Venture Lab with Luis
Venture Lab with Luis
Podcast Description
The greatest opportunities are often hidden behind closed doors. This podcast opens them up.
After seven years in a different industry, last year I developed a strange obsession with startups and venture capital. I consumed every podcast, video, and book I could find.
And while entrepreneurship does not need another podcast, it desperately needs transparency, accessibility, and conversations that go beyond funding rounds and exits.
Venture Lab tells the personal stories of Europe's most exceptional investors and most innovative founders.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast delves into venture capital intricacies, startup stories, and the personal journeys of investors, with episodes revealing insights on topics like building successful funds, the broken VC model, and the skills essential for founders, including talks with figures like Christian Nagel on top-performing funds and Ondrej Bartos discussing the future of investing
The greatest opportunities are often hidden behind closed doors. This podcast opens them up.
After seven years in a different industry, last year I developed a strange obsession with startups and venture capital. I consumed every podcast, video, and book I could find.
And while entrepreneurship does not need another podcast, it desperately needs transparency, accessibility, and conversations that go beyond funding rounds and exits.
Venture Lab tells the personal stories of Europe’s most exceptional investors and most innovative founders.
Filip Dames, co-founder of Zalando and Managing Partner at Cherry Ventures (€500M fund), reveals how he went from opera singer to failed founder to scaling Europe's largest fashion marketplace to backing deep tech startups in fusion energy, AI, and robotics. We cover startup failure lessons, seed fundraising strategy, hiring mistakes founders make, and why Europe will build trillion-dollar companies.
In this episode, Filip shares:
His first startup failure (Tamundo) and Zalando's near-death fundraising moments before IPO
The #1 hiring mistake that destroys early-stage startups and why firing fast saves companies
”Dream in decades, execute in weeks” – his framework for deep tech investing (Proxima Fusion, The Exploration Company)
How to overcome founder fear: the best founders act before fear wins
Cherry Ventures' operator-first approach: talent network, go-to-market support, daily founder support
”Skip the theory, start building” – stop writing business plans, start talking to customers
For founders raising pre-seed/seed, VCs investing in Europe, startup operators, and deep tech builders.
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