Welcome to the new season of the Mostly Awesome podcast!
Our first episode will drop on October 4, but before that we wanted to give you all a sneak preview of what season 4 is all about. Over this season, we will be chatting with 6 different changemakers and innovators – we can’t wait for you to hear! We’re also stoked to have Julia Kozlovskaia and Jaclyn Hovsmith as our fearless hosts.

In this week’s episode, we welcome Vidya Madhavan, Founder and CEO of Schmooze, the dating app where you swipe memes instead of people. Coming from Engineering and Business Background, Vidya will tell us how she did not build “just another dating app” but rather the fastest growing one. During this episode, we will get to hear Vidya's thoughts on how an MBA and Entrepreneurship complement each other, where the idea of a meme-based dating app even came from and how the online dating market might develop in the years to come.

For this week’s episode Passionfroot is on the menu! The co-founders Jennifer Phan and Michelle Tian combine backgrounds in venture capital at Rocket Internet and tech development at AirBnB and Shopify. In 2021 they co-founded Passionfroot with the aim to empower independent businesses of tomorrow. With this passion in mind, they are developing a back-office tool tailored to creator businesses. Tune in to learn more about Passionfroot and the future of the creator economy!

If we hear about living an almost nomadic life, we typically have a picture of a backpacker in mind, traveling the world. Our guest for today's episode, Maya Hari, however, would probably describe this as how she spent her 20s working in India, the U.S., France as well as Singapore. Maya is not your run-of-the-mill backpacker though - she studied engineering and did an MBA at INSEAD before she worked at the likes of Cisco, Google, and Microsoft before becoming the VP of Global Strategy and Operations at Twitter.

In this episode, Maya tells us more about her personal and truly international journey, founding an eCommerce start-up while being a mother, working for Twitter, and sharing her thoughts about the current state of online media.

Joshua and Mehmet both studied Business Administration and Math in Munich. Together they founded Freeletics in 2013, which later rose to become a popular consumer internet company that offers personalized fitness plans and community support via a mobile application. After exiting from Freeletics in 2018 they waited no more than three weeks before they founded yet again! Their current venture is called Zavvy, a company that aspires to invent aspects of the “future of work”.

During this episode, they talk about where the idea for Freeletics came from and the culture and community that Freeletics created for end users. Furthermore, Joshua and Mehmet tell us more about Zavvy, the differences from their previous experiences at Freeletics and how despite that they're both still able to draw on their past experiences to build an employee-enablement platform.

In today’s episode, our guest is Vlad Lata. Vlad is not only a serial entrepreneur with founding experience at KONUX and Avi Medical but also a CDTM alumnus.
His first venture, KONUX, is active in the field of IoT/AI providing smart sensor systems and AI-based analytics. With AVI Medical he is now active in the optimization of the patient experience by leveraging technology.

In the course of this episode, we learned why and how he decided to found a venture twice, what institutions impacted his journey most, and also how it is to operate a venture in regulated markets like the railway and healthcare industry.

In today’s episode we were delighted to have Hessam Lavi as our guest.
Hessam is the CEO and Co-Founder of Climatiq, a company that engineers
and develops a Carbon Footprint Intelligence Platform.
During the course of this episode we spoke about several topics that make
Hessam’s journey unique. We learnt about his voyage from war-torn Iran,
to Sweden, and finally to Berlin. We also took deep dives into the
learnings he drew from being a serial entrepreneur, how he built
successful startups in the very competitive recruiting industry and what it
means to be an entrepreneur in the climate-tech space today.

In this episode, we talk to Thomas Regier and Kivanc Semen - the founders of DataGuard. In 2017 they founded DataGuard together. And since then they help companies to manage their data privacy - an inviolable human right and key to a successful business in an increasingly digital world.

We talk to them about their multi-cultural background and how they first met as teenagers in a workshop for basketball trainers. Covid-19 has been a major topic of discussion everywhere in the last months. However, this time we discuss it from the perspective of data privacy and information security. Moreover, we spoke about the future of data privacy, GDPR, and about annoying cookie banners on every website.

In this episode, we are talking to Sona Chandra, the co-founder of Terra Lumina - an AI-based drug discovery platform.
Sona is a qualified Biomedical engineer who speaks passionately about drug discovery and healthcare. One can tell from her responses that she’s determined to make a dent in how we as a civilization discover and engineer medicines. We spoke to Sona about her cross-continental journey and understanding how a person of Indian origin, who is actually a citizen of Australia, gets educated in the US and eventually lands up in Berlin to become a two-time startup founder. Mind you, all of this happened in Sona’s life well before she turned 30, and that perhaps, explains how she ended up receiving the coveted Forbes 30-under-30 award in 2020.

In this episode, we spoke to Hung Dang- an inspiring CDTM alumnus and the founder of Y42 - the company that is on the mission to build the most powerful and simple to use data tool that allows everyone to work with their data efficiently and collaboratively. In October 2021, the company raised one of the biggest Series A funding rounds in Europe.

But before founding Y42, Hung had his fair share of hardship and challenges - He was born in Vietnam and grew up with his grandparents while his parents laboured in Germany to make a mark for themselves. Later, when he was 8, he took a flight all alone from Vietnam to Germany to start a new chapter in his life. Imagine being uprooted from a culture so different at such a tender age, battling all the odds that are stacked against you in the next two decades, and then going on to found a company that is on the way to impact the lives of hundreds of employees and thousands, if not millions, of data users.