White Box Rodeo

Lars Rasmussen co-created Google Maps with his brother Jens. He talks with Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou about the mapping startup no investor wanted, the question from Larry Page that changed the product and the three weeks in which the brothers rebuilt it for the browser.

The Rasmussens pitched a full-screen map you could drag around and no VC called back. Investors said people only need a map a few times a month. After a deal with a VC fell through, the brothers met Larry Page with maxed-out credit cards and no other options. Google hired them before it had time to buy their company, days before its IPO. Lars explains why Google Wave failed where Maps worked. He also says he should only build things he is bad at.

Today Lars is an angel investor in Athens. He was in Canva's first round and tells how its founders learned kite surfing to meet investors. A "Save Dave" sign later brought Canva its CTO. He also talks about Panathēnea, the startup festival he helps build in Athens.

New episodes every Monday and Friday. Recorded at HumanX, Amsterdam.

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
1:13 Meeting at HumanX
1:57 Panathēnea, the ancient festival of Athens
11:14 Why Athens and its startup scene
18:23 Where 2 Technologies and Jens's idea
23:38 No callbacks from any VC
24:48 "That's because your maps suck"
26:43 A spare bedroom in Sydney
27:39 Yahoo kills the deal
30:13 Start working for us on Monday
31:38 One of Google's best investments
32:49 Inside a VC's funnel
36:13 Meeting Larry Page
40:35 Three weeks to rebuild it in the browser
42:47 How big Google Maps became
48:42 Staying until Maps was number one
50:09 Google Wave
52:38 Only build what you are bad at
54:30 A first-round investor in Canva
57:36 Learn kite surfing to raise money
60:39 Save Dave
62:49 The 23-year-old CEO of Panathēnea

Corrections
12:02 During the 2015 capital controls the cash withdrawal limit in Greece was €60 per day.
45:29 Google's own mapping project was called Ground Truth.
48:48 Sebastian Thrun went on to lead the flying-car company Kitty Hawk.

White Box Rodeo is for information and entertainment only and is not investment advice. The hosts may hold interests in companies they discuss.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXlJBzcNjHU
White Box Rodeo: https://whiteboxrodeo.com
Hosts: Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou

Nasrin Mostafazadeh, co-founder and CEO of Verneek, talks with Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou at HumanX in Amsterdam. She grew up in Tehran, went to a school for exceptionally talented students from the age of 11 and started working in AI at 14. She has worked on common sense reasoning for twenty years. She met her co-founder and husband Omid at a robotics competition in Bremen, when they were both still in high school.

Verneek builds AI for retailers and consumer brands, trained on their own data. Nasrin explains why she says Silicon Valley hates retail, how she and Omid built a New York company without making fundraising the news, and why Verneek chose Luxembourg for its first European office. She talks about hiring now that candidates use AI in interviews, and why she doubts she would have become an AI scientist had she grown up in the US.

She ends with what drives her. Few female founders get funded, and she wants to show that it can be done.

New episodes every Monday and Friday. Recorded at HumanX, Amsterdam.

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
0:31 Have you been in Amsterdam before?
3:08 Why so many Iranians lead in tech
4:14 Doing more with less in Iran
6:29 Working in AI at 14
8:29 Maryam Mirzakhani and the Fields Medal
11:30 Education, AI and cheating in interviews
14:34 Her first and last company
16:14 What Verneek does
19:10 Why retail ends up with overstock
21:46 From AI scientist to retail
23:48 Silicon Valley hates retail
25:47 The hype cycle and causal reasoning
27:52 Deep domain expert AI
32:05 A New York company
36:39 Profitable and coming to Luxembourg
40:42 Fundraising is not an achievement
43:40 Meeting Omid at a robotics competition
45:40 Women founders and what drives her

Corrections
39:52 Luxembourg's cross-border workers come from France, Belgium and Germany. The Netherlands does not border Luxembourg. The flags of Luxembourg and the Netherlands differ in the shade of blue, not the red.
Verneek announced plans for its Luxembourg office in September 2026. The office had not opened yet at the time of recording.
46:11 PitchBook puts the share of US venture capital raised by all-female founding teams at 2.1% in 2024 and 1.1% in 2025.

White Box Rodeo is for information and entertainment only and is not investment advice. The hosts may hold interests in companies they discuss.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjmuhSbXifU
White Box Rodeo: https://whiteboxrodeo.com
Hosts: Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou

Parag Parekh, Chief Digital Officer of Ingka Group, the largest IKEA franchisee, talks with Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou at HumanX in Amsterdam. An engineer from Mumbai, he wrote software at Honeywell, joined GE's IT leadership program and worked at Adidas before IKEA came calling. He says a small screw made the decision easy: IKEA mailed it to his home in Germany, two weeks after he asked for it in a store. During the first question someone brings in the bag he left in an Uber.

Parag explains how IKEA is organised, from Inter IKEA as the franchisor to Ingka as its biggest franchisee, and why the restaurants matter. He admits IKEA was very late to digital: it was so successful in its stores that it missed how smartphones changed the way people shop. With AI it does not want to be late again. IKEA will not use customer data to manipulate people or AI to monitor its employees, and it wants to move its coworkers from being anxious to being curious.

He compares the work cultures of GE, Adidas and Sweden, where everyone is in it together but it is not always clear who is accountable. He furnished his new apartment in India almost entirely with IKEA, and his mother-in-law's kitchen too.

New episodes every Monday and Friday. Recorded at HumanX, Amsterdam.

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
1:02 We just want to know you as a person
1:23 What if IKEA stopped existing?
4:15 Growing up without IKEA and the missing screw
7:22 From engineer to GE and Adidas
9:39 Why so many Indians lead global companies
11:45 How IKEA is structured
16:00 Småland and 80 years of retail firsts
17:38 IKEA's restaurant business
18:33 Democratic design
20:30 Investing in lower prices
22:20 Margins and the cost of delivery
25:52 Smaller stores in city centres
27:15 Very late to digital
30:54 Who is IKEA's competitor?
32:07 AI and interior design for everyone
34:44 What IKEA will not do with AI
36:07 From anxious to curious
39:21 Ingka Centres and Ingka Investments
41:36 GE, Adidas and Swedish culture
44:24 IKEA in his own home

White Box Rodeo is for information and entertainment only and is not investment advice. The hosts may hold interests in companies they discuss.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1LZzgezimk
White Box Rodeo: https://whiteboxrodeo.com
Hosts: Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou

Robin Wauters, co-founder of Tech.eu, talks with Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou at HumanX in Amsterdam. Robin wrote for TechCrunch and was European editor of The Next Web before he started Tech.eu in 2013 to cover the European tech scene. He sold the company to Webrazzi in 2021 and left in 2024. Today he helps manage Syndicate One, a Belgian seed fund that invests in Belgian founders wherever they are.

Robin says most growth capital still comes from outside Europe and that Europe missed the boat on social networks, semiconductors and hardware. He is one of the people behind EU-INC, a campaign for one company standard that founders could use across the EU. If he were dictator of Belgium, he would first guarantee for fifty years that founders and investors only pay tax on their shares when they sell them.

As an investor Robin looks for founders who are “so obsessed with solving that problem that that's all they think about.” Syndicate One invested early in Aikido, a cybersecurity company that has since become a unicorn. Robin wants his children to stay curious and thinks all children should learn basic business thinking from elementary school to university. He gives Robert and Kayvan advice for their new podcast: “So just keep at it. Like, don't stop.”

New episodes every Monday and Friday. Recorded at HumanX, Amsterdam.

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
0:49 Jürgen Ingels and SuperNova
1:24 How Kayvan met Robin
3:51 Welcome to HumanX and bike thieves
5:28 Tech.eu and how tech media changed
7:43 Ambitious founders, exits and the EIC
12:28 Why the US has more capital
14:40 Delaware, Spotify and taxing paper gains
18:46 Estonia and smarter regulation
21:44 EU Inc explained
25:00 If Robin ruled Belgium
27:05 Europe in the AI race
28:57 Angel investing and Aikido
32:20 From journalist to investor at Syndicate One
36:01 A new generation building in Europe
39:37 Cosmic Aerospace and electric flight
40:45 What should kids learn?
43:45 Education and the lonely founder
47:01 Profits, exits and what investors bring
49:59 Why does Belgium exist?
54:14 White Box Rodeo and Robin's advice for the podcast

Correction: at 14:09 Robert says none of ASML's machines go to Europe. ASML does deliver machines in Europe, for example to Intel's chip plant in Ireland. In 2025, €529 million of ASML's €32.7 billion in net sales came from customers in the Netherlands and the rest of EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa).

Correction: at 34:33 Kayvan calls Jack Clark, the Anthropic co-founder who started out as a tech journalist, Jason Clark.

Correction: at 47:45 Robin says Amazon hasn't made a profit for more than a decade. Amazon made its first full-year profit in 2003 and has been profitable in most years since. In 2025 its net income was $77.7 billion.

White Box Rodeo is for information and entertainment only and is not investment advice. The hosts may hold interests in companies they discuss.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCmmlLMuCak
White Box Rodeo: https://whiteboxrodeo.com
Hosts: Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou

Fabian Hedin, co-founder and CTO of Lovable, talks with Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou at HumanX in Amsterdam. With Lovable, people who cannot code build websites and apps by describing what they want in plain text. Lovable launched under that name in November 2024 and says it passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue eight months later. In August 2026 it raised $400 million at a valuation of $13.3 billion. Fabian is 27 and in October 2026 Forbes estimated his net worth at $3.1 billion. He says most of it is paper money. He still rides his bike to the office every day.

Fabian tells how Lovable grew out of GPT Engineer, a side project of his co-founder Anton Osika. He explains why two earlier launches failed, why the company stayed in Stockholm when people in San Francisco told the founders to move there, how Lovable picks an AI model for each request and how it makes money with credits. About the SaaSpocalypse he says: “If your moat is the code that you have written and only the code, then yes, you're in trouble.”

Before the interview Robert and Kayvan look back on HumanX and announce a series of at least six conversations from the conference.

New episode every Friday. Recorded at HumanX, Amsterdam.

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
0:31 Robert and Kayvan at HumanX
1:26 Six guests and series on events and cities
2:43 Change makers, Europe and Amsterdam
5:02 The interview: Fabian's first time in Amsterdam
6:53 What Lovable is and a Saturday morning walk
9:42 Software for the 99%
12:12 The first prototype and building Lovable with Lovable
15:36 A waitlist, two failed launches and the first round
20:05 Why Lovable stayed in Stockholm
24:05 The first hire, the name and the .com
28:13 The third launch and building for everyone
31:32 How Lovable picks an AI model
33:52 From $1M to $100M ARR and how credits work
37:08 Paper money and day zero
41:48 The SaaSpocalypse and the big AI models
47:00 Next: running your business on Lovable
49:15 Why so many startups come from Stockholm
52:59 FIRE and democratizing AI

Correction: at 28:04 Kayvan says someone bought google.com and sold it back to Google. In September 2015 Sanmay Ved bought google.com for $12 through Google Domains. Google cancelled the order after about a minute and later paid him a reward.

White Box Rodeo is for information and entertainment only and is not investment advice. The hosts may hold interests in companies they discuss.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QGmPOWW9Tg
White Box Rodeo: https://whiteboxrodeo.com
Hosts: Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou

“It's a sh*t life. Being an entrepreneur is a sh*t life,” says Jürgen Ingels. He co-founded the payments company Clear2Pay, which FIS bought in 2014, and afterwards people told him he had been lucky. He wanted to show he could do it again and set up the fund Smartfin, where he is founding partner and chairman. He also runs SuperNova, the technology festival in Antwerp that brought Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Belgium. His book Start, Grow, Sell collects fifty lessons for entrepreneurs.

In the third episode of White Box Rodeo, Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou start in the studio with what stayed with them after meeting Jürgen: how calm and genuine he came across, trauma as a driver for founders and why a good company may need only a small team in the age of AI. Robert explains why some of his questions in the interview appear as cards on screen: his microphone did not work during the recording. After that comes the interview, in which Kayvan and Robert talk with Jürgen about SuperNova, his companies and what he has learned as a founder and investor.

Jürgen explains how SuperNova got Obama to Belgium through contacts in the US and how Oprah read his book on her plane and later invited him to her podcast. He talks about working every Saturday morning, about work-life balance in the first ten years of a career and about what he calls mushroom companies: small teams that grow fast. He also covers whether Europe can compete with China and the US, his space collection and the new space and defence fund at Smartfin. He tells the story of his chocolate shops in Stockholm and why they closed. The episode ends with what he has learned about happiness.

New episode every Friday. Recorded at Berghaus, Amsterdam (studio) and at Jürgen's office in Flanders (interview).

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
0:31 Who is Jürgen Ingels?
3:12 The missing cable and Robert's mic
4:31 AI, small teams and SuperNova
6:58 The interview: a week of SuperNova
8:25 How SuperNova got Obama
13:33 SuperNova's bar, investors and a prize in Cannes
16:43 Human capital and mushroom companies
21:58 Charlie Duke, Oprah and her podcast
27:35 Interviewing Oprah and Obama on stage
31:33 Saturday mornings and work-life balance
36:41 Creativity, robots and Europe's heritage
39:42 Can Europe compete with China and the US?
44:56 Does university still matter?
48:06 Musk, Jobs and what drives top founders
51:19 Deliverect and how he spots winners
56:16 Clear2Pay, "you got lucky" and Smartfin
1:00:04 Being an entrepreneur is a sh*t life
1:01:34 Why he stays in Belgium
1:03:47 His father, Apollo and a space museum
1:08:44 Space, defence and the road to Mars
1:15:18 Chocolate in Stockholm and other companies
1:24:24 Longevity, Celtic salt and Eat Move Sleep
1:30:30 Living longer and what happiness is

Correction: at 1:24 Kayvan says Clear2Pay was sold for 400 million euros. FIS paid approximately €375 million for all shares of Clear2Pay in 2014.
Correction: at 15:35 Kayvan links the prize for the SuperNova opening film to the Cannes Film Festival. The opening film of SuperNova 2025 won a Silver Dolphin in the Event Promotion category at the Cannes Corporate Media & TV Awards, a separate festival for corporate films, in September 2025.
Correction: at 22:12 Jürgen places Charlie Duke on Apollo 17. Duke walked on the moon as lunar module pilot of Apollo 16 in April 1972 and was the backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 17.

White Box Rodeo is for information and entertainment only and is not investment advice. The hosts may hold interests in companies they discuss.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaAUljLQewQ
White Box Rodeo: https://whiteboxrodeo.com
Hosts: Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou

The episode of history where humanity was the apex intelligence is about to end. That is how Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer of Google X and author of Scary Smart, sees it. Kayvan interviewed him on stage at the Love Tomorrow Summit in front of thousands of people, with one plan: challenge him instead of agreeing with him.

In the second episode of White Box Rodeo, Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou talk about how that interview came about, from journalism school and Forbes to two hours backstage with Mo. Then the full conversation from the Love Tomorrow stage: AI as the ultimate equalizer, America and China in the AI race, where Europe stands, what our children should still learn, and questions from the audience.

Back in the studio we go through what Mo told Kayvan off camera, AI and warfare, DeepSeek and intellectual property, and his ten-year timeframe.

Interview footage: Love Tomorrow Summit 2026, used with permission of Love Tomorrow. New episode every Friday. Recorded at Berghaus, Amsterdam.

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
0:27 Kayvan's interview with Mo Gawdat
2:55 Tomorrowland and the Love Tomorrow Summit
6:27 From journalism school to Forbes
14:03 Invited to challenge Mo Gawdat
15:02 Two hours backstage with Mo
17:22 Friend or opponent on stage
19:58 The Love Tomorrow interview
21:44 The viking chant
24:48 Who is Mo Gawdat?
33:08 The end of humans as the apex intelligence
34:14 America, China and the AI race
38:33 Where is Europe?
39:12 AI as the ultimate equalizer
42:14 What should our children study?
45:41 Memorising, boredom and a disagreement
50:31 Questions from the audience
1:02:26 Two questions at the end of a life
1:03:10 Back in the studio
1:09:35 What Mo said off camera
1:13:26 AI, warfare, China and Europe
1:16:11 America's role
1:17:18 DeepSeek and intellectual property
1:18:48 Ten years
1:19:50 Next: Jürgen Ingels

Correction: at 1:11:10 Robert mentions a US Air Force simulation in which an AI drone turned against its operator. The US Air Force has said no such simulation took place, and the colonel who described it later called it a hypothetical thought experiment.

White Box Rodeo is for information and entertainment only and is not investment advice. The hosts may hold interests in companies they discuss.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PEh9t2kSu0
White Box Rodeo: https://whiteboxrodeo.com
Hosts: Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou

Attention beats capital. In Europe the money is there but the attention is not, and the founders who work that out get ahead of the ones still waiting for a grant.

In the first episode of White Box Rodeo, Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou crack open European entrepreneurship. Why a €50,000 grant takes six months and a consultant. Why Dutch founders stay off camera while American CEOs turn into cult leaders. Why Stockholm punches above its weight and what Scott Galloway's line about making money in America and spending it in Europe is worth once you actually build here.

Then the money. Revenue per employee from OnlyFans to OpenAI, how Nvidia turned its staff into millionaires, founders with immigrant roots from Brin to Musk and why the people who get rich think in ten-year cycles. A friend of Kayvan's lived on ramen for two years to get there.

And late in the episode, Miro. Valued at $17.5 billion in 2022, sold to Bending Spoons on 10 September at an enterprise value of $1.36 billion. Kayvan got the news from the founders the day before we recorded, so we work through who actually gets paid.

New episode every Friday. Recorded at Berghaus, Amsterdam.

Chapters
0:00 Cold open
0:32 Why we're starting White Box Rodeo
6:24 The €50,000 grant that takes six months
7:46 Make money in America, spend it in Europe (Scott Galloway)
8:45 Tier-one cities, from London to Stockholm
11:28 Why Dutch founders stay camera-shy
15:24 Attention beats capital
23:29 Finland vs Sweden: the distribution gap
26:06 Revenue per employee, from OnlyFans to OpenAI
27:20 How Nvidia made its staff millionaires
30:55 Cult CEOs and the ASML boss nobody knows
37:56 Founders with immigrant roots, from Brin to Musk
41:46 Miro: 15 years, $17.5B, sold to Bending Spoons
46:02 The SaaS apocalypse theory
52:24 Who gets paid: founders, staff and VCs
1:00:06 Think in ten-year cycles

Sources
Bending Spoons agrees to acquire Miro (10 Sep 2026): https://investors.bendingspoons.com/newsroom/bending-spoons-agrees-to-acquire-miro
Miro valued at $17.5B after $400M Series C (TechCrunch, 5 Jan 2022): https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/05/visual-collaboration-company-miro-valued-at-17-5b-following-400m-in-new-funding/

White Box Rodeo is for information and entertainment only and is not investment advice. The hosts may hold interests in companies they discuss.

Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4c0-cDMooOs
White Box Rodeo: https://whiteboxrodeo.com
Hosts: Robert Valentine and Kayvan Nikjou