EWOR's Been There, Done That Podcast shares what's missing in the startup ecosystem: real stories from people who've actually built. The raw, unfiltered reality of the journey from 0 to a million ARR, what it takes, and what founders actually did to succeed.
If you're building, thinking about building, or wondering if you have what it takes – this is for you. Hosted by Daniel Dippold, Founder and CEO of EWOR. The EWOR Fellowship supports the top tech founders globally with up to €500,000 and bespoke mentorship by unicorn founders (Adjust, ProGlove, SumUp).
Europe saw a red flag, Silicon Valley saw ambition: How Wiktor Stanislawek is taking on the Frontier Labs with Reactive AI
In this episode, Wiktor Stanislawek, Co-founder and CEO of Reactive AI, tells Daniel Dippold why European VCs called his pitch deck a red flag for naming OpenAI as a competitor, and why the angels he met in San Francisco called it ambition.
Wiktor's team are young founders from Poland who had never worked at an AI lab. YC passed on them twice. EWOR said yes after a one-minute demo: Reactive AI's token count stayed flat as other LLMs kept climbing. When Wiktor approached an OpenAI researcher to join the team, the researcher asked to invest, and the deal closed within 24 hours. The founder of Snowflake and a 5x unicorn founder followed. Now, Wiktor is challenging Silicon Valley's frontier labs from Poland with Reactive AI’s Large Awareness Models.
20 Sept 2026
Achieving Profitability from Day Zero: Chris Fox on Scaling Nimbus AI
In this episode, Chris Fox, serial entrepreneur and Co-founder and CEO of Nimbus, talks with Daniel Dippold about treating profitability from day zero as a repeatable strategy rather than a milestone.
Chris does not start a company until he knows the one channel that will get him to profitability. For Nimbus, that was referrals, and it carried the business to millions in ARR. He explains why the old playbook of raising big and chasing product-market fit for years is gone, why that window has collapsed from 18 months to 30 days, and why he deliberately raised almost nothing when he could have raised far more.
7 Sept 2026
Radical frugality as a superpower, not a sacrifice: Fryderyk Sitnik on building Margin
In this episode, Fryderyk Sitnik, Co-founder and CEO of Margin, talks with Daniel Dippold about the radical frugality that kept his company alive long enough to find the idea that worked.
Fryderyk and his co-founders spent a year iterating and living on €300/month each in the Polish suburbs. Living on low burn meant that turning down money got easier, not harder. The team later said no to a €2M preempt offer over a single term, and to an acquisition offer, because neither fit the scale of what he wants Margin to become.
25 Aug 2026
Bragadeesh Suresh Babu on quitting the safe job to build the ‘impossible’ at Tattvam AI
In this episode, Bragadeesh Suresh Babu, Founder and CEO of Tattvam AI, tells Daniel Dippold why he walked away from a role at Google to build his own startup. He decided the cost of not trying was higher than anything he was giving up, even risking his UK residency to do it.
Getting there took a year of thinking, running simulations, and hiring interns on his own money before the company existed. Now, Bragadeesh is building the intelligence layer for chip design to enable a Cambrian explosion of chips. He also shares why startup success is never luck, and why convincing yourself is harder than convincing any investor or customer.
11 Aug 2026
Investors tried to steal his company 24 hours before he'd lose everything: Moises Barbera Ramos on how CLARO Surgical survived
In this episode, Moises Barbera Ramos, founder of CLARO Surgical, talks with Daniel Dippold about the investors who tried to steal his company. The day before signing, with a government grant on the line and nothing left in his bank account, they sent back a revised term sheet designed to take control from him. He chose to walk away.
What saved the company was a 15-minute conversation at a conference in Spain. From there, Moises shares how he mastered the art of storytelling in his investor updates, why he urges founders to think twice before dropping out of university, and why this Forbes 30 Under 30 honouree believes awards matter far less than the one thing that compounds: your progress.
27 Jul 2026
Restarting Momentum After Heartbreak: Emil Kostadinov on the Power of Community
In this episode, Emil Kostadinov, Co-founder and CEO of ManaMind, tells Daniel Dippold about the hardest weekend of his founder journey. On Friday, he closed the first big check of his round. On Sunday, he found out about his divorce. It completely decommissioned him, right when his fundraise depended on momentum.
What restarted his momentum was community. One EWOR Fellow flew from Zurich to London after Emil told him not to come. Another stayed up with him on the nights he could not sleep. And a single post in the EWOR Community Slack took him from a standstill to 15 hours of investor calls a day.
Emil also shares the three things every founder should get coached on and how eight months of co-founder interviews built the partnership ManaMind runs on today.
14 Jul 2026
Paul Graham told him not to join EWOR, he did anyway: Lukas Koestler on the contrarian bets behind SE3 Labs’ success
In this episode, Lukas Koestler, Co-founder and CEO of SE3 Labs, tells Daniel Dippold why he joined EWOR after Paul Graham called it "intellectually dishonest", and why it turned out to be one of his best decisions yet.He also discloses something he has never shared publicly: the last time he screamed at the top of his lungs. For Lukas, that is not losing control but a system, because bad shit happens all the time as a founder and your body needs an outlet before you can solve the problem. That system got tested mid-fundraise, when a Big Four consultancy called to admit they had failed to submit the tender his round depended on.Additionally, Lukas shares why he turned down Tesla's autopilot team to found a startup in Germany, and how he achieved an oversubscribed pre-seed with Lakestar and Seedcamp in June 2026.
2 Jul 2026
His product was so good it got someone fired: Elias Malm on Epiminds’ journey to finding PMF after a $6.6M Raise
In this episode, Elias Malm, Co-founder and CEO of Epiminds, talks with Daniel Dippold about the craziest Friday of his life: a customer called to say he'd just been fired. That phone call was the moment Elias knew he’d found PMF.
Getting to that moment started with closing the first 15 customers using an animated Figma file and crafting an offer so good it felt stupid to say no to. Following a $6.6M raise with Lightspeed in just 10 weeks, the hard work began: months of shipping 30+ features only to kill a third of them, learning the hard way never to outsource hiring, and quietly rebuilding almost everything while customers kept using the product.
25 May 2026
The co-founder breakup that didn't end the company: Allegro Sprute on getting it right
In this episode, Allegro Sprute, co-founder and CEO of Brio, talks with Petter Made about what it actually takes to lead an AI company as a non-technical CEO, including the moments when the co-founder wants to go in a different direction and every mentor in the room is suggesting something different.
Allegro started selling before the product existed, which led to early customers and enormous pressure to deliver. When the founding team's vision split in two, what followed was one of the rarest outcomes in startups: a co-founder breakup handled so professionally it didn't cost the company a single investor. He also opens up about hiring an engineer when what the company truly needed was a founding engineer, and why the difference matters more than most founders realise. When two people he deeply respected gave him completely opposite advice in the same week, Allegro had to find a third option: his own.
12 May 2026
Finding new ways to get punched in the face: Wael Abdelmalek on GTM failures that shaped Uthereal
In this episode, Wael Abdelmalek, CEO and Co-Founder of Uthereal, gets brutally honest about what it takes to build a technical moat in the AI era – when anyone can ship a competing product over a weekend.
Together with Paul Müller, Wael discusses why vibe coding without understanding the architecture can kill a product at scale, selling before the UX existed, spending $12,000 on sales emails with zero replies, and an enterprise demo that collapsed when a manager handed it to the wrong users without context. Plus the mindset shift that keeps Wael building through guaranteed failures and painful execution – this is not a journey for someone optimizing for happiness.
27 Apr 2026
The $5M US Government contract VCs said wouldn't happen: Ravi Teja Chadalavada on proving them wrong
In this episode, Ravi Teja Chadalavada, Co-founder and CEO of Sapios, talks with Petter Made about his newly-signed $5M US government contract most VCs told him would never happen.
Ravi is a PhD robotics researcher who built the world's first fully automated driving test system – autonomous car technology squeezed into a phone with no examiner required. Getting there meant cold-calling 100+ driving schools to get one yes, then throwing out the entire sales strategy afterward.
It also meant turning down a 3 million Krona grant while unemployed, because accepting it risked losing his most important future customers. When visiting his sister in the US, he drove several hours to the DMV headquarters in Richmond, Virginia for a meeting that got rescheduled 10 minutes before he arrived. Ravi walked in anyway and waited 6 hours in the car park until they could fit him in before his flight back to Stockholm the next day.
That 30-minute meeting turned into a $300,000 pilot, 2+ year partnership, a $5M contract, and 27 states in the pipeline. In this episode, Ravi breaks down every step of how he proved the B2G skeptics wrong.
12 Apr 2026
EU Inc or Delaware C Corp? Bjol Frenkenberger on the decision that defined his $4.2M seed raise
In this episode, Bjol Frenkenberger, co-founder and CEO of Sybilion, talks with Daniel Dippold about the structural decision at the heart of his $4.2M seed raise: whether to wait for EU Inc or flip to Delaware C Corp.
Bjol entered university at 12 and finished with an Oxford PhD on uncertainty and decision-making. He’s now building Sybilion – forecasting infrastructure that turns over a trillion data points into the signals decision-makers need – scaling from $17,500 to $500,000 ARR in twelve months with zero churn and no sales team.
When the seed round came, it forced a decision every European founder building for global markets will eventually face. Bjol makes the case for why EU Inc, however promising, was not ready – and why Delaware's consistency and reputation ultimately won out despite the political climate and the four months of confrontational shareholder negotiations it took to get there. He also opens up about the investor traps most founders only discover too late, and what it actually cost him to close a round while still being the only person selling: an emotional limit he did not see coming.
30 Mar 2026
The good, the bad, and ugly reality of fundraising: Jan Löwer on what the polished press releases leave out
In this episode, Jan Löwer, Co-founder and CEO of deeplify, talks with Daniel Dippold about the unfiltered reality of pre-seed fundraising that never makes it to LinkedIn. Jan is one of the rare founders who successfully transitioned a service business into a product company – but the fundraise that followed was anything but smooth.
2 months after joining EWOR, his CTO became seriously ill and left overnight, forcing Jan back into engineering himself and bringing sales to a complete standstill. Four weeks of back-to-back investor meetings passed before he realised a single framing error had been making the market sound 80 times smaller than it was. Then, in the final week of signing, one investor dropped out having misread the term sheet for months. Jan tells the full story in this episode, every messy step of it.
16 Mar 2026
Am I a psychopath? How Josiah Senu went from crisis mode to investor pitch in 5 minutes to build Africa’s payment infrastructure
In this episode, Josiah Senu, Co-founder and CEO of Zuba, shares the difficult decisions he had to make to go from being a Harvard law prodigy to building the payment infrastructure Africa’s never had. Together with Petter Made, Josiah discusses receiving hate mail after turning down a magic circle barristers' chambers in the UK, a failed business partnership that cost serious time and capital, the psychological whiplash of switching from crisis mode to investor pitch in five minutes, and why optimizing for hiring ‘nice’ people nearly cost him everything. Plus the fundraising insight that changed how Josiah sees the game entirely – there are no rules.
16 Mar 2026
His role models tried to steal his invention: Alfons Huber on losing everything and starting over.
In this episode, Alfons Huber, Co-founder and CEO of REPS, talks with Daniel Dippold about what it actually took to protect his invention when the people he trusted most tried to steal it. Alfons invented energy harvesting technology 200x more efficient than anything on the market, with 90,000 trucks already driving over it at the Port of Hamburg. Getting there meant walking away from his degree after four university professors threatened to destroy his career if he didn't hand over his work. He left to start over in a 20 square meter lab with almost nothing on his bank account, ripped the motor out of his own washing machine to save €5,000 in research costs, and went two weeks without washing his clothes as a result. The people who tried to stop him were his role models. Succeeding required him telling them to fuck off in order to bring his invention to life.
16 Mar 2026
Rejected by SpaceX and EWOR, then accepted by both: Julian Rothenbuchner on persevering through rejection
In this episode, Julian Rothenbuchner, Co-founder and CEO of Tumbleweed, talks with Daniel Dippold about the real cost of rejection before you break through. Julian is a rocket scientist building the infrastructure that could make manufacturing in space as accessible as mailing a package, with a SpaceX partnership to show for it. He opens up about the mental breakdown that followed SpaceX's initial rejection, six co-founder splits including a romantic relationship that didn't survive the pressure, and getting rejected by EWOR twice before finally getting accepted. Getting to yes cost more than anyone saw, and in this episode, Julian doesn't spare the details.
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