SPEED CHANGE REPEAT Podcast

Petteri Lahtela - Co-Founder of Oura Health

The oura ring is a wearable device created by a group of finnish entrepreneurs. It is one of the most incredible wearable devices developed up until this day and has more than one million users world wide. Leading CEOs, athletes, founders or biohackers are using the oura ring to track sleep and recovery. It is widely considered to be the best sleep tracker available.

On this episode we are talking with Petteri Lahtela who is one of the Co-Founders and the founding CEO of Oura Health, the company behind the Oura ring. Petteri acted as the CEO until mid-2018 and as Chief Innovation Officer and President until mid-2020 when he departed the company together with his co-founder colleagues. Petteri talks us through the early years of founding Oura, when the small team from Finnland went early on into the US market. He tells us some interesting stories like  how famous tech CEOs send him private messages to invest into Oura or how Oura got free marketing impressions worth millions by Prince Harry wearing the Oura Ring. 

Petteri is a genuine person who cares a lot about building meaningful things. I was deeply impressed by our conversation. 

 

 

Julian Jagtenberg - Improving Sleep with Robots | Helping 100 Million People | Digital Health Devices

Julian is an amazing young entrepreneur out of the Netherlands who invented a sleep robot to help his mother with her insomnia, eventually turning it into a leading start-up within the sleep tech space. 

Together with Julian we talk about the science of sleep and the global scale of sleep problems as well as the building of his company somnox and the way they collect different types of data to analyze sleep and behavior. 

This episode is a special one as we had to reschedule last minute because Julian was invited for a lunch with the king of the Netherlands. 

Sophie Chung - Improving Healthcare | Two-Sided Platform in Digital Health | Being a Mother and Founder

Sophie is the CEO and Founder of Qunomedical.

On this episode Sophie shares her story from being trained as a doctor in Austria to joining McKinsey and later a Digital Health start-up in New York. 

We dive deep into the business model of Qunomedical and the underlying problems of healthcare systems. Sophie is an incredible woman who balances the life of a founder and mother. 

 

 

Ignas Survila - Wearable Start-Ups | Continuous Glucose Monitoring | Silicon Valley VCs screening Eastern Europe

Ignas Survila is a Lithuanian entrepreneur and the Co-Founder of Tyler Health. 

Tyler uses a Continuous Glucose Monitor to provide biometric data on how your body reacts to different foods and activities.

(00:00) - Ignas talking about his first venture in Switzerland 

(21:53) - The case for continuous glucose monitoring

(46:55) - Scaling wearables into society 

(57:00) - Tyler Health's user and market focus

(01:12:10) - Hardware Innovation is hard

(01:20:18) - Lithuania and Eastern Europe Start-Up Ecosystems 

Robin P. G. Tech - Research | B2B Search Engine | CSR Data

Robin is the co-founder and Managing Director of delphai, a software company that has developed an AI-based B2B search engine. In addition, Dr. Tech is a member of the economic advisory board of the Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen party and senior researcher at the Hasso Plattner Institute and MIT, with a focus on complex systems and financial models.

Together with Robin we talked about his path towards becoming a founder as well as the fundamentals behind the B2B SaaS product he and his team are building. We also slightly covered the opportunities for building features for corporate social responsibility data. 

 

Allon Bloch - Concentrated Bets | WIX, Vroom and KHealth | Intelligence Layer for Medicine

Allon Bloch is a serial entrepreneur. Joining the early founding team of WIX as Co-CEO back in 2008 he went on to co-founding Vroom (IPOed in 2020) and KHealth his latest venture, the latter  having raised over $200 million to date. 

Allon is a great guy who has lots of experience to share from building incredible businesses. 

Our conversation mostly evolved around the complexity of medicine and what it means to build an intelligence layer on top of it, which at times went pretty philosophical. Medicine is fascinating, incredibly complex and we barely scratched the surface yet. 

InsideSCR - US AirForce, Academics and Founders | 100 Unicorns for Europe | The Rise of CEE Start-Ups

On this episode of the SPEED CHANGE REPEAT Podcast we are launching our new format "InsideSCR".

For this format Jonathan and Rajarshi (Raj) Chakraborty are sitting down bi-weekly to discuss: 

- News, trends and topics they care about in business, tech and beyond.

- Unlocking great ideas, stories, facts and data basically providing you with great research at your fingertips.

EPISODE OUTLINE:

(00:00) - 2021 Review 

(22:28) - Plans and Upcoming Guests for SPEED CHANGE REPEAT 

(55:08) - EU VC Landscape 

(1:15:22) - Eastern Europe Start-Ups 

Marlon Braumann - Managing a €125 Million Fund | Alternative Proteins | Construction Tech | Saving Endangered Species in Africa

Marlon is an incredible individual with an amazing story from being a founder to running a €125 million venture capital fund and building up a foundation focused on wildlife preservation in Africa. 

Together with Marlon we are talking about his story on getting into venture capital as well as diving into the insights behind the Elevat3 fund as they keep themselves mostly under the radar. 

We also touch upon start-up trends and Marlon's recent investment interests such as alternative proteins or construction tech.

Further Marlon also gave us a deep dive into the AMES Foundation, a community of makers, creatives, entrepreneurs, founders, investors and CEOs united by one goal, to stop the extinction of Africa's wildlife. 

 

 

Marek Sacha - Quick Commerce | Building Unicorns | Disrupting Incumbents | Next Big Ventures

Marek Sacha describes himself as a geek, however his track record in building ventures underlines the great entrepreneur he is. S

tarting his first business in high school and studying mathematics and AI set him up to build businesses in different industries, which have been incredible successes such as Rohlik Group and Cera Care. 

Together with Marek we touch on different topics taking advantage of his great expertise from building and scaling ventures in the e-commerce, digital health and industrial space.

Building highly scalable ventures is hard thats why we were happy to have Marek on the show to share his experiences and create an amazing deep dive. 

Eugene Borukhovich - Health Start-Ups | Big Tech in Health | Pharma & Digital Health

Eugene has spent more than two decades in the healthcare industry taking on different shoes by both driving digital health in pharma, consulting and being an entrepreneur. Among the many things he has been involved in, he used to be the global head of Bayer's digital health partnership and investment arm G4A. 

Being a US citizen he had the opportunity to live in multiple countries, which allowed him to see similarities and differences in the developments of the digital health space from a geographical point of view.

Nowadays together with his wife he is building up a digital health coaching start-up, which we dove deeper into breaking down the space of telehealth and health coaching.