CEO, NutriUnited

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He was 25 when a legendary British designer made him creative director. Twenty-five years later, he closed that world down to open a free school in Cape Town.

Justin Van Breda joins Tobi to trace the arc from arriving in London on a two-year working holiday visa to running the creative studio of Nicky Haslam, one of Britain's most storied interior designers, and opening his own shop on Pimlico Road, London's design and antiques street, at 26 with no money and a business plan he taught himself from a book. He explains how that career, and a furniture business selling to designers across the UK and US, eventually led him back to Cape Town to found Craft School South Africa: a free, year-long training programme for young people that opened in February with 47 students, most already through matric, but reading at a grade 3 level. Within six months of remedial literacy work, that average reading age rose to grade 10.

A candid conversation about the moment his partner told him "you want to go home," what it cost him to leave a life in London behind, and why he believes design is a form of impact, not just taste.

Guest: Justin Van Breda, Founder & Creative Director, Justin Van Breda London; Founder, Craft School South Africa

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When he joined, his fund's first $80 million was nearly half of all the venture capital that existed on the entire African continent. Eleven years later, Novastar manages close to $350 million and Brian Waswani Odhiambo has spent his career building the asset class from the ground up.

Brian Waswani Odhiambo joins Tobi to trace Novastar Ventures' journey from a handful of people with almost no ecosystem around them to one of Africa's largest venture funds — backing Moniepoint's rise from 3,000 customers to roughly 20 million, and building an electric-mobility portfolio spanning battery-swap networks, ride-hailing fleets, and East Africa's largest electric bus operator. They talk through Novastar's thesis of investing where commercial return and social impact intersect, why he thinks the American venture model built for five-year exits doesn't fit a continent where funds typically take 16 to 20 years to mature, and the $150 million fund he just closed to prove it can still work.

Brian's conviction: the biggest misconception about venture investing in Africa isn't that the opportunity is small — it's that people assume there's no money to be made at all, when the data proving otherwise simply hasn't caught up yet.

Guest: Brian Waswani Odhiambo, Partner, Novastar Ventures

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She spent years shaping climate policy from inside government. Today she invests in the founders trying to fix what policy alone couldn't.

Lena Thiede joins Tobi to trace her path from climate research and government work on sustainable finance to co-founding Planet A Ventures, an early-stage European fund built around an in-house science team that can veto any investment. They talk about how many of the planetary boundaries scientists track have already been breached, why a slowing ocean current is one of the tipping points that worries climate scientists most, and how Planet A publishes every impact assessment behind its investments so the numbers can be checked by anyone.

A candid conversation about leaving an influential government career for the uncertainty of venture capital, why biodiversity gets left out of most climate conversations, and what makes her optimistic about the frontier technologies coming through her portfolio.

Guest: Lena Thiede, Co-Founder & GP, Planet A Ventures

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He scaled WeFox to €800 million in revenue and the fastest unicorn valuation in insurtech history. Then, as a $6.5 billion term sheet fell through, he raised again anyway at $4.5 billion — a decision he now calls a blessing in disguise, one that changed how he thinks about building companies entirely.

Julian Teicke joins Tobi to trace the WeFox story from founding to the fastest insurtech ever to reach a billion-dollar valuation — an €800 million revenue run, a 1,500-person team across Europe, and valuations that peaked near $6.5 billion — through the 2022 down round at $4.5 billion that came bundled with liquidation preferences and set investors against each other. Julian reflects on that raise today, and how the experience reshaped how he builds: it's now the foundation of The Delta, the 15,000-square-meter campus in Berlin he's built to co-found and support up to 1,700 early-stage founders a year.

A candid conversation about the discomfort every founder has to sit with to grow, why Julian trains entrepreneurs like athletes, and his campaign to make Berlin — via the BAD1 conference he pulled together in 60 days — the center of a distinctly European tech narrative.

Guest: Julian Teicke, Founder, The Delta (Co-Founder & Former CEO, WeFox)

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He's built billion-dollar companies across Europe. Now he's living on a farm outside Cape Town — and funding the continent's early-stage founders.

Henrik Persson Ekdahl joins Tobi to walk through that arc: a sports-betting company he built with a Norwegian co-founder and sold in 2010 for close to €100 million — the biggest deal he'd done at the time — followed by Catena Media, which he took public in 2016 and which became the world's first billion-dollar iGaming affiliate company the year after. He's also backed other ventures that have gone on to reach unicorn status, including an early bet on a Spanish challenger to Klarna. In 2022 he relocated his family to South Africa, and this year launched what he believes is the country's first fund built purely to write the hardest cheque of all: the first one, for founders nobody else will bet on yet.

A candid conversation about the failed startup that cost him everything at 20, why financial success was never the point of moving to South Africa, and what it takes to back a founder before anyone else will.

Guest: Henrik Persson Ekdahl, Serial Entrepreneur & Investor, Founder of Oakvale Invest

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She chairs the most active seed investor on the African continent. Her discipline: never deploy a dollar until you can already see the exit.

Margaret O'Connor joins Tobi to trace the route from a desk at the Korean Ministry of Finance and MasterCard's Asia-Pacific build-out to chairing Launch Africa Ventures, a fund launched over Zoom in July 2020 that raised $36.3 million against a $15 million target and now holds more than 180 investments across 25 African markets and 15 tech verticals, backed by 400 LPs from 45 countries. She explains why Launch Africa became the first fund in Africa to hire a head of exits, how secondaries and trade sales rather than IPOs create liquidity on the continent, and where capital is moving next: climate tech, agri tech, data centres and Francophone West Africa.

Her conviction is that Africa needs to come out of the impact bucket. Fund One sits at 1.51x with 7% DPI in year six of a 2020 vintage, on par with top-quintile US funds, and Margaret makes the case that the continent offers profit and purpose rather than a trade-off between them.

Guest: Margaret O'Connor, Chairperson, Launch Africa Ventures

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Nobody starts an airline in the middle of a pandemic. That, he says, is exactly why it worked: aircraft were cheap, good people were suddenly available, and the competition was struggling.

Gidon Novick joins Tobi to explain how LIFT got off the ground, and why an industry that has collectively lost money since the Wright brothers first flew still pulls him back. He traces it to a childhood spent sitting in cockpits at the airport where his father worked, through kulula.com, to the four years at LIFT where the hardest days are the ones he now remembers most fondly, including the week the bank had not cleared the payment gateway while flights were already on sale. He and Tobi get into what actually makes airlines so hard: brutal fixed costs, volatile fuel, and the pricing discipline the industry keeps giving away.

Most of his energy now goes to SA Harvest, a food rescue operation moving 30 million meals a year in a country where roughly a third of the food produced is thrown out while around 10 million people do not have enough to eat. Asked for the target, Gidon does not offer a number he is confident of hitting. He names the problem instead: billions of meals, in South Africa alone.

A candid conversation about restlessness, why business is really just problem solving, and what a genuinely optimistic leader does to the people around them.

Guest: Gidon Novick, Entrepreneur & Investor, Co-Founder of LIFT Airline

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Since 2011 the S&P 500 has run away from European stocks, three times over. Take the ten most valuable companies out of each index and the gap almost disappears.

Dr. Hendrik Brandis joins Tobi to explain what follows from that: Europe's problem is not talent or technology but the absence of hyper-scaling companies — for Europe about ten of them, for Germany two. He names what holds Europe back: ambition that stops at a unicorn where the US treats it as the beginning, regulation that killed Lilium over a safety threshold a thousand times stricter than the one applied to helicopters, and capital, at 70 euros per inhabitant a year in Germany against 800 dollars in the US. He and Tobi also get into the space economy, Isar Aerospace's shot at a European launcher, and whether the two trillion dollars flowing into data centres will pay off.

Hendrik calls himself a structural optimist. He came out of the dot-com bust as one of three German venture firms left standing from more than a hundred, learned early that money is shy and that no concept beats a track record, and still holds that Europe has the brilliant minds and the capital already. What is missing, he says, is the commitment.

Guest: Dr. Hendrik Brandis, Co-Founder and General Partner, Earlybird

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A pub idea in a village of 2,100 people. Thirty-five years later, 85,000 metal fans from more than 90 nations show up on the same field.

Holger Hübner joins Tobi to share how Wacken Open Air went from that first edition in 1990 to a temporary city built across almost 500 hectares and ten municipalities. He talks about booking the early bands on a fax machine and his employer's copier, the near-collapse in 1993, and why they still run their own ticketing and merchandise to this day: nobody in the industry wanted to work with long-haired metalheads, so they built it themselves. He and Tobi get into how the festival actually works as a business, why they brought Superstruct on board in 2019, and what the 85,000 guests leave behind in the region.

Holger's answer to the investor question is unambiguous: you can buy infrastructure, market rights and event capacity, but you cannot buy the feeling on the ground. The same conviction runs through how he sees live experience in an age of AI, and through the motto he has kept for 35 years: authentic, honest and loud.

Guest: Holger Hübner, Co-Founder, Wacken Open Air

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