The Startup Saga Podcast Season 1 explores the inner journey of building a company. Hosted by Iulia Oprea, Gestalt Therapist, Founder Coach and CEO of Dragon Coaching House and Nick Pearce, CEO of Alexander Daniels Global this series goes beyond the headlines to explore the raw, unfiltered realities of building a tech company from the ground up.
In today’s episode, we’re diving into one of the most defining — and often underestimated — stages of building a company: finding the first believers and creating the founding team. This is the moment where everything is still fragile, where there’s little proof, limited resources, and a whole lot riding on trust, alignment, and shared belief.
To help us unpack this, I’m joined by someone I’ve known for a long time — and someone we genuinely admire — Markus Seibold. Markus is the co-founder and CEO of MakerVerse, a digital manufacturing platform that connects procurement and engineering teams with a trusted global supply base, making on-demand industrial parts easier to quote, source, and deliver.
Before founding MakerVerse, Markus spent more than a decade at Siemens Energy, where he built and led one of the most advanced additive manufacturing programs in the world, overseeing the serial production of high-end industrial components using cutting-edge 3D printing technologies.
What makes Markus’s story particularly relevant for this episode is that he’s lived both worlds — building deep expertise inside a global organisation, and then stepping out to create something entirely new, where the success of the venture depended on assembling the right people, earning early trust, and convincing others to believe in a vision before there was much to show.
Markus brings a rare combination of deep technical understanding, operational leadership, and a grounded, human approach to building teams. Whether he’s talking about co-founder alignment, early hires, or winning the confidence of first customers and partners, his insights are shaped by real experience — not theory.
So if you’re a founder thinking about who to build with, how to earn belief early on, or how to turn a strong vision into collective momentum, there’s a lot to take from this conversation.
Before we jump in, we prepared something you might find valuable. We created a free library of resources related to every episode in the Startup Saga founder journey. These resources are created by our guest speakers and they will offer you practical support in your journey.
Make sure you subscribe to the resource library! Let’s jump in!
Subscribe here: https://www.resourcestorelations.com/the-startup-saga-resource-library-subscription
The Startup Saga Podcast founding sponsors:
www.alexanderdanielsglobal.com
www.dragoncoachinghouse.com
About our guest speaker: Markus Seibold: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markus-seibold/
Special thanks for post-production: @szkubi.sznex Molnar Csaba
