Future Ventures: Clarity at Scale is the podcast for founders, operators, and investors who are building companies worth owning for the long term — and who need to think clearly about capital, structure, strategy, and growth to get there.
Each episode cuts through the noise around scaling: how to structure a deal, how to position a business for institutional capital, how to build operational leverage without losing control, and how to make the high-stakes decisions that compound in value long after the moment has passed.
Hosted by Maxim Atanassov — a four-time founder and the Managing Partner of Future Ventures Corp. Since 2018, FVC has invested in, incubated, and scaled companies across sectors — with a focus on platform opportunities that compound in value. Maxim's background spans executive leadership inside Canada's largest energy companies and senior advisory at Deloitte and EY. He's a CPA-CA who has sat at the table where capital gets deployed, governance gets built, and hard decisions get made. Now he helps founders get there faster.
New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.
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Données mises à jour le 14/07/2026
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Robert Stanley isn't a healthcare lifer. He spent most of his career in technology — running IT projects for big banks, telcos, and airlines — before moving into home care about a decade ago and building one of Ontario's established providers. That outsider's vantage point is exactly what makes this conversation worth your time. Where insiders see a system to optimize, Robert sees one that's structurally broken: wired to reward visits, procedures, and ambulance rides, with almost nothing that pays anyone to prevent the crisis in the first place. The math behind his urgency is hard to argue with — Canada's population of 82-year-olds peaks around 2051, and demand only climbs from here.
His idea is called Comprehensive Healthcare at Home: continuously monitor at-risk seniors and send a nurse or therapist when something seems wrong — often weeks before it would lead to an emergency room visit. But what makes CHA different isn't just the technology. It's how he set it up. Robert launched the care company first and treated it as a testing ground, so the technology became part of routines his clinicians already trusted, rather than being added on top. That's the key difference because most healthcare trials fail not because of the idea itself, but because they don’t fit into the busy schedule of overworked clinicians. For entrepreneurs facing a slow, regulated market, this is a lesson in earning the right to make changes.
Topics Covered
The prevention problem — why a system that funds episodic care has no incentive to stop the crisis before it happens.
Building care first, tech second — how running a home care company turned product-market fit into a non-question.
Ambient monitoring in practice — optical sensors, smart mattresses, and predicting falls up to four weeks out.
Data as the long-term moat — why the longitudinal dataset, not the hardware, becomes the company's most valuable asset.
The national health record vision — the case for a federated, interoperable record and hospital-at-home at scale.
Key Insights
Prevention is cheaper than almost anyone realizes, and the system ignores it anyway. A urinary tract infection caught early costs roughly $20 in antibiotics; missed, it can escalate to sepsis, a multi-week hospital stay near $20,000, and meaningful mortality risk — yet nothing in the funding model rewards catching it early.
The hard part isn't the AI, it's the clinical plumbing. Alerts are useful only if they appear in the workflows clinicians already use. That's why CHA sends its signals through the same electronic record that their teams have trusted for years, instead of asking busy staff to learn something new.
Owning the data eventually matters more than owning the device. Today, CHA is essentially an assistive tool with clinicians making every decision. Still, the continuous, anonymized picture of aging its building could become a defensible asset — even an early-warning system for the next pandemic.
Links
Scaling with Clarity Podcast: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/futureventures-podcast/
CHA Group / CHAH AI Care: https://chah.ai/
Robert Stanley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rjastanley/
Robert Stanley is the Founder and CEO of CHA Group, the parent company of State Home Nursing Care Services and CHA Technology. After a long career in technology delivering large-scale IT projects, he moved into home care a decade ago. He built one of Ontario's established providers before turning his focus to predictive, technology-enabled care. Today, he's pioneering Comprehensive Healthcare at Home, a model that combines AI-powered monitoring with clinical response to keep vulnerable seniors safe, independent, and out of the hospital.
This podcast has been brought to you by the Capital Intelligence Platform: capital.futureventures.ca
Greg Miles — Why Women's Health Has Been Ignored for Too Long | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 46
Greg Miles is the founder and CEO of Milestone Gyno-Mics, a biotech company developing the first AI-powered, non-invasive blood test for endometriosis. He is one of the first bioinformatics PhDs in the U.S., with over 15 years of experience in genomics, diagnostics, and AI. He left a 10-year job at Agilent to focus on this project. His motivation is personal: he lost both grandparents to leukemia that was diagnosed too late, and he watched a loved one struggle for 12 years seeing many doctors before finally being diagnosed with endometriosis by a surgeon.
This conversation matters because endometriosis affects more than 1 in 10 women, is the leading cause of infertility, and is invisible on imaging more than 95% of the time — leaving most women on a decade-long diagnostic odyssey. Greg's thesis is blunt: endometriosis behaves like cancer (a recent paper found it shares all eight hallmarks), so we should detect it like cancer. The result is a clear-eyed look at why women's health has been underfunded and overlooked, how AI changes the math on early detection, and why the next major breakthrough in medicine may be diagnosis, not treatment.
Key Topics Covered
The diagnostic gap in women's health — Why early detection exists for breast cancer but almost nowhere else, and what that absence costs women in lost years and lost fertility.
Endometriosis as a cancer-like disease — How endo shares all eight hallmarks of cancer, and why that reframing should change how we diagnose and treat it.
How the AI blood test works — Reading three distinct biological signals from a simple arm draw and using machine learning to turn 20,000+ data points into a single diagnostic signature.
The economics of delayed diagnosis — The roughly $200K-per-patient cost of a 10-year delay, and why insurers, fertility clinics, and employers all have skin in the game.
What investors should actually scrutinize — The four things that separate a real diagnostic from a hyped one, from sensitivity and specificity to the integrity of the held-out data.
Jan Poetsch — Turning Power Into Profitability | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 45
Jan Poetsch spent almost twenty years working on some of the world's most complicated energy projects. He then realized that the biggest hidden opportunity in industrial energy was right on the income statement: the power bill. His career took him from a small town in Germany to offshore platforms with Shell, the Sakhalin II project in Russia, and the LNG Canada supply chain. These big projects taught him where the money often leaks out unnoticed. In late 2023, he started Arder Energy to target one of the biggest costs that most industrial companies still ignore.
The timing of this conversation is hard to overstate. Alberta just logged 34 straight hours of $0.00/MWh power — a market record — while data centers alone are about to add a load equal to six years of normal demand growth. The operators still treating electricity as a passive flow-through cost are about to get caught flat-footed. Jan makes a sharp, practical case for why power is now a strategic lever rather than a line item, and what the smartest industrial players are already doing about it.
Key topics covered
From Germany to the oil sands — Jan's journey through Shell, Sakhalin II, and LNG Canada, and the moment he realized power was the most under-managed cost in industry.
Inside Alberta's wild power market — 34 hours at zero, an "islanded" grid, and prices that swing from the floor to nearly $1,000/MWh.
How Arder finds the wins — a top-down "green/amber/red" screen that surfaces 5–10% savings before anyone touches capital.
Why industrial heat is so hard to decarbonize — and how brick "toasters," electrode boilers, and thermal storage rewrite the economics.
Canada's energy superpower question — what it actually takes, why Texas is the model, and where nuclear really fits.
Key insights
Power has quietly become strategic. Most firms run "set-and-forget" energy contracts while sweating far smaller costs — yet a single 15-minute window can drive half a month's transmission bill, and the levers to manage it are sitting right there unused.
Jeremy Funk — The New Rules of Growth in the AI Era | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 44
Jeremy Funk has spent more than two decades doing the one thing most people in tech were told to stop prioritizing: building real relationships. As founder and CEO of Funk Futures — a fractional sales, recruiting, and marketing firm rooted in the energy sector — he's earned a reputation as one of the industry's premier "super connectors." His value, as he puts it plainly, is the people in his phone who actually pick up when he calls. Based in Boulder County, Colorado, and a veteran of 85 cold calls a day early in his career, Jeremy built his business on a single non-negotiable pillar: authenticity.
This conversation is important because Jeremy is using an innovative approach. As AI handles more outreach, skills like listening, curiosity, and real connection become the most valuable. For entrepreneurs trying to get big clients, build a sales process, or stand out in a world full of chatbots, Jeremy gives honest, simple advice on doing business the human way. It's part sales tips, part life lesson on building careers and raising kids in a tech-driven world.
Key Topics Covered
The relationship-first career — Why Jeremy bet on connection over coding, and how 85 cold calls a day became the foundation for everything that followed.
Authenticity as a sales strategy — How telling clients the truth instead of what they want to hear became Funk Futures' number-one differentiator.
Winning enterprise rapport — Doing the research, meeting buyers where they are, and turning transactional conversations into personal ones.
AI as an opening, not a threat — Why mass automation has made cold calling and authentic outreach more valuable, not less.
Raising connectors in a screen-first world — Phone-free summer camps, no-phone dinners, and a daughter's lawn-mowing hustle as a real lesson in selling.
Key Insights
The best salespeople run on a "two big ears, one small mouth" rule — they ask and listen far more than they pitch, because understanding someone would buy matters more than describing what you're selling.
Emilia De Stasio - The Democratization of Wealth Through Art | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 43
Emilia de Stasio spent years working in finance at places like the European Central Bank and Moody's, but she later turned her focus to a market that has very little data. As a long-time art collector, she often found it hard to get reliable information to decide if a piece was a good buy. Frustrated by this, she co-founded Artscapy, a platform that aims to bring clarity, organization, and data to an industry that's usually known for being secretive and exclusive.
This conversation is important because Emilia is in a unique position. She understands both how to build a portfolio and weigh risks versus rewards, but she also cares about art genuinely and refuses to let the financial side ignore the human aspect. Her approach offers a straightforward guide for anyone wondering if art has a place in a serious investment portfolio, how to include it without getting burned, and what it takes to shake up an industry that's been resistant to change for many years. For founders and investors, it also teaches how to create a strong data advantage and use AI to generate real value.
Key topics covered
The origin story of Artscapy — how a personal frustration with the lack of honest data turned a side project for collector friends into a global platform with 15,000 members.
Building data in an opaque market — why clean, standardized data, not raw volume, is the hardest part of making the art market legible.
Art as an asset class — how diversification, thematic collecting, and uncorrelated returns make art a credible portfolio component without stripping out the passion.
Securitization and liquidity — how Artscapy lets collectors unlock capital from their art without being forced to sell at the wrong moment.
AI's real role in art — where AI transforms the art market and where it can never replace the human core of great work.
Key insights
Art is not a single, homogeneous asset. Treating a collection like a guaranteed appreciation play is a mistake; like equities, outcomes depend on research, diversification, and the discipline to walk away from most opportunities.
Dave Guttman — From Terminal Diagnosis to 9-Figure Exits | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 42
Dave Guttman has spent more than three decades building, scaling, acquiring, and exiting businesses — racking up multiple 8- and 9-figure outcomes along the way. But the thing that shaped how he operates wasn't a deal. At 24, fresh off an acceptance to Wharton, three doctors misdiagnosed him and told him he had six months to live. He survived, and the experience rewired his definition of success from accumulation to impact. That shift is the throughline of this conversation.
Why this one matters: Guttman is rare in that he speaks fluently in both registers founders actually need — the hard mechanics of raising capital, building budgets, and engineering an exit, and the harder questions of what you're scaling toward in the first place. He's blunt about where most founders go wrong (no financial model, raising too little money, mistaking confidence for competence), candid about AI as both a force multiplier and a genuine risk, and refreshingly unsentimental about legacy. If you're scaling a company and quietly wondering whether the climb is worth it, this is a conversation worth your time.
Key Topics Covered
The misdiagnosis that reset everything — How a death sentence at 24 reframed his entire approach to work, relationships, and what he was building for.
Raising capital the right way — Why he argues raising $5M is easier than $500K, and the break-even math most founders get backwards.
AI as a creative force multiplier — How he built a 100-page business plan in three hours and is co-writing two books in months instead of years.
The coming collapse of traditional education — Why he begged his daughter not to go to college and where he thinks learning is actually headed.
Fortune vs. specialness — His case for radical humility, and the legacy question he poses that stops most people cold.
Key Insights
Self-awareness beats raw skill. Being weak in an area of your business is survivable; believing you're strong where you're actually weak is what kills companies. Knowing the difference is the founder's real edge.
Capital needs come before valuation, not after. Most founders fixate on their valuation first, then back into a raise. Guttman flips it — figure out two to three times what you genuinely need to reach break-even, because running out of cash is the business equivalent of a plane running out of fuel.
Dr. Samir Musayev has built a career helping businesses think well beyond their home turf. As Commercial Account Director at Export Development Canada (EDC), he works hands-on with Canadian companies navigating the messy reality of global trade — financing, risk, and the practical mechanics most founders badly underestimate. Originally from Baku, Azerbaijan, and now based in Calgary, he brings an international lens shaped by years in finance and business development across borders. He also hosts the Global Nomads podcast, where he unpacks entrepreneurship, leadership, and the stories of people building companies across borders.
This episode explains why many Canadian companies want to start exporting but often don't follow through. The reasons are usually different from what founders expect. Samir says the main challenges are not money, but lack of knowledge, paperwork problems, and thinking export is just a one-time effort instead of a long-term plan. With tariffs changing the Canada–US relationship and the need to diversify, this episode offers practical advice for any founder wanting to expand beyond Canada.
Key Topics Covered
The immigrant networking playbook — Why building a network from scratch takes double the effort, and how to actually stay top of mind once the event is over.
Why Canadian companies stall on export — The knowledge gaps and unfamiliar trade mechanics (bills of lading, Incoterms, getting paid) that quietly kill international ambitions.
Picking the right market — Why the "sexy" developed markets are often the wrong bet, and where real, under-penetrated demand actually hides.
Getting paid across borders — The crucial difference between a buyer's inability and unwillingness to pay, and how AR insurance and documentary credits de-risk it.
Tariffs, diversification, and the future of trade — What CUSMA renegotiation could mean, plus where AI does and doesn't help a still-paper-based industry.
3 Key Insights
Nicola Redi — Why Europe’s Deep Tech Moment Is Just Beginning | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 40
Italy is known for sun, food, and culture. What it isn't known for — and should be — is being one of the top research nations on the planet. Nicola Redi has built his career on closing that gap. As Managing Partner at Obloo Ventures, one of Italy's leading deep tech VC firms, he spends his days translating breakthroughs in AI, quantum, aerospace, and computational science into companies that can actually scale. With nearly three decades spanning venture capital, corporate innovation, and research commercialization — including 15 years inside multinational corporations — Nicola sees the entire pipeline from lab bench to market in a way few investors can.
This isn't just an Italian story. Europe and Canada both produce world-class research, then watch a lot of it get commercialized somewhere else — usually the US. Nicola is direct about why that keeps happening and what would actually have to change to stop it. He's also clear-eyed about where the real money in deep tech will be made next, and how to tell that apart from whatever everyone happens to be hyping this quarter. If you're building, operating, or investing, that filter alone makes this one worth your time.
Key Topics Covered
Italy's hidden research strength — Why a country famous for tourism quietly ranks among the world's top research nations, and how that output is now becoming startups.
The technology-transfer model — How Obloo acts as a bridge between research labs and corporations, functioning almost like a third-party corporate venture arm.
Europe's single-market problem — Why fragmented rules across 27 member states hold back scaling, and what unifying the market would unlock.
The physical AI thesis — Where Nicola believes Europe can win even after losing the initial AI race, and why specificity beats hype.
What founders actually need — The skills, humility, and language scientists must learn to become operators who can build and lead companies.
Key Insights
Technology is a small part of the job. One of Nicola's founders — a top bio-robotics researcher — came back years after launching his company to admit the technology was only about 5% of the work. Market adoption, team-building, and execution are where companies actually win or lose.
Tom Milar — The Infrastructure Behind Startup Ownership | FV Podcast Ep. 39
Tom Milar has spent over a decade building infrastructure for private companies — first through incorporation services out of Hong Kong and Las Vegas, and now through Eqvista, a valuation and equity management platform serving 23,000 startups. After a successful acquisition, Tom took five of his most important team members and set out to fix a problem he kept running into himself: founders were managing ownership and valuation off static PDFs and Excel sheets, working from data that was already months out of date by the time it landed. Eqvista's answer is a real-time valuation engine that now values $4 trillion in assets and gives founders, employees, and investors a live look at what their company is actually worth — like a stock ticker for private companies.
This conversation matters because valuation sits underneath almost every consequential decision a founder makes — raising, hiring, issuing equity, planning an exit — and most founders are working with a number that's stale, opaque, or both. Tom brings a rare combination of product obsession and financial discipline to the table, having bootstrapped Eqvista to scale on roughly half a million dollars rather than chasing rounds. For any founder thinking about their cap table, their next raise, or how to give their team real liquidity, this episode is a clear-eyed look at where private markets are heading.
Key Topics Covered
The problem with PDF valuations — Why the months-long lag between financials and a finished valuation report leaves founders making decisions on outdated numbers.
Real-time valuation at scale — How Eqvista's engine continuously values 20,000+ companies and the data behind a $4 trillion valuation engine.
Controlled tender offers and liquidity — How company-led tender offers let founders set the price and structure liquidity for employees and investors on their own terms.
Bootstrapped, product-led growth — Why a free cap table, paid valuations, and relentless customer support drove scale without heavy fundraising.
The most common cap table mistakes — What early founders get wrong with paid-up capital, adjusted cost base, and overcrowded cap tables.
Mathew Jackson — Building Circular Systems That Scale | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 12
Matthew Jackson is the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Alimentary Systems, a New Zealand company rethinking how the world handles organic waste and sewage. An Edmund Hillary Fellow with a track record of building and scaling high-growth ventures across global markets, Matthew has helped drive billions in market value creation — including bringing Netflix to New Zealand and triggering a wave of industry convergence that reshaped the local media landscape. But what makes this conversation matter isn't the resume. It's the way Matthew thinks about impact, risk, and the responsibility of building something that outlasts you.
This episode switches between two styles, which makes it interesting. First, it honestly tells the personal story of the founder — his childhood, losing his father at 15, studying process philosophy, and the daily habits that help him stay steady during tough times. Then, it explains one of the smartest business ideas we've discussed: a system that turns sewage and industrial waste into fertilizer, energy, and carbon credits, all at a lower cost than landfills. If you want to see what real product-market fit looks like — where investors, cities, residents, and the environment all benefit — this is a good place to start.
Some of the key topics covered in this episode were:
From media changes to climate projects — Matthew's first business helped Netflix start in New Zealand, increased its value by $2.1 billion, and led to a lawsuit that taught him what true commitment costs.
The Alimentary Systems model — Why combining two waste streams into one unlocks five distinct revenue lines and a 2.4x value multiplier over the traditional landfill.
The economics of impact — How the company hits roughly 30% IRR while saving municipalities money and lowering household costs, proving environmental gains and returns aren't a trade-off.
Carbon credits as arbitrage — The four-year effort to get onto compliance markets, and why the same credit can sell for $45 in New Zealand or $127 into the UK.
Founder psychology — Managing ego, mental health, and presence as the real infrastructure behind sustained execution.
Key Insights
Key Insights
Early detection is the key to everything downstream. Catch endometriosis in the first couple of years, and hormone therapy and surgery are far more likely to work; wait, and the disease spreads, recurs, and can close the window to start a family.
The "yellow light" problem is the tell. Plenty of companies tout 90% accuracy while quietly parking 30–50% of patients in an inconclusive bucket — and no insurer pays for a test that can't commit to an answer.
Repurposed drugs may be the fast track to treatment. Because endometriosis is a systemic, inflammatory disease recently linked to some 600 comorbidities, existing drugs with cleared safety profiles — GLP-1s among them — could leap straight toward endometriosis trials.
Links
Milestone Gyno-Mics: https://www.milestonegx.com/
Connect with Greg Miles: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-miles
Scaling with Clarity: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/futureventures-podcast/
About the Guest
Greg Miles is the founder and CEO of Milestone Gyno-Mics, a biotechnology company developing a non-invasive, AI-powered blood diagnostic platform for women's health. One of the first bioinformatics PhDs trained in the United States, he brings more than 15 years of experience across genomics, diagnostics, and artificial intelligence, including a decade at Agilent. His mission is to collapse the years-long diagnostic delay women face for conditions like endometriosis — starting with a single blood test.
Speed beats perfection. Arder deliberately chases a high cadence of smaller, self-funding wins over a 200-page strategy report. The first project pays for the next, so clients carry almost no downside risk.
Reward outcomes, not technologies. When policy picks winners, it distorts the market — cheaper, simpler decarbonization paths lose out to carbon capture on the subsidy structure rather than merit.
Links
Arder Energy — https://www.linkedin.com/company/arder-energy/
Jan Poetsch on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-poetsch-1206791a/
Jan Poetsch is the founder and CEO of Arder Energy. He helps industrial companies and investors turn their energy costs from a regular expense into a strategic advantage. Before starting Arder in 2023, he spent nearly 20 years working in global LNG and energy roles at Shell and PetroChina. He has experience working in Europe, Russia, and Canada on projects like Sakhalin II and LNG Canada. He combines business strategy with hands-on experience in industrial engineering, finance, and operations.
why
AI removes friction and saves time, so buyers will increasingly expect it — but that same automation creates an opening, because the more robotic everything feels, the more people crave doing business with an actual human.
You're always investing in people, not products or technology; resilience forged through real adversity — getting fired, losing deals, persevering anyway — is the trait that most reliably separates great founders from the rest.
Links
Funk Futures: https://www.funkfutures.com/
Jeremy Funk on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfunk
Jeremy Funk is the founder and CEO of Funk Futures, a fractional sales, recruiting, and marketing firm that helps innovative companies — particularly in energy — accelerate sales, recruit top talent, and expand their market presence. A Brandeis University graduate with more than 20 years in technology and energy sales, he's recognized as one of the industry's premier connectors and a trusted advisor to founders and executives. He lives in Boulder County, Colorado, with his wife and three kids, where he's a die-hard Boston sports fan and host of multiple podcasts.
The case for art is strongest when the financial and the personal coexist. Its low connection with other assets makes it a good fit for a modern portfolio, but its lasting value comes from owning something you truly want to keep for ten years or more.
AI will never produce great art, but it has already changed how art is bought. Great art is fundamentally human, so AI struggles to create work with real depth; its true power is synthesizing millions of data points faster than any human, which is exactly where Artscapy applies it.
Emilia de Stasio is the co-founder and COO of Artscapy, a platform that makes it easier for people to buy, manage, finance, and invest in art. She has experience working at the European Central Bank, Moody's, and family offices that invest in alternative assets. Emilia is passionate about collecting art and wants to make the art market more open, understandable, and based on data.
AI rewards people who already know the hard way. The tools are a multiplier on existing expertise and creativity, not a substitute for them, which is why those who learned to do the work the slow way may end up with the biggest advantage.
Links & Resources
Full episode: https://youtu.be/DreXyifEPBs
Dave Guttman — https://www.linkedin.com/in/drguttman/
Export holds up a mirror to your company. Cracks you can hide in a forgiving domestic market — sloppy paperwork, thin processes — get exposed the moment you go global. Build the company to export from the start; don't bolt it on later.
More companies die from growth than from recessions. A $50 million contract can ruin a $10 million business if it can't handle the execution, cover the working capital, or manage the extra staff needed. Selling more doesn't help if you can't deliver—it's a liability, not a success.
The cheapest risk to ignore is the one that ends you. A single unpaid six-figure invoice can take down an otherwise healthy exporter — and quotes for receivables insurance are usually free, so there's little excuse not to price it.
Links & Resources
Connect with Dr. Samir Musayev on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/musayevs/
Global Nomads Podcast (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@TheGlobalNomadsPodcast
Export Development Canada (EDC): https://www.edc.ca/
Dr. Samir Musayev is a Commercial Account Director at Export Development Canada. He helps Canadian companies get funding, reduce risks, and grow into international markets. Originally from Baku, Azerbaijan, now living in Calgary, he has experience in finance and trade, helping businesses expand across borders. He also hosts the Global Nomads podcast, where he talks with entrepreneurs and professionals who are building their lives and businesses around the world.
The real value is in the specifics. The categories everyone's talking about are usually overpriced just because everyone's talking about them. What Nicola actually gets excited about is deep tech aimed at narrow industrial problems — simulating new materials, running predictive maintenance through digital twins, and quantum built for one specific job. That's where the valuation reflects what a company can really do, not just the hype around it.
Government's most powerful lever isn't incentives — it's buying. Nicola argues the biggest shift isn't more grants or funds-of-funds, but governments and corporations acting as launch customers for startups. As competitive pressure rises, the relationship between incumbents and early-stage companies is becoming a matter of survival: either you engage, or you get left behind.
Links & Resources
Obloo Ventures: https://obloo.vc/
Nicola Redi on LinkedIn: https://it.linkedin.com/in/nicolaredi
Nicola Redi is Managing Partner at Obloo Ventures, one of Italy's leading deep tech venture capital firms focused on translating frontier science into scalable companies. He brings nearly three decades of experience across venture capital, corporate innovation, and research commercialization, with deep roots in scientific entrepreneurship and 15 years inside multinational corporations. His work sits at the intersection of advanced research, industrial transformation, and venture creation across AI, quantum computing, aerospace, biotech, and computational science.
Key Insights
Valuation is a byproduct, not the prize. Tom and Maxim align on the idea that a strong valuation flows from belief in the founder, the idea, and the market size — not the other way around. Founders who chase the number rather than the fundamentals are optimizing for the wrong thing.
De-risk before you raise. Tom's view is that founders should build a product that works, reaches real revenue, and approaches profitability before going to investors — so capital becomes fuel for acceleration rather than a bet on whether the business works at all. He's openly skeptical of early-stage bridge rounds as a sign that the original plan stalled.
The story behind the price is the product. What separates a defensible valuation from a guess is the ability to explain why the number is what it is. Eqvista's edge isn't just the figure it produces — it's the pricing narrative built on hundreds of billions in valued assets that auditors and shareholders can actually rely on.
Links
Eqvista: https://eqvista.com/
Tom Milar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasmilar
Tom Milar is the Founder and CEO of Eqvista, a platform for company valuation, equity management, and private-market liquidity serving 23,000 startups. Originally from the Czech Republic, he moved to Asia in 2009 and built incorporation-services businesses before launching Eqvista with a core team carried over from a prior successful exit. He is a product-first founder who scaled the company through bootstrapping, freemium adoption, and a real-time valuation engine that now values $4 trillion in assets.
Being right and being effective are two different things. Matthew argues that when you treat the person across the table as the obstacle, your ego takes over, and progress stalls. Real change comes from meeting people where they are and moving forward together — not winning the argument.
The term "risk-taker" is often misunderstood. What seems like bold risk-taking from the outside is usually careful planning—trying different approaches to reduce risks before making a big move. Matthew knows exactly what his current risks are, how much they cost, and has a clear plan for how to back out if needed.
Capital allocation is the number one risk every company faces. Working on the right things with the wrong people — or pointing capital at the wrong priorities — is what sinks ventures. Helping founders sharpen their capital allocation framework is the highest-leverage support you can offer.
Matthew Jackson is the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Alimentary Systems, where he's building circular waste-to-energy infrastructure across global markets. A four-time founder and Edmund Hillary Fellow, he has helped generate billions in market value, from pioneering media access in New Zealand to advancing climate-positive sanitation technology. He works closely with Indigenous communities on water security and is driven by a single conviction: that the best ventures make an impact and return the same thing.
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