Beginner's Mind

Epizode

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  #182 - How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You Are Going: 4 Lessons from Ben Horowitz (Part 2 of 2) 08.09.2026 58min

  What does it mean when the most respected adviser in Silicon Valley tells you that you are the best chief executive he works with, while your company is heading straight into a wall? Bill Campbell said exactly that to Ben Horowitz. Campbell was advising Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt at the time, so Horowitz assumed the compliment was absurd. Campbell explained himself: there are plenty of good peacetime chief executives and plenty of good wartime ones, and almost nobody who can do b...
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  #181 - When Things Fall Apart: 3 Lessons from Ben Horowitz on Leading Through the Struggle (Part 1 of 2) 30.08.2026 49min

  What do you do on the morning when there are no good moves left? In March 2001, Ben Horowitz took Loudcloud public in the middle of the dot-com collapse. The bankers cut the price from ten dollars a share to six in the week of the offering. The day before the deal, Yahoo announced its chief executive was stepping down. Neither of the two banks that took the company public offered the traditional closing dinner. On the plane home, Horowitz turned to his director of finance and said they had do...
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  EP 180: Eric Ries | Why Good Companies Go Bad After Success 03.08.2026 1h 3min

  What happens when the moment a company finally succeeds is the moment it becomes most likely to be destroyed? Most founders assume the market rewards the better product and protects what they built. The legal reality runs the other way. The dominant theory of the corporation treats a company as a financial instrument designed to enrich its shareholders, and treats everything else as optional. That theory has a name, shareholder primacy, and nobody voted for it. It hardened in courtrooms and b...
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  EP 179: Joško Bobanović | Why Venture Capital Fights Human Instinct 25.07.2026 2h 19min

  What happens when the instinct to help a struggling company is exactly what prevents the strongest companies from succeeding? Venture capital forces investors to make decisions that can feel deeply uncomfortable: stop rescuing the weakest, concentrate scarce capital behind the most promising, and accept that most investments will fail. Deep tech intensifies this conflict. Investors must commit capital while the technology remains unproven, customers are still uncertain and the eventual exit m...
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  #178 - The Elon Musk Method: 7 Rules for Building What the Market Thinks Is Impossible 12.07.2026 56min

  How can a company have the right numbers and still reach the wrong strategic conclusion? In 2017, Volkswagen’s chief executive mocked Tesla as one of the “world champions of big announcements.” At the time, Volkswagen sold roughly eleven million cars a year, while Tesla sold fewer than eighty thousand. The facts supported the criticism, but the conclusion missed the change already underway. That moment explains why Elon Musk remains worth studying. Most public discussion focuses on his person...
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  EP 177: Alberto Chalon | Liquidity Before the IPO Window Opens 22.06.2026 1h 43min

  Private companies are staying private longer, and that changes who gets liquidity, when, and why. Founders, employees, and early investors can wait a decade or more for an IPO or acquisition. Meanwhile, venture funds face growing pressure to return capital, and many of Europe's best companies struggle to access the growth capital needed to scale. In this conversation, Christian Soschner speaks with Alberto Chalon, Co-Founder of Giano Capital, about the rise of single-asset secondary investmen...
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  Alasdair Milton, KPMG | Why Precision Medicine Still Fails Patients (SPARK20 – 168) 25.05.2026 25min

  Only one in three eligible lung cancer patients receives the targeted therapy they should get. That is not a failure of science. It is a failure of delivery. After more than two decades of precision oncology, biopharma has never had better tools: cell and gene therapy, in vivo CAR-T, antibody-drug conjugates, AI-enabled diagnostics, organoids, multi-omics, and global clinical data. Yet too many breakthroughs still fail to reach the bedside. Patients fall through fragmented systems. Data does ...
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  #176 - Why Smart People Say Yes: 7 Lessons from Influence by Robert Cialdini 17.05.2026 1h

  Some books explain how the world works. Influence explains why people move. Why someone takes the meeting. Why an investor leans in. Why a customer trusts. Why a team follows. Why a board stays stuck. Why a founder keeps defending a decision that stopped making sense months ago. Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is one of those books that becomes more valuable the longer you build, invest, sell, negotiate, hire, and lead. Because at some point, you realize something un...
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  EP 175: Stefanie Schubert | Why Smart People Lose Negotiations Before They Start 25.04.2026 1h 56min

  Most leaders think negotiation begins when both sides sit down to talk numbers. By then, trust, incentives, timing, internal alignment, and first impressions have already shaped the outcome. That is why smart founders, executives, investors, and board members can have the right facts and still walk away with the wrong result. In this episode of Beginner’s Mind, Stefanie Schubert explains why negotiation is not a last-minute performance at the table. It is a leadership capability t...
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  EP 174: Wanwipa Siriwatwechakul | Funding the Next Industrial Era 11.04.2026 2h 5min

  Most people still treat climate solutions as a cost. Wanwipa Siriwatwechakul argues that this is exactly why so many leaders miss the real opportunity. The next industrial era will not be built by patching old systems, but by redesigning them from the ground up. In this episode of Beginner’s Mind, Wanwipa explains why industrial decarbonization is not mainly about sacrifice, compliance, or adding expensive fixes to yesterday’s infrastructure. It is about building better systems, stronger comp...
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  EP 173: Bret Kugelmass | The West Bet on the Wrong Energy Future 28.03.2026 1h 3min

  Power demand is rising faster than the systems meant to support it. AI, electrification, and industry all need stable energy, but the dominant story sold to the public was far simpler than reality. In this episode, Bret Kugelmass explains why the real bottleneck was never just climate ambition, but how the West misunderstood energy itself. For years, nuclear was framed as too dangerous, too slow, too expensive, and politically untouchable. Meanwhile, electricity demand kept rising, indu...
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  #172 - Fast Forward Thinking: Why Most Investments Fail — And How Elite VCs Think Differently 08.03.2026 59min

  Most investors think they’re rational. Most founders think they’re disciplined. Most boards think they’re strategic. They’re usually wrong. In this episode, we unpack Fast Forward Thinking by Luis Pareras — a physician turned deep-tech venture capitalist who distilled decades of investing under scientific uncertainty into 40 brutally structured rules. This is not a summary. It’s a decision upgrade for founders, operators, board members, and capital allocators navigating the high-stakes terrai...
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  EP 171 - Björn Cochlovius: Why Brilliant Biotech Breaks at Manufacturing 03.02.2026 1h 6min

  Most biotech breakthroughs don’t fail in the lab. They fail when science meets manufacturing reality. And by the time this bottleneck appears, tens of millions are already sunk. This episode examines the most under-discussed failure point in modern biotech: the gap between scientific discovery and scalable, usable healthcare solutions. While science has never been stronger—and big pharma excels at market access—companies that can translate breakthrough biology into industrialized medicines re...
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  EP 170 - Jim Pulcrano: Why Most Venture Capital Fails And What Europe Still Gets Wrong 25.01.2026 1h 56min

  Nine out of ten startups fail, yet Europe keeps funding them the same way. Governments replace judgment with bureaucracy, capital replaces experience, and failure is misunderstood instead of learned from. This conversation exposes why venture capital is a profession, not a policy tool — and why getting this wrong quietly kills innovation. In this episode, Jim Pulcrano, Adjunct Professor at IMD and longtime venture investor, explains why most venture capital systems fail before capital is eve...
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  EP 169 - Why New Year’s Goals Fail by February - Even for Disciplined People 11.01.2026 36min

  Most goals don’t fail because of laziness or lack of ambition. They fail quietly — buried under daily noise, competing priorities, and forgotten intentions. By March, even the most meaningful goals have slipped down the list… replaced by urgency, meetings, and excuses. In the last years, whenever I work with companies or people in my executive coaching a pattern showed up frequently. In private life: marathons abandoned, educations postponed, mountains left unclimbed. In business: bold ...
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  EP 168 - Alasdair Milton: The Innovation Inflection Point: Why 70% of Cures Never Reach Patients 30.12.2025 2h 42min

  Breakthrough science has never been stronger — yet patients still miss life-saving therapies. Despite decades of innovation, most precision medicines fail at the last mile of healthcare delivery. The problem isn’t discovery. It’s how science, capital, and systems are aligned — or not. Possessing elite science is no longer enough to win in the multi-trillion-dollar biopharma ecosystem. As innovation shifts from West to East and from treatment to prevention, leadership teams struggle to bridge ...
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  #167: Pattern Breakers — 7 Laws Behind Category-Defining Companies 15.12.2025 47min

  Most founders obsess over ideas. Breakthrough companies obsess over inflections, conviction, and structure. This episode unpacks Pattern Breakers by Mike Maples Jr.—a book that quietly explains why most startups never break out… and why a small minority reshape entire categories. But this isn’t a book summary. It’s a thinking upgrade for founders, operators, board members, and investors navigating the most fragile phase of company building: Series A to IPO, where timing, conviction, and struc...
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  SPARK20 – 156: Janos Pasztor | The Climate Diplomat Who Refuses to Give Up on Humanity 23.11.2025 26min

  The world has grown quiet about climate change. Too quiet. We scroll past floods, fires, droughts… and move on with our day. As if the problem solved itself. As if we’ve earned the luxury to look away. Janos Pasztor (full episode) has spent 40 years inside the rooms where climate decisions are made — from serving as UN Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Change to advising presidents, prime ministers, and global institutions. And in this SPARK20 highlight episode, one truth stood out: We ...
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  EP 166 - Karl Nehammer: Why Europe Fails to Scale – And How the EIB Plans to Fix It 06.11.2025 20min

  Europe leads the world in discovery — yet too often, its breakthroughs never become global companies. Billions in research funding turn into patents, not products. While others build empires from ideas, Europe risks becoming the world’s laboratory — brilliant, but broke. That’s the paradox at the heart of this conversation. In this episode, Karl Nehammer, Vice-President of the European Investment Bank (EIB) and former Chancellor of Austria, joins Christian Soschner live at BIO-Europe 2025 to ...
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  EP 165 – Jason Foster: 153 Rejections Later — What Every Founder Must Learn About Resilience 28.10.2025 2h 7min

  Most founders dream of raising millions. Few survive the 153 “no’s” it takes to get there. Behind every biotech breakthrough lies exhaustion — late-night calls, failed rounds, and investors who walk away at the finish line. What separates the ones who make it isn’t luck or timing — it’s resilience built into process. In this episode, Jason Foster, CEO of Ori Biotech, shares how he transformed relentless rejection into a billion-dollar trajectory. From rebuilding cell-therapy manufacturing to ...