The Extra Mile Podcast Episode 8 is out now! Our guest: Felipe Furlan da Silva, CTO of Jimdo, serial entrepreneur, and one of the sharpest AI minds we've met in the German tech scene.
Felipe moved from Brazil to Germany in 2019 after exiting his own companies. Today he leads engineering at Jimdo, helping solopreneurs go from "selling chocolate at home" to running a fully online business powered by AI agents.
In this episode, Tilman and Puria go deep with Felipe on what's really happening inside modern tech companies right now:
1/ Why Felipe measures his year by the number of books he reads (target: 2 books/month)
2/ How Jimdo went from website builder solution to full lifecycle platform for solopreneurs
3/ Productivity inside his engineering team: already 3-5x, heading exponential
4/ The real shift: it's not "coders code 10x faster”. It's designers coding, engineers designing, PMs shipping PoCs themselves.
5/ Hyper-personalization as the default, not a configuration project
6/ Why he flew San Francisco → back to Germany in 48 hours for OpenAI Dev Day (and would do it again)
7/ The South Side Festival: lunch with the NASA scientist who found water on Mars
8/ The philosophical question nobody's answering yet: what happens when economies thrive but people don't have jobs?
9/ Migration, demographics, and AI. What changes if Germany doesn't need imported skilled workers anymore?
10/ Why "the glasses" are the most underestimated tech trend right now
Felipe's mindset hit different. A few lines that stayed with us:
- “I don't differentiate between my life and my work. I walk the street in my company hoodie on weekends. It's part of my identity."
- “Every conversation is an opportunity to learn. Never go into one trying to get something."
We also talked about education. Felipe is building Delta Academy in Brazil to empower people to properly use AI.
His conviction is the same as ours: we can have the tools, the assets, the capital, but without education, none of it works.
One commitment we got from Felipe live on the mic: he's going to post 5-10 books that inspired him.
You can find the list on his LinkedIn Post here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ffurlansilva_hello-everyone-last-sunday-i-had-the-pleasure-share-7446808232905531392-FOK7?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACeeB0IBeeLJ9K_Hv5vqXSiTjmY8pvOreQY
Timestamps:
00:00 Welcome Felipe
02:11 Felipe's journey: Brazil → Germany → Jimdo
07:08 The mentors that shaped him (including his father)
10:17 Leaving IBM at the "safe" moment to join a 10-person startup
14:41 The companies he founded and exited in Brazil
17:03 What Jimdo actually does today 18:35 AI is the most exciting moment of his 20-year tech career
22:23 3-5x productivity gains inside Jimdo's engineering team
27:00 The Codex hackathon story: 3 days of work → 6 minutes
33:31 Hyper-personalization by default (why SAP/Salesforce get disrupted)
40:38 The South Side Festival and the NASA Mars scientist at lunch
45:17 How to prepare as an individual for what's coming 54:35 What "going the extra mile" really means
56:18 Morning routine with his 2-year-old daughter
59:17 The most underestimated tech trend right now
1:01:07 Two books per month: Felipe's personal metric
1:04:29 Felipe turns the question around: where is AI really going?
This podcast is about going the extra mile – in business, in health, in learning, in life. If you're building something and you want to hear how other operators actually think, subscribe and ring the bell.
Connect with Felipe Furlan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ffurlansilva/
Connect with Tilman Resch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tilman-resch/
Connect with Puria Izady: https://www.linkedin.com/in/puria-izady/
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