The Future Series

Today we talk with Michiel about his journey from traditional Belgian law firms and in-house counsel at AI company ML6 to co-founding and leading Duely, an AI native services company that does legal M&A work with its own software rather than selling the tech. We cover why he and his co-founder refused to sell a legal tech platform into firms stuck on billable hours, how their first product sold an AI engine to data room providers until the market proved too small, and the pivot on Piccadilly Circus, sparked by a Jude Law Legora campaign, to compete directly with traditional law firms and sell to private equity and corporate development. We also dig into advice from HG Capital on choosing that competitor, the Sequoia and Y Combinator line that services are the new software, more than twenty M&A projects with results almost five times cheaper without sacrificing quality, a best sales month near 100K in October, what it means when lawyers still sign off the work while AI drafts the reports, and why Michiel's advice to future founders is simple: just do it, just don't die, and sell, then build, then scale.

Today we talk with Diogo about his journey from teenage surf instructor to co-founding and leading Hands On, Portugal's pioneer marketplace connecting people with local experts for in-person learning experiences, from surfing and ceramics to cooking. We cover how a path through surf camps in Norway and Sri Lanka and yacht work in Mallorca led him into a vacation rental company, where he helped merge four companies across Portugal, Scotland, Italy and England onto one system, and how he built a no-code marketplace prototype with a spreadsheet to convince his co-founder. We also dig into the year he built Hands On on the side before agreeing a one-year exit from his job, launching at a Christmas market in Lisbon, going from 60 euros in sales in January to around 10,000 euros in December once gift cards launched, and the brutal lessons of building a team. Diogo also shares what it was like to raise his first funding round as a first-time founder, why distribution is the focus for the year ahead, including gift cards, expansion into Spain and partnerships with travel companies, and why he believes that if you have purpose, the skills will come later.

Today we talk with Diego about his journey from AI engineer and data scientist to co-founding Anyformat, a horizontal document processing platform helping enterprises like L’Oreal and Iberia reliably extract data from complex PDFs to feed their AI agents. We cover how seven years as the first employee at a $600M Spanish scaleup gave him the entrepreneurial foundations to go out on his own, how he built the initial prototype over weekends in his spare bedroom before raising a pre-seed in just two weeks, and the wild story of spending four months working inside a Singapore prison to deploy their air-gapped solution for the government. We also dig into why selling to enterprises is really about selling trust, how his background in MMA has given him the discipline and resilience to keep going through the toughest moments of the founder journey, and why he believes the next big opportunity is building products that agents love rather than just people.

Today we talk with Vaneesa about her journey from NYU law graduate and venture capital lawyer to co-founding Perry AI, the AI legal operating system built specifically for venture funds, private equity funds and credit funds. We cover how years of working inside the private capital ecosystem as a lawyer revealed a problem nobody had properly solved, why she and her co-founder spent months validating the idea with 25 funds before writing a single line of code, and what it was like to flip from advising founders on fundraising to becoming a founder raising capital herself. We also dig into how Perry AI is already being used across the UK, US, Germany and India, why being deeply vertical in a noisy legal AI market is their biggest competitive advantage, and why Vaneesa believes the best signal of product market fit is not when someone tells you the idea is good but when they actually pay for it.

Today we talk with Jody about his journey from falling into recruitment twenty years ago to co-founding Atara Partners, an exec search firm placing senior leaders into founder led and VC backed businesses. We cover what it was really like to launch a business during Covid with no Wi-Fi and win a NYSE listed client on day four, how staying lean while others scaled aggressively turned out to be the decision that kept the lights on when the VC funding boom came crashing down, and why building a community of five hundred founders has become the most powerful thing Atara has ever done. We also dig into the Founders Circle events series, why twenty percent of their business now flows directly from community, and what Jody has learned from working alongside some of the most ambitious founders in the UK about what it really takes to build something that lasts.

Today we talk with Christian about his journey from auditor at PwC to serial entrepreneur and co-founder of CYKOM, a two sided platform building the infrastructure for social sports communities and the brands that want to connect with them in real life. We cover how a career spanning accounting, M&A and helping over 40 startups raise funding gave him the perfect foundation to build his own company, the wild story of how he and his co-founder borrowed against their apartments to buy the entire stock of a bankrupt cycling company just to secure the brand name, and what those first twelve months of selling bikes out of an old grocery store while simultaneously building a tech startup really looked like. We also dig into why the trend of run clubs, social rides and real life community is accelerating in a world drowning in digital noise, how CYKOM is already expanding from Copenhagen into Germany and the Nordics, and why Christian believes the best thing his app can do is get people to spend as little time in it as possible.

Today we talk with Bernhard about his journey from extreme sports athlete and decade long career quantifying physical risks at one of the world's leading reinsurance firms to founding ScyAI, an AI lab building the intelligence layer for corporate insurance and risk management. We cover how a frustration with risk reports that never translated into real action sparked the idea for ScyAI, how he bootstrapped and built a fully AI enabled team that operates with the horsepower of a company five times its size, and what it took to close an oversubscribed €2M seed round backed by unicorn founders and top tier institutional VCs. We also dig into why founder market fit matters more than ever in the age of AI, why specialising in a vertical where you have a genuine right to win is the only strategy that makes sense right now, and why Bernhard believes the best companies of the future will be built in small high powered pods rather than scaling headcount the traditional way.

Today we talk with Stefan and John about their journey from education industry veterans to co-founding AskEd, a voice AI platform building multilingual student recruitment agents that can live on a university website, be called on the phone or reached via WhatsApp in up to 80 languages. We cover how Stefan's redundancy sparked a weekend experiment with ElevenLabs that turned into a live prototype tested on the streets outside Middlesex University, how the pair went from a coffee in Farringdon to incorporating a company, securing £100k in angel investment and launching a full product in under six months, and why 60% of student leads coming in after 5pm represents a massive untapped opportunity for education institutions around the world. We also dig into what those first three months of building really looked like, why their combined 35 years of education experience gives them a genuine edge in a fragmented global market, and why they believe voice AI is about to become the new front door for every university, language school and education provider on the planet.

Today we talk with Jitka about her journey from marketing strategist and serial consultant to founding Eterny, a company building an intelligence layer for financial institutions that turns mountains of dormant data into proactive insights for financial advisors. We cover how a deeply personal loss in 2019 revealed just how fragmented and inaccessible financial data becomes at the worst possible moment, how she flew to the US to validate her idea by talking to everyone from consumers on the street to the Department of Military Affairs, and what it really felt like to go from working for founders to being one herself. We also dig into the pivot from a B2C consumer app with seventeen thousand users to a B2B intelligence platform, why she believes the US is the right market to build in first, and why her biggest lesson has been learning to stay concise when you are deeply in love with the problem you are solving.

Today we talk with Daniel about his journey from management consultant to co-founding ShipShape VC — a free investment search engine that has helped over seven and a half thousand companies identify the right investors for their raise, with those companies going on to raise a combined £2.1 billion and counting. We cover how a frustrating experience trying to find specialist investors for a fintech series A sparked the idea, why the investment market was fundamentally broken for founders who couldn't afford expensive platforms, and what those first two and a half years of building in a pre-LLM world really looked like. We also dig into why finding investors who truly understand your niche can dramatically change your valuation, why Daniel believes the US is the best place to start a company today, and how ShipShape is now setting its sights on making private equity markets more accessible for everyone.