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Who dares to make predictions in the current landscape? We do!  Our Predictions are back. Will our track-record continue on a high or will we be fundamentally wrong? Listen in to our Predictions for 2026 Navigation: Intro What will 2026 be all about? AI, AI and … more AI The big Hardware movements Of Start-ups and VCs Regulatory & Geopolitical Headwinds… and the Wars Fintech, Crypto and Frontier Tech Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show:   Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand Schmitt Introduction Welcome to Tech Deciphered Episode 74. That would be an episode about some predictions about 2026. What will be 2026 all about? I guess this year is probably starting with a bang. We saw the acquisition of xAI by SpaceX. We saw an acquisition from Grok by NVIDIA. What’s your take about what would be the big themes in 2026? I guess it would be for sure about AI and space. Nuno Goncalves Pedro What will 2026 be all about? Yeah. I predict a year that will be a little bit more of a year of reckoning in some way. There will be a lot of things that I think we’ll start seeing through. The fact that we are in the midst of an amazing transformational era for technology, the use of AI, but at the same time, obviously, a ridiculous bubble that is going alongside it as we’ve discussed in previous episodes. I think that we’ll start seeing some early reckonings of that, companies that might start failing, floundering, maybe a couple of frauds along the way, etc. I’ll tell you what I will not make many predictions about today, which is geopolitics. Geopolitics, I will not make predictions at all. Who the hell knows what’s going to happen to the world this year in 2026? I don’t dare making any predictions on that. Back to things where I would make predictions. I think on AI, we’ll have a little bit of reckoning. We’ll talk about it a little bit more in detail during this episode. Interesting elements around the hardware and physical space. Physical space, we just dedicated a full episode to it. We won’t go into a lot of details on that, but definitely on the hardware side, we’ll talk a little bit more about it. The VC landscape is going through an incredible transformation. We’ll talk about it today as well and some of our predictions for this year. What will happen to the asset class? It seems to be transforming itself dramatically. Obviously, that has a very direct impact on startups, so we’ll talk about that as well. And then to close a little bit the chapter on this, we will address some regulatory and geopolitical, let’s call it, headwinds without making maybe too many complex predictions. We shall see. Maybe by that time of the episode, we will be making some predictions. You guys should stay and listen to us, and maybe we will actually make some predictions about the geopolitical transformations that we will see this year in the world. Then last but not the least, we’ll talk about fintech, crypto, frontier tech, and a couple of other areas before concluding the episode. A classic predictions’ episode. We normally have a pretty good track record on some of these, but right now, the world is going a bit interesting, not to say insane. Bertrand Schmitt Yes, and going back to some news, Groq technically was not acquired, but, practically, it’s as if it got acquired. I’m talking about Groq, G-R-O-Q. The AI semiconductor company focused on inference AI, and it was late December. It was a way to end the year. This year, we started again with an acquisition of xAI by its sister company, SpaceX. I guess that’s where we are starting. AI, AI and … more AI We are going to start on AI. That’s definitely the big stuff. Everything these days, I guess, is about AI or has to have some connection with AI, or it doesn’t matter. I think every company in the world has seen that. You have to have the absolute minimum on AI strategy. You better execute on this strategy and show results, I would say. For the companies that were not AI native, you truly have to have a way to transform yourself. I guess at some point, the stretch might be too much, and it’s not really reasonable. Then you maybe better stay on what you are doing, especially if you’re in tech, you better be moving faster to AI. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Just to highlight, and I think throughout the episode, you’ll see that there’re obviously a lot of implications that would manifest themselves into capital markets. I mean, we’ll specifically talk about VCs and startups later on. But the fact that everything needs to be AI, the fact that there’s so much innovation happening right now, in my opinion, and this is maybe the first pre-topic to AI, is we’ll see a tremendous increase in M&A activity this year across the board. I mean, we’ve seen already some big acquihires we mentioned in some of our previous episodes, but we’ll see a lot more activity on M&A this year. Normally, that’s a precursor to the opening of capital markets. I predict also that there will be a reopening of the IPO market that never really reopened last year, to be honest. M&A, a lot more, reopening of the IPO market. Normally, it happens in the second or third quarter of the year. That’s what my M&A friends tell me. First quarter of year, everyone’s figuring out stuff. Then last quarter of the year, things should be more or less closed. Maybe the third quarter is the big quarter. We shall see. But definitely, as a precursor to our conversation today, I think we’ll see a lot of M&A, and we’ll see reopening of the IPO mark. Bertrand Schmitt I guess last year was not as big as you could expect on M&A given the tariff situation announced in April and May. I mean, it became quite tough to do IPO in such market conditions. Definitely, we can hope for something dramatically different in 2026. I guess talking about public markets and IPO, I guess the big one everyone is waiting for is SpaceX. SpaceX getting even more interesting with its xAI acquisition. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Do you think that because of the acquisition, it’s more likely that it will happen this year, or because of the acquisition, it’s less likely that it will happen this year? Bertrand Schmitt That’s a good question. My guess is the acquisition of xAI is all about xAI needing more financing and cheaper financing. This acquisition is a pathway to that. SpaceX being a much bigger company, a company that is also making much more revenues. I could bet that there is higher probability that, actually, SpaceX will go public in order to finance itself. At the same time, will it have enough time to prepare itself for the IPO given this acquisition just happened? Can they do that in 6 months? I mean, if anyone can do it, I guess it’s Elon Musk. It’s a strategy to present an even more attractive company with an even more interesting story, a story of vertical integration from AI to space. I guess the story as it’s presented itself right now, it’s one about having your AI data centers in space. Because in space, you have much better solar energy production with solar panels. You have a perfect cooling situation because you are in space. Thanks to Starlink, you have the mean to communicate between the satellites and with Earth itself. I think if someone can pull up a story like AI data center in space, I guess Elon Musk can. There is, of course, a lot of questions about is it practical? Is it economical? Yes. I certainly agree. I’m not clear on the mass, and can you make it work? Again, I mean, Elon Musk single-handedly, with SpaceX, managed to transform the space market on its head. I mean, they are the biggest satellite launching company in the world. They have the most satellites in the world. I mean, I’m not sure I would bet against him, and I guess I would probably believe that he could pull up something. Time frames, different story. The 2-3 years data center in space for AI as cheap as on Earth, I have more trouble with that one. I mean, it’s a usual suspect with Elon Musk. You promise something unachievable in a few years, but, ultimately, you still manage to reach it in 5 or 10. Again, I would not bet against the strategy. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah. I’ve talked to a couple of space experts, people that have launched rockets, and have worked JPL, NASA, and a couple of other places, etc. For what it’s worth, their feedback is, “No way in hell, and we’re decades away.” We’ll see. I mean, to your point, Elon has pulled very dramatic stuff. Not as fast as he normally says he’s going to pull it, but within a time span that we all see it. Difficult to bet against him. In terms of actually the prediction, maybe to respond to the prediction as well, will SpaceX IPO? I’m going to make a prediction that has a very high likelihood of missing the mark, but I think Tesla’s going to buy and merge them both into it. It’s going to become a public company through Tesla. That’s my hypothesis. Bertrand Schmitt No. That’s supposed to be it. That’s how you solve that. Nuno Goncalves Pedro And Elon controls the whole universe. X, xAI, Tesla, SpaceX, all under one umbrella beautifully run. And SolarCity is well in there, of course, so wonderful. Bertrand Schmitt That’s possible. Certainly, you are not the only one thinking Tesla will acquire or merge with SpaceX. To remind everyone, Tesla is around 1.3, 1.5 trillion market cap. Depending on the day, SpaceX seems to be valued at similar range, 1.2, 1.3 trillion. It looks like it’s the most valued private company at this stage. These are companies of similar size, so that’s one piece of the puzzle. When you think about the combined company, we could be talking about a 3 trillion entity. Playing right here with the biggest companies in the marketplace today. Nuno Goncalves Pedro With a couple of tweets from Elon, it will rapidly get to 4 to 5 trillion. Bertrand Schmitt That’s so tricky. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yes. On AI and back to AI, one thing I think that we’re about to see is this will probably be the year of agentic AI. Obviously, we predict a lot of growth on that side of the fence, in particular on the enterprise B2B side. We see a lot of opportunities coming through. From our perspective, at least at Chamaeleon, we generally believe that there’s going to be a lot of movements on agentic AI. It’s also going to be probably the year of the first big fails of agentic AI that will be newsworthy. There will be some elements about that loop and how it gets closed that will happen. I think we might see some scandals already. We’re already seeing the social network of bots talking to bots. We will see other scandals going on this year even in the consumer space and in the bot to bot space, which we now can talk about or in the AI agent to AI agent space. My prediction is we will see some move forwards. There’ll be some dramatic funding rounds along the way. We’ll see a couple of really cool things out of the gates coming out that are really impressive, but we’ll also see the first big misses of the technology stack. I don’t think we’ll go fully mainstream yet this year, so it’s probably maybe something more for 2027 along the way. That would be my prediction again. I think enterprise will lead the way. We’ll definitely see a lot of stuff on consumer as well that is cool. Then we’ll all have our own personal assistance in our hands, basically, literally in our phones. Bertrand Schmitt Going back to agentic AI, we also started the year with some pretty dramatic move. I mean, the launch of Clawdbot, renamed OpenClaw. I mean, this stuff took fire in like a week or 2. It was coded by just one person who actually didn’t even code the product but used AI to build the product, 100% used AI, proposing some new ways also to leverage AI to do coding. He has a pretty unique approach. It’s not vibe coding. I would say it’s a better way to do that. Then the surprising evolution with the launch of a social network for AI agents, Moltbook. I mean, this stuff, probably there is some fake in it. But at the same time, I think it’s quite impressive because it’s the first time we see truly 100,000 plus agents communicating directly to each other. Yeah. I mean, that’s the first time we see surfacing the possibility of some sort of hive mind on the Internet. It’s pretty surprising. Right now, all of this is a hack done in a few days. By end of year, by 2 years, 3 years, we might discover that, actually, the best approach to AI might not be the AI assistant like we are doing today, but a combination of hundreds of thousands of AI working closely together. We might be witnessing the first sign of new intelligence in a way. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Things like this social network might either be Skynet, the beginning of Skynet. They might be the beginning of Her, or they might just be a fad and nothing really happens. It’s just interesting to see what these agents are doing. Bertrand Schmitt Totally. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Obviously, there are real and clear and present dangers of some of the integrations of AI we’re seeing in the market. Interesting enough, and I’ll ask you for your prediction a bit, Bertrand. I think we’ll probably see the first big mishap of AI being used in some infrastructural decision in the age of AI. I mean, we’ve seen AI issues in the past and software issues in the past. We talked in previous episodes about that as well. Mishaps of software that have led to people dying. But I think probably the first big mishap will happen this year as well. Very public mishap of the use of AI and serve its interactions with infrastructure or something that’s very platform related, etc, that will have big impact that everyone will notice. That’s my prediction for the year as well. We’ll have the first big oops moment, as I would call it, for AI in this new age of full on AI. Bertrand Schmitt I would say first some perspective. I think today, people are not using AI directly for life and death decision, at least not that I’m aware. We’re not going to let AI fly a plane, for instance, tomorrow so you can be, reassured. At the same time, given there is such a race to AI, there definitely might be some mistakes. We were talking about the social network for AI agents, Moltbook. Apparently, all the keys used to secure the AI were shared by mistake because it was not properly locked down. We can see that indirectly, mistakes will be made for sure. Two, it’s highly probable that some people will trust AI too much to do some stuff, and this stuff might not work and might have some grave consequence. Hopefully, there is not so much of this. Hopefully, it’s mostly AI used for the good. But you’re right. I mean, at some point, the more we use the technology, the more there would be issue. I mean, it’s highly probable. Nuno Goncalves Pedro That will lead me to another prediction, which is, and we’ll talk about more of it later, but it probably will lead to the first significant movement in terms of regulatory environment certainly in the US at some point if it happens in the US in particular, where there will be some movement that will be like, “Hey, you guys can’t do this anymore.” Because this will probably emerge from mismanaged interfaces. From systems having access to stuff that they shouldn’t have access to in the first place. Talking a little bit more about what’s happening in AI. You’ve already mentioned some of the issues that relate actually to security and cybersecurity. We keep talking about AI. We keep talking about all these infrastructure pieces and platforms that are being built. I think we’ll have a lot more incidents like the one you just mentioned where things will be shared that shouldn’t have been shared, where people will break systems and get into it, etc. Let’s see where that takes us, which is a little bit ironic because, obviously, with AI, the promise is that cybersecurity becomes more robust as well because there’re agents working on our behalf on the cybersecurity side. There’s also agents working on the other side. Bertrand Schmitt It’s a constant race. It’s the attackers, defenders. Each time you have new technology, you have a new race to who is going to attack or defend the best. Each new wave of technology, it’s an opportunity to challenge the status quo. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The attackers have been winning, and I feel they’ll continue winning in 2026. I think it’s going to still be a year of attack. We’ll see more and more breaches, more and more stuff that will happen. Bertrand Schmitt I don’t know if they will win. I mean, it’s normal that they win once in a while. For sure, some infrastructure is not updated as it should. Some stuff are not managed as it should, so there will always be breaches. I don’t know if things are dramatically going to change because, again, everyone who cares who is going to update his infrastructure with AI for defense. There is no question that you have no choice. We will see. That I don’t know. For sure, AI will be used to attack directly with AI. Maybe you’re able to do bigger, larger scale attack. Or thanks to AI, you are simply able to create new type of attacks more easily. AI can be used behind the scene as a way to prepare and organise new type of attacks, even if it’s not used directly live in the battle. Nuno Goncalves Pedro One topic that we’ll come back to later is the geopolitics of everything, but maybe more broadly. On the geopolitics of AI, it’s very clear that we have an arms race going on. Obviously, the US on the one hand, China on the other hand is the two extremes, putting tremendous amount of capital into data centers just at the base of that infrastructure. Chipset development, chipset access, a huge theme in terms of the export restrictions, etc, that are being forced by the US. I think it will continue. From a European standpoint, obviously, they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, to be very honest. Let’s see what happens on that side of the fence. My view of the world is that certainly from a US and China perspective, we’re going to see a lot more movements in 2026, like big movements. The Chinese movements we always see in delay.  It takes us a couple of months, sometimes even more than that to understand exactly what’s going on. I think we’re going to see some huge moves this year in terms of the States, the United States of America, and China really pouring capital into the creation of the next big winners around AI. I think the US is obviously more visible. We see a lot of these companies. We’ve just discussed xAI and its acquisition by SpaceX or merger. I don’t know what they’re calling it exactly. Effectively, on the China side, the movements I think are already very big. As I said, it will take a while to figure out exactly what those moves are. One thing that I propose is that at some point, China will have very little dependency on chipsets from the US. I’m not sure it’s going to happen this year, but I think the writing is on the wall. Irrespective of any other geopolitical issues that is coming to the fore at this moment in time. That’s one of the key areas or in arenas of fight. Bertrand Schmitt It makes sense. If you are China, you will look at what happened. You would think that you cannot just depend on the largest of one country. It makes rational sense, the same way it makes rational sense for the US to limit exports to China because there is value to delay some peer pressure that could use these technologies for good but also for bad. If you were an ally of the US, that would be one thing. But when you are not an ally of the US, that certainly should be a different perspective. Maybe one last point concerning agents, I think there will be a lot that will revolve around coding. We can see OpenAI with Codex. We can see Cloud with code. There was, of course, [inaudible 00:18:28] that was trying to be big on agentic coding. I think agentic coding was one of the big transformation in 2025 and is going to get bigger in 2026. I think for a lot of people who do coding, there was a radical transformation in terms of what you can achieve, what you can do, how much you can trust AI to help you code. I start to think we might see this year, the replacement of not just one AI replace one coder, but one AI replace a full team because of the new ability to manage that at scale. Coding might be a common activity where you are going to think about outcomes, think about objective, think about how you organise, but not really coding by itself anymore. A big change, like you used to code, directly your hand on the stuff, but step by step, everyone is going to become a manager of agent. I think in one year, we saw enough transformation to think that in the coming year, the transformation can be even more dramatic. Nuno Goncalves Pedro The big Hardware movements Now switching gears to hardware. Obviously, a lot of movements in 2025 and over the last few years. One piece of thesis that we’ve had long-standing at Chamaeleon is that we will see the emergence of AI devices. Some of them have been tremendous failures as we discussed in the past. I predict that we’ll have a couple of really interesting full stack AI devices in the market this year. Why does that matter? Because, as many of you know, obviously, there’s compute that can happen in data centers and cloud infrastructure all over the world, but also there’s compute that can happen at the edges. The more you can move to the edges and the more you can create devices that actually allow you to have user experiences that are very distinctive at the edge, the more powerful some of these devices might become. I predict Apple will not be the first to launch anything on this. I predict probably OpenAI, after the acquisition of IO, will maybe not launch something this year, but will announce something this year. I’ll step back on that prediction. They’ll announce something this year, but maybe not launch. But we’ll start seeing some devices that have some interesting value in the market, probably devices that are AI devices, but they are very focused on very specific user flows, and so very much adequate to specific activities. I won’t make a prediction on that, but I think areas that would make sense for that to happen would be obviously around fitness, health, et cetera, et cetera, where we already have the ascendancy of products like Oura Ring and others out there. Definitely, that’s one area that might have quite a lot of developments. I think AI-first devices, devices that are very focused on compute at the edges, providing user flows that are AI-enabled to end users, we’ll see a lot more of that and a lot more activity this year. Again, I don’t think Apple will be necessarily ahead of the game. Again, maybe OpenAI will give us something to at least think about and look forward to. Bertrand Schmitt First, I’m not sure it will be that transformational because if it’s not in your phone, in your pocket, there is only so much you can do with it, and there is only so much computing power you will have. I’m doubtful it would be really impactful this year. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I feel we’ve been discussing this shift of paradigm in input and output. For me, some of these devices could lead to that shift. Because, again, a mobile phone is not a great long-term paradigm for the usage that we have because it’s really constrained by the screen. The screen is really what takes most of the battery life away. If we didn’t have that screen, what could we do? If we have the block that is as big as a mobile phone, and it didn’t have a screen, it was just compute, that’s a mini computer, a microcomputer. Bertrand Schmitt That’s a fair point, but I don’t see that transformation this year. That’s really more my point. I can see that you can have AI-enabled smart glasses, and it’s clear there is a race to AI-enabled smart glasses. My point is more to go beyond the gadget, it would take quite a while. It would need to have cameras. It would need to analyse what you see. It would need to hear what you hear. Again, it might come, but then at some point, it would be okay, what do you do with it? We have the example of the movie Her. That’s showing Her what it could be. There are definitely possibilities. It’s clear that if you take the big VR headset like the Apple Vision Pro, there is a failure from that perspective in the sense that I think it’s a great, amazing device. The big problem is that it’s doing way more that makes sense. I think there will be a clearer separation between your smart AR glasses that has to be light, that has to be always unconnected, and that’s primarily there to help you make sense of the world around you. The true VR headset that doesn’t really require much in terms of AI, and it’s just there to immerse you in a different world. For this, we know, unfortunately, in some ways, that there is not a lot of demand for it. Maybe there is little demand because you are too hidden in your own world. The technology is not working well enough yet. There are a lot of reasons. But I think Apple trying to do both at the same time, AR and VR, with the Vision Pro, was a pretty grave structural mistake. I think we would see a clearer line of separation between the two. There is bigger market opportunity for AR glasses. That, I certainly agree. There is opportunity to connect that to a computing device. As you talk about, your glasses are your screen, your phone becomes something in your pocket connected to your glasses. Nuno Goncalves Pedro For me, Apple has their way of doing things. From the perspective of what you said, they normally really plan their devices. Even if it’s a big shift in terms of a new area, like they tried with the Vision Pro, and we criticised them for launching it as a device that should have been more of a dev device that they really launched as a full-on device, but that’s their playbook, classically. I think Apple needs to change how they put products out and how they experiment with those products, et cetera. I think they have enough money to be doing everything all the time and figuring it out. If they don’t want to put it out, then they need to do a lot more hell of testing internally with their silos, but they should be playing across all these arenas, VR, AR, everything. They just should put devices out that are either ready for prime time, or they should call it something else. They should call it like this is a dev device or whatever it is. Bertrand Schmitt I agree with you. My complaint is more that it was marketed as a consumer device when it was not. It was a true developer device. Two, they tried to mix the two at once, and it made no sense. No one is going to walk in their home or in the street with their Vision Pro on their head. You have to be deranged, quite frankly, to have use cases like this. I think that for me is a crazy mistake from a company like Apple that prides itself in pure UI, pure user interface, very well-designed device for one specific use case, not mixing the two use cases. We still don’t have Macs with a touchscreen, you know?  We still don’t have an iPad with a good OS that makes use of this great hardware. For some strange reason, they decided to mix everything in the Vision Pro with a device that weighs a ton on your head and is so uncomfortable. That’s why, for me, I’m like, “Guys, what is wrong? Why did you let this team run crazy?” I hope at some point, Apple will go back to the drawing board. My understanding is that that’s what they are doing. They are going to have two devices, one smart glasses, an evolution of the Vision Pro, just focus on VR. They might actually abandon the concept of the pure VR-oriented headset. Because, from a market size perspective, it might not be big enough for Apple, quite frankly. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I read on all of the above, and people at this point was like, “Why are then players like Samsung and others not doing it. LG, et cetera?” Because those players historically have not invented new categories. They’re amazing at catching up once the category is invented, and then they scale the hell out of it, and that’s what these companies have been exceptional at. I wouldn’t see a dramatic innovation, I think, in terms of devices coming from any of the big ones on that side of the fence. Not to disrespect them in any way, but I think that’s not been their playbook ever. Again, if the origination doesn’t come from a start-up or from an Apple, I don’t see those guys going after it. My bet is that we’ll see some start-up activity and, again, hopefully, some announcement from IO now within the OpenAI world. Bertrand Schmitt I would slightly disagree with you. I see where you are coming from. But take the Samsung Galaxy Note, that sudden much bigger headphone that no one was doing that was launched by Samsung, at some point, it forced Apple to launch an iPhone Max. Let’s look at the Z Fold that Samsung launched 7 years ago, copied by everyone. Now Samsung launching a trifold. Apple has still not launched their foldable phone. I think there is a mix, actually, of sometimes- Nuno Goncalves Pedro For me, that’s not a proper new category. It’s still a mobile phone. It just happens to have a screen that folds in half. Bertrand Schmitt The iPhone was still a mobile phone, you could argue.  Nuno Goncalves Pedro No. I think the iPhone was…  I could actually agree with you on that point. Maybe Apple is not as innovative in that case. I think what Steve Jobs was exceptionally good at in terms of his ability as this master product manager was to be an exceptional curator of user flows and user experiences, and creating incredible experiences from devices based on that. That was his secret sauce. Could you say, “Wasn’t all of this stuff already around?” It was. You just put it all together very neatly and very nicely. But if you’re talking about significant shifts in how a category is done, the iPhone was a significant shift in how the category was done. The Fold is still an interesting device. I actually have a Fold right now in front of me. The 7 that you highly recommended to me that we both got, the Z Fold 7. I think they do amazing devices. I don’t think they normally are the most innovative players. Then, when they come to innovation, it comes from technology edges. Obviously, they have Samsung Display, there’s a bunch of other things. They had the ability to do foldable screens in-house themselves. Bertrand Schmitt I don’t disagree with you. I think there is an interesting situation where some companies have some strengths, another one has some strengths. My worry with Apple is that this was not demonstrated with the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro was a hot pot of technologies barely integrated together, with use cases absolutely not well-defined and certainly not something that makes sense for most of us. There is a question of has Apple lost it? While Samsung actually keeps doing their own stuff, that, yes, might be more minor improvements, but at least they are doing it. Because it looks like Apple is missing the train on even the minor improvements. By the way, you might not be aware, but Samsung launched its Vision Pro competitor. Interestingly enough, it might be a better product in some ways, being much lighter and much more comfortable. Nuno Goncalves Pedro We should play around with that and report back to our listeners. Of Start-ups and VCs Moving to venture capital and the startup ecosystem and what’s happening there, I think it is very much a bifurcated environment, and it’s bifurcated for both VCs and for startups. If you’re a startup in the AI space, and you have the hottest team since sliced bread, and you can create FOMO at the speed of light, you can raise ridiculous rounds. Five hundred million at the $3 billion, or $4 billion, or $5 billion valuation, and you still haven’t really even started. First round, you can raise 500 million. That’s back to the whole discussion on Bubble and where are we, et cetera. Some of these companies might actually become huge, some of them might not. But definitely, we are seeing really the haves and have-nots on the startup ecosystem with incredible teams raising a lot of money very, very early on or mid-stage if they’ve already existed for a while, and then the rest not being able to raise. We see a lot of non-necessarily AI sectors, some of the areas of SaaS that don’t necessarily have AI in it, or fintech, or the consumer space that are really, really struggling. If you don’t have an AI story for your startup right now, it’s extremely difficult to raise money unless your numbers are just the best numbers ever. That’s, I think, the first part of the element of bifurcation that we’re seeing today. The second element of bifurcation that we’re seeing today in terms of fundraising is for VCs themselves, and really propelled by the large VC firms raising more and more capital in recent orbits, announcing 15 billion across funds raised. Lightspeed, I think, had made an announcement a couple of weeks ago as well. They’ve raised a bunch of money as well. The big guys are all raising a lot of money. At some point in time, the question some of you might ask is, “These VCs are redeploying more and more money if they have a couple of billion for a VC fund. How does that look like? Is that still VC?” My perspective, I’ve shared before in some of our previous episodes, is that that’s no longer venture capital. At that point in time, we’re talking about something else. Private equity hedge funds, if you want to call them, maybe funds that are really driven by growth investment or late-stage investment. If you have a couple of billion under management, you’re not going to make your returns by writing a $3 million check in a series seed and leading that round.  That has implications for everyone in the ecosystem. It has implications for smaller funds that obviously have a lot more difficulty in raising capital. It’s difficult to differentiate. Last but not least, also for startups that really continue searching for that capital that is out there. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, runs Speedrun, which is a great program for companies around consumer in particular. Initially, it was a lot for gaming. But at some point in time, Andreessen Horowitz could decide that they don’t want to invest more in you. They just put money from Speedrun, which is obviously a very small check compared to the very large checks they could write mid to late stage and that will have an effect on you as a startup. What happens at that point in time if Andreessen Horowitz is not backing you up in later stages? More than that, what happens if I can’t get these big funds interested in me? Are the small funds still valuable to me? Punchline, my view is yes. Obviously, we’re a smaller fund, so there’s parochial interest in what I’m saying. Small funds can still create a ton of value for you, also in terms of credibility, ability to accompany you in those first stages of investment, and the ability to bring other larger investors later down the road as well. There’s definitely a big movement happening in terms of the fundraising for VC funds, which we shouldn’t neglect, which is the big guys are raising a lot more capital and are therefore emptying the market to smaller funds that are having more and more difficult raising at this point in time. We had discussed that there would be a need for concentration in the industry, that micro funds would need to concentrate, and we didn’t have the space for so many micro funds as we had around. But the way it’s happening is extremely dramatic at this moment in time. I think it will continue through 2026. Bertrand Schmitt Remember a few years ago, with the rise of AI, there was more and more of the question about, “What’s the point of SaaS at this stage?” Because SaaS was around for 15 years. Basically, how do you come up with something new that was not already tested, validated by the market? How do you bring something new? We say this was reinforced to the power of 10. If your product is not clearly built from the ground up for a new use case enabled by AI, anyone could then might have built your product 5, 10 years ago, and therefore, why now has no clear answer, and it’s a big problem. I’m still surprised myself to still see some entrepreneurs where you talk to them about AI because you don’t see them in the deck, and they explain to you, “It’s not yet there,” and you’re like, “What’s wrong with you guys?” Fine. Do whatever you want. Do a small business and whatever, but don’t think you can come up pitch and raise without an AI story. The second category is people who come with an AI story, but you can feel very quickly, I guess you saw that many times, Nuno, where just a story layered on top with little credibility. It’s not better. It’s not enough to just have a story. Your business needs to be radically built differently or radically proposing some brand-new use cases that were impossible to solve 5 years ago. Nuno Goncalves Pedro To stack up on that, absolutely in agreement. If you’re just adding to the story, and it’s an afterthought, and you’re just trying to make the story somehow gel, once you go into one or two layers of due diligence, your investors will very quickly realise that you’re not really AI-first or dramatically AI-enabled or whatever. It’s just you’re sort of stacking something on top of another thesis. It needs to make sense from the product onwards. It’s not just, let’s just put it together with chewing gum, and magically, people will give you money. It was true also if we remember the good old crypto blockchain days, where everyone’s investing in crypto. A lot of stories that didn’t make much sense. In that sense, it’s not very different. I would go one step further. I think in the world of the VC winter that we’re a little bit in, where it’s more and more difficult if you’re a smaller fund to raise your fund at this moment in time, there’s a lot of sources of distinctiveness still talked about, like proprietary networks, access to deal flow, fast track record, all that stuff that really, really matters. But our bet continues at Chamaeleon continues being that you need to be AI-first as a VC fund yourself. You need to have core advantages in using not only readily-available AI tools or third-party available AI tools, data sources, technology stacks, but actually building your own stack over time, which is what we did with Mantis at Chamaeleon. Again, just to reinforce that, I think we’re at the beginning of that stage. We, Chamaeleon, are ahead of the game, but we think that the rest of the market will have to move towards that as well. Still, to be honest, very surprising to me to see that many significant large players are doing very little still around some of these spaces. They have data scientists. They’re running some tools. They’re running some analysis and all that stuff, but it’s still, again, back to the point I was making for startups, all glued up with chewing gum. It doesn’t all come together nicely, which it does need to from a platform standpoint. Bertrand Schmitt It’s quite surprising. I agree with you that some VC funds might think that they can do business as usual in that brand-new world. It’s difficult to believe. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Maybe moving a little bit toward the capital formation piece. We already discussed the M&A space really accelerating. We’ve also discussed the IPO market and some predictions on that. Secondaries, there’s obviously a lot of liquidity coming from secondaries from mid to late stage. I think it will continue throughout the rest of 2026. A lot of activity in buying, selling in secondaries as some asset managers are becoming more distressed, as some very high net worth individuals and family offices are becoming more distressed as well, at the same time, where there’s a lot of opportunities to potentially arbitrage around some investments. I believe a lot of money will be made and lost this year by decisions made this year, just to be very, very clear in terms of equity, purchases, et cetera. Exciting year ahead of us. Definitely a very, very interesting market ahead of us. Secondaries, M&A, growth, and late-stage investing, also, early-stage investing will continue just for those that were wondering. Last but not least, the public markets, the IPO market as well. Bertrand Schmitt One of the big questions for the IPO market would be, will SpaceX go public? Would it be good for the startup ecosystem? Because suddenly that they go public, it would be to raise money. If they raise money, will there be any money left for anybody else? That would be an interesting test of the market. For sure, it would be proof that market are risk on financing a new IPO like this one. Or as you said, maybe there is no IPO, and it’s a merger with Tesla. Time will tell. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Regulatory & Geopolitical Headwinds… and the Wars Moving maybe to our topic of regulation and geopolitical headwinds, as we’re seeing … definitely not tailwinds. The Google antitrust verdict and, obviously, the remedies are expected to come forward now, and a lot of people are saying, “There are some risks of structural separation.” What do you think? Is it cool, but nothing will happen in the end dramatically? Alphabet or Google? I’m not sure, actually. It’s Google LLC. I think that’s the case. It’s The United States versus Google LLC. Bertrand Schmitt I’m not sure. Personally, I’m not a big fan. I think there needs to be a better way to manage some anticompetitive behavior. I’m not a big fan. There was this temptation to do that for Microsoft 25 years ago. Look at what happened. No one needed to buy Microsoft to leave space for others. I see the same with Google, and I guess they are happy to not be the number 1 in AI today, but to have an open AI in front of them. Even if they are doing a great job, by the way, to move forward and go faster and faster. Personally, quite impressed now with some of what they have released. Gemini 3 is doing great from my perspective. I’m not a big fan of this. I think to be clear, it’s important that bigger companies don’t behave anticompetitively, but at the same time, we need to find the right approach where it’s not about breaking these companies, and it’s also not about forbidding them to do acquisitions. Because then you end up with what NVIDIA just did with a $20 billion acquihire IP licensing type of acquisition, because they didn’t want to have the uncertainties. They didn’t want to wait 1–2 years in order to acquire the people and the technology, so they organised it in a different way. But I don’t like that. I think they should be able to acquire companies without facing so much uncertainty. To be clear, it’s not new. Uncertainty when you are Google, NVIDIA, or others, it happens. It has happened for a decade plus, 2 decades. I think there needs to be, for sure, some safety valves. At the same time, we want an efficient capital market. An efficient capital market need companies that can acquire other companies. If you don’t do that efficiently, it will be worse for the entrepreneurs, it will be worse for the investors, it will be worse for everybody. I think we have not reached a good equilibrium from my perspective. We need more efficient acquisition process. And at the same time, we need to also enforce faster anticompetitive behavior. Because what you talk about concerning Google, this is a case that was what? That is 10 years old. You see what I mean? This is way too long. If you’re a startup, you are dead by then. It’s like the story of Netscape facing Microsoft. They were dead long after the fact. I think we need a different approach. I’m not sure the best answer. I’m not sure we’ll get a better approach. There are probably too many vested interest. My hope is that it will get better with this current administration because, certainly, the past administration was very anti acquisition and efficient markets. Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’ve talked about the European Union AI Act a bunch of times, so I don’t want to spend too many cycles on that. The only effect that I would say is we are seeing in very slow motion the splitting of the Internet. I once had Tim Berners-Lee, by the way, shouting at me that we were going to break the Internet when we were applying for the .mobi top-level domain. I was part of that consortium that eventually did get the .mobi top-level domain, and I had him shouting at us. But, apparently, this is going to split the Internet, Tim. So in case you’re listening. Because it will create all these different rules. If your data is relating to consumers there, then it’s treated in a different way, and The US is… Well, obviously, we have the case of California with its own rules and laws. I don’t know. I feel we’re having a moment of siloing that goes beyond economic and geopolitical siloing. It will also apply to the digital world, and we’ll start having different landscapes around it. We’ll see how this affects global expansion of services, for example, around AI, particularly for consumer, but I don’t foresee anything dramatically positive. Recently, we had the whole deal around TikTok finally having a solution for their US problem where there’s now a US conglomerate magically that owns it. The conglomerate doesn’t magically own it, they just straight up own it for the US. But it was driven by many of these concerns around data ownership. Where’s the data? Where is it based? I think a lot of other concerns that have to do with the geopolitics of China, obviously, being the basis of ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, that still is a significant owner, by the way, in TikTok in US. Then also the interest in the economics of making money out of something as powerful as TikTok, to be honest, in The US. Just to be clear, I don’t think this was all about the best interests of consumers. It was also about money. Just follow the money. Bertrand Schmitt There are for sure, some powerful interest at play. But let’s be clear. I think one is data, as you rightfully said, but the other one is algorithm. It’s not as if China is authorising any competitor on its territory. They have blocked access to most of the Internet platforms from the US, either finding new rules or just trade blocking them. So I don’t think it’s fair competition. You don’t want some of that data in China about the US or European consumer. Three, it’s about the algorithm. If suddenly, you are a foreign power, and you can as we know in China, you better follow what’s required of you from the Chinese Communist Party. You cannot take a chance with influencing other stuff like elections in other countries. It’s fair from the US perspective. One could even argue it’s fair from a Chinese perspective to want that. I think the only one in the middle who doesn’t really know what they want is Europe because on one side, they want to benefit from American platforms, on the other end, they want to have some controls. On the other end, they don’t create the environment for startups to flourish. So in that weird situation where they have to accept some control by the big US providers and either provider of underlying infrastructure or provider of consumer business facing services. Then they try to regulate them. But I think they are misunderstanding the power relationship, and I think some of this regulation would get some blowback, at least by the current administration. Just, I believe, this morning, there was some news around X being under a criminal investigation in France. This is not going to end well for the French startup and VC ecosystem. This is not going to end well for France and Europe when you depend so much from your American friends. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Regulation will be weaponised. Regulation constraints around exports, all of this will be weaponised geopolitically, and the bigger guys will normally win. I think that’s normally what we’ve seen. Just on TikTok just to… And you guys, if you’re listening to us, just see if you see a pattern here, but obviously, 19.9% still owned by ByteDance of the TikTok entity in the US. It was initially said that 80% of the TikTok entity is owned by non-Chinese investors. Initially, people were saying US investors, and then they changed it to non-Chinese because MGX, I think, has 15% of it. MGX is based in the UAE, connected obviously to Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. Silver Lake is in there, I think, with 15% as well. Oracle as well with 15%. Those three are the big bucket owners together, 45%. Silver Lake having collaborated with MGX before, and I’m sure a lot of connectivity there. Then you still see a pattern in this in terms of shareholders. If you don’t, then just Google it. Dell Family Office, Vastmir Strategic Investments, which is owned by billionaire Jeff Yass, Alpha Wave Partners, obviously involved with a bunch of things like SpaceX and Klarna, Virgoli, Revolution, which is Steve Case’s, a former founder of AOL, is also in there. Meritway, which is managed by partners, I think, of Dragonair. Vinova from General Atlantic, an affiliate of General Atlantic. Also, NJJ Capital, which I believe is Xavier Nil, the French billionaire that founded Iliad. Mostly American, I think, if the math is correct. 80% non-Chinese, which was what mattered, I think, in many cases. But do see if you saw a pattern in most of those investors. I won’t say anything more than that. Maybe moving to other topics, maybe just to finalise on regulation and geopolitics. In geopolitics, we should talk about wars if we predict anything. Not that we are nasty and one want to be negative, but what the hell is going on? Will we have ending to the wars we already have ongoing or not? But before that, the struggles on the App Stores, I think, will continue both for Apple and for Google Play Store. The writing’s on the wall, the EU keeps pushing it dramatically and Apple keeps just doing stuff. I’m on the board of an App Store company. Apple just creates all these things that basically make you not really… It doesn’t work. You can’t provision then an App Store on Apple devices. On iPhones, et cetera. We’ll see how that will continue going, but I feel the writing’s on the wall. Both Apple and Google will have to open up a bit more of their platforms. I’m not sure it will have a huge impact in the medium to long term, but definitely we need to see more openness in access to apps as given by the two big platform owners, Apple and Google, out there. Bertrand Schmitt Let’s be clear. Google is way more open than Apple. We both have Android devices. You can install alternative app stores. It’s a different ballgame by very far. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Google does other nasty stuff. It’s public. You can check which board I’m a part of. You can see what that company has done towards Google over time. But to your point, yes. It is true that Google has been more open than Apple, but Google has done their own things. Just to be very clear, so I’ll just leave that caveat bracketed there for people to think about it and maybe read a little bit about it as well. Bertrand Schmitt I can say that, me, from my perspective, that path of total control that Apple has been going through on all their devices, that includes macOS, pushed me to, over the past 2, 3 years, to completely live and abandon the Apple ecosystem. I just couldn’t accept that level of control, that golden handcuff approach of the Apple ecosystem, each their own obviously, they are golden, their handcuffs, but they are still handcuffs. Personally, that pushed me way more to Linux, Android, Windows, back to Windows after all these years. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I want to pick my devices. I want to pick what I install on them, and I don’t want to be controlled like this by just one entity for all my tech devices. For me, at some point, it was just not acceptable anymore. It’s still very warm, very golden handcuffs, but for me, they were just handcuffs at this stage. Yes, what they are doing with the App Store is very typical of that mindset. I think it’s quite sad because I think it started with good intention in some ways. “We need a new computing paradigm, we need to make things smoother and safer,” but it has really become a way to control your clients. For me, it has reached a point where it’s just way too much. Nuno Goncalves Pedro There’s obviously the great power comes great responsibility that uncle Ben told Spider-Man or Peter Parker. But there’s also with great power comes shitload of money, and control. So it’s like, “Yeah. Should we open the server? Do we want to delay opening it up?” “Yeah.” Anyway, it is what it is. Maybe let’s end on the more difficult note of the episode, which is going to be around wars. What’s our prediction? Will we have an end to the Gaza situation with Israel? Will we have an end to Ukraine and, obviously, Russia? What will happen in Iran? Those are the three big, big conflicts right now. Then, obviously, if we want to add just bonus points, what’s going to happen to Greenland, and what’s going to happen to Taiwan, and what’s going to happen to Venezuela? Let’s throw the whole basket in there. We’ve never had like… Let’s talk about all these territories and all these countries. At some point in time, I’m saying this in a light manner, but it’s obviously more tragic than it should be light, and people are dying, and there’s a lot of implications of all of that that is happening right now. Do you have any predictions, Bertrand, for this year? Bertrand Schmitt No. It’s tough to predict on an individual basis. I think on a more bigger picture basis is on one side, obviously, the rise of China on one side. You have also the rise of other countries like India, while very indirectly connected to some of these conflicts are still part of the game, buying oil from Russia, for instance. At the same time, I think overall, the US is more clear about with the sheriff in town. I think it’s good because in some ways, you cannot pay for the goods, you cannot have such a massive advantage versus nearly every other country on earth and just not be clear about who is the boss in some ways. As a result, what are the rules of the game and how it should be played? The US is not alone, obviously, you have China, you have Russia, you have India, you have Europe. You have different other countries. But at some point, it’s not good when countries are not rational and are not clear. I think I prefer the current situation where things are more clear and where you have to assume responsibilities about what you are doing. It’s time to be rational again about how the world behave. Yes, the concept of power and balance of power. I think there has been that dream, maybe mostly coming from Europe, about the end of history. I think that’s simply not the case. It’s not the end of history. It’s still about the balance of power. It has always been about the balance of power. If you are dumb enough to think it was not about that anymore, I just have a bridge to nowhere to sell you. I don’t have specific prediction, but I think it’s clear there is a new sheriff in town. There is a new doctrine about the Western Hemisphere that has been in some ways resurrected on the [inaudible 00:51:35] train, and I think we’ll see more of it. I think at this point, the biggest question is for the Europeans. What do they want to do? Because right now, their position of being a dwarf militarily while being a pretty big giant economically, I don’t think it works. Nuno Goncalves Pedro I agreed on everything that you said. I do have predictions. I’ll stick a flag on the ground just with my predictions. Bertrand Schmitt Good luck. Nuno Goncalves Pedro They are mostly positive. I do think we’ll see an end or, for the most, end to the two big conflicts, the one in Gaza and the one in Ukraine. I think Ukraine will end up in readjustment of territory and splitting between Russia and the Ukraine, but the end of hostilities, I think that we will see an end to the conflict in Gaza also with a readjustment on what that will mean for the Palestinian territories and the Palestinians in general. That I’m not sure, but I feel that there will be an end to those two big conflicts. Iran, I have no clue. I will not put a stick on the ground that I have no clue. There are so many things that could go wrong there. I’ve been reading some really interesting thoughts about even some aggressive thoughts that this might be the time to really change regimes in Iran and for the US to have a bit more of an aggressive stance. I really don’t have a perspective. Obviously, there’s a lot at stake there. Then, if we talk about the other parts, Greenland, I will not opine too much on. Maybe we’re done for now. Maybe there’ll be some other concessions to the US that weren’t already there in the ’50s. Taiwan, I won’t bet either. I’m sad to say I think it might happen at some point in time, but I’m not sure when and what would drive it. Last but not the least, Venezuela is my only really negative prediction. I feel it will continue to be a significant dictatorship as it was before managed enough by other people with the difference now that it has a tax to be paid to the US in the form of oil of some sort, etcetera, and maybe gas, maybe other things as well that it didn’t have before. That’s probably my most negative prediction for the coming year on the geopolitical side. Bertrand Schmitt Without going into detail, I would mostly agree with what you shared. At least that makes sense. But as we know, it’s not always what makes sense, but what might happen. I can tell you 100% I would not have guessed this operation against Maduro. This was so well done, well executed, and shocking at the same time that it’s… I think it shows that it’s hard to guess some of this stuff because there are certainly some new ways to wage limited war, for instance. So it’s certainly interesting, and we certainly need to get used to pretty bombastic statements. But for Venezuela, I don’t think it can be worse than what it was before. I’m probably more optimistic that gradually it can get better. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Just to put perspective on why we’re not making predictions on some of these elements, I think this is a funny story, but I was in Madeira. Actually, first time I was in Madeira, although I’m originally from Portugal. I’ve never been to the islands. Obviously, as you guys know, or some of you might know, there’s a lot of connection between Madeira and Venezuela. There’s a lot of immigration from Madeira Islands to Venezuela. One of my Uber or Bolt drivers there in Madeira was Venezuelan. Was born in Venezuela, but Portuguese descent, et cetera. He was telling me this was still last year. Late last year. Because I told him I lived in US, et cetera, and he was like, “Oh, hopefully, Trump will get Maduro out of there.” In my mind, I was like, “Dude.” No disrespect to the gentleman, but it’s like, “Okay. Mike, your perspective on geopolitics is maybe a little bit exaggerated.” And a couple of days later, we know what happened. When geopolitical decisions are better predicted by some probably very astute Uber drivers, you’re like, “Maybe I shouldn’t make a bet. I have no clue what’s going to happen, no clue what’s going to happen in Greenland, et cetera.” Anyway, a couple of predictions on that element. Bertrand Schmitt That’s why it’s so right. You have to be careful with the prediction, but it doesn’t remove the fact that I think nations and companies that have to play a global game have to understand in some ways what is the game, what are the powers in place, what could happen potentially, but also be realistic. Not be about wish and dreams, but more about, what’s the power relationship? Who has the money? Who has the means? Who has the capacity to do this or that? Because if you start that way, at least the scope of what’s possible, what’s reasonable is more and more clear more quickly. Some stuff like happened with Maduro, I would never have predicted, but for sure, if there’s one country that can do this sort of stuff, it’s the US. I’m not sure anyone has a technology and the means in terms of support infrastructure to do something like this. It’s tough to predict what will happen a year from now for any specific country, but I think that even trying to get a better understanding about the forces in play and their capacity and understanding and accepting that at some point, it’s all about real politic and relationship of power, the more your eyes would be wide open about what’s possible versus simple, wishful thinking. Nuno Goncalves Pedro Fintech, Crypto and Frontier Tech Moving maybe to our last section around fintech, crypto, and frontier tech. For me, just two very quick predictions, views of the world. I think on the frontier tech side, I won’t make a prediction. I will just tell you all to go and listen to our episodes, the one on infrastructure, which is immediately prior to this one, and the episodes that we’ve had around a couple of other topics including AI, what’s the future of your children, because I think they illustrate a lot of the points that we’re seeing and manifesting themselves over the next year and over the next 2 or 3 years as well beyond that. I feel those tomes are complete in and out of themselves, so you can just go and listen to them. Then my second comment is on crypto. I feel crypto has become of the essence, particularly under the current administration in the US, very favored. Obviously, we are now in a world where crypto is just part of the economic system, and I think we’ll see more and more of that emerging, and in some ways, crypto is becoming mainstream. Question is what blockchains will be the blockchains of the future? Obviously, there’s a bunch of bets put out there. We, ourselves, as Chamaeleon, have one investment in one of the significant bets in the space. But besides that, who’s going to win or not, we feel that we’re past the crypto winter. It’s now mainstream days, and we’ll see a lot more activity in there. Bertrand Schmitt I must say with crypto, I’m a bit confused. As you say, we are past the crypto winter. There is much less uncertainty in regul

In der heutigen #kassensturz Folge, unseren wöchentlichen Marketing & eCommerce News, geht es unter anderem um folgende Themen:(00:00) Intro(02:36) Gen Z kauft immer häufiger auf Roblox statt auf TikTok(11:00) Netflix zieht sich aus Warner Bros Deal zurück (19:37) Benjamin Otto neuer Vorsitzender im Otto Aufsichtsrat(23:20) eBay entlässt Mitarbeiter(23:59) DHL Group und JD.com vereinbaren Zusammenarbeit(23:35) TikTok Shop hebt Frist für Fulfillment-Zwang auf(26:34) TikTok führt in den USA die Funktion „Local Feed” ein (27:23) General Atlantic verkauft ByteDance Anteile zu $550 Mrd. Bewertung(28:00) Best Brands: Coca-Cola stößt Vorjahressieger vom Thron(29:33) Gerüchteküche: Paypal vor einer Übernahme(31:33) Jugendschutz in Social Media nimmt zu(32:25 ) EU bringt Anti-Deepfake-Allianz auf den Weg(33:32) Betrug über Telegram steigt QuellenGen Z kauft immer häufiger auf Roblox statt auf TikTokhttps://retail-news.de/roblox-tiktok-gen-z-social-commerce/Netflix zieht sich aus Warner Bros Deal zurück https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y6p5ypgmzoBenjamin Otto neuer Vorsitzender im Otto Aufsichtsrathttps://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/benjamin-otto-aufsichtsrat-otto-group-hamburg-li.3392990eBay entlässt Mitarbeiterhttps://wortfilter.de/breaking-news-ebay-stellenabbau/DHL Group und JD.com vereinbaren Zusammenarbeithttps://logistik-heute.de/news/kooperationen-dhl-group-und-jd-com-vereinbaren-zusammenarbeit-fuer-einfacheren-marktzugang-deutscher-marken-251512.htmlTikTok Shop hebt Frist für Fulfillment-Zwang aufhttps://www.modernretail.co/operations/tiktok-halts-plan-to-end-independent-shipping-for-u-s-sellers-after-backlash/#TikTok führt in den USA die Funktion „Local Feed” ein https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/11/tiktok-launches-an-opt-in-local-feed-in-the-u-s-leveraging-users-precise-location/General Atlantic verkauft ByteDance Anteile zu $550 Mrd. Bewertunghttps://www.reuters.com/world/china/bytedance-valued-550-billion-proposed-share-sale-by-general-atlantic-sources-say-2026-02-25/Best Brands: Coca-Cola stößt Vorjahressieger vom Thronhttps://www.wuv.de/Themen/Marke/Best-Brands-Coca-Cola-stoesst-Vorjahressieger-vom-ThronGerüchteküche: Paypal vor einer Übernahmehttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-24/payments-processor-stripe-expresses-interest-in-paypalJugendschutz in Social Media nimmt zuhttps://9to5mac.com/2026/02/24/apple-expands-age-assurance-tools-as-new-app-store-requirements-roll-out-in-several-regions/https://www.theverge.com/policy/883852/discord-age-verification-global-walkback-delayEU bringt Anti-Deepfake-Allianz auf den WegOMR Betrug über Telegram steigt https://t3n.de/news/revolut-fraud-report-betrug-ueber-telegram-steigt-um-233-prozent-und-fake-jobs-sind-das-groesste-problem-1731379/Max & Kristina auf LinkedIn>⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠Max Rottenaicher⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠>⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠Kristina Mertens⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CreditsLogo Design: Naim SolisIntro & Jingles: Kurt WoischytzkyFotos: Stefan GrauIntro-Video: Tim Solle

In today's MadTech Daily, we cover WPP unveiling a £500m cost-cutting plan in an AI-led overhaul, ByteDance being valued at $550bn in a proposed General Atlantic stake sale, and UK news giants launching a ‘NATO for News' AI coalition.

Neda Vakilian of Actis and David Swift of General Atlantic join the InsuranceAUM.com Podcast to explore how growth equity and infrastructure equity are reshaping the opportunity set for insurance investors in the energy transition era. As electrification accelerates, AI drives non-linear power demand, and energy security becomes a strategic priority, they outline how these structural forces are creating durable, long-term investment themes.   The discussion examines the difference between traditional infrastructure debt and control-oriented equity strategies, highlighting capital-efficient growth businesses and essential, baseline infrastructure in both developed and growth markets. Neda and David detail how their teams approach risk, focusing on execution rather than technology risk, policy-agnostic business models, long-dated cash flows, and disciplined underwriting frameworks designed to support capital preservation.   They also address how sustainability outcomes can emerge from solving economic problems, aligning measurable impact with institutional-grade return expectations. For insurers navigating long-duration liabilities and evolving enterprise risk priorities, this conversation offers a practical perspective on deploying capital into a structurally changing energy landscape.

About Rasmus Holst:Rasmus Holst is the CEO of Zensai (formerly LMS365), where he built a learning management business from $0–30M ARR, bootstrapped, completed three acquisitions, and pioneered the “Human Success” category as a replacement for Human Resources. He has been part of management teams delivering exits just shy of $1bn, raised +$50m for companies like Wire and Huddle, and worked across PE-backed (Carlyle, Warburg Pincus) and VC-funded (General Atlantic, Index, Vertex, Morpheus, Iconical) environments.His experience spans scaling start-ups from zero revenue, operating +$300M Lines of Business at Syniverse, and leading branding and B2B storytelling efforts, including Zensai's Red Dot Award and Great Place to Work recognition. Rasmus has managed global teams across 14 countries, traveled to +100 nations, and lived in Denmark, Luxembourg, and San Francisco, making him a leader with a uniquely international view on culture, growth, and balance. In this episode, Dean Newlund and Rasmus Holst discuss:Turning HR into Human Success and redefining what organizations measureLinking performance, learning, and engagement into one real-time scoreFeedback rituals and kudos culture as engines of team identityMeasuring soft skills through sentiment and peer behaviorAI as a teammate that amplifies human contribution instead of replacing it Key Takeaways:Replace annual HR lag metrics with weekly human success check-ins tied to learning, performance, and engagement.Institutionalize positive feedback (e.g., weekly kudos) to normalize critique, build confidence, and surface soft-skill leaders.Track soft skills through peer sentiment and recognition patterns rather than relying solely on manager evaluations.Use generationally agnostic baselines (showing up as a good human and delivering success) to align multicultural/global teams. "There's a high correlation between people who get a lot of kudos and those who are really good at a lot of soft skills.” — Rasmus Holst Connect with Rasmus Holst:  Website: https://zensai.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rasmusholst/    See Dean's TedTalk “Why Business Needs Intuition” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEq9IYvgV7I Connect with Dean:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgqRK8GC8jBIFYPmECUCMkwWebsite: https://www.mfileadership.com/The Mission Statement E-Newsletter: https://www.mfileadership.com/blog/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deannewlund/X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/deannewlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/MissionFacilitators/Email: dean.newlund@mfileadership.comPhone: 1-800-926-7370 Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

Muy buenos días, transmitiendo Desde Davos por segundo día y con la primera conversación de la semana. Hablamos con el representante de General Atlantic en México, uno de los fondos de inversión más importantes en el mundo que recién hicieron una alianza con Emilio Azcárraga y el negocio del Club América. La entrevista completa la encuestas en el siguiente episodio. También, qué más está pasando en el Foro Económico Mundial y desde México, Italia López nos pone al tanto de otras noticias.[Patrocinado] Descubre cómo Mastercard impulsa la digitalización y el crecimiento de las pymes: youtube.com/watch?v=LysIAKxDLrk&feature=youtu.be

En una conversación en exclusiva desde el Foro Económico Mundial, Luis Cervantes, Managing Director del fondo de inversión, General Atlantic, revela por qué decidieron aliarse con Ollamani de Emilio Azcárraga, de su inversión en Kavak, de su salida de Justo, el supermercado en línea y el panorama de financiamiento para las empresas de reciente creación en el país. 

Los titulares de la industria del deporte, con Patricia López, de 2Playbook. El Club América cierra la entrada del fondo estadounidense General Atlantic, que adquiere el 49% del equipo, del Estadio Banorte y de los terrenos anexos, en una operación que valora el negocio en 490 millones de dólares. Grupo Ollamani, filial de Televisa, mantiene el control con el 51%. En Europa, el Swansea City suma a la empresaria Martha Stewart como nueva socia minoritaria, reforzando su estrategia de atraer inversores de alto perfil mediático junto a Snoop Dogg y Luka Modric. En el ámbito audiovisual, Sky y MotoGP renuevan su alianza en Italia hasta 2027. Por último, Brooklyn Fitboxing acelera su crecimiento y prevé cerrar 2025 con hasta 48 millones de euros de facturación.

En esta edición nocturna de SAGA Noticias, Max Espejel le presenta un recuento completo de los hechos más relevantes en México y el mundo: la detención en la Ciudad de México de dos presuntos generadores de violencia ligados al robo de relojes de alta gama; la orden de prisión preventiva contra el exárbitro Marco “N”, conocido como Chiquimarco, por violencia familiar; el alarmante aumento en el consumo de drogas, alcohol y tabaco en el país, de acuerdo con la Encuesta Nacional 2025; las dudas en torno al caso de Hernán Bermúdez, “líder de La Barredora”; el saldo final del accidente aéreo con misión médica en Texas; incendios, hechos de riesgo captados en video, política nacional, economía, deportes e información internacional, además de los momentos más destacados de Palabras más, Palabras menos, todo en un espacio informativo serio, ágil y puntual. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

En esta edición nocturna de SAGA Noticias, Max Espejel le presenta un recuento completo de los hechos más relevantes en México y el mundo: la detención en la Ciudad de México de dos presuntos generadores de violencia ligados al robo de relojes de alta gama; la orden de prisión preventiva contra el exárbitro Marco “N”, conocido como Chiquimarco, por violencia familiar; el alarmante aumento en el consumo de drogas, alcohol y tabaco en el país, de acuerdo con la Encuesta Nacional 2025; las dudas en torno al caso de Hernán Bermúdez, “líder de La Barredora”; el saldo final del accidente aéreo con misión médica en Texas; incendios, hechos de riesgo captados en video, política nacional, economía, deportes e información internacional, además de los momentos más destacados de Palabras más, Palabras menos, todo en un espacio informativo serio, ágil y puntual. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Ecoutez L'angle éco de François Lenglet du 23 décembre 2025.Hébergé par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Ecoutez L'angle éco de François Lenglet du 23 décembre 2025.Hébergé par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Il aura fallu plus de cinq ans de tensions politiques et de négociations feutrées pour que TikTok parvienne à se débarrasser de son handicap originel aux États-Unis : ses racines chinoises. Sous la menace persistante d'une interdiction pure et simple, sa maison mère, ByteDance, a finalement signé, le 18 décembre 2025, un accord décisif avec l'administration américaine. Objectif : rester sur le sol américain en se pliant aux exigences de sécurité nationale portées par Donald Trump.La solution trouvée passe par la création d'une nouvelle entité indépendante : TikTok USDS Joint Venture. Cette coentreprise américaine pilotera désormais les données, l'algorithme et la modération de la plateforme aux États-Unis. Plusieurs acteurs entrent au capital à hauteur de 15 % chacun, dont Oracle, le fonds américain Silver Lake et l'investisseur émirati MGX. ByteDance, de son côté, voit sa participation réduite à 19,9 %, tandis que 30,1 % restent entre les mains d'investisseurs historiques, parmi lesquels Fidelity et General Atlantic.Un nouveau conseil d'administration, composé de sept membres à majorité américaine, doit être mis en place. Selon une note interne consultée par l'Associated Press, sa mission est claire : « protéger les données des Américains et la sécurité nationale des États-Unis ». TikTok conservera néanmoins le contrôle de l'essentiel de ses activités commerciales sur le territoire. La transaction doit être finalisée le 22 janvier 2026, soit la veille de la date à laquelle l'interdiction de TikTok aurait dû entrer en vigueur. Sur le fond, Washington reprochait à TikTok deux points majeurs : l'hébergement potentiel des données d'utilisateurs américains hors du pays et la puissance de son algorithme, soupçonné de pouvoir servir d'outil d'influence à Pékin. Désormais, les données seront stockées localement via Oracle. TikTok reconnaît que des employés basés en Chine y ont eu accès par le passé, tout en affirmant qu'aucune information n'a jamais été transmise aux autorités chinoises.Cet accord met fin à un feuilleton entamé dès 2020, lorsque Donald Trump avait tenté, sans succès, de bannir l'application lors de son premier mandat. En 2024, le Congrès, dans un rare consensus bipartisan, avait adopté une loi signée par Joe Biden, imposant la vente ou la suspension des applications contrôlées par des adversaires étrangers. Une échéance repoussée à quatre reprises depuis janvier 2025, le temps de négocier. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Investment in clean energy technologies is on course to hit a record $2.2 trillion this year, according to the International Energy Agency. That's more than twice the amount invested in fossil fuels.  But 2025 also brought lots of geopolitical, economic, and political uncertainty to clean technology investing. Waning enthusiasm for climate action in some governments and intensifying trade wars have created more risk for many investors.  So how much are these policy shifts impacting climate investment strategies? How have investors in the United States reacted to the roll-back of some key incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act? What technologies are most promising? And where is the climate investing landscape headed in the next decade? This week, Jason Bordoff talks to Emmanuel Lagarrigue about the state of renewables and clean tech investing. Emmanuel is a partner and the global co-head of KKR's climate transition strategy. Before that, he was a founding partner of BeyondNetZero, a General Atlantic fund focusing on decarbonization technologies. Emmanuel spent the first two decades of his career at Schneider Electric, where he held a number of leadership roles. He is also an advisory board member here at the Center on Global Energy Policy. Credits: Hosted by Jason Bordoff and Bill Loveless. Produced by Mary Catherine O'Connor, Caroline Pitman, and Kyu Lee. Engineering by Gregory Vilfranc.  

Este episodio es posible gracias a HolaflyCon los planes de datos internacionales de Holafly tendrás internet en más de 170 destinos.Olvídate de buscar WiFi o pagar cargos extra: solo disfruta tu viaje conectado. Conoce los planes de Holaflyhttps://esim.holafly.com/es/utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=itnigEn este capítulo del podcast de Itnig, Pedro Tortosa nos explica en detalle una de las historias más llamativas del ecosistema tech reciente: cómo ONUM pasó de nacer en 2022 a venderse a CrowdStrike por 300 millones de dólares en solo tres años. Pedro explica de forma sencilla qué problema resolvía ONUM (la optimización y el ruteo inteligente de datos en tiempo real) y por qué esta tecnología era tan valiosa para gigantes como Splunk, Cribl o la propia CrowdStrike, que gastaba más de 50 millones al año en soluciones similares. Además, profundizamos en el recorrido profesional de Pedro, desde sus 20 años al frente de un integrador tecnológico hasta su experiencia en Devo, donde levantaron rondas con fondos como Insight, TCV o General Atlantic. Habla abiertamente sobre la dureza del mercado enterprise, los errores cometidos, la importancia de construir productos realmente diferenciales y cómo tomar decisiones difíciles cuando una startup quema mucha caja o se enfrenta a rondas complicadas. Finalmente, se abordan temas clave para cualquier emprendedor: cómo negociar ventas de empresas, cómo funcionan los earnouts, los liquidation preferences, las dinámicas con fondos de inversión y el reto de escalar productos deeptech desde España al mercado global. Un capítulo lleno de aprendizajes reales para fundadores, inversores y amantes del mundo startup.

We spoke to El Jannah CEO Brett Houldin who took over as CEO in 2020 and has grown the company from 5 to 50 restaurants. Over the weekend it was announced that the company received huge investment from General Atlantic, a leading global investor to expand the business across the US and will expand their stores across NSW, VIC and ACT.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

El Jannah, the cult-favourite charcoal chicken chain, is set to be snapped up for almost $1 billion by US private equity giant General Atlantic. Google is taking it up to Nvidia in the chip wars as it looks to sell its own proprietary chips to Meta and its share rose 4% on the news. Harvey Norman has seen its sales jump 9% in the last quarter as its international growth pushes the business forward. _ Download the free app (App Store): http://bit.ly/FluxAppStore Download the free app (Google Play): http://bit.ly/FluxappGooglePlay Daily newsletter: https://bit.ly/fluxnewsletter Flux on Instagram: http://bit.ly/fluxinsta Flux on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@flux.finance —- The content in this podcast reflects the views and opinions of the hosts, and is intended for personal and not commercial use. We do not represent or endorse the accuracy or reliability of any opinion, statement or other information provided or distributed in these episodes.__See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My guest today is Martín Escobari. Martín is Co-President and Head of Global Growth Equity at General Atlantic. We talk about General Atlantic's unique founding story and how its long-term structure, including permanent capital, a single P&L, and partnership culture, allows it to invest differently than other growth equity firms. We discuss the firm's global perspective and particularly why the premium on U.S. equities is creating compelling opportunities across international and emerging markets. Martín has spent his career investing through bubbles, market cycles, and technological shifts. He shares his investing framework for balancing intuition with analysis, his approach to “spearfishing” for once-in-a-decade opportunities, and why he believes this is the best window for growth equity since 2009. Martín also reflects on his incredible personal story. He talks about growing up in turbulent Bolivia, and the role of curiosity and optimism in sustaining a long investing career. Martín's infectious energy and genuine love for investing made this conversation both insightful and a lot of fun. Please enjoy my great conversation with Martín Escobari. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ----- This episode is brought to you by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Ramp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Ramp's mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. ----- This episode is brought to you by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AlphaSense⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. AlphaSense has completely transformed the research process with cutting-edge AI technology and a vast collection of top-tier, reliable business content. Invest Like the Best listeners can get a free trial now at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Alpha-Sense.com/Invest⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and experience firsthand how AlphaSense and Tegus help you make smarter decisions faster. ----- This episode is brought to you by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Ridgeline⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgelineapps.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more about the platform. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best (00:05:00) The Bold Move That Landed a Job (00:07:16) The Art of Spearfishing in Business (00:11:55) Navigating the Dotcom Bubble (00:15:18) Investing Through the AI “Bubble” (00:20:06) General Atlantic Founding Story (00:23:04) General Atlantic's Unique Investing Strategy (00:28:20) Lessons on Fundraising (00:30:48) Global Diversification and Market Insights (00:33:12) Understanding Chinese Entrepreneurs (00:35:27) Personal and Generational Traumas (00:39:10) Characteristics of a GA Investment and Martín's “Educated Intuition" (00:43:55) Proud Investment Achievements (00:44:41) Lessons from CEO Bill Ford (00:46:15) Changes in Investing with Experience (00:48:52) Current Market and Future Predictions (00:54:55) Growth Equity's Competitive Landscape (00:56:59) How to Invest Outside the US (00:59:44) How to Develop Investing Talent (01:01:50) Inside the Investment Committee Process (01:04:56) Why Growth Equity is Attractive Today (01:05:58) Martín's Unfinished Business and Mentoring (01:09:33) The Kindest Thing

Growth equity has evolved from the “middle child” between venture and buyout into a distinct and increasingly institutionalized part of the private markets ecosystem. Its role in capital formation, the characteristics of the companies it targets, and the ways value is created have sharpened its identity in a post-COVID market. In this episode, we are joined by Steve McCourt of Meketa and Suzanne Gauron of General Atlantic as they unpack the modern growth equity playbook, how managers compete and differentiate themselves today, and why the strategy's repositioning matters for investors.Guests:Suzanne Gauron, Managing Director of Capital Solutions, General AtlanticStephen P. McCourt, CFA, Managing Principal and  Co-CEO, Meketa Investment GroupEpisode Sources

Gabe is Co-President at General Atlantic, a global growth equity firm managing approximately $114 billion in assets as of June 2025. He discusses growth equity investing and how GA partners with visionary entrepreneurs to build category-leading companies. The conversation explores technology, market evolution, and collaboration strategies that drive transformational growth.

Dmitry Gurski founded Flo Health in 2015, turning it into the leading women's health app globally with over 420 million downloads and 80 million monthly active users. From bootstrapped beginnings to a $200M Series C from General Atlantic in 2024 (valuing Flo at $1B+), Dmitry has scaled the company to profitability, with offices in Lithuania and the UK. 

This week's Espresso covers news from VAAS, Somos Internet, Loto, and more!Outline of this episode:[00:30] – Starian raises $115M from General Atlantic[00:38] – VAAS raises $3.7M in a round led by Headline[00:45] – Mercado de Recebíveis reaches $56M valuation[00:57] – Somos Internet raises $18M Series A round[01:07] – Loto raises $1M pre-seed round[01:19] – Whalemate raises $1M for cybersecurity platform[01:30] – B3 acquires 62% stake in fintech Shipay[01:38] – Evertec acquires Tecnobank for $145M[01:50] – Latamlist Roundup August 1st – August 15thResources & people mentioned:Startups: Starian, VAAS, Mercado de Recebíveis, B3, Shipay, Somos Internet, Loto, Whalemate, Evertec, Tecnobank,VCs: General Atlantic, Headline, Union Square Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Parceiro Ventures, 

Notion te regala 3 meses del plan Business + IA ilimitada

When Mike Rypka launched Torchy's Tacos out of a trailer in Austin, he wasn't thinking about private equity or market expansion. He just wanted to serve “damn good tacos.”  Fast forward to today, and Torchy's has grown into a revered fast-casual chain with national ambitions, fueled by strategic investment and a fiercely loyal customer base. But the real engine behind the brand's success isn't just craveable food. It's culture. Torchy's differentiates itself through scratch-made food and a willingness to take creative risks with its menu. Behind the scenes is a deeply human company culture built around second chances, internal growth and genuine care for employees.  In this episode, Mike opens up about the humble beginnings of the company, how word of mouth and grassroots marketing initially drove Torchy's success and why “clean, craveable food” keeps the customers coming back. He also explains why it was critical to find an investment partner that provided not just capital, but deep operational and consumer insights, and how his personal struggles shaped a company culture rooted in redemption and opportunity.  Show notes: 0:25: Interview: Mike Rypka, Founder, Torchy's Tacos – Mike reflects on the early days of Torchy's Tacos and how it gradually evolved into a beloved taco chain with over 130 locations. He highlights the importance of quality, consistency, and culture in differentiating Torchy's from competitors, especially through their scratch-made food, full-service bars, and commitment to hospitality. Mike explains why he recently transitioned into the role of Chief Innovation Officer, how the company attempts to sell affordable food despite economic pressures and why Torchy's has resisted franchising in favor of maintaining tight operational control. He also talks about the importance of strong supplier relationships, transparency, and how deliberate growth has helped Torchy's preserve its identity and quality. Mike discusses how private equity firm General Atlantic has helped strategically guide the company's national expansion, how Torchy's innovation process blends customer feedback, social media listening and culinary trend tools and why not every idea has succeeded. Brands in this episode: Torchy's Tacos, Athletic Brewing

With a career spanning corporate compliance, private equity, and international climate policy, Cornelia Gomez brings a mix of pragmatism and passion to the conversation on sustainability. Now Global Head of Sustainability at General Atlantic, Cornelia joins Jenn to reflect on how the ESG movement has evolved and where it goes from here.From the rise and retrenchment of ESG practices to the importance of adaptability, Cornelia shares lessons learned from working across industries and during shifting market conditions. She also explains why the next generation of leaders must rethink their approach to impact, and why resilience is so important right now.Useful Links:Follow Cornelia on LinkedIn hereLearn more about General Atlantic and Cornelia's sustainability work hereRead Cornelia's book recommendation, Man's Search for Meaning, hereClick here for the episode web page. This episode is also available on YouTube.For more insights straight to your inbox subscribe to the Future in Sight newsletter, and follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram This podcast is brought to you by Re:Co, a tech-powered advisory company helping private market investors pursue sustainability objectives and value creation in tandem. Produced by Chris AttawayArtwork by Harriet RichardsonMusic by Cody Martin

This week we sat down with James Flynn, an investor at Sequoia. James focuses on growth-stage investments for Sequoia and was previously an investor at General Atlantic.  During the episode, we cover James's journey to Sequoia, highlighting intellectual curiosity and his competitive spirit as key attributes in his path to the firm. The conversation features a number of fascinating perspectives across investing in "daring" companies, including James's take on the relative importance of business model / founder / market in making an investment decision. We also cover how James thinks about absolute valuation as opposed to a multiple, and how he believes junior investors can add value.  James's energy is infectious and his eloquence and clarity of thought stand out, making the conversation one of our most fascinating yet. Episode Chapters:Key personal characteristics - 2:19James's journey post-college - 9:30Breaking in to Sequoia - 12:55Taking the shot - 13:55 Underwriting thoughts - numbers support the story - 21:33Sequoia's singular KPI - 27:45How junior investors can add value - 30:10Absolute valuation matters - 35:31 James's areas of focus - 38:32 Implications on education - 41:12Quick fire round - 43:26As always, feel free to contact us at partnerpathpodcast@gmail.com. We would love to hear ideas for content, guests, and overall feedback.This episode is brought to you by Grata, the world's leading deal sourcing platform. Our AI-powered search, investment-grade data, and intuitive workflows give you the edge needed to find and win deals in your industry. Visit grata.com to schedule a demo today.Fresh out of Y Combinator's Summer batch, Overlap is an AI-driven app that uses LLMs to curate the best moments from podcast episodes. Imagine having a smart assistant who reads through every podcast transcript, finds the best parts or parts most relevant to your search, and strings them together to form a new curated stream of content - that is what Overlap does. Podcasts are an exponentially growing source of unique information. Make use of it! Check out Overlap 2.0 on the App Store today.

This week's Espresso covers news from Finaktiva, Smart Compass, Mombak, and more!Outline of this episode:[00:30] – Kavak raises $127M in down round, drops valuation to $2.2B[00:43] – Onfly raises $40M Series B to expand corporate travel platform[00:56] – Altis raises $2.6M in equity and debt[01:05] – Toku raises $48M Series A extension to expand payments platform[01:16] – AdmiralONE raises $462K and acquires two startups[01:31] – Banorte acquires RappiCard in $50M deal[01:39] – ActiveCampaign acquires Mexican WhatsApp automation startup HilosResources & people mentioned:Startups: Kavak, Onfly, Altis, Toku, AdmiralONE, Grupo Financiero Banorte, RappiCard, ActiveCampaign, Hilos, VCs: SoftBank, General Atlantic, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Tidemark, Magma Partners, Latitud, Oak HC/FT

In a world where adult beverages have long been synonymous with alcohol, Bill Shufelt saw something different—a cultural and economic opportunity hidden in plain sight. He successfully navigated the startup ecosystem--scaling, manufacturing, building, and financing his company. Bill's company, Athletic Brewing, has attracted funding from top-tier investors like General Atlantic, Keurig Dr Pepper, Blake Mycoskie, and Lance Armstrong.

Hoy conversé con Stefan Moeller, cofundador y CEO de Klar, uno de los bancos digitales más grandes en México con +3M usuarios. Klar factura más de $200M por año y logra operar 10 veces más eficiente que los bancos tradicionales. A la fecha, ha levantado $167M de inversionistas como General Atlantic, Prosus Ventures y Santander.-En Startupeable hacemos más gracias a  Notion, la plataforma todo en uno para organizar tu startup.Centraliza documentos, tareas y bases de datos en un solo lugar: el cerebro digital de tu negocio, ahora con IA para agilizar tu trabajo.Nos aliamos con Notion para regalarte 3 meses gratis del plan Plus y acceso ilimitado a su IA.

In this episode of the Rainmaker Podcast, host Gui Costin, founder and CEO of Dakota, sits down with John Bailey, co-founder of OneFund Investments, to discuss how his firm is democratizing access to venture capital and private equity. Bailey shares insights into his journey from working at General Atlantic to launching OneFund and the strategies that have contributed to the firm's growth.Bailey begins by reflecting on his background, from studying at Tufts University to earning an MBA from Wharton. After working in consulting and growth equity, he realized a fundamental issue in the investment industry: access to top-tier private equity and venture capital funds was restricted to institutional investors and ultra-high-net-worth individuals. With minimum check sizes in the millions, most investors were effectively shut out of these opportunities. Seeing this gap, Bailey co-founded OneFund Investments, a fund of funds designed to provide accredited investors with diversified access to top-performing funds in the private markets.Launching OneFund required a strategic approach to building investor relationships from the ground up. Unlike established firms with large institutional networks, OneFund had to develop a go-to-market strategy tailored to a new investor demographic. One key lesson Bailey shares is the importance of listening to potential investors before designing a product. Many firms build their funds first and then try to sell them, but OneFund engaged with investors early to understand their needs, shaping its offerings to provide the access and diversification they were looking for.Bailey also highlights the crucial role of technology in managing investor relationships. A well-implemented CRM system allows the team to track investor engagement, refine outreach efforts, and tailor communications based on behavior patterns. Rather than relying on broad content distribution, OneFund takes a personalized, high-touch approach, ensuring investors receive relevant and timely information. Education has been a major focus, as many of their investors are new to private equity. To address this, OneFund offers webinars, investor calls, and detailed materials to help clients make informed decisions.Reflecting on leadership, Bailey believes in leading by example and embracing every aspect of the startup process, from high-level strategy to granular tasks. His advice to young professionals is to align themselves with a product they truly believe in, as conviction is key to long-term success. This conversation offers valuable insights for sales professionals, fundraisers, and investors looking to navigate the evolving private equity landscape.

In this episode we speak with Mark Dzialga, the Founder and Managing Partner of Brighton Park Capital, a growth equity investment firm focused on entrepreneur-led, growth-stage software, healthcare, and tech-enabled services companies. Brighton Park Capital invests in companies that provide highly innovative solutions in partnership with great management teams. The firm brings purpose-built, value-add capabilities that match the unique requirements of each of its companies to build market leading products and to execute the needed strategies to create important global companies. Prior to starting Brighton Park Capital, Mark was a Managing Director at General Atlantic for more than 20 years. I am your host RJ Lumba.  We hope you enjoy the show.  If you like the episode, click to follow.

Anish Batlaw, Global Head of Talent at General Atlantic and Co-Author of Talent: The Market Cap Multiplier, joins Jessica this week to dive into the importance of talent density, its impact on the bottom line, and why the right CEO makes all the difference. Do you have an ongoing work issue you need guidance solving? Or maybe you want to know how Patty and Jess would have dealt with a past problem. Share your stories and questions with our producers here.TruthWorks is hosted by Jessica Neal and Patty McCord. The show is edited, mixed and produced by Megan Hayward. Our Production Manager is Kathleen Speckert. TruthWorks is an editaudio production.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this installment of Workday Shift: Moving Financial Services Forward, we delve into the operational complexities of business transformation with Lee Vanderpool, Chief Accounting Officer at General Atlantic. In this episode, Vanderpool reveals how the ability to quickly extract intelligence from financial data has become a critical competitive advantage. Tune in to discover how your organization can harness the power of data in today's rapidly evolving business landscape.

HEADLINES:- Huda Beauty Sells Stake in Kayali to General Atlantic- Emaar to Boost Investments in Egypt by $7 Billion, Expanding Presence in Real Estate- How GetProp is transforming real estate through AI-powered search and verified listings

Today, I'm talking with Cornelia Gomez, Global Head of Sustainability at General Atlantic. Cornelia is a leader who has uniquely merged corporate social responsibility with real-world business practices.Born and raised in Paris, Cornelia's culturally vibrant yet traditional family shaped her strong sense of justice and commitment to ethical business practices.Starting her corporate journey at Group Casino, in Hong Kong, Cornelia took the lead on improving supply chain sustainability across Asia. Her work involved conducting audits, implementing system changes, and ensuring compliance with labor and environmental standards. She pushed for stronger accountability and higher sustainability benchmarks, driving meaningful change in an industry resistant to transformation.Now at General Atlantic, Cornelia oversees ESG integration across the firm's portfolio, spanning over 330 companies across 20+ countries​. Under Cornelia's leadership, sustainability has become a core pillar of the firm's investment approach​.GA doesn't see ESG as a checkbox exercise. Instead, they have developed a unique "value creation" framework based on three key triggers: revenue growth, cost efficiency, and risk mitigation​. This approach ensures that sustainability initiatives are directly linked to financial performance, helping businesses grow while making a positive impact.In this interview, Cornelia talks about the evolution of ESG and sustainability in private equity investing – from compliance-driven checklists to deeply integrated strategies that influence corporate governance and competitive advantage. Tune in to learn more about GA's pragmatic, data-driven approach to sustainability and how they integrate ESG principles to drive real-world value while ensuring long-term business growth.—About the SRI 360° Podcast: The SRI 360° Podcast is focused exclusively on sustainable & responsible investing. In each episode, I interview a world-class investor who is an accomplished practitioner from all asset classes. In my interviews, I cover everything from their early personal journeys to insights into how they developed and executed their investment strategies and what challenges they face today. Each episode is a chance to go way below the surface with these impressive people and gain additional insights and useful lessons from professional investors.—Connect with SRI360°:Sign up for the free weekly email updateVisit the SRI360° PODCASTVisit the SRI360° WEBSITEFollow SRI360° on XFollow SRI360° on FACEBOOK—Key Takeaways:Intro (00:00)Cornelia's background and education (03:27)Transition to business and sustainability (15:15)Role at Group Casino and early challenges (17:21)Move to France and role at PAI Partners (34:36)Joining General Atlantic (38:32)General Atlantic's theory of change (48:26)ESG integration in the investment life cycle (50:43)Three key value creation triggers (01:03:47)Using data collection and analysis to drive decision-making (01:13:32)Sustainability challenges and opportunities (01:25:28)Rapid fire questions (01:31:46)Contact info (01:35:17)—Additional Resources:- General Atlantic Website - General Atlantic LinkedIn   - Cornelia Gomez LinkedIn

conversé con Adolfo Babatz, cofundador y CEO de Clip, la fintech mexicana que permite a miles de comercios aceptar pagos con tarjeta, posicionándose como el segundo mayor procesador de pagos con tarjeta en México. -Este episodio es presentado por Zendesk, la plataforma todo-en-uno para la gestión de atención al cliente, en la que confían miles de startups y empresas globales como Slack, Shopify y Airbnb.Prueba Zendesk completamente gratis por 6 meses aquí: https://rebrand.ly/SSPZNSP-Por favor ayúdame dejando una reseña en Spotify o Apple Podcasts: https://ratethispodcast.com/startupeable-En 2021, Clip alcanzó una valuación de $2,000M y ha levantado más de $400M de inversionistas como SoftBank, Goldman Sachs, Viking Global, General Atlantic y Dalus Capital.Adolfo y yo hablamos sobre:Cómo la falta de competencia frena el desarrollo de startupsPor qué el verdadero reto de emprender es la batalla contra uno mismoLas claves para escalar masivamente la tecnología en MéxicoCómo construir una cultura basada en la confianza y el mérito-Notas del episodio: https://startupeable.com/clip-adolfoPara más contenido síguenos en:YouTube  | Sitio Web -Distribuido por Genuina Media

In this episode of the Canary Cast, Florian Hagenbuch, co-founder and partner at Canary, sits down with Christophe Gerlach, co-founder and CEO of Comp, a new kind of HR Tech that is rethinking the way businesses approach their total compensation strategies.From the origins of his entrepreneurial journey alongside Pedro Bobrow—delivering açaí to college students—to pioneering a "Service-as-a-Software" business model that leverages the combination of AI and human expertise, Chris shares details of his story and his vision for Comp's future. During the episode, he also reflects on the importance of thoughtful experimentation, building strategic trust when entering a new market, and the powerful impact of an intentional company culture.In this episode, we dive into: How Comp is helping companies be more strategic about every cent invested in labor costs Pioneering the "Service-as-a-Software" Business Model: How Comp is disrupting traditional compensation consultants and building the company at the intersection of technology and human expertise, where AI supports senior compensation executives to deliver personalized, effective solutions Comp’s approach to working closely with CEOs, CFOs, and CHROs to strategically manage compensation decisions during periods of expansion, restructuring, or business strategy shifts. Lessons learned about building a lean, high-performance team and why hiring A+ talent makes all the difference. Exceptionally, this episode was recorded in English, but we included a translated transcription below in the description of the episode. Whether you're a founder, business leader, HR professional, or just passionate about innovation, this episode is packed with insights at the forefront of compensation strategy and business-building. Tune in now to hear how Comp is not only solving today’s compensation challenges but also defining a new category in the HR landscape for the future. Guest:Christophe Gerlach Christophe Gerlach is the co-founder and CEO of Comp. Christophe graduated in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University, where he met Pedro Bobrow. Together, they first founded Suna and are now building Comp. The company raised $4 million in a Seed round led by Kaszek, with participation from Canary, Norte, and 1616 funds, as well as 40 angel investors who are also executives from American companies and Brazilian startups such as Nubank, Creditas, and Caju. Follow Chris on LinkedIn Host: Florian Hagenbuch Florian is the co-founder and General Partner at Canary, a leading early-stage investment firm in Brazil and Latin America. Canary has invested in more than 100 companies since its founding in 2017. Previously, Florian founded Loft, a company that digitized and transformed the home buying experience in Brazil, bringing transparency, liquidity, and credit to millions of Brazilians. Before that, Florian also co-founded Printi, the leading online printing marketplace in Latin America. Follow Florian on LinkedIn Highlights: 00:00 - Opening01:50 - Personal Journey and the Beginning of Chris and Pedro's Partnership03:07 - Starting a Food Delivery Business in College07:25 - Transition to HR Tech and General Atlantic Experience08:37 - Labor Cost Challenges and Finding a thesis11:48 - Founding Comp and Initial Product Development13:30 - Comp's Value Proposition in the HR and Compensation Market18:29 - "Service-as-a-Software" Business Model and Strategic Use of AI for Software, Services, and Tools26:20 - Comp's Traction So Far28:44 - Building a team in a AI native company35:12 - Challenges along the way39:26 - Vision for the Future and Global Ambitions46:56 - Customer Success Stories and Impact51:56 - Closing RemarksEpisode Transcription in Portuguese: O mundo que estamos construindo é um em que um executivo pode vir e dizer: “Ei, em 2025, minha empresa vai crescer a receita em 25%. Precisamos alcançar o ponto de equilíbrio. Vamos abrir uma divisão de fintech, então precisaremos de novos tipos de talentos nessa área, e também vamos encerrar nossas operações no país X, Y, Z. Assim, gostaria que vocês me ajudassem a desenhar cada elemento do meu custo total de mão de obra." Quais benefícios eu devo oferecer? Quanto eu devo aumentar nos salários baseado nesse objetivo de ponto de equilíbrio, na minha retenção anterior, no índice de conversão de candidatos que já tivemos? Existe uma enorme quantidade de dados que podem ser usados, digamos, para otimizar essas decisões. E tudo isso pode começar a partir de um input estratégico de alto nível, como esse, composto por uma ou duas frases de um executivo, e, a partir daí, podemos fazer todo o trabalho e voltar com soluções para o cliente. Realmente acredito que é assim que as empresas tomarão decisões no futuro. E, honestamente, colocaria vocês nessa categoria. Não é fácil apontar para uma empresa específica, em outro lugar, fazendo algo verdadeiramente parecido com o que vocês estão fazendo. Vocês estão assumindo riscos reais de inovação e realmente estão na vanguarda do que é possível nessa área de atuação em que vocês trabalham. Chris, agora vamos mudar para o inglês para começar nosso episódio, já que temos um gringo aqui no programa hoje – gringo, como eu, de várias maneiras. Muito obrigado, Chris, por aceitar o convite de compartilhar um pouco sobre sua história e sua trajetória com a Comp. Estamos muito, muito empolgados em tê-lo aqui e ansiosos por essa conversa com você. Então, muito obrigado e seja bem-vindo. Chris: Obrigado pelo convite. Estou super animado para estar aqui e por essa conversa. Florian: Ótimo. Talvez comecemos com o comentário do gringo. Quando comecei minha carreira como empreendedor aqui no Brasil, havia muitos de nós. Era na época da Rocket Internet: tinha muitos alemães, americanos e franceses. E então, durante um tempo, eles meio que desapareceram. Provavelmente tem a ver com os altos e baixos econômicos do Brasil, mas eis que agora você está aqui, um gringo na cidade, construindo algo no Brasil. Algo realmente único e intrigante. Eu adoraria ouvir mais: você pode compartilhar um pouco sobre o seu passado, sua trajetória e o que o trouxe ao Brasil e à decisão de começar a Comp localmente? Chris: Claro! Que honra! Acho que sou o primeiro gringo no podcast, então estou honrado de ser o primeiro. Um pouco sobre mim – sou meio holandês e meio americano. Nasci na Holanda e cresci principalmente nos EUA. Quando jovem, meu sonho era jogar futebol profissional. Além de ser o “gringo” com quem você está conversando agora, meu segundo maior orgulho é que joguei contra o Mbappé na França quando eu tinha cerca de 14 anos. Mas, em certo ponto, percebi que não seria bom o suficiente para fazer disso uma carreira. Eu fui jogar na universidade e estudei na Cornell, em Nova York. Foi lá que conheci meu cofundador brasileiro, chamado Pedro, há mais ou menos uns 7 ou 8 anos. Estávamos em uma aula de comunicação empresarial, onde a tarefa era dar um discurso inspirador sobre algo que queríamos fazer em nossa carreira. Todo mundo na classe dizia que queria trabalhar no Goldman Sachs como banqueiro ou ser consultor na McKinsey. Pedro e eu fomos os únicos a falar sobre empreendedorismo. Achei que Pedro fez um discurso muito carismático e emocional sobre porque queria ser empreendedor. Mas o professor, depois do discurso dele, disse algo como: “Pedro, tenho certeza de que o que você disse foi ótimo, mas não consegui entender por causa do seu sotaque brasileiro. Você precisa melhorar isso se quiser passar nessa matéria." Após a aula, fiz uma brincadeira com ele, e acabamos nos tornando amigos por sermos os únicos da turma com mentalidade empreendedora. Começamos a almoçar juntos, a trocar ideias, etc. Durante nosso segundo ano de faculdade, começamos um negócio de entrega de comida. Entregávamos açaí para estudantes no campus e alguns outros itens de café da manhã. A inovação que criamos, entre aspas, foi que, diferente de plataformas como Uber Eats, iFood ou DoorDash, onde cada entrega é feita separadamente, nós coletávamos vários pedidos de uma vez para reduzir o preço da entrega. Em vez de uma pessoa da entrega pegar um pedido por vez, pegávamos, por exemplo, 8 ou 10 pedidos de uma só vez. Dessa forma, reduzíamos o custo para o consumidor e tornávamos o processo mais eficiente. Como muitos estudantes moravam próximos uns dos outros no campus, fazia sentido. Além disso, ajudávamos restaurantes fora do campus a atender os estudantes e a gerar mais receita durante as manhãs, quando eles tinham capacidade ociosa. Esse foi, basicamente, o nosso modelo de negócio. Chegamos a levantar capital de algumas aceleradoras, crescemos para uma equipe de 30 pessoas, aprendemos muito, mas tivemos o que chamamos de uma saída pequena. Não foi um grande sucesso financeiro, mas aprendemos que amávamos ser empreendedores. Até hoje, não sei explicar de forma 100% racional; foi mais emocional, e ainda é. Amamos construir algo do zero, trabalhar com colegas inteligentes e ambiciosos, enfrentar novos desafios todos os dias. Também aprendemos que adorávamos trabalhar juntos, e nos comprometemos a continuar trabalhando juntos por anos. Então, dessa experiência, não tivemos um grande retorno financeiro, mas conquistamos uma parceria de longo prazo entre mim e o Pedro. Depois de nos formarmos, trabalhei na General Atlantic, uma firma global de private equity focada em estágio de crescimento (Series B, Series C). Lá, me concentrei em empresas de tecnologia B2B e avaliei várias empresas de recrutamento, performance, folha de pagamento, compensação, etc. Foi um lugar fantástico para aprender e, eventualmente, acabei mergulhando fundo na área de tecnologia para RH, que encabeça o que fazemos hoje na Comp. Florian: Impressionante! Há muito o que explorar só nessa parte da sua trajetória, e também muitos aspectos em comum, Chris. Eu também joguei futebol, mas, infelizmente, não contra o Mbappé. Essa é uma ótima história! Você deveria contar isso mais vezes. Chris: Eu até contaria mais vezes, mas perdemos aquele jogo de 5 a 1. Florian: Ele marcou? Chris: Ele marcou três vezes. Florian: Uau. Já dava pra perceber que ele era incrível, né? Chris: Sim, dava pra ver que ele era fantástico. Florian: Então provavelmente você está em um daqueles vídeos caseiros onde o Mbappé destrói todo mundo, e você é um dos meninos tentando detê-lo no vídeo. Chris: Eu adoraria ver esse vídeo, por mais embaraçoso que fosse. Florian: Muito bom. Mas voltando ao que você mencionou, algo que capturou minha atenção foi quando você disse que, até hoje, não sabe muito bem por que quis começar uma empresa, dizendo ser um processo emocional. E, em muitos aspectos, isso se assemelha a ser uma criança querendo ser jogador de futebol, certo? É mais como um sonho, algo que você simplesmente quer fazer. E, como empreendedor, esperamos que você acabe se tornando mais um "Mbappé", do que "Chris". Mas, me conte um pouco mais sobre como vocês construíram a empresa na faculdade, venderam e seguiram em frente. Você sabia que ia começar outra empresa? E trabalhar na General Atlantic foi mais um “deixa eu olhar o mundo real e adquirir habilidades” ou algo mais? Como foi essa decisão? Para você, foi sempre óbvio que aquilo era algo temporário e que você voltaria a ser fundador? Chris: Sim, diria que foi algo assim. No último semestre da faculdade, Pedro e eu fizemos uma promessa um ao outro de que, em até 3 anos, iríamos começar um negócio juntos. Pedro foi trabalhar em um cargo de produto no Vale do Silício, enquanto eu fui para a General Atlantic, mas o plano era claro: trabalhar por alguns anos, ter experiências complementares em nossas trajetórias e aprender como é estar no “mundo real”. Queríamos construir um currículo sólido, mesmo que por apenas 1 ou 2 anos. Mas sabíamos, desde o dia em que paramos de trabalhar no negócio de entrega de açaí, que um dia voltaríamos. Florian: E vocês sabiam que seria vocês dois juntos novamente. Chris: Exatamente. Disso nós tínhamos certeza. Não sabíamos se seria uma empresa B2B, B2C, em qual setor, ou mesmo em qual geografia, mas sabíamos que seria nós dois. Acabamos indo para o mundo do tech para RH porque foi o foco do meu trabalho na General Atlantic, e posso aprofundar mais sobre isso. Florian: Legal, fale mais sobre isso. Acho muito interessante. Chris: Eu diria que existiam alguns temas principais. Na General Atlantic, como a maioria das empresas de investimento, o papel dos analistas juniores é basicamente buscar oportunidades e fazer diligências, no nosso caso, em empresas de tecnologia em estágios mais avançados (Series B em diante). Algo que me surpreendeu inicialmente – e lembro de comentar isso com o Pedro – foi que, ao fazermos diligência em empresas promissoras, percebíamos que a maioria dos CEOs tinha muita clareza sobre sua estratégia de mercado e visão do produto, mas, por outro lado, não tinham tanto domínio sobre a estratégia relacionada às pessoas que fazem todas essas coisas acontecerem. Perguntávamos coisas como: “Por que vocês têm essa divisão específica de salário fixo versus variável?”, ou “Quais são os custos associados à folha de pagamento nessa região ou país, se você contratar CLT ou prestadores de serviço?”. Também perguntávamos coisas como: “Como os gestores conseguem orçamento para novas contratações?” ou “Como vocês alocam o orçamento de aumento salarial anual?”. E a maioria dos líderes usava uma boa dose de intuição para responder a essas questões. Isso não é necessariamente errado, mas começamos a chamar isso de “estratégia de custo de mão de obra”. E ficou claro para nós que, mesmo em empresas modernas de tecnologia e serviços, onde 50% a 80% do orçamento operacional vai para folha de pagamento e benefícios, a abordagem usada para essas questões era baseada em “achismos”. O foco nessas decisões críticas parecia ser insuficiente. Outra coisa que eu aprendi na General Atlantic foi a operação do RH, ou seja, o lado operacional do RH, e não tanto o estratégico. Quando digo operacional, quero dizer as atividades diárias geridas, muitas vezes, em planilhas de Excel e PDFs. Observamos que esse era um espaço relativamente saturado globalmente. Em qualquer mercado grande (Latam, EUA, Europa, etc.), havia dezenas de empresas vendendo ferramentas de software que ajudavam as empresas a gerenciar diferentes partes da área de RH: desde folha de pagamento até recrutamento, desempenho, entre outros. Avaliamos que o lado operacional já tinha muitos concorrentes e seria muito difícil entrar nesse mercado com um SaaS tradicional. Além disso, percebemos que, enquanto o lado operacional era bem atendido, o lado estratégico – especificamente em relação a compensação e estratégia de custo de mão de obra – ainda dependia amplamente de consultorias como Mercer, Korn Ferry e Willis Towers Watson. Essas consultorias são extremamente caras e com NPS negativo. Foi um momento de “eureka” perceber que, apesar do custo alto, os resultados obtidos com essas consultorias não atendiam às expectativas. Além disso, muitas decisões relacionadas à compensação nas empresas ainda eram feitas de forma pouco transparente, tanto para recrutadores quanto para os próprios colaboradores. A compensação como um todo parecia ser um “problema cabeludo” tanto do lado da empresa quanto do colaborador. E foi aí que começamos a explorar a ideia de construir uma empresa que ajudasse outras empresas com suas estratégias de compensação total. Florian: Super interessante, Chris. Isso faz muito sentido. Por que você não nos conta um pouco mais sobre a evolução do produto da Comp e como a empresa começou? Também trabalhamos juntos nisso, então vi boa parte da jornada. Quando começaram, e quando investimos em vocês pela primeira vez, a ideia e o produto inicial eram, essencialmente, um banco de dados de compensação, com dados em tempo real. E foi incrível como vocês conseguiram atrair várias techs para participarem da plataforma, compartilhando, de forma anônima, os dados de compensação. Em troca, essas empresas recebiam benchmarks do mercado. Se minha descrição não for precisa, me corrija. Mas esse era o produto inicial. Como o valor evoluiu desde então? O que vocês aprenderam ao longo desses últimos anos e, agora, qual o principal valor que a Comp entrega? Chris: Certo! Há muita coisa para discutir aqui. Mas sim, começamos exatamente como você descreveu. Criamos um banco de dados de compensação, que é o primeiro produto. A proposta de valor para os clientes era: para tomar a maioria das decisões sobre salários, benefícios, bônus, e incentivos de longo prazo, eles precisariam de benchmarks do mercado. Quer dizer, dados específicos sobre o que os concorrentes diretos estão fazendo. E, claro, cada cliente precisa de benchmarks diferentes: por exemplo, uma empresa pode querer comparar seus engenheiros com Nubank e PicPay, mas precisa olhar para Itaú ou Bradesco quando se trata de analistas financeiros. O primeiro produto que criamos foi, basicamente, isso: um banco de dados com rede de dados altamente valiosa. Quanto mais empresas participam da base compartilhando seus dados anonimamente, mais robusto o banco de dados fica para todos. Por isso, disponibilizamos essa ferramenta gratuitamente – além do fato de que não existe orçamento tão significativo destinado apenas para a aquisição de benchmark. Hoje, temos mais de 1.000 empresas usando esse produto na América Latina, com foco no Brasil, além de algumas multinacionais que têm operações locais. Continuamos expandindo: começamos apenas com benchmarks de salário, mas já adicionamos dados sobre modelos de salário variável, benefícios, incentivos de longo prazo e até análises organizacionais como número médio de subordinados por gestor. Agora, ajudamos os clientes em duas frentes principais: estratégia e implementação. Sobre estratégia: hoje empresas nos contratam para desenhar ou revisar a estratégia de compensação. Isso inclui desde construir tabelas salariais até planos de bônus e benefícios. Por outro lado, também fornecemos ferramentas para implementar essas políticas, automatizando promoções, comunicação de benefícios, entre outras atividades. Florian: Super interessante, Chris. Isso faz muito sentido. Por que você não nos conta um pouco mais sobre a evolução do produto da Comp e como a empresa começou? Também trabalhamos juntos nisso, então vi boa parte da jornada. Quando começaram, e quando investimos em vocês pela primeira vez, a ideia e o produto inicial eram, essencialmente, um banco de dados de compensação, com dados em tempo real. E foi incrível como vocês conseguiram atrair várias techs para participarem da plataforma, compartilhando, de forma anônima, os dados de compensação. Em troca, essas empresas recebiam benchmarks do mercado. Se minha descrição não for precisa, me corrija. Mas esse era o produto inicial. Como o valor evoluiu desde então? O que vocês aprenderam ao longo desses últimos anos e, agora, qual o principal valor que a Comp entrega? Chris: Certo! Há muita coisa para discutir aqui. Mas sim, começamos exatamente como você descreveu. Criamos um banco de dados de compensação, que é o primeiro produto. A proposta de valor para os clientes era: para tomar a maioria das decisões sobre salários, benefícios, bônus, e incentivos de longo prazo, eles precisariam de benchmarks do mercado. Quer dizer, dados específicos sobre o que os concorrentes diretos estão fazendo. E, claro, cada cliente precisa de benchmarks diferentes: por exemplo, uma empresa pode querer comparar seus engenheiros com Nubank e PicPay, mas precisa olhar para Itaú ou Bradesco quando se trata de analistas financeiros. O primeiro produto que criamos foi, basicamente, isso: um banco de dados com rede de dados altamente valiosa. Quanto mais empresas participam da base compartilhando seus dados anonimamente, mais robusto o banco de dados fica para todos. Por isso, disponibilizamos essa ferramenta gratuitamente – além do fato de que não existe orçamento tão significativo destinado apenas para a aquisição de benchmark. Hoje, temos mais de 1.000 empresas usando esse produto na América Latina, com foco no Brasil, além de algumas multinacionais que têm operações locais. Continuamos expandindo: começamos apenas com benchmarks de salário, mas já adicionamos dados sobre modelos de salário variável, benefícios, incentivos de longo prazo e até análises organizacionais como número médio de subordinados por gestor. Agora, ajudamos os clientes em duas frentes principais: estratégia e implementação. Sobre estratégia: hoje empresas nos contratam para desenhar ou revisar a estratégia de compensação. Isso inclui desde construir tabelas salariais até planos de bônus e benefícios. Por outro lado, também fornecemos ferramentas para implementar essas políticas, automatizando promoções, comunicação de benefícios, entre outras atividades. Florian: Muito interessante, Chris. Notei que você não mencionou a palavra "IA" ao falar do produto, o que é curioso, porque vejo a Comp como uma empresa nativa de IA. Vamos falar um pouco sobre o que significa ser uma empresa nativa de IA, tanto no produto quanto na cultura. Como vocês estão utilizando IA para liderar essa categoria de "selling work"? Chris: Ótima pergunta. Talvez a primeira coisa a abordar seja por que não mencionamos IA ao falar da Comp. Diferente de outras empresas de "selling work", que tentam eliminar completamente a necessidade de humanos na operação, nós intencionalmente mantemos humanos no processo. Isso porque acreditamos que, em decisões estratégicas como compensação, é crucial ter um especialista humano envolvido. Nosso diferencial é que usamos IA para apoiar esses especialistas. A IA nos ajuda a analisar grandes volumes de dados, identificar padrões e fornecer recomendações baseadas em dados. Mas o toque humano ainda é essencial, especialmente em decisões estratégicas críticas. Florian: Faz sentido. E como vocês têm se saído em termos de tração e marcos importantes? Chris: Hoje, temos mais de 1.000 empresas usando nosso produto de benchmark e mais de 100 clientes pagantes utilizando nossos serviços de estratégia e implementação. Crescemos mais de 8x ano a ano em 2024 com uma equipe enxuta de 16 pessoas. Florian: Impressionante. E como vocês pensam sobre a cultura da empresa, especialmente em um ambiente de crescimento tão rápido? Chris: Temos sido muito intencionais sobre manter a equipe pequena e focada. Acreditamos que uma equipe menor e altamente qualificada é mais eficiente e ágil. Isso nos permite evitar burocracia e tomar decisões rapidamente. Também incentivamos uma cultura de colaboração e propriedade, onde cada membro da equipe é incentivado a assumir responsabilidade e contribuir ativamente. Florian: Muito interessante, Chris. E quais são os maiores desafios que vocês enfrentaram até agora? Chris: Um dos maiores desafios tem sido vender para compradores avessos ao risco, como o RH. É difícil convencê-los a adotar uma nova abordagem sem muita confiança. Investimos muito em construir nossa marca e estabelecer confiança com nossos clientes. Outro desafio é educar o mercado sobre o valor que oferecemos. Muitas vezes, os clientes não percebem que têm um problema até que seja tarde demais. Por isso, começamos com contratos menores e expandimos conforme ganhamos a confiança do cliente. Florian: E quais são os planos futuros para a Comp? Chris: Temos ambições globais. O problema que resolvemos é universal, e acreditamos que podemos levar nossa abordagem para outros mercados. Estamos apenas começando, mas estamos animados com o potencial de crescimento e impacto que podemos ter. Florian: Muito obrigado, Chris, por compartilhar sua história e insights. Foi uma conversa incrível, e estamos ansiosos para ver o que o futuro reserva para a Comp. Chris: Obrigado, Florian, e a toda a equipe da Canary pelo apoio. Estamos apenas começando, e há muito mais por vir. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A Cloud9 Capital, com R$ 500 milhões sob gestão, tem um portfólio concentrado e se define como uma mini-General Atlantic ou uma mini-Riverwood Capital. Entenda a tese

Franco Verona, Managing Partner of Foxmont Capital Partners and Jeremy Au discussed: 1. Foxmont Capital VC & BCG Report: Franco recounted Foxmont Capital Partners' journey since its founding in 2018, highlighting 40 investments across fintech, deep tech, and consumer goods. Their Philippine Venture Capital Report in collaboration with BCG has been instrumental in attracting global attention to the Philippines' potential as an emerging market. Analysis includes the rise of the middle class, which grew from 12% to 48% of the population within a decade, alongside consistent 6% GDP growth. This economic momentum has driven demand for local consumer brands like Pickup Coffee and Colourette. 2. Philippines Startup Opportunities: They explored how startups can address gaps between generational low-cost products and premium U.S. imports by targeting the young, experimental population with an average age of 25. Franco emphasized prioritizing profitability and creating Filipino solutions for Filipino problems. Examples included TPG's investment in BillEase, IFC's funding of Salmon, and the rise of B2B solutions like Sprout Solutions addressing HR and payroll inefficiencies. 3. 10 Year Predictions: Franco forecasted that the Philippines would mirror Indonesia's growth trajectory from a decade ago, with fintech, e-commerce, and logistics driving the next wave of investments. While trends like AI and crypto dominate globally, foundational sectors where the Philippines lags 5–10 years behind peers present the most immediate opportunity. Key investments such as General Atlantic's involvement in Kumu and MUFG's funding of GCash signal ecosystem maturity. They also discussed how geopolitical tensions with the U.S. and China could shape future growth and relations. The influx of Chinese goods and EVs was also noted as shaping competition and local demand. Additionally, they touched on the Philippines' dual colonial history and its cultural impact on business, the economic implications of the recent POGO ban, and the rise of tech-driven business models replacing BPO-led operations === Watch, listen or read the full insight at www.bravesea.com/blog/philippine-startups-rising Nonton, dengar atau baca wawasan lengkapnya di www.bravesea.com/blog/philippine-startups-rising 观看、收听或阅读全文，请访问 www.bravesea.com/blog/philippine-startups-rising Xem, nghe hoặc đọc toàn bộ thông tin chi tiết tại www.bravesea.com/blog/philippine-startups-rising Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VakR55X6BIElUEvkN02e TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyau Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyauz Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremyau LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bravesea Spotify English: https://open.spotify.com/show/4TnqkaWpTT181lMA8xNu0T Bahasa Indonesia: https://open.spotify.com/show/2Vs8t6qPo0eFb4o6zOmiVZ Chinese: https://open.spotify.com/show/20AGbzHhzFDWyRTbHTVDJR Vietnamese: https://open.spotify.com/show/0yqd3Jj0I19NhN0h8lWrK1 YouTube English: https://www.youtube.com/@JeremyAu?sub_confirmation=1 Apple Podcast English: https://podcasts.apple.com/sg/podcast/brave-southeast-asia-tech-singapore-indonesia-vietnam/id1506890464 Learn more about Nika.eco! Reach out to info@nika.eco if you are a geospatial data scientist or climate researcher who is interested to partner on a pilot or research opportunities

How a 1,500-Year-Old Game Became an Online SensationIt started as a simple idea in 2005—a hub for chess enthusiasts to connect, chat, and share their love for the game.Erik Allebest and Jay Severson, two college buddies with a shared passion for strategy, had just purchased the domain Chess.com for $55,000. Initially, it was a forum, but then the demand for online play began to soar.In 2007, they launched the first subscription-based version of Chess.com. Within a few years, the platform began to gain members and marked its place as the go-to site for chess lovers.In 2023, it hosted the first-ever Champions Chess Tour, offering a record-breaking $2 million prize pool.Last year alone, 12.5 billion games were played on Chess.com—an astonishing 35 million games per day.In this episode of the NEON Show, Erik Allebest, co-founder of Chess.com, discusses his journey from a chess enthusiast to creating the world's largest online chess platform. He talks about his entrepreneurial start, the hurdles in building a sustainable business, and key moments in Chess.com's success, including lawsuits, early VC rejections, a $600 million valuation, and scaling during the pandemic.Timestamp00:00 - Introduction02:06 - Family influence on Erik's entrepreneurial mindset05:00 - Falling in love with chess at 18 through books07:25 - Selling an e-commerce business to fund chess.com09:00 - Founding challenges and initial growth struggles13:50 - Why conventional careers didn't suit Erik18:30 - Settling lawsuits, including the vodka-based case21:50 - Persevering despite doubts about the chess market22:55 - General Atlantic's investment in chess.com26:10 - Key insights learned from investor partnerships29:56 - Shifting from entrepreneur to CEO33:24 - Erik's passion for creating products37:18 - How media boosted chess's popularity globally44:23 - The downsides of rapid monetization46:53 - Managing chess.com's pandemic-driven growth50:06 - Erik's focus on sustainability and future growth56:00 - India's cultural impact on global chess59:24 - Erik's views on digital security risks01:03:40 - Why employees stay for passion, not just pay01:07:26 - Erik's belief in chess's continued global growth01:09:00 - Embracing errors as learning opportunities-----Hi, I am your host Siddhartha! I have been an entrepreneur from 2012-2017 building two products AddoDoc and Babygogo. After selling my company to SHEROES, I and my partner Nansi decided to start up again. But we felt unequipped in our skillset in 2018 to build a large company. We had known 0-1 journeys from our startups but lacked the experience of building 1-10 journeys. Hence was born The Neon Show (Earlier 100x Entrepreneur) to learn from founders and investors, the mindset to scale yourself and your company. This quest still keeps us excited even after 5 years and doing 200+ episodes.We welcome you to our journey to understand what goes behind building a super successful company. Every episode is done with a very selfish motive, that I and Nansi should come out as a better entrepreneur and professional after absorbing the learnings.-----Check us out on:Website: https://neon.fund/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theneonshoww/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/beneon/Twitter: https://x.com/TheNeonShowwConnect with Siddhartha on:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7-----This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.Send us a text

Entre a proposta de compra de uma empresa e o fechamento do negócio há um mar de negociações onde muitos empresários se lançam sem nenhum preparo e acabam perdendo dinheiro. Daniel Milanez, sócio e fundador da igc Partners, transformou essa odisseia numa oportunidade. Hoje ele vem aqui contar essa história e explicar como conduzir um processo de fusão ou aquisição de maneira favorável, sem cair no canto da sereia. Conteúdo patrocinado #insiderstore Compre sua Tech T-Shirt Insider com 15% de desconto usando o cupom CAFECOMADM15 https://adm.to/4ikEKl7 CÂMBIO Proteja os ganhos do seu negócio com a Wise Empresas https://adm.to/49u6gbG ERP Potencialize os resultados da sua empresa com o software de gestão da Sankhya https://adm.to/494GhYc Sobre o entrevistadoDaniel Milanez é cofundador e COO da igc Partners, empresa líder em M&A na América Latina pelo sell side. Fundada em 1997, a igc já realizou mais de 400 transações nos mais diversos setores, com deals emblemáticos para o mercado, como a venda da Aldo Solar para a Brookfield e a fusão da Farmasa com a Hypermarcas e o fundraising da Livemode com o General Atlantic.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sergio Fogel's entrepreneurial journey is a testament to the power of adaptability, resilience, and innovation. Born in Uruguay and later traversing the world for education and business, Sergio has built and scaled multiple ventures. The latest venture is dLocal, a fintech unicorn valued at $18 billion at its peak. It has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Alkeon Capital, General Atlantic, Tiger Global Management, and D1 Capital Partners.

Welcome to Omni Talk's Retail Daily Minute, sponsored by Ownit AI and Mirakl. In today's Retail Daily Minute:Vuori has raised $825 million from General Atlantic and Stripes, boosting its valuation to $5.5 billion.Amazon Fresh has opened eight new stores in California, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, bringing its total to 60 locations.Midwest and Western grocers, like Bowman's Market, Maurer's Market IGA, Neiman's Family Market, Queen's Price Chopper and Soelbergs Market, are rolling out Caper Carts, smart shopping carts with AI-powered features like item recognition, interactive screens, and direct checkout capabilities.Stay informed with Omni Talk's Retail Daily Minute, your source for the latest and most important retail insights. Be careful out there!

Guest: Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO and co-founder of KlarnaLiving and working in Stockholm, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski thinks a lot about how he's perceived in Silicon Valley: “I feel like here I am, I am the small, country cousin from Sweden.” And on top of that, he knew that someone like Sam Altman wouldn't initially think of a European banking startup as an ideal partner for OpenAI — so, he made up an excuse to fly to San Francisco and meet with Altman. “I felt like, OK, this is going to be the busiest man in the world very soon,” Sebastian recalls. “When I first booked it with Sam, I think I got three hours in his calendar. By the time I arrived in San Francisco, it was down to 30 minutes.”Chapters:(01:02) - Workday and Salesforce (06:01) - Rolling your own (08:45) - AI-driven customer service (15:33) - Automation at scale for business (19:28) - The Toyota way (23:40) - Sam Altman (25:36) - Playing offense (28:25) - Reinventing Klarna (31:44) - The startup journey (35:37) - Common equity (39:28) - Champions League (42:24) - Hype cycles (47:35) - Sebastian's father (52:28) - Control and stability (57:23) - Comfort zone vs. stretch zone (01:02:27) - Creating resilience (01:06:23) - Why Klarna isn't hiring Mentioned in this episode: OpenAI, Seeking Alpha, Slack, Workday, ChatGPT, Stripe, CRMs, Mark Benioff, Twitter, Anthropic, Waymo, Devin AI, the Collison brothers and Stripe, Pieter van der Does and Adyen, Daniel Ek and Spotify, General Atlantic, DST Global, Anton Levy, Michael Moritz, Sequoia Capital, Niklas Adalberth, PayPal, CNBC, “Under Pressure” by Queen, Boris Johnson, Elon Musk, Google, Sam Walton, Made in America, Nina Siemiatkowski, and Snoop Dogg.Links:Connect with SebastianTwitterLinkedInConnect with JoubinTwitterLinkedInEmail: grit@kleinerperkins.com Learn more about Kleiner PerkinsThis episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

In this episode, Tyler Hogge & Sterling Snow sit down with David George, General Partner at a16z, where he leads the growth investing practice. Since joining in 2019, David has been at the forefront of investments in companies like Coinbase, Databricks, Figma, Robinhood and Instacart. Prior to a16z, David was at General Atlantic, where he invested in iconic brands like Airbnb, Opendoor, Slack, Crowdstrike, and Uber. David shares his unique insights into growth investing and his predictions for the future.Chapters: 01:15 David's Path to Venture 05:30 What Makes Andreessen Horowitz Different 10:30 What He Looks For When Making Growth Investments21:15 Focus On Inputs Not Outputs29:30 How They Source Investments35:10 "On TAM, Ignore the Research Reports". Here's What To Look For Instead44:30 What It Takes To Go Public: The Three Things A Company Needs48:56 Where AI Is Going And How He's Investing1:01:23 Episode Takeaways Connect With David & a16zhttps://x.com/DavidGeorge83https://a16z.com/growth/

Today we hear from Pat Hedley, an advisor and investor in innovative growth companies, about the significance of human connections in personal and professional realms. Pat shares the inspiration behind her book 'Meet 100 People,' which she wrote to offer advice she wished she had early in her career. Jen and Pat will discuss the importance of building relationships, curiosity, and generosity, and Pat addresses common concerns from introverts about networking. Through personal anecdotes, Pat illustrates how even casual connections can lead to significant opportunities and emphasizes the value of consistency, authenticity, and a willingness to help others. Jennifer and Pat also highlight strategies for making meaningful connections and maintaining them over time. The conversation underscores the interconnectedness of relationships and the impact they have on various facets of life.In this interview with Pat, you'll discover:00:16 Introduction to the Show00:50 Meet Pat Hedley: Visionary and Strategist01:51 The Power of Human Connection02:16 Lessons from 'Meet 100 People'04:45 Personal Stories of Connection08:26 Advice for Introverts and Networking Tips22:36 The Importance of Authenticity and Self-Awareness27:45 Final Thoughts and How to ConnectResources mentioned:Meet 100 PeopleAbout the guest:Connect on LinkedInPat Hedley is an advisor to and investor in innovative growth companies. A visionary and strategist with a broad, global network of experts and resources, Pat counsels CEOs, entrepreneurs, and management teams. Previously she was a managing director with General Atlantic, a global growth equity firm. Pat has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a degree in computer science from Dartmouth College.OptiMatchAre you ready to stop struggling with high churn rates, decreased satisfaction, and financial losses due to poor matches in your business? See how the power of our SaaS algorithm delivers proven increases in satisfaction, higher retention rates, and increased revenue for businesses and marketplaces.OptiMatch is designed to be integrated into your existing recruitment process and used alongside your other tools.Our cutting-edge algorithms facilitate successful matches between employees and employers or customers and practitioners, resulting in proven increased satisfaction, effective sessions, higher retention rates, and increased revenue.Say goodbye to the friction, frustration, and inefficiency of poor matches, and hello to success with OptiMatch.

Our Social Media Pages, follow us and engage with the Pill-grim community!Join our Entre CommunityInstagramTwitter YouTubeTikTokLinkedIn And now for this week's prescription:On this week's dose, we start (1:41) with a breakdown on Posh, an event startup that is looking to foster human connection through its platform that brings people together in intimate settings, and their $22M Series A. Then (8:37), we have a Pillfolio Update with Saronic, a startup that's leading the charge in autonomous surface vehicle innovation, and their $175MB that vaulted them to unicorn status. Lastly (15:55), we close out this week's dose with a deepdive on Athletic Brewing Company, America's largest non-alcoholic brewery, and their $50M funding round led by General Atlantic.Sources:https://posh.vip/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/23/event-startup-posh-raises-22m-in-to-focus-on-personalisation-and-event-diversification/ https://www.saronic.com/https://medium.com/saronic-technologies/saronic-raises-175-million-in-series-b-funding-valuing-company-at-1-billion-ad64de58babe https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/09/saronic-a-defense-startup-building-autonomous-ships-raises-55m/https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/30/vc-defense-tech/https://athleticbrewing.com/https://nabeerclub.com/athletic-brewings-50m-expansion-pushing-the-non-alcoholic-beer-revolution-further/https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/athletic-brewing-company-announces-50-million-equity-financing-round-led-by-general-atlantic-302191415.htmlMusic Credit: Chapter One by Cole Bauer and Dean Keetonhttps://www.colebauer.com/https://www.instagram.com/deankeeton/?hl=enDisclosure:The views, statements, and opinions,  expressed herein by the hosts and guests are their own, and their appearance on the podcast should not be construed as reflecting the views or implied endorsement of Independent Brokerage Solutions LLC or any of its officers, employees, or agents. The statements made herein should not be considered an investment opinion, advice, or a recommendation regarding securities of any company. This podcast is produced solely for informational purposes and is not to be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy a security.

Pat Hedley, investor, advisor, author of Meet 100 People, and TEDx speaker joins me on this episode. For 30 years, Pat was a managing director at General Atlantic, a global growth equity firm. Before joining General Atlantic, she worked as a consultant at Bain & Company. Pat is a graduate of Dartmouth College and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. Topics we cover include networking and building meaningful relationships, developing confidence and overcoming the fear of networking, how to meet 100 people, and more. Get connected with Pat: Website: https://meet100people.com/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Meet100people/  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pathedley/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meet100people  Twitter: https://x.com/meet100people  Purchase a copy of Meet 100 People: https://www.amazon.com/Meet-100-People-How-Everyones/dp/0998651508  Leave a 5-star review with a comment on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/business-minds-coffee-chat/id1539014324  Subscribe to my Business Builder Newsletter: https://bit.ly/32y0YxJ  Want to learn how you can work with me to gain more clarity, build a rock-solid foundation for your business, and achieve the results and success you deserve? Visit http://jayscherrbusinessconsulting.com/ and schedule a 1:1 discovery coaching call. Enjoy, thanks for listening, and please share with a friend!

Recorded on January 31, 2024  Featuring guest co-host FM Nate Solon  With talk of online cheating recently dominating chess conversations, Chess.com CEO and co-founder Erik Allebest joined me (and guest co-host FM Nate Solon) to discuss the issue at length. While Erik acknowledges that chess cheating is an existential threat to the game, the research of his Chess.com team suggests that people overestimate the frequency of online cheating occurrences. Erik also discussed Chess.com's current and forthcoming anti-cheat measures, their policy regarding not naming suspected cheaters, and Erik's thoughts on some recent headline-grabbing comments by GM Fabiano Caruana. We also covered a lot of topics unrelated to online cheating, including The Magnus-Hikaru match that fell through last year, the closures of Chess24 and the Pro Chess League, Chess.com's relationship with FIDE, and Erik's reflections on the Niemann-Carlsen story. As Erik discussed, there will still be a lot more information coming out about that story in a forthcoming Netflix documentary. I appreciated Erik's willingness to speak so openly about so many issues and think that you will learn a lot from the conversation.  0:00- Be sure to check out Chessable's new courses including GM Srinath Narayanan's brand new course on the Classical Sicilian, and if you use this link to sign up for Chessable Pro, and/or make a Chessable purchase, it will help support Perpetual Chess.  https://www.chessable.com/pro/?utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=benjohnson&utm_campaign=pro 0:01- Here are the links to subscribe to guest co-host FM Nate Solon's blog and to check out his new learning cohort, The Chess Gym: https://thechessgym.com/ https://zwischenzug.substack.com/ 0:03- Erik Allebest joins the podcast! We begin by discussing chess cheating.  Mentioned: Erik's first interview with Ilya Levitov https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZDRrWAx2Rk (there is a part 2 to that interview that was released after this podcast was recorded) NY Times article:  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/crosswords/chess-cheating-online-fide.html 13:30- What does Erik think of GM Fabiano Caruana's recent suggestions of widespread cheating during Titled Tuesday?  Mentioned; Nate's post called Beating Hikaru https://zwischenzug.substack.com/p/beating-hikaru 27:00- More on cheating, including whether they have considered having players play from centralized locations and other issues.  31:00- What goes into their policy of not naming cheaters, might that policy be changed?  40:00- Has Chess.com had discussions with FIDE about sharing info about who has been banned from their site?  42;00- Would Chess.com consider being involved in a new chess governing body?  Mentioned: Episode 364 with GM Patrick Wolff  49:00- What happened with the match between Magnus and Hikaru that fell through last year?  Mentioned: The State of Chess.com 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri3Z809CbS8 55:00- What will be the subject of a forthcoming Netflix chess documentary? Mentioned: GM Sam Sevian  57:00- What did the CHess.com team learn from the Niemann-Carlsen controversy?  1:01:00- Why was the Pro Chess League shut down? What about Chess24?  1:11:00- Was selling a partial stake of Chess.com to the private equity firm General Atlantic related to the Play Magnus acquisition?  Mentioned: Isai Scheinberg, General Atlantic Announces Investment in Chess.com: https://www.generalatlantic.com/media-article/chess-com-announces-growth-investment-from-general-atlantic/ 1:20:00- Closing thoughts- what is Erik excited for in the coming year?  Thanks to Erik for joining us, and to FM Nate Solon for co-hosting!  If you would like to help support Perpetual Chess, you can do so here: https://www.patreon.com/perpetualchess Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices