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PODCAST

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology

Riding Unicorns Productions

Riding Unicorns is the go-to podcast for anyone interested in venture capital and high-growth startups. Hosted by VCs James Pringle and Hector Mason, the show explores what it takes to build and back successful tech unicorns.Each episode features candid conversations with top founders, operators, and investors—unpacking the strategies, challenges, and insights behind scaling category-defining companies. From fundraising and product-market fit to hiring, growth, and beyond, no topic is off-limits

business entrepreneurship

All Episodes

52:11

Why "AI Visibility" is critical for your brand with...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/12/17

James and Hector sit down with James Cadwallader, CEO and Co Founder of Profound, to unpack how AI is reshaping the internet and what that means for every brand on the planet. James explains why large language models are not just a new interface, but a fundamental platform shift in how people retrieve information. Instead of humans clicking blue links, user agents now visit the web on our behalf, read content, and answer questions directly. Profound sits in the middle of this change, helping ...

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38:08

From Formula 3 to AI Accountants: Ariel Harmoko,...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/12/10

Ariel Harmoko is the Co Founder and CEO of Artifact AI. Ariel joined James and Hector for a conversation that moves from race tracks to reconciliation engines. Ariel grew up in Jakarta, was thrown into Go Karts at eight, and went on to race professionally all the way to Formula 3 alongside the likes of Lando Norris and George Russell. That early immersion in high performance teams, engineering and discipline shaped how he now operates as a founder. He shares how a love of maths and science to...

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48:48

Building the AI Super Connector with Andrew D’Souza,...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/12/03

Andrew D’Souza is the Founder of Boardy, the Creandum backed AI super connector reshaping how founders and investors meet and build trust. Before Boardy, Andrew co-founded Clearco, one of the first revenue based financing companies. Clearco deployed over $5bn to thousands of businesses, scaled to six hundred employees, and passed one hundred million dollars in revenue. Andrew is one of the few founders who has built a nine figure company before starting again. Clearco’s early AI work and Andr...

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44:38

Inside SVB's dramatic acquisition and the Future of...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/11/26

Erin Platts is the CEO of Octopus Ventures and former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank UK & Europe — one of the most pivotal figures in the UK tech ecosystem. In this conversation, Erin opens up in remarkable detail about her personal journey from two decades inside SVB to leading one of Europe’s most active venture firms. She shares the inside story of the SVB collapse — the all-nighters, the adrenaline, the leadership decisions made under extreme pressure, and what it was really like to shoul...

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43:51

How SuperAwesome Built the World’s Biggest Kid Tech...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/11/19

Lee Veitch is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of SuperAwesome, the world’s leading kid-tech and youth marketing platform. SuperAwesome powers billions of kid-safe digital transactions every month — helping brands like LEGO, Disney, and Nickelodeon connect with young audiences responsibly and safely. Lee takes us behind the scenes of a remarkable 13-year journey — from the early days of fear, frustration, and opportunity, to scaling globally, being acquired by Epic Games, and then buying ...

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45:57

Pioneering the AI-rollup model in the property...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/11/12

The AI rollup transforming property management This week on Riding Unicorns, we sit down with Dan Lifshits, Co-Founder & COO of Dwelly — the AI-first lettings and property management platform reinventing how landlords, tenants, and agents interact. Dwelly is on a mission to modernise the UK rental market by acquiring traditional letting agencies and rebuilding them with technology at their core. The business is growing fast, backed by General Catalyst and other leading investors, combinin...

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44:56

Building the "Spotify of Textbooks" with Gauthier Van...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/11/05

Hector is joined by Gauthier van Malderen, Founder and CEO of Perlego, the “Spotify for textbooks” and one of Europe’s leading edtech scale-ups. Gauthier shares the remarkable journey of building Perlego from a personal frustration with expensive university textbooks into a global subscription platform transforming access to educational content. He reflects on early failures, the turning points that led to success, and how COVID accelerated the company’s growth. The discussion dives deep into...

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52:19

Building the capital operating system for...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/10/29

This week on Riding Unicorns, we’re joined by Paul Becker, Co-Founder & CEO of re:cap, a fintech platform helping digital businesses unlock capital and understand their financial position through intelligent forecasting, real-time data insights, and flexible financing. In this wide-ranging conversation, Paul walks us through re:cap’s journey from an idea for automated due diligence software to becoming one of Europe’s fastest-growing capital platforms, recently securing over €125M in debt...

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44:24

What happened to Babylon Health after reaching $1bn+...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/10/22

Ali first joined us in January 2022, when Babylon was still one of the most ambitious healthtech companies in the world. Today, he returns with a new mission, building Quadrivia and its clinical AI assistant, “Qu”, designed to automate millions of repetitive healthcare workflows and rebalance the global shortage of clinical labour. In this episode, Ali reflects candidly on the rise and fall of Babylon, the structural challenges behind its collapse, and the lessons he’s applying to his new ven...

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43:35

The future of Social Commerce with Sam Jacobs,...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/10/15

Sam Jacobs is the Co-Founder of Go Places, the operating system for social commerce. In just 18 months, Go Places has become a trusted partner to some of the world’s biggest brands including Samsung, Mars, The Body Shop, and Trip. Backed by deep experience from Amazon and Coca-Cola, Sam and his co-founder Jack are building the infrastructure layer for TikTok Shop, combining performance, content, live shopping, affiliate management and analytics into a single high-performance engine. Go Places...

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47:15

AI, Infra vs Apps & Spotting Red Herrings with Akash...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/10/08

Akash Bajwa, Principal at Earlybird VC, one of Europe’s longest-standing early-stage funds. Akash shares his journey into venture and how he helped launch Earlybird’s London office, now a core hub for the firm. We dive into the state of AI investing, how to distinguish enduring companies from short-term hype, and what traits define the next wave of outlier founders. With experience backing companies like Briefcase (AI for accountants) and Spatial (3D generative AI), Akash offers a deep and pr...

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43:51

Investing in Africa's Digital Future, Lexi Novitske,...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/10/01

Lexi Novitske, General Partner at Norrsken22, a $205m growth-stage fund backing transformative tech companies across Africa. Lexi has spent over a decade living and investing in Nigeria, backing breakout African startups like Paystack, Flutterwave, and Smile Identity. As one of the continent’s most respected VCs, she shares how her team is building a truly Pan-African platform — with partners on the ground in Lagos, Johannesburg, and Nairobi — and why local presence and context are essential ...

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43:17

Growth Equity, VCTs and Exits with Rupert West,...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/09/24

Please note: The topics covered in this episode should not be taken as investment advice. This week on Riding Unicorns, we’re joined by Rupert West, the founder and Managing Director of Puma Growth Partners, a UK-based growth equity investor backing companies at Series A with cheque sizes of £4–10m. Puma invests across consumer brands, B2B SaaS, and scalable business services, with a hands-on approach to helping founders scale sustainably and successfully exit. Rupert shares the story of buil...

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50:38

Building Outreach to a $4bn unicorn and helping AI...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/09/17

This week on Riding Unicorns, we’re joined by Manny Medina, the visionary founder behind Outreach — the $4B sales engagement unicorn — and now co-founder & CEO of Paid.ai, a startup pioneering how AI agents get priced, paid, and scaled. We dive into Manny’s remarkable journey from zero to $250M+ ARR with Outreach, the gritty early days of selling door-to-door with no cash, and how he turned that experience into a masterclass in category creation. Now, with Paid.ai, Manny is laser-focused ...

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47:26

Building, Backing & Scaling in an AI-Native World...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/09/10

In this episode we are joined by Kenneth Auchenberg, Partner at AlleyCorp — one of New York’s most prolific early-stage funds known for incubating companies like MongoDB, Business Insider, and Radical AI. Kenneth’s journey from coding at 16 in Copenhagen to shaping global developer ecosystems at Stripe and Microsoft gives him a unique lens into the next generation of software businesses — and the rise of AI agents. 💥 In this episode, we dive into: 🤖 Why “agentic” workflows are changing

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43:33

Inside the Quantum Infrastructure Revolution with...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/09/03

This week on Riding Unicorns, we’re joined by Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, Founder and CEO of Nu Quantum, a pioneering company building the networking layer for the quantum computing era. Carmen’s journey started in academia, researching quantum photonics, before she spun out Nu Quantum from the University of Cambridge. Now backed by top deep tech investors, the company is on a mission to connect quantum processors and make quantum computing commercially scalable. 🎙️ In this episode, we

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56:31

Building the "Lovable of Marketing" with Patrick...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/08/27

In this episode, we're joined by Patrick Haede, the founder of Superscale AI, a breakout new startup transforming how digital products are marketed. 🚀 Inspired by Lovable’s success in democratising product-building, Patrick saw the next major frontier: distribution. In a world where anyone can now build a product, how do you market it effectively? Superscale AI is the answer — a platform that lets you instantly generate performance-ready, AI-powered video ads for TikTok, Instagram, and Meta,

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55:58

Scaling from startup to £70M+ funding in 16 months...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/08/13

Paul Anthony is the co-founder of Primer, a rapidly growing payment orchestration platform with over 200 employees and more than £70 million in funding from top-tier investors including Seed Camp, Balderton, Accel, and Iconic. His journey began as the first employee at a FinTech startup (now called Depay), followed by a stint at PayPal's Braintree division, before founding Primer to solve the complex payment infrastructure challenges he witnessed amongst enterprise merchants. Paul is now also...

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37:05

Simone Maini, CEO @ Elliptic, on Leading Through...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/08/06

In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James and Hector sit down with Simone Maini, CEO of Elliptic, the world’s leading blockchain analytics company. Simone’s career path is anything but conventional — from a history degree and Deutsche Bank to leading a $100M+ funded crypto intelligence powerhouse. 🧠 After 8 years in banking and a stint in anti-money laundering consulting, Simone joined Elliptic as Head of Product. What began as a pivot turned into a mission: tackling financial crime in the

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39:32

Pattern recognition and backing Europe's next...

Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship |... ·

2025/07/30

From international math olympiads to high-frequency trading to leading deals at Accel, Andrei Brasoveanu has carved one of the most impressive careers in European tech. After a decade on Wall Street as a quant, he joined Accel’s London office and quickly became one of their top investors—backing breakout companies like Celonis and, more recently, Polar. In this episode, we explore the mindset, methods, and milestones behind his success. What You’ll Learn: 🧠 “Founders are the constant” — Why

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