The ICONS Show

Julian Teicke is a serial founder, in the last 12 months alone, he's co-founded four companies. But before any of that, he spent 10 years as CEO of the company that made his name, scaling it to €800M in revenue and 1,500 people.
He raised the money using an "ultimate experiment of manifestation," as he calls it: find the largest round ever raised in your vertical at your stage, then take it times two. It worked — Series A went from a $15M benchmark to $30M raised, Series B from $120M to $240M, Series C from $300M to over $600M. Then he tells you the part most founders never say out loud: it came from wanting to be seen, not from a calibrated goal.
In this ICONS episode, Julian gets specific about what actually happened — not the sanitized version. He explains the difference between building from "dirty fuel" (a paradigm he calls the dominant theme in venture capital, built on exploiting childhood trauma) and building from a grounded place. He recounts the moment an employee confronted him directly: that his unresolved dynamic with his father was scaling to every corner of the organization, taking the whole team hostage. And he admits, on the record, that going full-stack instead of building a broker model was the wrong choice — one that cost the organization its spirit.
He also walks through what he's building now: The Delta, a Berlin campus and venture builder that started as a way to process the 30 business ideas he generates in a single hour, and BAD1, the conference that grew out of it. He makes the case for why Berlin is the ecosystem worth betting on, backing it with the ecosystem's own 10x ambition — from €169B to €1.7T by 2036, with 250 unicorns and €30B in annual venture funding. And he closes on something AI still can't do, no matter how good the models get.
Watch or listen to the full episode on our channel or Spotify.
Guest: Julian Teicke, Co-Founder of wefox, Founder of The Delta & BAD1Host: Roman Kirsch
Topics Discussed
Scaling wefox to €800M in revenue over 10 years as CEO — with his father joining the team as a hire along the way
The fundraising formula: find the largest round ever raised at your stage, then raise 2x
Series A, B, and C — how the round sizes escalated, and what it revealed about manifestation
The honest admission behind the strategy: raising to be seen, not from a calibrated goal
"Dirty fuel" vs. clean fuel — why he calls trauma-driven ambition the dominant pattern in venture capital
The employee who confronted him: how an unresolved family dynamic was taking the whole organization hostage
The full-stack insurer decision he now calls the wrong choice, and what it cost the company
Why trauma is not required to build great companies — and what he believes now instead
The job of a CEO: spotting which data point turns into a positive spiral versus a negative one
What he looks for in founders now: whether they seek discomfort or avoid it
Co-founding four companies in the last 12 months, and the one just announced that's "a completely different beast"
The Delta's origin story: turning 30 business ideas an hour into an actual venture-building platform
How BAD1 grew out of that same need
His case for why Berlin is the ecosystem worth betting on
Berlin's 10x ecosystem goal by 2036 — from €169B to €1.7T, 250 unicorns, €30B in venture funding
What Julian believes AI still can't replicate about human connection
Chapters: 0:00 Cold Open1:12 Meet Julian Teicke3:41 Welcome, Julian!4:57 Why He Became an Entrepreneur6:44 "Dirty Fuel" vs. Clean Fuel8:04 The Manifestation Story13:41 From Dirty Fuel to Balance14:52 Hiring His Father — The Hostage Moment17:00 Would He Do It Again?18:29 The Delta & BAD1 Origin Story20:12 Luca App, Theo, Handly — The Hit Rate21:49 What He Looks For in Founders Now23:45 4 Companies in 12 Months29:57 How AI Changed Company Building32:10 15 Years of Lessons41:59 The Fundraising Formula: Raise 2x44:47 The Goal Wasn't Calibrated47:18 The Wrong Choice: Full-Stack Insurer51:44 Masa Son & "The Beginning of the River"58:09 Berlin's 10x Ecosystem Goal by 20361:03:08 Rapid Fire Questions1:03:26 "Stop The Suffering"1:03:40 What AI Still Can't DoAbout Julian TeickeJulian Teicke is a serial founder who has co-founded four companies in the last 12 months alone. Before that, he spent 10 years as CEO scaling a company to €800M in revenue and 1,500 people. Today he runs The Delta, a Berlin campus and venture builder home to over 900 early-stage founders, and BAD1, the conference that grew out of it.

Ramin Hasani spent a decade studying a 2-millimeter worm before anyone outside academia knew his name. Then he solved an equation that had gone unsolved for over 100 years, published it in Nature Machine Intelligence, and woke up to an inbox full of term sheets he never asked for. That paper became Liquid AI.
While every other foundation model company was racing to build bigger transformers and consume more compute, Ramin went the other direction. Liquid foundation models cut the exponential energy cost of AI down to linear — same output quality, a fraction of the hardware. They run on phones, laptops, and cars. No data center required. Today his models are downloaded 1.4 million times per week on Hugging Face. Liquid AI raised $270M at a $2.2B valuation with 110 people — while the companies they compete with raised that in a single week.
In this ICONS episode, Ramin covers the full arc — from growing up in Iran with an anatomy professor uncle who made him study the human brain, to the two professors at Politecnico di Milano who introduced him to brain-inspired computing, to the PhD at Vienna and MIT where he discovered that a microscopic worm with 302 neurons could control 95 muscles better than any robot ever built. He explains the mathematics behind liquid neural networks, why the transformer architecture hits an inevitable energy wall, and what two years at Vanguard — the $8 trillion asset manager — taught him about building for real enterprise value. He also talks about closing Mercedes-Benz in four months, why he thinks 85% of AI token spend is waste, and what he believes the world looks like in 25 years when humans stop talking to each other entirely.
Topics Discussed
Growing up in Iran, studying in Italy, completing his PhD across Vienna and MIT
The C. Elegans worm: 302 neurons, 95 muscles, and four Nobel Prizes
How modeling worm neuroscience led to the discovery of liquid neural networks
Solving a 100-year-old differential equation — and why he thought he'd win a Nobel Prize
The Hacker News moment: one paper, one morning, and an inbox full of Silicon Valley term sheets
Transformer architecture explained — and why it becomes an energy crisis at scale
Liquid foundation models: reducing exponential compute to linear without sacrificing quality
Two years at Vanguard: what a $8 trillion business teaches you about enterprise and large numbers
Why foundation model companies should be started by scientists, not operators
Raising $270M while competitors raised $20B — and why that's a feature, not a bug
1.4 million downloads per week: how a 110-person company became one third of Nvidia's open source footprint
Mercedes-Benz: closing an enterprise OEM deal in four months
Shopify: foundation models powering product search and recommendation at scale
Why they charge per request, not per token — and why contracts run 4 to 10 years
The talent war: winning 3 out of 10 battles against Anthropic, xAI, Meta, and Cursor
The taste test: why training a machine learning model is an art, not a recipe
The next frontier: Bezos's Prometheus, AI for science, and the world model thesis
Why humans can't grasp exponentials — and what the worm's nervous system has to do with it
25 years from now: neural chips, parallel communication, and realities indistinguishable from the physical world
The goal: Liquid foundation models running on 50% of all devices on the planet by 2029

Martin Varsavsky has never had a job in his life. Not one. He arrived in New York at 26 as an Argentine refugee, convinced a Nobel Prize-winning scientist to build a biotech company with him, and has been founding unicorns ever since — six in total, spanning telecoms, fertility, and now AI medicine. At 66, he has just launched Certuma, the first medical AI company explicitly designed to be FDA-regulated and capable of writing prescriptions. The trigger: an AI correctly diagnosed a condition in his eye, recommended a specific medication, and then said 'I'm not a doctor.' He decided to fix that. In this ICONS episode, Martin covers his entire arc — from the pre-money valuation insight that unlocked entrepreneurship for him, to the meeting with the King of Spain where he said fertility — not nationalism — was the country's greatest threat. He talks about the technology his companies are building to make having children easier, the ethical lines he draws on designer babies, why he believes frozen embryos should be stored as a backup for civilization, and how cycling 14 hours a week at age 66 means he never had to plan for his own decay.
Topics Discussed
Fleeing Argentina during the military dictatorship, arriving in New York at 26 with nothing
Never getting a job offer — and how the same bank that rejected him funded his first company
Co-founding biotech with Nobel Prize winner César Milstein: how a random holiday party at Oxford changed everything
The Columbia MBA lesson that unlocked entrepreneurship: the magic of pre-money valuations
Three consecutive telecom unicorns: Viatel ($1.2B exit), Jaztel (€4B+ exit), and Yardcom
His method: solve problems you personally experience — telecoms, fertility, now AI medicine
The fertility crisis: every developed country is collapsing toward 1.0 — and the political divide nobody talks about
His private meeting with the King of Spain: 'Your heirs will have no inhabitants in this kingdom'
Gameto's Fertilo treatment — compressing IVF from 14 days of injections to 3 days
Overture: the embryology robot that automates the making of human embryos with ICSI
Vitara: the artificial womb saving premature babies, and the FDA battle blocking it
Why frozen embryos should never be discarded — as insurance for the species, not for religious reasons
Embryo selection: monogenic illness screening yes, designer babies: where he draws the line
Germany: the worst country in Europe for IVF regulations, and why
Certuma: the AI doctor company born to be regulated — and the story behind the founding moment
Starting his most ambitious company at 66, and why age is a bias not a barrier
Longevity through sport: 14 hours of cycling a week, blood work every quarter
US vs. Europe: healthcare waste, defence spending, and what America gets wrong about learning from Europe

Oskar Hartmann has co-founded 20+ companies, invested in 150 as an angel, found 15 unicorns from seed stage, broke two world indoor rowing records, wrote a million-copy best-seller, and co-founded Accumulator — a financial infrastructure supporting private-company ownership for founders.
In this episode of ICONS, he gives the most unfiltered account of building at scale we’ve ever heard: the €500K liability that nearly destroyed him, the 2013 hospital breakdown, the frameworks of alternating and mini lives that rebuilt hi
Topics Discussed
From fitness belts to Pro Fitness Shop: how Oskar built his first internet business at 18 in Germany
What AI-powered research reveals about the 10,000 people who've built billion-dollar companies — and why 'you have to be abnormal'
How to read a founder in the wild: the warehouse CEO, the nightclub closer, the street fight walker
Launching KupiVIP on the day of the Lehman Brothers collapse — and the courier company that stole all the revenue
The true story behind building 20 parallel companies: a €500K personal liability and a desperate need for $1M in safety
2013: the year everything collapsed — bankruptcies, hospital, nervous system shutdown
The alternating framework: seasonal beast mode, recovery weeks, and what decathlon athletes can teach entrepreneurs about balance
Mini lives: how Oskar used 18-month focused sprints to break world rowing records and complete a 17-city stand-up tour
The Accumulator Fund: share pooling, adverse selection, and why 75% of founder outcomes are outside their control
What founders need differently in the AI era: speed, noise-muting, and trillion-dollar ambition

Marc-Alexander Christ, co-founder at SumUp, pulls back the curtain on how a five-founder startup launched simultaneously in Dublin, Berlin, and Bulgaria in 2012 and grew into one of Europe's most formidable fintech companies — serving 4 million merchants across 36 countries at an approximately €8 billion valuation. From the early mistake of hiring 100 salespeople before achieving product-market fit, to the iron discipline of a 12-month payback period that governs every growth decision, to a planned proprietary stablecoin - Marc delivers a rare, unfiltered account of what it actually takes to build payments infrastructure at global scale for small merchants who were almost entirely underserved before SumUp existed.
Topics Discussed
SumUp's unusual origin: 5 co-founders, 3 launch locations simultaneously — Dublin, Berlin, and Bulgaria
The original merchant super-app vision and why early investors said it was too big to build
Why payment is the single universal common denominator across every small merchant business type
The €10/month per merchant revenue problem and why human field sales was a structural impossibility
Facebook as the winning early acquisition channel — the discovery of a 9-month payback period that worked
The 12-month payback period rule and the math behind why incremental CAC breaks responsible growth
SumUp's three business lines: Get Paid (card acceptance), Run My Business (POS/software), SumUp Card Account (banking)
Self-setup, zero human labor onboarding — marginal cost of adding a new merchant approaches zero
Tap-on-phone: 30% of new merchant acquisition, SumUp as European market leader
M&A strategy: 10+ acquisitions, lessons from Tiller (CRM fragmentation failure) vs. Payleven (48-hour integration success)
The "run all distances" philosophy — competing horizontally across verticals rather than owning one like Toast
SumUp Edge: AI co-pilot for small merchants with competitive pricing intelligence and seasonal recommendations
Building a proprietary stablecoin to reduce payment settlement from 24-48 hours to instant
Why acquiring AI companies makes no sense right now — but deploying AI everywhere internally does
Consumer products: SumUp Pay (neobank card and account) and SumUp loyalty aggregator
Marketing evolution: performance-first → retail (14,000 stores) → 3,400 integration partners → direct and field sales

In this episode of ICONS, host Roman Kirsch sits down with Tushar Ahluwalia, Co-Founder of Razor Group, to unpack one of the most complex entrepreneurial journeys in e-commerce. Tushar's career spans three continents and three ventures: building India's first major D2C fashion brand (SBL) that reached 100 crores in revenue, creating Razor Group into a $700 million revenue aggregator that acquired 300+ Amazon businesses, and now launching ADA AI to solve supply chain complexity with artificial intelligence. This conversation reveals the operational playbooks, capital strategy, and leadership principles behind building at massive scale—plus the hard-earned lessons from navigating board dynamics, capital stack challenges, and market timing.
Topics Discussed:
Building and scaling D2C brands in emerging markets with limited infrastructure
Navigating complex board relationships and investor dynamics as a first-time founder
Timing market opportunities and surviving when assumptions change
The FBA aggregator model: capital structure, underwriting assumptions, and what actually happened
Operationalizing extreme complexity: integrating 300 businesses, 500 suppliers, and 5,000 SKUs
Multi-founder team structures and why trust matters more than pure skill
Post-COVID market correction and strategic consolidation through M&A
Building AI-powered supply chain automation for enterprise
The "human glue" problem in global supply chains and how AI can solve it

In this episode of ICONS, host Roman Kirsch interviews Heini Zachariassen, founder of Vivino and current chairman of the board, who is now building Vota (vota.org), a quality rating system for restaurants. Growing up on the remote Faroe Islands (population 50,000) between Norway and Iceland, Heini developed the entrepreneurial belief that you can walk to parliament and knock on the prime minister's door to create change. This island mindset shaped his approach to building global businesses. Despite knowing nothing about wine, Heini transformed his intimidation at wine store "walls of wine" into the world's largest wine database with over 15 million wines and over 70 million users. Starting as a simple wine scanning app competing against 600 other wine apps, Vivino succeeded by focusing relentlessly on match rate over aesthetics, achieving 70-80% word-of-mouth growth with near-zero marketing spend and reaching a billion-dollar valuation during the 2021 boom. Through surviving the COVID boom-bust cycle and transitioning from community to marketplace, Heini shares hard-won lessons about founder-market fit, data moats, and building sustainable consumer businesses in competitive markets. Today, he remains connected to his Faroe Islands roots, regularly visiting home where they now boast a two-star Michelin restaurant while he builds a whiskey distillery to help diversify the local economy beyond fishing.
Topics Discussed:
Transforming personal pain points into scalable consumer products
Building community-driven marketplaces with authentic user engagement
Surviving boom-bust cycles and venture capital market volatility
Creating defensible data moats in competitive consumer categories
Scaling from product-market fit to marketplace monetization
Managing founder transitions and maintaining company culture
Leveraging AI and emerging technologies in established product categories

In this episode of ICONS, host Roman Kirsch interviews Barbara Martin Coppola, one of the most accomplished global marketing and digital transformation executives of our time. Barbara shares her playbook for scaling iconic brands globally, having led transformations at Samsung Korea, Google/YouTube, IKEA, and Decathlon. Her unique perspective comes from successfully navigating vastly different corporate cultures while maintaining brand consistency and driving exponential growth. From turning IKEA from a digital skeptic into a €12 billion e-commerce powerhouse to scaling YouTube's global expansion through localized community building, Barbara reveals the tactical frameworks that work across cultures and industries.
Topics Discussed:
Building consensus-driven execution across different corporate cultures
Scaling global brands while maintaining local relevance and authenticity
Leading digital transformations in traditional retail environments
Creating viral growth through community-driven content strategies
Managing stakeholder alignment during major organizational changes
Balancing centralized brand control with local market adaptation
Converting offline brand experiences into digital touchpoints
 

In this episode of ICONS, host Roman Kirsch interviews Luca Ferrari and Matteo Danieli, founders of Bending Spoons. Operating from Milan, Bending Spoons has evolved from a failed startup into Europe's most sophisticated digital acquisition platform, acquiring and improving dozens of businesses worth over $1.2 billion in revenue. From their first $10,000 acquisition to writing $500 million checks, the founders share how they built a unique culture-driven approach to scaling tech businesses through strategic acquisitions, proprietary technology platforms, and an unconventional talent strategy focused entirely on developing young graduates into business leaders.
Topics Discussed:
Building a serial acquisition platform from startup failure to billion-dollar scale
Creating a culture where talent allocation drives competitive advantage
Developing proprietary technology platforms that enable massive operational leverage
Strategic decision-making around geographic expansion and market positioning
Managing risk and capital allocation across dozens of acquired businesses
Scaling from consumer mobile apps to enterprise software worth hundreds of millions
 
 
 

In this episode of ICONS, host Roman Kirsch interviews Eric Wahlforss, founder of SoundCloud and Dance. From building one of the world's most influential music platforms to revolutionizing urban mobility through e-bike subscriptions, Eric shares how he's created two category-defining brands across completely different industries. His journey reveals the power of product-first thinking, authentic community building, and leveraging network effects to scale from zero to millions of users. Through SoundCloud's transformation from a simple sharing tool to a cultural phenomenon that launched entire music genres, and Dance's approach to turning mobility hardware into a beloved subscription service, Eric demonstrates how great brands emerge from solving real user pain points with obsessive attention to product quality and customer feedback.
Topics Discussed:
Building viral growth loops through product utility rather than marketing spend
Creating authentic communities around creator expression and lifestyle products
Scaling network effects from single-player utility to multi-sided platforms
Leveraging early adopters and influencers as authentic brand ambassadors
Transforming traditional product categories into subscription services
Managing complex supply chains and city-by-city expansion challenges
Converting user pain points into moments of delight through service excellence