Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

This week we sat down with Tom Hanan, who left a pre-IPO seat at Google in 2009 to start Webrepublic. Sixteen years later it is the largest independent, owner-managed marketing agency in Switzerland, around 250 people, and it has never raised outside capital. From Zurich, his teams run campaigns at FIFA World Cup scale. So when Tom talks about what AI is actually doing to a services business, it comes from someone who runs the campaigns, not someone selling the keynote.

🎧 Tune in now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and share your thoughts! In the meantime: Follow the Gradient and stay tuned!

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Why you should listen

You should listen to this if you run or work in a services business and your clients have started asking why AI hasn't made you cheaper yet. Tom has run the numbers from inside the agency, and his answer is the opposite of the one everyone else is giving.

As the conversation unfolds, the real tension is not AI versus humans. It is whether the better tools quietly make the work worse, and who ends up paying to keep it good.

What we talk about

• 00:00 - Introduction

• 04:35 - Advice to his younger self

• 05:58 - Why they never raised

• 12:09 - A culture that aligns the team

• 15:13 - Be ready for chaos

• 17:30 - Hiring for the oomph factor

• 24:47 - The AI magic button myth

• 28:04 - The shorter planning horizon

• 30:45 - Marketing in the age of AI slop

• 36:34 - Rapid fire

Our main take away’s

1. There is no magic AI button. When clients hear Tom has AI, some ask for a 30 to 40% discount. He calls that "absolute bogus." Webrepublic spends a seven-figure sum every year just to deploy the technology, and as he puts it, "the illusion that your work will become less is an illusion."

2. AI buys efficiency, not a smaller team. The real gain is throughput. Instead of managing three clients, a team can manage four, which lifts profitability. AI changes the math underneath the work, it does not remove the work or the bill.

3. AI is a Ferrari most companies can't drive. Tom watches banks and insurers buy the same tools the data giants use and then "don't even have a driver's license." The bottleneck is never the tool. It is whether the culture is ready to change its processes, and if it is not, "all your AI investment will fail."

4. Sixteen years, 250 people, never raised a franc. Tom and co-founder Tobias Zehnder bootstrapped from day one. External funding would have helped him sleep through COVID, but "every VC has a five year plan to exit," and staying independent kept the company focused: "we didn't have the millions to spend on stuff that we might not really need."

5. Hire for the oomph factor. Tom screens candidates on two axes: their academic and professional background, and what he calls "the oomph factor," meaning charisma, passion, fire and drive. "You could have an MIT A-grade student, but this person might be boring as hell." His ideal hire is "a mix of Captain Kirk, Yoda and Indiana Jones."

How to reach out to Tom

• LinkedIn

Exclusive from Tom

Incoming…

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Thursday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Snap unveiled a $2’195 pair of AR glasses the internet decided had "absolutely zero style", sending the stock down around 17%. AI poster child Midjourney announced its next act: a full-body ultrasound scanner you enter through "a shallow pool of golden light", with a wellness spa in SF to follow. Seems like AI will give us many options spending money for things we don’t need. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

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Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

1Komma5° is racing Enpal to the stock market

Hamburg solar group 1Komma5° is lining up an IPO, having pulled in a €150m pre-IPO round and now sitting on close to €400m of equity, debt-free. Revenue reached €520m in 2024. A listing would sharpen its fight with rival Enpal for the top of Germany's home-energy market.

A Paris startup raised €32m to run the battlefield

Comand AI landed a €32m Series A led by Blossom Capital, with a strategic investment from Sweden's defence giant Saab. Its Prevail platform uses AI agents to turn battlefield data into decisions, and is already deployed with units in France, Germany and Ukraine.

Ex-Palantir founders raised €51m to untangle SAP

London-based Conduct raised a €51m ($60m) Series A co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ, with SAP itself investing. Founded by three ex-Palantir engineers, it uses AI to help giants like Daimler Truck, DHL and Fraport understand and modernise their tangled ERP systems, claiming 30% faster transformation work.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

Big Tech changed its mind about your job

For two years the people building AI told us it was coming for our jobs. Now Jeff Bezos says it will cause "a labour shortage", not mass unemployment, and Sam Altman says he is "delighted to be wrong" about white-collar work vanishing. The timing is convenient, given they are all hiring. Will the honest answer probably be messier than either the panic or the relief?

It's not ready yet is the most expensive lie

The hardest lesson from YC: launch early, launch often. Every founder nods, almost nobody does it, because shipping means a real user might tell you your core assumption was wrong. He has watched founders polish onboarding flows for months, for users they have never spoken to. Sounds familiar?

How is “content” done right?

Beehiiv's Tyler Denk points to Ramp as the template: built on proprietary data nobody else has (SaaS spend rankings from 50k+ companies), owning a topic rather than pushing a product, and real editorial with named writers and a point of view. His test: would you subscribe even if the company sold you nothing?

Smart hack

From our Partners

Cap table tools founders and finance teams love

As you grow, you need a cap table management platform that you can trust to keep up. 

From issuing grants to 409A valuations or ASC 718 reporting, Pulley gives you the tools to manage equity. Experience a platform built for you: transparent, reliable, and designed to put your company first.

Learn why companies choose Pulley

From us

Hiring the wrong person is the most expensive mistake a small team makes. Darren Bush lays out a hiring system, and most of the work happens before you ever post the role.

• Write the success profile first. Define what great looks like, with evidence, before you source anyone.

• Use work samples, not gameable tests. Assess on real job tasks, not trivia.

• Score in writing before the debrief. Every interviewer commits a scorecard first, so the loudest voice does not win.

• The debrief is where quality is decided. That structured conversation produces the real quality-of-hire call at offer time, not six months later.

Hire on evidence, not on vibes.

One good read

Patrick Collison's advice

Join the entrepreneurial journey

Are you ready to take your first steps into the startup ecosystem or seeking an exciting new opportunity? Below is a curated list of startup job openings across Europe for you to explore.

Internships

Founders Associate Intern [📍Lisbon, Portugal], MicroHarvest [Apply]
Product Data Management Internship [📍Zurich, Switzerland], Tangible, ANYbotics [Apply]
Partner Success Intern (French-speaking) [📍Paris, France], Citymapper [Apply]
B Corp & Sustainability Manager Intern [📍Paris, France], Prose [Apply]
HR Intern (2 months) [Geneva] [📍Geneva, Switzerland], FinTech (B2B), Taurus [Apply]
Online Marketing Stage [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], Consumer, Butternut Box [Apply]

Customer Success

Senior Client Account Manager, Global Strategic Accounts (UK) [📍London, United Kingdom], Consumer, Reddit [Apply]
Junior Customer Success Specialist - fresh graduates opportunity [📍Ukraine], Foxintelligence [Apply]
Customer Success Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], FinTech, Stripe [Apply]
Customer Success Manager (German speaking) [📍Berlin, Germany], Pleo [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Creative Marketing Executive [📍London, United Kingdom], HealthTech, Happl [Apply]
Market Activation Lead, Manchester [📍Manchester, United Kingdom], Neko Health [Apply]
Stagiair Content Creator [📍Deinze, Belgium], Cooper Pet Care [Apply]
Senior Marketing Data Analyst (all genders) [📍Berlin, Germany], HELLOFRESH [Apply]
Marketing Manager [📍Slovakia], Wolt [Apply]
Head of B2B Marketing [📍Paris, France], Joko [Apply]
Head of Campaign & Merchandising [📍Paris, France], Joko [Apply]

Sales

Enterprise Account Executive - Germany [📍Germany], API Infrastructure, Kong [Apply]
Enterprise Account Executive, Switzerland (French Speaking) [📍Switzerland], API Infrastructure, Kong [Apply]
Sales Manager - Paris [📍Paris, France], Food Delivery, Deliveroo [Apply]
Sales Team Lead (Health Center Segment) [📍Paris, France], HealthTech, Vocca [Apply]
Sales Development Representative I B2B SaaS [📍Madrid, Spain], Qlip.ai [Apply]
Junior Field Sales Partner - Roma (x/f/m) [📍Rome, Italy], Digital Health, Doctolib [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Talent Acquisition Lead [📍London, United Kingdom], Plain [Apply]
Director of Talent Acquisition, Tech [📍London, United Kingdom], LegalTech, Legora [Apply]
Director People (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Voyfai [Apply]
HR Generalist (x/f/m) [📍Paris, France], Digital Health, Doctolib [Apply]

Product & Tech

Embedded Software Engineer - Wearable Systems [📍London, United Kingdom], XYZ Reality [Apply]
AI Engineer [📍France], Pennylane [Apply]
Engineering Lead II [📍London, United Kingdom], 9fin [Apply]
AI Software Engineer - Internship (f/m/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Data & AI, Datagon ai [Apply]
Senior Automation Developer [📍Paris, France], Automation, UiPath [Apply]
Senior Cloud Engineer [📍Helsinki, Finland], Supercell [Apply]

Stay connected and spread the word! If you found this newsletter insightful, why not share it with your network? Thanks for reading, and we look forward to bringing you even more insights in the next edition!

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Tuesday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Last week Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire after SpaceX went public, a number so large it stops meaning anything. Closer to home, Europe got a far smaller number that matters more: zero, as in zero access to the most capable AI on the planet. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Mistral is raising at €20bn, nearly double

Mistral is in talks to raise about €3bn at a €20bn valuation, almost doubling the €11.7bn it carried in September. Europe's AI champion needs the cash to keep pace in the compute race against the US and China. Landing days after the Anthropic shutdown, the timing is not subtle.

A German startup just raised €1.2bn for humanoid robots

Neura Robotics raised up to €1.2bn ($1.4bn) to build humanoid robots, led by Tether with Nvidia, Qualcomm, Amazon and Bosch all backing it. That values the Metzingen company near €4bn, up from €120m early last year. It has already booked €1bn in orders and wants to ship 5m robots by 2030.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

There is no perfect founder routine

Jessica Holzbach pushed back on the "perfect" founder routine, where “consensus” says you have to wake up at 5 a.m. Her point: what actually makes the difference is understanding how you work best, when your energy is real, and how to structure a day in which you can think clearly and stay consistent. Success is not copying someone else's routine, it is building one you can sustain and perform at your best over the long term.

Assume you are being recorded at work

a16z's call is blunt: assume everything you say at work is now recorded by default, and stop expecting that to reverse. The logic is that you onboard AI the way you onboard a hire, not by pointing it at the wiki, but by letting it sit in the meetings where the real context actually lives. An agent that has absorbed two years of your company's conversations is simply a better assistant than one that only read the docs

Smart hack

From our Partners

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Defining your ICP on vibes is a pipeline killer. In Build Your GTM Alpha, Clay + HubSpot for Startups walk you through a live build. Real prospect list. Real enrichment. Real outreach sequence. You don't leave with a plan. You leave with outbound running. June 18. 11am ET / 4pm GMT.

Register Before June 18

From us

Most teams still burn the hour after every meeting writing notes nobody reopens. There is a sharper move: stop summarizing, start logging decisions.

• Capture decisions, not discussion. Feed the transcript to your AI and ask only for what was decided, by whom, and by when.

• One line per decision. An hour of chatter becomes ten bullets your team can act on.

• Make it searchable. A running decision log beats a folder of summaries no one reopens.

• Reuse the prompt. Save it once, run it after every call, and the habit compounds.

Less note-taking, more follow-through.

One good read

Europe 2031

Join the entrepreneurial journey

Are you ready to take your first steps into the startup ecosystem or seeking an exciting new opportunity? Below is a curated list of startup job openings across Europe for you to explore.

Internships

Marketing Intern - Sweden (Part-Time, Fall Semester) [📍Stockholm, Sweden], Wolt [Apply]
Global Campaigns Graduated Internship (12-months) [📍Madrid, Spain], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]
Sales Strategy Intern - Milan (x/f/m) [📍Milan, Italy], Digital Health, Doctolib [Apply]
Customer Care Internship [📍Vienna, Austria], B2B Marketplace, Eversports [Apply]

Customer Success

VP Customer Success (f/m/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Data & AI, Datagon ai [Apply]
Customer Success Manager - Enterprise [📍Milan, Italy], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
VP, Client Success [📍London, United Kingdom], Mental Health Care, Unmind [Apply]
Forward Deployed Engineering Lead [📍Germany], Workflow Automation, n8n [Apply]
Customer Success Public Sector [📍Paris, France], Malt [Apply]
Consultant Customer Success Manager (w/m/d) [📍Vienna, Austria], Foxintelligence [Apply]
Service Account Manager - Warehouse Robotics [📍Bruxelles, Belgium], Industrial Tech, Exotec [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Marketing & Communications Specialist [📍Lisbon, Portugal], Iceye [Apply]
Social Media Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], FinTech, LemFi [Apply]
Events & Community Marketer [📍London, United Kingdom], Lightdash [Apply]
CRM Specialist [📍Prague, Czechia], Grocery Delivery, Rohlik [Apply]
Search Engine Marketing Manager [📍Prague, Czechia], Grocery Delivery, Rohlik [Apply]
Marketing Manager - Brand, Paid Social & Partnerships (m/f/x) in Köln [📍Cologne, Germany], Marketplaces & Consumer, Konfetti [Apply]

Sales

Sales Team Lead (Liberal Segment) [📍Paris, France], HealthTech, Vocca [Apply]
Business Development Manager - Iberia [📍Berlin, Germany], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]
Account Manager - Nordics - Danish Speaking [📍Denmark], Pleo [Apply]
Account Executive - French Speaking - London [📍London, United Kingdom], Hiya Inc. [Apply]
Senior Sales Executive - French Market [📍Barcelona, Spain], Perk [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Senior Commercial Legal Counsel, EMEA [📍Paris, France], AI Infrastructure, Mistral AI [Apply]
Business Developer & Tech Recruiter - Theodo [📍Paris, France], Tech Consulting, Theodo [Apply]
Executive Assistant - Growth [📍Stockholm, Sweden], LegalTech, Legora [Apply]
VP of Finance [📍Berlin, Germany], Babbel [Apply]
Finance Lead (FP&A) [📍Berlin, Germany], Prior Labs [Apply]

Product & Tech

AI Fullstack Engineer, Health Intelligence [📍Helsinki, Finland], Ouraring [Apply]
Senior Product Manager - US B2C Experience (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], E-Commerce / Marketplace, Raisin [Apply]
Graduate Electrical Engineer [📍London, United Kingdom], Fuse [Apply]
Data and Analytics Working Student [📍Berlin, Germany], TOURLANE [Apply]

Stay connected and spread the word! If you found this newsletter insightful, why not share it with your network? Thanks for reading, and we look forward to bringing you even more insights in the next edition!

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Tuesday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

This week the internet quietly crossed a line: for the first time, bots are sending more traffic than humans, with agentic AI traffic up nearly 8,000%. Off-screen, two giants go live too: SpaceX is set to price the biggest IPO in history at a $1.75tn valuation, and the World Cup kicks off on Thursday. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Factorial hits a $2.5bn valuation on a $150m round

Barcelona's Factorial raised a $150m Series D at a $2.5bn valuation. The HR platform is rebranding as an "AI workforce operations" suite spanning HR, finance and IT, now used by 16,000+ businesses in 90+ countries.

Salesforce buys Berlin's Contentful

Salesforce is acquiring Berlin-founded Contentful, the API-first headless CMS used by 4,800+ brands, for an undisclosed sum. Contentful was last valued north of $3bn in 2021. Salesforce wants its composable content layer to feed Agentforce, so AI agents can assemble and personalise content at scale.

France's Quobly lands a €115m Series A for silicon quantum

Quobly raised a €115m Series A to commercialise quantum computing built on standard silicon. First cloud systems are slated for 2026. A rare European deep-tech round at Series A size.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

Great founders work themselves out of a job

Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph shared that his first title at Looker was "ABC", as in Anything But Coding: he was simultaneously the CFO, head of sales, chief counsel and head of marketing, qualified for none of them. One by one he recruited people who did each job far better than he could. By the time Google bought Looker for $2.6bn, his title was simply "Board Member". The job, he argues, is to make yourself unnecessary.

Do you actually know your own productivity curve?

No weekends, just work? More and more startups are embracing this. We appreciated the point of Sara Landfors to reflect on a crucial point the debate on working culture miss: output rises with hours, peaks, and then falls - but that curve sits in a different place for everyone. The real skill is knowing your curve honestly, then learning to optimise it over time.

Treat every VC meeting like a golden bullet?

Investor Pramod Gosavi shared his fundraising advice: Every VC meeting is a bullet you fire once, so don't run the "not raising, but also raising" game. Before you take one, ask who's attending and what the agenda is: casual catch-ups with junior VCs are the dangerous ones, because they're fishing for numbers you may not want to share yet. With senior partners, lead with vision, and walk out with market feedback and intros.

Smart hack

How does the CEO of a frontier AI lab spend his time? Mostly not on AI. Dario Amodei says he now spends 30 to 40% of his time on culture, not the product, after Anthropic scaled past 2,500 people. A few things he does on purpose:

• A bi-weekly all-hands. He speaks for an hour on strategy, geopolitics and where the industry is heading, so the whole company hears it first-hand.

• No corpo speak. He bans defensive, polished communication in favour of plain, candid language.

• Stay reachable. He keeps an active Slack channel open for ongoing back-and-forth across the company.

The bet: hire people you trust, speak plainly, and you stop being the bottleneck on every decision.

One good read

Agents, not apps

Join the entrepreneurial journey

Are you ready to take your first steps into the startup ecosystem or seeking an exciting new opportunity? Below is a curated list of startup job openings across Europe for you to explore.

Internships

Internship Bioengineering / Molecular Biology [📍Lausanne, Switzerland], Healthcare, Adaptyv [Apply]
Operations and Fleet Manager Werkstudent (m/w/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]
Intern – Quantum Applications (f/m/d) [📍Siegen, Germany], eleQtron [Apply]
Marketing Communications Intern [📍London, United Kingdom], Scandit [Apply]

Customer Success

Care Expert - Customer Training (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Healthcare, Voize [Apply]
Key Account Manager - Secteur Industrie - CDI Paris - Theodo [📍Paris, France], Tech Consulting, Theodo [Apply]
Customer Success Manager [📍Paris, France], FinTech, Stripe [Apply]
Customer Success Account Manager, Europe [📍London, United Kingdom], GoCardless [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Junior Creative Marketing Specialist (TikTok) [📍Ukraine], Holywater [Apply]
Community & Social Media Manager (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Healthcare, Voize [Apply]
Senior brand designer [📍Paris, France], Healthcare, Lucis [Apply]
Partner Growth Manager [📍Berlin, Germany], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]
Head of B2C Marketing Italy (x/f/m) [📍Milan, Italy], Digital Health, Doctolib [Apply]
Google Ads Specialist [📍Ghent, Belgium], Aikido Security [Apply]

Sales

Sales Operations Manager [📍Berlin, Germany], Amboss [Apply]
Go to Market Manager [📍France], Pennylane [Apply]
Account Executive (Paris) [📍Paris, France], Hiya Inc. [Apply]
Business Development Representative (m/w/d) Sell My Car [📍Munich, Germany], Carwow [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Head of Information Security [📍London, United Kingdom], Zinc [Apply]
Accountant [📍London, United Kingdom], FinTech, LemFi [Apply]
Lead Talent Partner - Engineering [📍Barcelona, Spain], Consumer, Preply [Apply]
Junior HR Officer [📍Belgium], Foxintelligence [Apply]
Lead Talent Acquisition Partner [📍Munich, Germany], Helsing [Apply]
HR Business Partner Spain [📍Madrid, Spain], Malt [Apply]

Product & Tech

Software Engineer Graduate [📍London, United Kingdom], Fintern [Apply]
Senior AI Engineer - LLMs and Finetuning [📍London, United Kingdom], 9fin [Apply]
Product Manager (Agile Delivery & Roadmap Execution) [📍Romania], Nexus [Apply]
Product Manager (Remote | HealthTech Startup) [📍Poland], Nexus [Apply]
Product Designer (f/m/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Juro [Apply]
Senior Product Manager - Vault Expansion [📍Lisbon, Portugal], Thought Machine [Apply]
Senior Product Engineer - Insights [📍Dublin, Ireland], Nory [Apply]

Stay connected and spread the word! If you found this newsletter insightful, why not share it with your network? Thanks for reading, and we look forward to bringing you even more insights in the next edition!

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Tuesday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Today's episode is with Olivia Elf, VP of Operations at Sana, the Stockholm AI company that Workday acquired in November 2025 in a $1.1 billion deal. Olivia joined as Chief of Staff three months before Sana's Series A in 2021. She held the same seat through five rounds, three offices, and the close. This conversation goes after the operating decisions Sana made when there were 20 people in a room, not the strategy memo the press release wrote afterwards.

🎧 Tune in now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and share your thoughts! In the meantime: Follow the Gradient and stay tuned!

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Why you should listen

You should listen to this if you are running an org that has scaled past 20 people and still looks the way it did at 8. The conversation maps the playbook that took Sana from a vision document to a $1.1bn exit while rebuilding the entire org around the strategy every six months.

As the conversation unfolded, the real tension emerged between keeping a culture intact and demanding that every new hire actively rewrite it.

What we talk about

• 00:00 Introduction

• 01:41 Three Months Before Series A

• 04:29 Vision Before Product Existed

• 07:05 Building the UK From Zero

• 11:16 The 666 Rhythm and DIBS

• 14:11 Strategy First, Org Second

• 15:47 The Hire She Wouldn't Make Again

• 18:02 Generalists Beat Specialists

• 21:41 Deploying AI Inside the Company

• 26:15 When Sana Stopped Being a Startup

• 28:04 Every New Hire Rewrites the Company

• 30:12 Inside the $1.1B Workday Acquisition

• 31:28 Staying Sane While Scaling

Our main take away's

1. Sana rebuilt the entire org around a new strategy every six months for almost five years. Olivia set the rhythm when she joined in 2021. It runs on a 666 cadence: six years to dream, six months to set the strategy, six weeks to execute. "Every six months is almost like a lifetime in itself," she said. "You can think back at that era and you can say, that's when I built the UK with this person." The company that closed the Workday deal in November 2025 went through almost ten of those eras.

2. Strategy shapes the org, not the other way around. "You shouldn't shape your strategy based on your org. You should do it the other way around. You should shape your org based on the strategy. Because otherwise you end up in these local maximums where you say, Christian really wants to do this thing, so then he should do that. But that might not be the most important thing the company should do." This was the bet Sana doubled down on through every funding round.

3. Specialists push you toward a local maximum. Sana's most contrarian hiring decision was to lean on generalists. "Specialists risk pushing you toward a local maximum because they're going to optimize for what they already know and they're going to reframe the problem to fit what they know how to solve." The exception that proves it: when Sana did hire specialists, they were asked to unlearn the playbook. Olivia screens for the willingness in interview.

4. The UK expansion mistake she would not repeat: hiring senior leaders into the new market. "We had never hired leaders in [Stockholm]. We've always hired ICs that grew into leaders. When we came into new markets we told ourselves we should hire leaders into them instead of growing them from within. I wouldn't do that again." Her current playbook: ship a core team of three to five people from a working market and ask them to stay one to two years. Culture does not transfer over a video call.

5. Every new hire is told their job is to change the company, not preserve it. "If you joined the company, I would expect you to change it. That's the expectation." The opposite of the standard onboarding script. Combined with the closing principle of the episode — "defy gravity," the assumption that everything decays into mediocrity unless you fight it daily — it produces a culture where ownership is distributed by default, not opted into.

How to reach out to Olivia

• LinkedIn

• Sana

• Sana leadership principles (authored by Olivia)

Exclusive from Olivia

Coming shortly!

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Thursday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Amazon just killed its internal AI leaderboard after staff started "tokenmaxxing", assigning AI agents pointless tasks to climb the rankings and quietly running up the company's own compute bill. An excerpt from the internal memo: "please don't use AI just for the sake of using AI." Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Berlin's Stark doubles to a €2.5bn valuation in months

Berlin defence startup Stark is raising €300m at a €2.5bn valuation, more than double its mark from earlier this year. Founded in 2024, it builds loitering munitions, the so-called kamikaze drones, and counts Peter Thiel among its backers. Co-founder Florian Seibel also started drone-maker Quantum Systems.

Ex-DeepMind team raises $50m to pick better science questions

London's Inherent came out of stealth with a $50m seed co-led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures, with Nvidia's NVentures joining. Its platform, Faraday, pairs researchers with AI agents that decide which scientific questions are worth asking, not just answer them faster.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

Will the next $1tn company sell work, not software?

A widely-shared post points back to Sequoia's "Services as the New Software" thesis: the next trillion-dollar company won't sell a tool, it will sell the work itself, AI-delivered and packaged like a traditional services firm. A fundamentally different approach to product building.

We dug into service-as-software and the move from selling tools to selling outcomes with Andreas Goeldi (Youtube / Spotify / Apple).

The hardest skill in the job is managing your own head

We talked to VARA founder Jonas Muff (Youtube / Spotify / Apple) about fear versus purpose and the founder's inner game.

Smart hack

From our Partners

Cap table tools founders and finance teams love

As you grow, you need a cap table management platform that you can trust to keep up. 

From issuing grants to 409A valuations or ASC 718 reporting, Pulley gives you the tools to manage equity. Experience a platform built for you: transparent, reliable, and designed to put your company first.

Learn why companies choose Pulley

From us

Your first hires define the company more than any deck. David Politis, who has hired hundreds of people at early-stage companies, says the top 5%, the ones who actually move the needle, all share three traits.

• Work ethic and stamina. They outwork the room and execute without a process to lean on.

• Hunger to learn. They go and research the product, market and customer themselves instead of waiting to be trained.

• Sharp EQ. They genuinely read the person across the table, teammate or customer.

Hire for these before the CV. People with all three are rare, roughly 1 in 20.

One good read

Europe wants startup sovereignty, but 62% of founders rely on US AI infrastructure

Join the entrepreneurial journey

Are you ready to take your first steps into the startup ecosystem or seeking an exciting new opportunity? Below is a curated list of startup job openings across Europe for you to explore.

Internships

AI Product Intern [📍Berlin, Germany], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]
Working Student Back Office Management (m/f/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Hospitality Tech, Limehome [Apply]
Intern Strategic Program Management [📍Madrid, Spain], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]
Compliance Lead [📍London, United Kingdom], Valarian [Apply]
Intern Demo Experience & Applied AI [📍Madrid, Spain], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]
Industry Relations Intern [📍Lisbon, Portugal], Feedzai [Apply]

Customer Success

Senior Customer Success Manager, Influencer Marketing (SaaS) [📍United Kingdom], Gaming & Media, Kyra [Apply]
Senior Customer Success Manager - FR/ENG [📍Paris, France], Brevo [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Marketing Designer - Performance Marketing (12-month fixed-term contract) [📍Berlin, Germany], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]
CRM Marketing Manager - US Physicians [📍Berlin, Germany], Amboss [Apply]
Senior Influence Marketing Manager [📍Ukraine], Holywater [Apply]
Senior EMEA Partner Marketing Manager (15 month FTC) [📍London, United Kingdom], Quantexa [Apply]
Head of Communications [📍London, United Kingdom], Lawhive [Apply]
Content Editor - Spain & Italy - CDD (m/f/d) [📍France], E-Commerce & Marketplace, Splendia [Apply]

Sales

Sales Development Representative [📍Dublin, Ireland], FinTech, Payrails [Apply]
Account Development Representative (Swedish Speaking) [📍United Kingdom], API Infrastructure, Kong [Apply]
Senior GTM Systems Engineer [📍London, United Kingdom], Fonoa [Apply]
Account Executive, Enterprise (Card-Linked, intermediate level) [📍Paris, France], Joko [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

General Counsel [📍Berlin, Germany], Amboss [Apply]
Chief of Staff to CTO [📍London, United Kingdom], Fintern [Apply]
Associate Finance Manager [📍Zagreb, Croatia], Fonoa [Apply]
Revenue Operations Manager [📍Paris, France], Joko [Apply]
Talent Operations Internship [📍Zurich, Switzerland], Tangible, ANYbotics [Apply]
Team Lead AML Operations [📍Bulgaria], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]

Product & Tech

Senior Platform Engineer, AI Enablement (f/m/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Retail, Zenjob [Apply]
Product Monetisation & Pricing Lead [📍Paris, France], AI Infrastructure, Mistral AI [Apply]
Lead Product Manager, eCommerce (all genders) [📍Berlin, Germany], Distribusion [Apply]
Product Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Funding Circle [Apply]
Applied AI/ML Engineer (Agents/RL) [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], AI & Machine Learning, CuspAI [Apply]
Application Security Engineer [📍Lisbon, Portugal], Thought Machine [Apply]

Stay connected and spread the word! If you found this newsletter insightful, why not share it with your network? Thanks for reading, and we look forward to bringing you even more insights in the next edition!

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Tuesday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Today's guest is Jan Goetz, co-founder and CEO of IQM Quantum Computers, the first European quantum company on its way to a public listing. Jan spun IQM out of Aalto University and VTT in 2018 with three scientific co-founders, closed Finland's largest seed round, and has since raised over €600m across Seed, Series A, Series B and a pre-IPO add-on. In February 2026 IQM announced a SPAC merger at a $1.8bn pre-money valuation, heading to a dual NYSE and Nasdaq Helsinki listing.

🎧 Tune in now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and share your thoughts! In the meantime: Follow the Gradient and stay tuned!

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Why you should listen

You should listen to this if you are building a deep-tech or capital-intensive company in Europe and need a real account of the leadership, fundraising, and structural decisions that don't survive press releases.

As the conversation unfolded, the real tension emerged between building a company to last and building one to be acquired, and how every leadership, capital, and architecture decision quietly picks one or the other.

What we talk about

• Co-CEO Reversal: Why IQM Went Back to One

• Co-CEO Playbook: When Bandwidth Beats Ego

• Founder Role: Transform Yourself or Change It

• Deep Tech Fundraising: From Science to Product

• European Cap Table: Pension Funds and Lidl

• Full-Stack Quantum: Building Our Chip Factory

• Dual Listing: NYSE and Helsinki Together

• Selling Deep Tech: Why It Isn't SaaS

• Founder Discipline: Marathon and Calendar

Our main take away’s

1. Co-CEO is a bandwidth fix, not an ego fix. IQM didn't add a second CEO because Jan ran out of ambition. He was on the road fundraising full-time while commercial traction needed an owner. The setup only made sense because there was a real, structural gap — and once the gap closed, the setup stopped making sense.

2. A written org chart is the floor, not the ceiling. Roles were extremely clear and documented from day one: fundraising, PR and tech to Jan; operations, finance and commercial to Mikko. The system still broke at the edges, because people will route to whoever they think will give them the answer they want — no matter what the chart says.

3. "Either transform yourself alongside the company, or change your role. Don't try to do neither." Jan's framework for every scaling crisis. The painful path is changing yourself as the company grows. The clarifying path is accepting a specialised role. The path that destroys companies is pretending the choice doesn't exist.

4. Deep tech requires building the full stack on purpose. IQM built its own chip factory, assembly line, and data centre in Europe — and explicitly rejected the cleaner alternative of optimising for a US-hyperscaler acquisition. That choice compounds across the cap table, the hiring plan, the customer base, and the eventual listing structure.

5. A European cap table doesn't survive a US-only listing. Pension funds, governmental investors, and European family offices need a European venue to continue supporting the company. Listing on Nasdaq Helsinki alongside NYSE wasn't a vanity move — it was the only structure that protects both US capital access and the institutional support that got IQM here.

How to reach out to Jan

• LinkedIn

• IQM Quantum Computers

Exclusive from Jan

We are working on this…

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Thursday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

The Pope's first encyclical drops by the end of the month, and it's about AI. Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas, signed May 15, frames the challenge as "not technological, but anthropological." Meanwhile, a California jury took less than two hours to toss Elon Musk's case against Sam Altman on a statute of limitations. A OpenAI IPO may follow lifting its valuation to heaven. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Italy's Lexroom closes a €42.9m Series B eight months after Series A

Milan-based Lexroom raised a €42.9m Series B led by Left Lane Capital, only eight months after its €16.2m Series A and bringing total funding to €62.7m. The legaltech is making a contrarian bet: build civil-law AI from a data layer of six million verified legal sources, instead of fine-tuning a generalist LLM. 8,000 law firms already use it daily.

Berlin's Peec AI doubles ARR to $10m in months

Berlin's Peec AI has more than doubled annualised revenue to $10m in six months, TechCrunch reports, six months after a $21m Series A at a $100m valuation. The 16-month-old startup builds the GEO version of SEO: tracking and improving brand visibility inside ChatGPT and other AI answer engines.

Viktor pulls $75m and $15m ARR out of ten weeks

Warsaw and Munich's Viktor raised a $75m Series A from Accel and reached $15m ARR within ten weeks of launch. Built by ex-Meta engineers Peter Albert and Fryderyk Wiatrowski, it drops an AI coworker into Slack and Microsoft Teams to handle reports, drafting and data entry. 12,000 teams installed.

What do you meme?

In support of our One Good Read today

Food for thought

€800k vested. €0 accessed.

François Veronat puts a number on a problem nobody is fixing: an employee vested €800k in options at a European scale-up between 2016 and 2020. The company is now worth €1.2bn. In 2026, she has accessed exactly €0. The US has Forge, EquityZen and Carta for pre-IPO liquidity. Europe's institutional brokers want €20m minimum tickets and nothing below them. What is you option book worth if you can’t sell it?

Could Europe's red tape finally be a moat?

An EU-Startups essay flips the standard narrative: Europe's most regulated industries (healthcare, financial services, insurance, legal, energy) hold trillions in enterprise value and are almost entirely untouched by software. AI is the first technology that can absorb that complexity at speed. A European founder who builds compliance, data residency and procurement readiness into the architecture from day one sits in a position non-European AI companies cannot reach. The red tape that hurt the last generation might be the moat the next one is built on.

Smart hack

From our Partners

Attio - the AI CRM for modern businesses.

Attio is the AI CRM that keeps you ten steps ahead.

Ask Attio anything. Where should I focus? What deals are at risk? Search, update, and create across your customer data.

Ask more from CRM. Ask Attio.

Try Attio for free

From us

Most founders sign their first term sheet without knowing what half the words mean. a16z just published a clean 8-term cheat sheet:

• Equity and dilution. Equity is ownership as a percentage. Every new round shrinks every existing slice.

• Pre-money vs post-money. Pre-money is the agreed value before cash arrives. Post-money is pre-money plus the cash (€9m + €3m = €12m).

• Angel vs lead investor. Angels write personal cheques. The lead writes the biggest one, sets the terms and runs due diligence.

• Board seat and pro-rata. Leads typically get a board vote on hires, raises and exits, plus the right to maintain their stake in future rounds.

Save it for the next term sheet that lands in your inbox.

One good read

Your job is changing faster than you think

Join the entrepreneurial journey

Are you ready to take your first steps into the startup ecosystem or seeking an exciting new opportunity? Below is a curated list of startup job openings across Europe for you to explore.

Internships

Digital Marketing Graduate Internship (12 months) [📍Madrid, Spain], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]
Working Student Applied AI Solution Consulting (Nordics) [📍Copenhagen, Denmark], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]
Workplace Experience - Working Student [📍Warsaw, Poland], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]
Mandatory Internship Business Process Digitalization - Central Controlling in the Area of Mobility Electronics [📍Reutlingen, Germany], Automation; Robotics, Bosch Rexroth [Apply]
Data Analyst Intern [📍Paris, France], Marketing & Advertising, adikteev loho [Apply]
Intern - Product Management (x/f/m) [📍Milan, Italy], Digital Health, Doctolib [Apply]
People Transformation & Enablement Intern [📍Madrid, Spain], Planetly [Apply]

Customer Success

Strategic Programme Manager - Customer Experience [📍Lisbon, Portugal], Pleo [Apply]
Grocery Account Manager Apprenticeship [📍Paris, France], Food Delivery, Deliveroo [Apply]
Enterprise Customer Success - Team Lead (m/f/d) [📍Berlin, Germany], Healthcare, Voize [Apply]
Team Lead Customer Success - French speaking [📍Paris, France], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
(Senior) Customer Success Manager Spain [📍Madrid, Spain], Fintech/Payments, bezahl.de [Apply]
Shift Supervisor [📍Brussels, Belgium], Automation; Robotics, BEUMER Group A/S [Apply]
Key Account Manager Soluzioni Acqua Domestica [📍Cagliari, Italy], Rhino [Apply]
Junior Customer Service [📍Giugliano in Campania, Italy], Rhino [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Junior Marketing Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], HealthTech, Happl [Apply]
Lead, Communications Sweden [📍Stockholm, Sweden], Neko Health [Apply]
Events & Regional Marketing Specialist [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], Machinery, Hubs [Apply]
Senior Growth Marketing Manager (m/f/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Hospitality Tech, Limehome [Apply]
Junior Marketing Manager / Projektmanager (m/w/d) – Brand Marketing [📍Munich, Germany], Check24 [Apply]

Sales

Head of Sales - Germany [📍Munich, Germany], Tandem Health [Apply]
Senior Engineer (Salesforce) [📍London, United Kingdom], Funding Circle [Apply]
Enterprise Account Executive, Switzerland [📍Switzerland], API Infrastructure, Kong [Apply]
(Senior) Account Executive | VC | UK [📍London, United Kingdom], Juro [Apply]
Account Manager - Bouches-du-Rhône (Marseille) - CDI [📍Marseille, France], Food Delivery, Deliveroo [Apply]
Account Management - Long Tail - Spain [📍Barcelona, Spain], Perk [Apply]
Business Development Representative - English Speaking [📍Paris, France], Prelude [Apply]
Director of Field Sales, Central Region [📍Napoli, Italy], Block [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Finance Director, HelloFresh Holding (all genders) [📍Berlin, Germany], HELLOFRESH [Apply]
Head of Legal [📍London, United Kingdom], Causaly [Apply]
Lead, FP&A and Controlling [📍Berlin, Germany], TOURLANE [Apply]
Legal Counsel [📍London, United Kingdom], 9fin [Apply]
Security Compliance Officer [📍Copenhagen, Denmark], Healthcare AI, Corti [Apply]
Operations Lead - Supply & Onboarding [📍Milan, Italy], Unobravo [Apply]

Product & Tech

Senior ML Engineer - Kimchi (LLM Inference Optimization) UK [📍United Kingdom], Cast AI [Apply]
Senior IoT Engineer [📍London, United Kingdom], Fuse [Apply]
Senior Backend Engineer [📍Berlin, Germany], FinTech, Payrails [Apply]
Senior Front End Engineer [📍Barcelona, Spain], Financial Planning, Abacum [Apply]
Senior Software Engineer (GoLang / PHP) [📍Berlin, Germany], Gelato [Apply]
Android Engineer | Mid-Senior [📍Poland], nexos.ai [Apply]
Product Domain Specialist DAF/PME [📍France], Pennylane [Apply]
Software Engineer [📍Stockholm, Sweden], LegalTech, Legora [Apply]

Final words — take what you need

Stay connected and spread the word! If you found this newsletter insightful, why not share it with your network? Thanks for reading, and we look forward to bringing you even more insights in the next edition!

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Tuesday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

H Company's last operational cofounder stepped down as CTO this week, two years after the €220m seed that was supposed to make Paris a frontier AI capital. At the same time, DeepMind spinout Isomorphic Labs raised $2.1bn to keep cracking drug discovery. One way or the other, Europe’s AI map is cooking. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Fractile lands $220m to take on Nvidia, from London

UK chip startup Fractile raised $220m, with Accel and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund leading. The company is building inference silicon optimised to run large models locally, ~100x cheaper.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

Is internal marketing the real GTM moat?

Davide Grieco, Head of Growth at Clay, argues that GTM teams obsess over tools and AI when they should obsess over customer experience first. His sharper claim: internal marketing, the work of aligning your own sales team around the story, drives more than 50% of the success of a sales-led growth campaign. Clay's own "How Clay Uses Clay" series works because it talks about outcomes, not features.

Is the "AI honeymoon" already over?

Linear CEO Karri Saarinen offers a six-month reality check: the binary hype-vs-doom framing is over, and what's left is the unglamorous middle. Teams are not 10x faster, they are differently constrained. The bottleneck moved from typing to thinking, and most orgs haven't redesigned around that yet.

YC’s wishlist for the next decade

Y Combinator's Summer 2026 Requests for Startups opens with a single line: "AI has stopped being a feature and started being the foundation." The 16 categories that follow are not subtle. AI-native service companies replacing accounting and insurance. Counter-swarm drone defence. Inference chips for agent workflows. Industrial capabilities in space. What are you building?

Smart hack

From our Partners

Turn Google Ads into predictable customer acquisition

Echelonn manages over $15M/mo in Google and YouTube Ads for 300+ ecommerce brands. One vertical. One channel. Total focus. If you're not confident your account is performing the way it should, book a free audit.

Get your free audit

From us

Everyone is selling you a hack for ranking in AI answers. Google just quietly published their first official AI optimization guide, its key points:

• SEO is still the foundation. AI Overviews and Gemini retrieve from the same index as classic search. No separate AI ranking system.

• Skip the LLM hacks. Don't write llms.txt, don't chunk content for bots, don't rewrite for crawlers. Google's words: people-first content.

• Commodity content is dead. Generic "7 Tips for X" pages are precisely what AI replaces in the answer. Replace them with first-hand expertise, case studies, unique viewpoints.

• "Inauthentic mentions" are the new link scheme. Paid reciprocal brand mentions now fall under Google's spam policy for AI features.

Stop optimising for the bot. Start being the thing it has to cite.

One good read

Presentations: AI eats the world (May 2026)

Join the entrepreneurial journey

Are you ready to take your first steps into the startup ecosystem or seeking an exciting new opportunity? Below is a curated list of startup job openings across Europe for you to explore.

Internships

Fintech Sales Internship [📍Madrid, Spain], Financial Services, Dojo [Apply]
Strategic Project Intern (Sales Training, Retail Excellence) [📍Paris, France], Apparel & Fashion, ANINE BING [Apply]
Working Student Logistics Planning [📍Romania], Automation; Robotics, Bosch Rexroth [Apply]
Science Team Internship [📍London, United Kingdom], Climate X [Apply]
Operations Intern – Offline Business Development [📍Milan, Italy], Marketplaces & Consumer, GoStudent [Apply]
Data Research Intern [📍London, United Kingdom], Climate X [Apply]
Influencer Marketing Stage [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], Consumer, Butternut Box [Apply]
Working Student Applied AI Brand Solutions [📍Munich, Germany], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]

Customer Success

Account Manager [📍Dublin, Ireland], Kota [Apply]
Customer Success Manager - German Speaking (EMEA) [📍Berlin, Germany], Workflow Automation, n8n [Apply]
Customer Success Specialist [📍London, United Kingdom], Mast [Apply]
Customer Growth Specialist - Pflegewegweiser Onlineshop [📍Zurich, Switzerland], Healthcare, Entyre [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Senior Performance Marketing Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Digital Banking, Zopa Bank [Apply]
Marketing operativo Tecnologie Comfort Quotidiano [📍Rimini, Italy], Rhino [Apply]
B2B Organic Growth Marketing Manager [📍Barcelona, Spain], BEST TABLES [Apply]

Sales

Founding (Senior) Account Executive [📍Berlin, Germany], AI Phone System, telli [Apply]
Sales Development Representative (SDR) [📍London, United Kingdom], Carwow [Apply]
Account Executive - Mid Market, Barcelona Sales Hub [📍Barcelona, Spain], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
Field Account Executive - Campania [📍Italy], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
Head of Sales - France [📍Paris, France], Tandem Health [Apply]
Sales Team Leader [📍Dublin, Ireland], Consumer, Butternut Box [Apply]
B2B Sales Manager - Corporate Events (m/f/x) in Köln [📍Cologne, Germany], Marketplaces & Consumer, Konfetti [Apply]
Head of Growth/GTM Engineer [📍Paris, France], Payflows [Apply]
Senior Sales Executive [📍Madrid, Spain], FinTech, Ebury [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Head of FP&A [📍London, United Kingdom], XYZ Reality [Apply]
People Operations Coordinator [📍Berlin, Germany], FATMAP [Apply]
Legal Counsel - IP [📍Stockholm, Sweden], LegalTech, Legora [Apply]
Chief of Staff [📍Paris, France], Joko [Apply]
Talent Acquisition Specialist - Spanish Speaker [📍Madrid, Spain], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]
Senior Accountant [📍Stockholm, Sweden], Tandem Health [Apply]

Product & Tech

Staff Brand Designer [📍London, United Kingdom], Fonoa [Apply]
AI Engineer - London [📍London, United Kingdom], FinTech, Sequence [Apply]
Group Product Manager - Finance Automation [📍Barcelona, Spain], Perk [Apply]
Data Analyst [📍Paris, France], Joko [Apply]
Product Manager [📍Porto, Portugal], Luxury Goods & Jewelry, FARFETCH [Apply]

Final words — take what you need

Stay connected and spread the word! If you found this newsletter insightful, why not share it with your network? Thanks for reading, and we look forward to bringing you even more insights in the next edition!

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Tuesday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Anthropic is reportedly weighing a deal that would value it at close to $1tn as revenue accelerates, a number that used to belong to public-company stalwarts and oil majors. Meanwhile, a robot has been welcomed into a Buddhist sect in Japan. Things are getting weird. Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

DeepL cuts 250 jobs and writes the new AI-layoff playbook

DeepL is letting 21% of its workforce go and reshaping the company around AI from the inside out. Founder Jarek Kutylowski framed the cuts as "completely reshaping how we operate, with AI at the centre", a memo Business Insider is already calling the template for AI-era layoff announcements. Cologne HQ takes the brunt.

We made this list on current job openings in the Greater Cologne area.

QuantWare lands €152m to build the world's largest quantum fab

Dutch quantum startup QuantWare raised €152m to build KiloFab in Delf, the largest deeptech round ever closed by a Dutch company, and the largest private round any dedicated quantum-processor company has done globally. Intel Capital and In-Q-Tel joined the syndicate. Europe's deeptech bench keeps quietly getting deeper.

Brussels rolls back the toughest parts of the AI Act

EU legislators agreed to delay the toughest AI Act deadlines by more than a year, pushing high-risk AI compliance to 2027 and largely exempting industrial AI applications. A major win for Germany and Europe's manufacturing base.

What do you meme?

From the community

Theresa is looking for a Technical Co-Founder to grow her venture in AI Real Estate SaaS: PropStage.ai. Let us know if you want an Intro.

Food for thought

Should you track talent like a VC tracks founders?

Finding top talent is hard. Reality is: when you open a role, it’s already too late. The best operators don't wait for that. They run Brian Chesky's playbook: work backwards from work you admire to find the actual creator behind it, and maintain an ongoing list of your top two or three candidates from talent clusters like the OpenAI and Anthropic alumni mafias. Track your talent as if you were a soccer scout!

What does a €200m exit actually pay the founders?

The math from this breakdown: €100m invested at a 1.5x liquidation preference means investors take €150m off the top. €50m left for three founders, structured as €5m cash at close each and €35m in 4-year earnouts tied to the ambitious post-close targets they pitched. So: most earnouts never land. Is it better to bootstrap in quiet than to raise with a bang?

How long to PMF?

Is the shape of your company the new moat?

In an AI era where products, categories, and even pitch language collapse into commodity within months, the only thing that compounds is the institution underneath. The shape of the company is decisive: how it attracts, organises and concentrates exceptional people around a kind of work no other company has structured before.

Smart hack

From our Partners

Most AI agents demo well. Few ship real work.

Most AI agents can run a task. The problem is everything around it: setup, memory, context, cost, and figuring out what actually happened.

SureThing turns useful AI skills into autonomous agents with business context, persistent memory, cost-aware model selection, and a live dashboard. Paste a link, assign the work, and your agent reports back like a human teammate: what it did, what it cost, what needs your decision, and what happens next.

Built for founders, operators, and marketers who want AI to ship work, not become another tool to babysit.

Create Your Agent

From us

"I'm not a developer. And yet now I have more than 10,000 lines of committed code on GitHub." Christian broke down the essentials for non-technical operators who keep seeing AI demos on LinkedIn and don't know where to actually start.

What you will get:

• The mental model. The three places AI actually pays off in any customer-facing team.

• A live lead-scoring demo. From a cold account list to ICP scores, deep-dive briefs and outbound hooks, end to end.

• Files beat prompts. The folder architecture (AGENT.md, CLAUDE.md, skills) that does the real work before you write a single prompt.

• Optimize for the LLM, not the human. Why your SharePoint is the bottleneck, and how to fix it this week.

One good read

The "AI Job Apocalypse" Is a Complete Fantasy

Join the entrepreneurial journey

Are you ready to take your first steps into the startup ecosystem or seeking an exciting new opportunity? Below is a curated list of startup job openings across Europe for you to explore.

Internships

Founders Associate (Intern) [📍Berlin, Germany], Context layer for AI, Qontext [Apply]
Farmer Sales Working Student (all genders) [📍Berlin, Germany], Data & AI, Klim [Apply]
Working Student – IT Systems Administrator (d/f/m) [📍Munich, Germany], Arculus [Apply]
Retail Customer Success Intern [📍Milan, Italy], Foxintelligence [Apply]
Finance & Accounting Intern [📍Barcelona, Spain], Vertical Software, Amenitiz [Apply]
Commercial Intern [📍London, United Kingdom], Citymapper [Apply]
Working Student (20-40%) – Autonomy Kits Configuration [📍Zurich, Switzerland], Robotics, Gravis Robotics [Apply]
Intern Sales Development Program (French-Speaking) [📍Madrid, Spain], Process Mining, Celonis [Apply]

Customer Success

Security Awareness Consultant (Spain) [📍Madrid, Spain], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
Customer Success Manager SMB (German speaking) [📍Lisbon, Portugal], Pleo [Apply]
Technical Account Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], HealthTech, Happl [Apply]
Federal Account Manager - Public Sector [📍Vienna, Austria], Technology & Software, Esri R&D Center Zurich AG [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Senior Product Marketing Manager (m/f/d) [📍Cologne, Germany], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
Senior Manager, Policy & Corporate Communications [📍London, United Kingdom], Funding Circle [Apply]
Senior 3D Marketing Artist [📍Paris, France], Consumer, Madbox [Apply]
Communications Specialist [📍Vienna, Austria], Fintech & DeFi, Bitpanda [Apply]

Sales

Team Lead Account Executives DACH (m/w/d) - Public Sector [📍Cologne, Germany], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
Sales Development Representative France [📍Paris, France], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
(Senior) European Partnership Manager (m/f/d) [📍Rome, Italy], Fintech/Payments, bezahl.de [Apply]
Business Development Representative [📍London, United Kingdom], Funding Circle [Apply]
Senior Account Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Tillo [Apply]
Sales Director Europe [📍Prague, Czechia], Grocery Delivery, Rohlik [Apply]
Sales Manager | Madrid Sales Hub [📍Madrid, Spain], Digital, Lexroom AI [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

(Staff) Product Operations Manager [📍United Kingdom], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
Finance Operations & Governance Manager (w/m/d) [📍Aachen, Germany], Semiconductor/Graphene, Black Semiconductor [Apply]
Technical Support Senior Associate [📍Lisbon, Portugal], Pleo [Apply]
Site Manager, Expanded Access Programs [📍Amsterdam, Netherlands], HealthTech, myTomorrows [Apply]
Operations Associate [📍Prague, Czechia], Grocery Delivery, Rohlik [Apply]
Accounting Assistant [📍Malmö, Sweden], BHG [Apply]
People Operations Specialist [📍Lisbon, Portugal], ComplyAdvantage [Apply]

Product & Tech

Product Engineer [📍Berlin, Germany], Context layer for AI, Qontext [Apply]
Backend Engineer – AI/ML [📍Berlin, Germany], Context layer for AI, Qontext [Apply]
Team Lead Engineering - Messaging Platform [📍United Kingdom], Cyber Awareness Training, SoSafe [Apply]
Robotics Field Operations Specialist (Netherlands) [📍Netherlands], AI Robotics/Greenhouse, Eternal [Apply]
Solution Architect [📍Zurich, Switzerland], DeepJudge [Apply]
Solutions Engineer - Spanish Speaking [📍Madrid, Spain], Pleo [Apply]

Final words — take what you need

Stay connected and spread the word! If you found this newsletter insightful, why not share it with your network? Thanks for reading, and we look forward to bringing you even more insights in the next edition!

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Tuesday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Today’s guest is Andreas Schwarzenbrunner, Partner at Speedinvest, who has spent over a decade investing in early-stage European startups and scaling the firm across Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris, and Munich. He focuses on leading early rounds and supporting founders through the first 3–5 years of company building.

🎧 Tune in now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and share your thoughts! In the meantime: Follow the Gradient and stay tuned!

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Why you should listen

You should listen to this if you want to understand why Europe consistently produces top-tier technical talent but fails to retain and scale its biggest AI opportunities.

As the conversation unfolded, the tension between capital availability and regulatory fragmentation became clear as the core constraint holding back European tech.

What we talk about

• 00:00 - Introduction

• 01:32 - The Peter Steinberger moment and what Europe missed

• 06:20 - The 0.1 percent vs 3 percent pension fund gap, explained

• 10:51 - How European money flows to Sandhill Road and back at a markup

• 16:48 - EU Inc, public procurement, and the 28th regime

• 26:18 - What European founders do differently

Our main take away’s

1. Capital is the single bottleneck that explains most of Europe’s startup gap. European pension funds allocate around 0.1% to venture compared to roughly 3% in the US, creating a 25x gap that directly limits late-stage funding and forces founders to look abroad.

2. Europe is indirectly financing its own competitive disadvantage. Large parts of European institutional capital flow into US venture funds, which then reinvest into European companies at later stages, capturing upside that could have stayed local.

3. Regulatory fragmentation, not regulation itself, is the real growth killer. Founders face 27 different national systems, making expansion in Europe as complex as entering the US, which slows scaling and discourages early ambition.

4. Europe’s talent gap is not about engineers but about scaling experience. The region produces strong technical and research talent, but lacks operators who have taken companies to billion dollar scale, forcing startups to import leadership from US tech ecosystems.

5. Constraints in Europe create disciplined companies but delay outcomes. Founders learn to operate with less capital and think internationally from day one, but this comes at the cost of slower scaling and reduced room to compete when massive funding rounds define the market.

How to reach out to Andreas

• LinkedIn

• X

Exclusive from Andreas

What is one signal in the first meeting that makes you lean in on a founder?

Visible energy and excitement for what they are trying to build.

What is a “false positive” you’ve learned to ignore when evaluating startups?

Shiny decks and CVs are good to raise a round in the beginning, but building a successful company long term needs very specific personality traits and skills.

Where do you see founders consistently wasting time or money in the first 12–18 months?

Time definitely on self promotion as by now many founders think they at the same time need to be an influencer. As long as it does not pay into either hiring the best people or attracting customers it is a waste of time in my view. Money on fancy offices and cool merch. That is still something that I often do not fully understand for early stage companies in the first 1-2 years.

What books, podcasts, articles inspired you?

That is a tricky one and inspired is a high bar. I love to read so many books. What inspires me are often biographies about interesting people that drive humanity forward. Recently the one by Sebastian Mallaby on Demis Hassabis and DeepMind. Or the Autobiography by Jens Stoltenberg, former Secretary General of NATO. A lot of interesting background stories. I always realize that although we sometimes do not believe it, individuals can change the world.
On podcasts I love Interview formats in general. Shows I like are Intelligence Squared, In Good Company, Invest like the Best, Everything from the Economist and FT, Odd Lots, The Rest is Politics and Alles Gesagt by Die Zeit.

What’s one advice, founders should actually ignore?

That constantly raising more money and going from round to round is the best way to do it. In many cases this is not true and rather kills the business. Only in rare cases this is a successful strategy.

What are habits, activities or rituals that keep you sane (while scaling your business)

For me it is rather the obvious things than something special. Cycling, and Sport in general, reading, strawling through my neighbourhood in Paris and trying great food. Sit in the sun and have a great time with friends. Get enough sleep and eat well even in stressful times with lots of travels. And mentally see things in perspective and always remind yourself about the great things you experienced or achieved.

What is one “growth hack” (be it business, health or personal-wise) that has a positive impact on you or the company?

Finding your circle of competence where you are really good at and scale that.

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Thursday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Today’s guest is Tony Beltramelli, Head of AI Strategy and Product at Miro, who built Uizard from a viral ML research project into a product with over 3 million users before its acquisition by Miro. He spent seven years scaling the company from pre-product R&D to acquisition while operating a distributed team across Europe.

🎧 Tune in now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and share your thoughts! In the meantime: Follow the Gradient and stay tuned!

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Why you should listen

You should listen to this if you are building deep tech without clear product-market fit and need to decide between prolonged R&D versus early customer feedback.

As the conversation unfolded, the tension between founder intuition and customer reality became clear, especially in how overbuilding delayed learning.

What we talk about

• 00:00 - Introduction

• 01:31 - The White Paper That Became A Startup

• 06:25 - Avoiding The Henry Ford Customer Trap

• 09:07 - Hiring Only When Growth Starts To Hurt

• 11:34 - Building Remote First Across Four Countries

• 16:50 - Growing To Three Million Users Without Marketing

• 19:27 - Turning Miro Interest Into A Structured Sale

• 26:46 - Why Teams Hear About Acquisitions Last

• 32:47 - Making A Legacy Company AI First

• 37:43 - Why AI Agents Break User Metrics

Our main take away’s

1. Customer validation matters more than technical conviction. The company only became real after inbound demand from GitHub and the white paper proved companies wanted to use the technology, despite years of prior solo R&D without product or revenue.

2. Long R&D cycles require irrational persistence but come with real survival risk. The team spent three and a half years building before having a usable product, surviving multiple near-death moments including closing their first round in the final month of personal runway.

3. Founders systematically overestimate their understanding of the customer. Building from personal pain led to over-engineering and delayed feedback loops, forcing a late correction toward customer conversations, retention metrics, and real usage data.

4. Hiring should lag pain, not precede it. The team only added roles when tasks stopped scaling, which reduced mis-hires and clarified job scopes, especially critical when capital is limited and execution mistakes are expensive.

5. AI shifts product organizations toward builders over roles. As execution cost approaches zero with agents, the constraint moves to idea generation and problem framing, making curiosity and the ability to build end-to-end more valuable than traditional specialization.

How to reach out to Tony

• LinkedIn

• Website

Exclusive from Tony

You spent 3.5 years doing R&D before Uizard had a real product. How do you know whether you are early and should keep going, or whether you are just building something nobody wants?

This is one of the hardest questions in entrepreneurship, and honestly, we asked ourselves this constantly. Here's how I think about it.

First, there's a difference between "nobody wants this" and "nobody understands this yet." When we started in 2018, there was no general understanding of what AI could do for design. We had the Henry Ford problem — if we'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said "faster horses." So we couldn't purely rely on customer interviews to validate the idea early on. We had to build based on our vision first.
But that doesn't mean you fly blind. The signal that kept us going was pull. When I open-sourced pix2code in 2017, it went viral. People were reaching out asking if they could use it for work. That's not a product, but it's a signal that the problem resonates. Later, when we put out demo videos of early prototypes, people would sign up in droves to get access. That's demand, even if the product isn't ready yet.
The trap is when you confuse "people think this is cool" with "people will pay for this." We made that mistake — we waited way too long to introduce pricing. Paying users give you a completely different quality of signal. Someone willing to put dollars on the table validates your product in a way that 100,000 free signups never will. If I had to do it again, I'd introduce pricing from day one.
So my framework is: look for pull signals (organic interest, waitlist growth, people asking to use it), but validate with money as early as possible. If you have pull but no one will pay, you might have entertainment, not a business. If you have neither, you should probably iterate on your core idea.
And one more thing: things always take way longer than you think. It took Figma four years from inception to launch. It took us three and a half. That's roughly the same timeline, and Figma is now one of the most important software companies in the world. Patience matters — but patient conviction, not blind faith.

You grew Uizard to millions of users with almost no marketing budget. If you started a new product today, what would be your first three growth channels or experiments?

95% of our growth was organic, here’s is what actually worked:

First, I'd make the product inherently shareable. The visual “wow effect” was a key element that made Uizard marketing-ready. Because Uizard was a product generating visual outputs — app designs, wireframes, prototypes — users would naturally record videos of the AI in action and share them on social media because they were genuinely amazed. We didn't ask them to. They did it because the output was visual and surprising. If you're building something today, ask yourself: does my product produce an artifact that people will want to show others? If yes, make that sharing path as frictionless as possible.

Second, I'd build viral mechanics directly into the product and the pre-launch experience. We did this multiple times with gamified waitlists — when people signed up, they'd see their position in the queue and could move up by inviting friends or colleagues. This simple trick grew our pre-launch list to 100K users. It's a simple mechanic but it works incredibly well for products with visual, shareable outputs.

Third, don’t hesitate to invest in content from day one — but not generic blog posts. When we started in 2018, we wrote a ton of content specifically about AI for design to educate the market about what AI could do in the context of product design and software development. Nobody was searching for this stuff yet. But when ChatGPT launched and suddenly everyone wanted AI solutions, we already had our entire content funnel ranking on Google. We captured demand we had been seeding for years. The lesson is: create content around the future your product is building toward, not just around today's search volume. When the wave comes, you're already there.
Last but not least, distribution should not be an afterthought. As a first-time founder with an engineering background, we made the classic mistake of focusing on product before distribution. Successful SaaS startups have distribution inherently built into their products from day one.

You were raising a Series B when Miro approached to acquire Uizard. Looking back, how should founders think about the decision between raising another round and selling the company? What are the questions they should ask themselves?

I think the honest answer is that this is one of the most personal decisions a founder will ever make, and there's no universal right answer.
What I can share is the framework I'd encourage founders to think through. First, ask yourself: what do I want the next five years of my life to look like? Starting a company is an emotional rollercoaster that most people don't fully appreciate until they're in it. There's a great interview where Jensen Huang is asked if he would start NVIDIA again knowing everything he knows today, and he says no — the hardship, the vulnerability, the emotional toll is not something anyone in their right mind would sign up for. I completely agree with that sentiment. So when an acquisition offer comes, you have to be honest with yourself about whether you have the fire and the energy for another multi-year chapter of independent growth.
Second, think about what the acquisition unlocks that you couldn't do alone. For us, Miro serves over 100 million users. The AI technology we built at Uizard could suddenly reach a completely different scale inside Miro's platform. Sometimes the best way to maximize the impact of what you've built is to combine it with someone else's distribution and resources.
Third, consider the team. Your co-founders and employees took a bet on you. What outcome serves them well? What gives them the best opportunity going forward?
And finally — and this might be the most practical point — look at the fundraising environment honestly. Raising a Series B is hard even in good times. If you have a strong acquisition offer on the table, you need to weigh the certainty of that outcome against the probability-weighted outcome of raising more capital and continuing independently.
There's no formula here. But I'd say: be honest with yourself, be honest with your investors, about what you actually want, not what you think you're supposed to want.

You recently wrote that “your users aren’t human anymore.” If a founder is starting a SaaS company today, how should they build their product differently from someone starting a SaaS company five years ago?

The fundamental shift is this: we're moving from a world where humans are the central router of information — manually context-switching between a dozen SaaS tools — to one where humans delegate to AI agents, and those agents interact with your software on their behalf. The human provides the high-level goal. The agent becomes the primary consumer of your product's interface.
So what does this mean practically for founders?
Your API is your new UI. As Karpathy recently warned, products built on opaque formats with no scripting support won't survive the era of human-AI collaboration. If an LLM can't read and manipulate the core objects of your product programmatically, you're building a legacy product on day one. Designing an AI-first API today is becoming as important, if not more, as designing a user-friendly UI/UX 10 years ago.
Rethink pricing. Seat-based models collapse when one human deploys 100 agents doing the work of 100 people. The February 2026 "SaaS-pocalypse" — $300 billion wiped from software stocks in days — was the market realizing this in real time. The future is consumption-based or value-metric pricing, which is actually healthier because it ties your revenue to the value you create.

What does a great product team look like in an AI-first company today?

First, the AI and the product can't be separate. At Uizard, the inception of the company was from applied AI research, and the first building block of the product was a set of AI models built in-house. The product was built around the model, not the other way around. When I see companies where AI is bolted on as an afterthought, you end up with a weird disconnect — the AI experience feels magical, but the rest of the product is complex, and you get an inconsistent user experience that confuses users.
A great AI-first product team needs people who deeply understand both the capabilities and the limitations of AI. You need AI engineers who build solutions around off-the-shelves models and APIs, but you also need product thinkers who understand that defining intent is non-trivial — that turning brain waves into English sentences is far from a lossless compression format. The best AI product people internalize that AI will always make mistakes, and they design the experience around that reality rather than pretending it away.
At Uizard, our first two hires were a product designer and a computer vision engineer. That pairing was deliberate. You need the craft of great user experience married to deep technical AI capability.
It was true yesterday and even more so today: the team needs to be comfortable killing their darlings. We had to scrap features we personally loved because they weren't solving the right problem for users. Less is more — a simple product that does a few things very well is always better than a complex product doing a million things poorly. The best AI product teams have the discipline to say “no”.

What is success for you?

In the early days, success was survival. We closed our pre-seed funding in the last month where I could still pay rent. At that stage, success was literally keeping the lights on and proving that the technology could work.
Then success became traction — users signing up, using the product, paying for the product, retaining. When we crossed $3 million in ARR and were serving millions of users, that felt like validation that we'd built something real.
But what I've come to appreciate more over time is impact. The thing that excites me most is the potential to amplify human creativity and help people solve problems that matter to them. At the end of the day, we are people solving problems for people. If the technology we build enables more people to express themselves and bring their ideas to life, I am happy 🙂 The revenue, the accolades, the public recognition — those are byproducts of impact, not the goal itself.
And personally, I never wanted to start a company. I wanted to build technology that would solve a specific problem, and that technology led to a company. I guess success for me is still fundamentally about building things that matter.

What books, podcasts, articles inspired you?

"Growth Hacking" by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown was transformative for us. But I'll caveat that: don't invest in growth until you have strong signals of early product-market fit. The growth tactics in that book are powerful, but they're accelerants — if you pour accelerant on a fire that doesn't exist, nothing happens.
On pricing specifically, Patrick Campbell from ProfitWell was a huge influence. His thinking on pricing as an ongoing discipline rather than a one-time decision shaped how we approached our pricing strategy.

I'm quite a nerd so I consume a lot of AI research papers on arXiv (although it's hard to keep up these days!)
But practically, I think the most impactful learning comes from talking to other founders and operators who are in the trenches. The best insights I've gotten came from candid conversations with other entrepreneurs.

What’s one advice, founders should actually ignore?

There's a classic Y Combinator advice that says: "If you're not embarrassed by your launch, you've launched too late."
I think this doesn't fully apply to AI startups. It's true to some extent — you shouldn't over-polish everything. The rest of your product can be awkward. But if you're an AI startup, your core AI magic needs to be pretty good before you launch. I'd say at least 80% there.
Here's why: AI products create expectations. The more intelligent a software product appears, the more intelligence users will expect from it, and the less willing they are to learn how to work around its limitations. If your core AI feature is mediocre at launch, users won't give you the benefit of the doubt the way they might with a non-AI product. They'll try it once, be disappointed, and leave.
So yes, launch before you're comfortable with everything else. But make sure the magic works.

What are habits, activities or rituals that keep you sane (while scaling your business)?

I'm a huge guitar nerd, and it has become my meditation practice. When you play music, your brain can only focus on the playing — it's one of the best ways I've found to truly unwind. It's meditation through rock and roll I guess 😅
Beyond that, I try to cultivate serendipity. Some of the best ideas and connections come from unexpected places, but you have to create the space for them to happen.

What is one “growth hack” (be it business, health or personal-wise) that has a positive impact on you or the company?

This is by far the one I’ve shared with founders the most: try a gamified pre-launch waitlist. This was probably the single most effective growth hack we ever deployed, and we used it multiple times.
The mechanic is simple: whenever we were a few months away from launching a new feature or product, we'd create a marketing video and a landing page where people could sign up for early access. When they signed up, we'd show them their position in the queue — and they could climb higher by inviting friends and colleagues. That's it.
This turned every new feature launch into a viral growth engine. It grew our pre-launch list for Uizard 1.0 to over 100,000 signups. When we applied the same technique to promote major new features, we were getting 10,000 or more new signups every other day.
It works because it taps into two basic human motivations: the desire for exclusive early access and the social dynamic of sharing something exciting with people you know with a feeling of scarcity.

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Thursday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Anthropic is opening an 800-person London office and listing 52 roles paying up to £630,000. The talent war just moved continents. Meanwhile in Beijing, a humanoid robot finished a half-marathon in 50:26, nearly seven minutes faster than the human world record. Are we humans going to be the lame duck? Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Adyen buys Talon.One for €750m

Dutch payments giant Adyen agreed to acquire Berlin-based loyalty and promotions API Talon.One for €750m. Talon.One does ~€60m ARR across 300+ merchants including Nordstrom and H&M, growing 30-40% annually. Adyen wants real-time decisioning to recognise a shopper and apply an offer before payment completes.

Aleph Alpha and Cohere merge at a $20bn valuation

Germany's Aleph Alpha is merging with Canada's Cohere to create a transatlantic alternative to US-dominated AI providers, valuing the combined entity at $20bn. Schwarz Group (Lidl's parent) leads a €500m Series E. The play is data sovereignty for defence, energy, finance and the public sector.

French weather data tampered with for a $34k Polymarket payout

Météo France filed a criminal complaint after temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle Airport spiked 4-5°C on the evenings of 6 and 15 April, coinciding with Polymarket bets on Paris exceeding 64°F. One trader turned $119 into $21,398 in profit. Suspected method: a lighter or hairdryer held to the sensor.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

Is non-AI the best opportunity?

What is the "forward deployed GTM"?

Is "forward deployed" becoming the new status label for every customer-facing role. This essay argues that as LLMs commoditise the writing of code, the value shifts to distribution, in turn AEs and CSMs get rebadged with titles that sound more technical and more strategic.

Europe: move fast and move decisively

Antoine Leboyer's names four structural failures behind Europe's missing trillion-dollar tech sector: (1) VC at 0.4% of GDP vs 0.6-1% in the US, (2) European pension funds allocate 0.02% to VC vs ~2% in the US; (3) no equivalent of the US Small Business Act's $183bn in mandated procurement; (4) intra-EU barriers worth a 45% tariff on goods, 110% on services.

Tom Wehmeier of Atomico (Youtube / Spotify / Apple) walked us through the same numbers from a different angle: capital exists in Europe, it just routes around tech.

Smart hack

From our Partners

HubSpot's ex-Head of Paid shares his 2026 playbook

Most paid media doesn't fail because of budget. It fails because of strategy. On Monday, April 27, we're going live with HubSpot for Startups to fix that. You'll walk away knowing:

• Which channels to prioritize and in what order (and why most people get this wrong)

• Why following up with leads within 1 minute can improve conversion by 391%

• How to set up tracking so your AI bidding actually optimizes for pipeline, not just clicks

• The top gotchas on Google and LinkedIn that quietly kill performance

Free to attend. Free ad credits for everyone who shows up live.

Save Your Spot

From us

AI is the biggest leverage to scale yourself and your team, but how do it? YC's playbook on building an AI-native company breaks this down and shows what changes when AI is the operating system your company runs on, not a feature you bolt on:

• AI as operating system, not tool. Every workflow, every decision flows through an intelligent layer. One person with AI tools now ships features that used to need a team.

• Make the company queryable. Every important action produces an artifact AI can learn from. Record meetings, minimise DMs, dashboard everything (revenue, sales, engineering, hiring, ops), and feed models the same context you'd give an employee.

• Token-max, not headcount-max. Run an uncomfortable API bill instead of an inflated payroll. Engineering, design, HR and admin all get dramatically leaner.

Your velocity is only as fast as your information flow. Every layer of human middleware you remove is a direct speed gain.

One good read

How Anthropic's product team moves faster than anyone else

Join the entrepreneurial journey

Are you ready to take your first steps into the startup ecosystem or seeking an exciting new opportunity? Below is a curated list of startup job openings across Europe for you to explore.

Internships

Fintech Underwriting & Risk Internship Program [📍Madrid, Spain], Financial Services, Dojo [Apply]
Working Student at Sales Electrified Motion [📍Sweden], Automation; Robotics, Bosch Rexroth [Apply]
Sales Development Representative Intern [📍Barcelona, Spain], BEST TABLES [Apply]
Working Student SEO (m/f/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Healthcare, Wellster Healthtech Group [Apply]
Social Content Creation Intern (6-month Internship) [📍London, United Kingdom], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]

Customer Success

Senior Customer Success Manager - Switzerland [📍Switzerland], Dataiku [Apply]
Customer Success Manager [📍Madrid, Spain], Marketing & Advertising, Smartly.io [Apply]
Account Manager (m/f/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Data Privacy, DataGuard [Apply]
Vice President, Global Customer Success [📍Germany, Germany], Truvio [Apply]
Customer Experience Associate [📍London, United Kingdom], Harry's [Apply]
Account Manager/New Business Developer – T&D Industry [📍Belgium], Foxintelligence [Apply]
Enterprise Account Manager [📍Luxembourg], Wolt [Apply]
Account Manager [📍Madrid, Spain], FinTech, Adyen [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Sales Enablement Content Specialist (Parental Leave Cover) [📍London, United Kingdom], FinTech, SUMUP [Apply]
CRM Marketing Manager - US Physicians [📍Berlin, Germany], Amboss [Apply]
Senior SEO and Generative Search Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Pleo [Apply]
CFO Community & Events Lead [📍Paris, France], Spiko [Apply]
(Senior) Growth Marketing Manager (all genders) [📍Berlin, Germany], HELLOFRESH [Apply]
Marketing & Demand Generation Specialist [📍Switzerland], Urban Connect [Apply]
Performance Creative Strategist [📍Madrid, Spain], Ucademy [Apply]
Social Media Associate with German [📍Bulgaria], Tide [Apply]

Sales

Sales Consultant [📍Athens, Greece], Automotive, Cars as a Service [Apply]
Senior Field Sales Associate [📍Dublin, Ireland], Financial Services, Dojo [Apply]
Sales Development Representative (SDR) DACH (German-speaking) [📍Spain], Hr-Compliance-Software, WorkMotion Platform [Apply]
Senior Account Development Representative, Benelux [📍London, United Kingdom], API Infrastructure, Kong [Apply]
Business Development Manager - Supermarchés & Retail [📍Lyon, France], Food Delivery, Deliveroo [Apply]
GTM Associate [📍London, United Kingdom], Omnea [Apply]
Partner Manager DACH (m/f/d) [📍Offenburg, Germany], Data & AI, Happyhotel [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Insurance Operations Associate (m/f/d) [📍Germany], eEye Digital Security [Apply]
Senior People Partner - Customer Care and Support Functions [📍Barcelona, Spain], Perk [Apply]

Product & Tech

Head of Software Engineering [📍London, United Kingdom], Duku AI [Apply]
Lead Product Manager (Liveops) [📍Barcelona, Spain], Socialpoint [Apply]
Delivery Lead [📍Gent, Belgium], Donna [Apply]

Final words — take what you need

Stay connected and spread the word! If you found this newsletter insightful, why not share it with your network? Thanks for reading, and we look forward to bringing you even more insights in the next edition!

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Tuesday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Today’s guest is Pascal Hügli, crypto analyst and educator at a Swiss private bank, who has spent over a decade studying and teaching blockchain while advising on digital asset portfolios. He operates at the intersection of macroeconomics and crypto and lectures on the topic at a Zurich business school.

🎧 Tune in now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and share your thoughts! In the meantime: Follow the Gradient and stay tuned!

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Why you should listen

You should listen to this if you want to understand why founders must beat a 7–10% monetary dilution rate and where crypto fits on that risk curve.

As the conversation unfolded, the real distinction emerged between crypto as infrastructure with real cash flows and crypto as speculation that behaves like a casino.

What we talk about

• 00:00 - Introduction

• 01:52 - The impact of inflation for your money

• 06:51 - The risks your money as an Entrepreneur faces

• 14:03 - Successful business models in Crypto

• 20:52 - Casino vs. computer: Chris Dixon's framework for separating signal from noise

• 30:04 - Zero-knowledge proofs: proving something without revealing anything

• 33:17 - Cross-border payments: how stablecoins are disrupting correspondent banking

• 38:26 - Portfolio allocation: why 2-3% crypto improves risk-adjusted returns

• 42:32 - The institutional adoption wave: Bank of America and beyond

• 49:47 - AI agents, micropayments, and the machine-to-machine economy

Our main take away’s

1. Fiat money expansion creates a structural hurdle rate most founders ignore. Money supply has grown 7–10% annually for decades, which means holding cash or low-yield assets guarantees real loss unless returns exceed that threshold. This pushes entrepreneurs toward higher-risk assets by necessity, not preference.

2. Stablecoins are the most proven crypto business model because they monetize trust, not technology. Tether generates tens of billions in profit with ~150 employees by issuing dollar-backed tokens and earning yield on treasury holdings. The constraint is distribution and adoption, not technical complexity, which flips the usual startup advantage.

3. Crypto’s transparency breaks traditional competitive moats built on secrecy. Fully public transaction data can expose margins, pricing logic, and profitable segments, as seen in AXA’s discontinued flight delay insurance pilot. This forces new architectures like selective disclosure and layered privacy to preserve defensibility.

4. Cross-border payments are structurally inefficient and vulnerable to disintermediation. Current systems rely on multi-bank routing chains that extract fees, while stablecoins enable near-instant peer-to-peer settlement without intermediaries. The trade-off is regulatory friction and incomplete adoption, which delays but does not prevent disruption.

5. Small crypto allocations improve portfolios because of asymmetric return profiles, not conviction. Adding 1–2% of Bitcoin and Ethereum historically doubled portfolio returns with only marginal increases in volatility due to low correlation with traditional assets. The consequence is institutional adoption creeping upward despite risk aversion, compressing future outsized gains.

How to reach out to Pascal

• LinkedIn

• Maerki Baumann

  • LinkedIn

  • Youtube

  • Instagram

Exclusive from Pascal

We are still working on this!

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Thursday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Europe's flagship SaaS conference SaaStock rebranded itself to "Shift AI", saying the quiet part out loud about what's left of the category. Meanwhile, Allbirds sold its footwear brand for $39m, renamed itself NewBird AI and announced a pivot to GPU-as-a-Service. Its stock surge 582% in a day. When we all look back to this period in a few years, what will we say? Follow the Gradient and stay tuned.

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

Lovable scrambles to ship under Anthropic pressure

Swedish vibe-coding startup Lovable worked through the night on a product update after reports Anthropic is building a rival to its core offering. The scramble exposes how much AI product companies depend on the US foundation labs whose tools they sit on top of.

Cursor in talks to raise $2bn at a $50bn valuation

AI coding unicorn Cursor is in talks to raise $2bn+ at a $50bn pre-money valuation. The company says it's on track for $6bn+ ARR by end of 2026, up from $2bn in February. Six months ago the valuation was $29.3bn. Enterprise is now gross-margin positive. Individual dev accounts are not.

Hexagon buys Waygate for $1.45bn

Stockholm-headquartered Hexagon agreed to acquire Waygate Technologies from Baker Hughes for $1.45bn in cash, expanding into non-destructive industrial testing. Waygate generates around $630m in annual revenue at a 10% EBIT margin, with 1,500 employees across 25 locations and a German HQ. The deal closes in H2 2026, pending regulatory approval.

What do you meme?

Food for thought

Still in business after six years of running a startup?

Chris Bakke beautifully captures what operators have actually lived through: pandemic, $600K engineers, SVB collapse, endless pivots from AI to crypto to defense tech, $2bn Series Bs for all your competitors, and now the "thunderclap of godlike LLMs" letting any customer rebuild your app in two hours. Where is this all going?

Does European tech need more money, or fewer excuses?

What is it that the European market actually needs? As Sifted argues, there's no capital shortage in Europe, only capital choosing not to go to tech. There is a surge of public money being pured into the Startup sector in Europe, but does pumping more public money into the sector risk distorting incentives before the systemic issues are addressed?

We talked to Tom Wehmeier of Atomico about the state of European capital markets (Youtube / Spotify / Apple). His data cuts right through the "more money will fix it" narrative.

Is seed the new growth round in the AI era?

Daniel Tomov of Eleven Ventures argues that AI-native companies now reach profitability on seed funding alone, making traditional growth rounds irrelevant. Meanwhile, $300m+ mega-rounds function as category-declaration events, not venture capital. The middle gets squeezed from both sides. We ask: if you are profitable at Seed, why need a Seed round and VC money in the first place?

Andreas Goeldi of b2venture made a related point in our conversation (Youtube / Spotify / Apple): AI compresses the time and capital to product-market fit, rewriting SaaS unit economics in the process.

Smart hack

From our Partners

One brand built 30+ landing pages through Viktor without a single developer.

Each page mapped to a specific ad group. All deployed within hours. Viktor wrote the code and shipped every one from a Slack message.

That same team has Viktor monitoring ad accounts across the portfolio and posting performance briefs before the day starts. One colleague. Always on. Across every account.

5,700+ teams. 3,000+ integrations.

Start free. $100 in credits →

From us

Cool kids build agents these days. Or so it seems. But not all AI agents are created equal. Lenny Rachitsky's framework splits agent work into three categories and tells operators where to start.

• Category 1: Deterministic automation. You define the flow, AI handles the content at each step. Tools: n8n, Zapier, Make. 6-week builds, fast ROI.

• Category 2: Reasoning and acting (ReAct). The LLM picks the tools and steps. Tools: LangGraph, CrewAI. Three-month builds, specialist expertise needed.

• Category 3: Multi-agent networks. Specialised agents coordinating across domains. Tools: ADK, AutoGen. Six months plus, highest complexity.

Start at Category 1. Progress only when you've saturated it. Match the tool to the architecture, not the other way around.

One good read

OpenAI's Memos, Frontier, Amazon and Anthropic

Join the entrepreneurial journey

Are you ready to take your first steps into the startup ecosystem or seeking an exciting new opportunity? Below is a curated list of startup job openings across Europe for you to explore.

Internships

Internship - Risk Analyst [📍Paris, France], Verley Food [Apply]
Working Student/Intern Simulation Engineer (f/m/x) [📍Offenburg, Germany], HyperHeat [Apply]
Software Engineering Intern [📍London, United Kingdom], Wexler [Apply]
Tourism & Operations Internship [📍Dusseldorf, Germany], Indiecampers [Apply]

Customer Success

Junior Customer Success Manger (m/f/d) [📍Munich, Germany], Data Privacy, DataGuard [Apply]
Customer Success Manager European Universities (Medical Doctor) [📍Berlin, Germany], Amboss [Apply]
Customer Support Executive [📍London, United Kingdom], Zinc [Apply]
Customer Support Agent [📍Berlin, Germany], Construction Tech, Cosuno [Apply]
Senior Customer Success Manager [📍Berlin, Germany], Construction Tech, Cosuno [Apply]

Marketing & Comms

Director, Product Marketing [📍London, United Kingdom], Pleo [Apply]
Social Media Manager [📍Paris, France], Joko [Apply]
Campaign and Marketing Project Manager [📍Prague, Czechia], Grocery Delivery, Rohlik [Apply]
Senior Manager, Marketing Effectiveness Consulting (Media Analytics) [📍Warsaw, Poland], Foxintelligence [Apply]

Sales

Sales Account Executive (UK Based) - Enterprise [📍United Kingdom], Gaming & Media, Kyra [Apply]
Sales Business Analyst [📍Madrid, Spain], Docplanner [Apply]
Enterprise Account Executive | UKI [📍London, United Kingdom], AI Translation, DeepL [Apply]
Senior Revenue Operations & Enablement Manager [📍London, United Kingdom], Sparta [Apply]

Strategy & Ops

Solutions Engineer [📍Berlin, Germany], FinTech, Payrails [Apply]
Operations Analyst [📍Madrid, Spain], Docplanner [Apply]
Legal Counsel; Germany [📍Berlin, Germany], Iceye [Apply]
Senior Legal Counsel [📍London, United Kingdom], Multiverse [Apply]
Senior Strategy & Operations Manager | Menus and Value [📍London, United Kingdom], Food Delivery, Deliveroo [Apply]

Product & Tech

Senior Product Engineer (AI) [📍United Kingdom], Plain [Apply]
Product Engineer (Full Stack) [📍London, United Kingdom], Plain [Apply]
Delivery Manager - Core Technology Platform [📍Brussels, Belgium], Skip to content [Apply]
Sr. Software Engineer - Machine & Workload Identity [📍United Kingdom], Teleport [Apply]

Final words — take what you need

Stay connected and spread the word! If you found this newsletter insightful, why not share it with your network? Thanks for reading, and we look forward to bringing you even more insights in the next edition!

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Tuesday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries,

Today’s guest is Gülsah Wilke, Partner at DN Capital, who built Two Hearts into Europe’s largest migrant founder community with ~5,000 members across 120 nationalities. She invests from a €1B+ fund and operates at the intersection of venture, diversity, and enterprise AI.

🎧 Tune in now on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and share your thoughts! In the meantime: Follow the Gradient and stay tuned!

🫶🏼 Melanie & Christian

PS: Has this e-mail been forwarded to you? Sign up here.
PS II: Big shout out to the team at START Global who connected us with Gülsah!

Why you should listen

You should listen to this if you want to understand why immigrant founders outperform despite having less access to capital and networks.

As the conversation unfolded, it became clear that Europe’s AI edge depends less on foundation models and more on proprietary data inside traditional industries.

What we talk about

• 00:00 - Introduction

• 01:40 - Why “everyone can make it” is flawed

• 09:03 - The similarity bias in European VC

• 12:06 - Diversity as ROI, not charity

• 14:11 - Vertical AI: Germany's structural edge

• 18:28 - SAP data as the unlock for enterprise AI

• 22:32 - The Cognigy story: $955M exit, 22x return

• 26:41 - AI democratizing access for underrepresented founders

• 30:41 - 2hearts: Europe's largest migrant founder community

• 36:35 - The bird in the air: finding environments that fit your strengths

Our main take away’s

1. Immigrant founders outperform because constraints force focus and commitment. Most lack early capital, safety nets, and insider networks, which removes optionality and pushes all-in execution from day one.

2. Venture outcomes are biased upstream by who controls capital. Homogeneous investor bases lead to pattern-matching on background, which systematically filters out high-potential founders before they start.

3. Europe has already lost the race for foundation AI but holds an edge in vertical applications. Proprietary industrial data in sectors like manufacturing and healthcare creates defensibility that large LLM providers cannot easily access.

4. AI is compressing the time and capital required to build companies. Founders now reach €1M ARR in 12–18 months, shifting early-stage investing dynamics and lowering barriers for underrepresented builders.

5. Enterprise AI adoption fails less on technology and more on organizational readiness. Companies struggle with legacy systems like SAP, fragmented data, and lack of clear prioritization across use cases.

How to reach out to Gülsah

• LinkedIn

• Learn more about the 2hearts community

• Learn more about DN Capital

Exclusive from Gülsah

If you’re a founder with an immigration background in Europe – what is a specific advantage you have that others systematically underestimate, and how should you actively leverage it?

Your biggest advantage is pattern diversity. You’ve seen multiple systems, cultures, and ways of operating — which means you question assumptions others don’t even notice. That often leads to better products and more resilient companies. Most founders underestimate this and try to “fit in.” I would do the opposite: lean into your edge. Build for global markets earlier, hire diverse teams from day one, and use your perspective to spot problems others overlook.

Where have you seen diverse teams outperform homogeneous ones in a very concrete business situation – hiring, product, or go-to-market?

In go-to-market. We’ve seen diverse teams significantly outperform when selling into complex, multi-stakeholder environments — like healthcare or enterprise.

Why? Because they naturally adapt communication, understand different incentives, and navigate ambiguity better. Homogeneous teams often optimize for one type of buyer. Diverse teams build multi-layered understanding — and win more deals.

What is a blind spot non-diverse founders typically have when building teams or products in Europe – that actually costs them growth?

They optimize for familiarity over capability. That shows up in hiring (same backgrounds), product (same assumptions), and GTM (same networks). The cost is huge: missed markets, weaker products, slower iteration. In a continent as fragmented as Europe, this is a real growth limiter.

What is something the 2hearts community does differently that traditional networks in Europe don’t – and why does that matter for career or company outcomes?

We don’t optimize for exclusivity — we optimize for access and trust at scale. Most networks in Europe are closed and relationship-driven over decades. At 2hearts, we create intentional collisions across industries, cultures, and seniority levels. That leads to: faster opportunities, unexpected partnerships, and often career-defining moments

Access shouldn’t depend on where you were born or who you already know.

From a VC perspective: where does the lack of diversity actually show up in investment decisions or portfolio outcomes – even if people don’t admit it?

In pattern recognition. VCs are trained to look for “what worked before.”
The problem: what worked before is often very narrow. So founders who don’t match that pattern are: questioned more, funded less, or seen as higher risk. Ironically, those are often the founders building the most differentiated companies.

What is success for you?

Success is creating leverage for others. Not just building companies — but opening doors, enabling talent, and creating systems where more people can participate and win. If more founders succeed because they had access, capital, or belief at the right time — that’s success.

What books, podcasts, articles inspired you?

• The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby

• Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

• Lean in by Sheryl Sandberg

• ⁠Rich dad poor dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki

• 20 VC podcast

And honestly — most inspiration comes from conversations with founders who are building against the odds.

What’s one advice founders should actually ignore?

“Stay focused on one thing from day one.” Focus matters — but early on, exploration matters just as much. Many of the best companies didn’t start fully formed —
they evolved through constant iteration and learning.

What are habits, activities or rituals that keep you sane (while scaling your business)?

Movement and reflection. Whether it’s sports, meditation, or just time offline — I need space to think. And staying close to my family and people who give honest feedback, not just positive reinforcement.

What is one “growth hack”?

Proximity to exceptional people. Everything compounds from that: better decisions, better opportunities, better perspectives. Put yourself in environments where you’re slightly out of your comfort zone — that’s where growth happens fastest.

Follow the Gradient is a weekly newsletter and podcast by the serial founders Melanie Gabriel & Christian Woese about how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.

You have full control over what we send to you. We sent a weekly rundown on Tuesdays, and our podcast brief on Thursdays. If you do not want to receive this Thursday one, you can change this in the email preferences below.