Future Ventures: Scaling with Clarity

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Most founders are taught to follow proven playbooks, adopt best practices, and compete for the resources they need to grow. But what if those same approaches are preventing them from building truly valuable businesses? In this episode of Scaling with Clarity, Maxim Atanassov sits down with Jeff Spence, Founder of WithFuel and author of Unconstrained: Fueling Opportunities & Unsucking Your Business, to challenge conventional thinking about growth, capital, competition, and enterprise value. 

Drawing on more than three decades of experience working with over 400 leadership teams across 100 countries, Jeff a...

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Kevin Ertell is the founder of Mistere Advisory and author of The Strategy Trap, bringing more than 30 years of leadership experience across companies including Nike, Borders, Tower Records, and other major brands. Throughout his career, he has seen organizations invest heavily in developing ambitious strategies, only to struggle when it comes time to execute them. His central argument is that strategy and execution cannot be treated as separate activities. A strategy that has not been designed for execution is already at risk of failure. 

In this episode of Scaling with Clarity, K...

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Salvatore Manzi is a leadership communications coach, speaker, and author who helps founders and executives communicate with clarity, confidence, and influence. With more than 20 years of experience coaching leaders, including Y Combinator founders and executives in technical fields, Salvatore specializes in helping analytical, data-driven thinkers connect with their audiences. His book, Clear and Compelling, explores how leaders can translate complex ideas into messages that resonate, build trust, and inspire action. 

This conversation looks at why communication becomes such a big leadership challenge as a company grows. What works for five employees m...

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Mark Francis has spent nearly two decades working at the intersection of executive search, entrepreneurship, fintech, and HR technology across Asia-Pacific. As CEO of Preferrd, he is now applying that experience to a fundamental problem for scaling companies: how to find the right people, assess them well, and build teams that can grow without losing the trust, judgment, and culture that made the company work in the first place. 

This conversation goes well beyond recruitment. Mark and Maxim explore what happens as a founder-led business moves from its first tightly aligned g...

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Dave Irvine, known as The Leader’s Navigator, has spent decades helping leaders understand a deceptively simple idea: leadership is not primarily about title, authority, or technique. It starts with who you are. His work focuses on authenticity, self-awareness, trust, accountability, and the inner work required to lead others with clarity and conviction. 

For founders, that conversation becomes especially important as a company scales. Growth changes the business, but it also changes what the founder is being asked to become. In this deeply personal conversation, Dave and Maxim explore the...

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Jae Hwang is the co-founder of Former, where he is challenging a deeply embedded assumption in venture capital: that the best founders are young, technical, and built for hypergrowth at all costs. His own career followed a different path. Jae began in brand consulting and strategy in New York, worked across North America, Asia, and the Middle East, and eventually became a Chief Strategy Officer within a Dubai government asset management organization, gaining firsthand exposure to strategy, operations, venture capital, private equity, and large-scale economic development. 

This conversation matters b...

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Linda Carlisle founded Comm-ext and is a certified change management professional. Her work focuses on communication, culture, and organizational change. With years of experience, she has helped organizations through growth, transformation, mergers and acquisitions, workforce changes, and other important moments when leadership communication can build trust or slowly wear it down. Her view is simple: communication is not just what leaders say. It is how people experience strategy, change, and culture as the organization grows and evolves. 

When a company is small, communication is usually easy. The founder is ea...

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Manuj Aggarwal is the founder of TetraNoodle Technologies, a technologist and entrepreneur with nearly three decades of experience across technology and artificial intelligence. His path has been anything but conventional: from learning to program on early computers after dropping out of college, to working with companies including Microsoft, IBM, and T-Mobile, earning four AI patents, and eventually combining technology with neuroscience, psychology, meditation, and human performance. That combination has shaped how he thinks about a problem every founder eventually faces: how do you continue growing when the person who built the company becomes...

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James Chalmers is the CEO of NovoPower, a Canadian deep-tech company developing systems that convert low-temperature waste heat into usable electricity. A five-time CEO with experience supporting more than 1,500 startups and 2,800 products, James has spent his career working alongside engineering teams to move complex technologies from research and development into commercial markets. 

This conversation matters because energy demand is rising faster than grids and new generation capacity can be built. James and Maxim examine how industrial companies can recover more value from energy they already consume—and what founders must do to...

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Peter Boolkah, known as “The Transition Guy,” is a business coach who helps founders build companies that can grow without remaining permanently dependent on them. After starting at McDonald’s at 16 and spending 15 years inside one of the world’s most disciplined operating systems, Peter moved into entrepreneurship and discovered how rare that level of structure was in founder-led businesses. For more than two decades, he has helped owners strengthen leadership, install operational discipline, and prepare their companies to scale, step back, or eventually exit. 

This conversation looks at why founders often end...

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Shane Wilson is Managing Partner at Citta Capital, where he focuses on early-stage investing and helping build companies, especially in B2B AI, deep technology, and robotics. He started his career in go-to-market roles at New York startups, where he learned how sales, marketing, and product need to work together for a company to grow. Today, he brings that operator’s perspective to venture investing, helping portfolio companies shape their strategies, systems, and business models for an AI-driven market. 

This conversation matters because AI is changing more than how software gets bui...

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Peter Dorfner is a Partner at Green Generation Fund (GGF), a Berlin-based venture capital firm investing in early-stage companies across agri-food and energy technology. He helped launch the fund in 2021 after years of investing in food and consumer innovation, bringing experience from both corporate venture capital and specialist investing. Since then, GGF’s thesis has evolved from consumer-led climate trends toward the technologies, infrastructure, and business models that can make food and energy systems more efficient, reliable, and commercially viable. 

This conversation shows that deep-tech founders need more than great science to...

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Boris Besner is the Founder and CEO of Okos AI, a technology-enabled field services company built to deliver security and low-voltage installations across distributed physical locations. What began as a smart-home and energy-efficiency business evolved into an enterprise deployment platform that now coordinates hundreds of certified technicians and has supported the installation of more than 60,000 devices across North America and parts of Europe. 

This conversation shows that having a strong product is not enough — companies also need a reliable way to deliver it in the real world. Boris and Maxim talk abo...

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Etinosa Agbonlahor is a behavioral economist and the CEO of Decision Alpha, where she helps companies make sharper decisions about pricing, customer value, and growth. Her work sits at the intersection of economics, psychology, and commercial strategy—an important combination for founders trying to understand not only what customers say they want, but how they actually choose, compare, hesitate, and buy. 

Pricing is about more than just numbers. It affects profit, how customers see the product, trust, product design, and whether a company can stay healthy. Etinosa and Maxim explain why fou...

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Dr. Nisha Kohli is the Founder and CEO of Corpstage, a chartered accountant, and a corporate governance specialist with a PhD focused on the relationship between governance and company valuation. For more than two decades, she has worked across finance, governance, sustainability, risk, and technology, helping organizations move beyond policies and disclosures towards systems that influence how the business is actually managed. 

This conversation matters because ESG often gets stuck between two extremes: it is either treated like a reporting task or dismissed as an added cost. Nisha and Maxim take a...

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Craig Taggart is a Venture Partner at Qubits Ventures, where he works at the intersection of venture capital, family office capital, and emerging technologies moving from scientific research into commercial markets. His background spans UBS, investment banking, wealth management, capital advisory, and venture-backed technology and healthcare companies — experience that gives him a practical lens on a sector often dominated by technical theory. 

This conversation matters because quantum is starting to run into real business needs. Traditional computing is reaching physical and energy limits, cyber systems are preparing for post-quantum threats, and AI...

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Dr. Lyle Oberg is a physician, former Alberta Cabinet Minister, former board chair of Alberta Health Services, and now CEO and Chief Medical Officer of Exocellular Diagnostics Inc. He has worked across medicine, public policy, healthcare leadership, and biotechnology, giving him a unique perspective on what it really takes to turn a promising health innovation into patient care. 

This conversation is about more than cancer detection as a medical issue. It is also about systems, costs, adoption, and how healthcare dollars are spent. Lyle and Maxim talk about whether a blood t...

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Steve Walsh is the founder of Bison International Group and the author of Make the 10X Leap. He has spent decades around entrepreneurship, capital, private equity, and business building, helping founders answer one of the hardest questions in scaling: is the company actually built to grow, attract capital, and survive beyond the founder? 

This conversation matters because many founders want growth, but not every business is ready for it. Steve and Maxim unpack what separates a company that is simply busy from one that is truly scalable: founder mindset, smart capital, c...

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Emanuele Pizzatti is the Founding Partner of Futurewave AG, a Switzerland-based investment and advisory platform focused on private markets, asset management, and cross-border capital opportunities. Futurewave operates across a highly connected network that includes Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Malta, and Saudi Arabia, with a model built around flexibility, trust, and access rather than a traditional fund-only structure. 

This conversation matters because private markets are changing. The old venture model — raise a fund, chase power-law outcomes, wait ten years, hope for liquidity — no longer fits every investor, founder, or market cycle. Maxim and Emanuele explo...

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Yarin Gaon is the Managing Partner of Fractional Partners, a growth advisory firm built for post-product-market-fit companies that are not yet ready to scale cleanly. He is an entrepreneur-turned-investor who started building companies as a teenager, created and sold Israel’s largest e-commerce platform for military goods, and later worked with hundreds of founders through a venture capital firm. 

This conversation is important because most companies making between $1 million and $20 million don’t go under due to market issues. Instead, they often fail because they become too complicated, the founder keeps sayin...

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Joerg Erlemeier is the cofounder and COO of QUCOXX, a platform powered by AI that helps small and medium businesses improve their operations, sales, and finances. With over 30 years of experience working in big organizations, during times of change, and in consulting, Joerg decided to start his own business. He believes that small and medium-sized enterprises form the backbone of the economy, but they often don’t have the same strategic guidance, tools, or support to execute their plans as big companies do. 

This conversation is important because growth isn’t just...

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Esra Kaygin is the founder and CEO of Hirize, an AI company building infrastructure for how organizations process, understand, and structure document-based data. Before Hirize, Esra worked as a headhunter, built and exited an early AI scheduling tool, and spent seven years on the venture capital side investing across marketplaces, fintech, deep tech, semiconductors, lab-grown diamonds, and defense. She brings the rare founder-investor perspective: she has seen the startup game from both sides of the table, and she is now back in the arena building again. 

This conversation is important because A...

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Alan McLaren is the co-founder of Strata Originals, where he helps CEOs, founders, and executive teams understand one of the most overlooked forces in leadership: how they are actually experienced by other people. His work sits at the intersection of leadership, storytelling, trust, brand, and high-stakes communication. In these rooms, investors, boards, teams, and buyers often make decisions before anyone says the quiet part out loud. 

This conversation is important because most leaders think they're judged by their strategy, intelligence, or words. Alan explains that people can often tell who you a...

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In a moment where everyone is racing to build with AI, Dennis Bruce is the voice telling founders to slow down enough to know where they're going. With more than three decades navigating large-scale technology transformations — from integrating minicomputers and mainframes at the UN in the 1980s, to rebuilding the privatized Entel (now Telecom Argentina) during Latin America's privatization wave, to turnarounds across airports, retail, and property management — Dennis has seen every flavor of ambitious tech project. In 2007, he founded Tangonet Solutions, which today collaborates with 200+ technology professionals across the Americas, pair...

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Damian Roller is a Partner at Inovexus, a community-backed founders club that invests in and supports early-stage European startups across the DACH region — Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Before backing founders, he was one: born in Poland, raised in Germany, he built and sold an e-commerce company at university, spent a couple of years day trading and in real estate, then joined the founding team of a Munich B2B SaaS company in 2016. Eight years, one pandemic, and one exit later, he came out the other side with a hard-won operator's view of what sc...

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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...

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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. 

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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...

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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 buil...

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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 p...

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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 reg...

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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. 

T...

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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 benc...

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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 en...

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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 th...

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Stanley Wei is the Founder and CEO of Pine AI, an autonomous agent platform that doesn't just answer questions — it picks up the phone, fills out the forms, and gets things done on behalf of consumers. Pine negotiates bills, cancels subscriptions, files complaints, resolves disputes, and navigates insurance claims autonomously. Before launching Pine, Stanley held leadership roles at Gore and invested in AI through Hillhouse Capital, watching the space evolve from the early deep learning era through the DALL-E inflection point that convinced him AGI was no longer a question of if, but wh...

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Stan Christiaens is the Cofounder and Chief Data Citizen of Collibra, one of the companies that helped define the modern data governance category. What began in 2008 as a spinoff from a semantics research lab at the Free University of Brussels has grown into a global platform used by some of the world's largest enterprises to manage data trust, lineage, governance, and increasingly, AI oversight. Eighteen years in, Stan has a vantage point most operators do not — he has watched governance get sidelined every 5 to 10 years by the next shiny technology, and he has wa...

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While most of Silicon Valley argues over whether SaaS is dead, Neeraj Singh is quietly running the experiment that might answer the question. He's the founder and CEO of BigBinary, a 15-year-old remote-first software consultancy, and Neeto, a growing suite of affordable alternatives to the bloated enterprise tools founders begrudgingly pay for every month. NeetoCal goes head-to-head with Calendly at $30 a year — less than a single month of the competition. NeetoSign takes on DocuSign. NeetoForm takes on Typeform. The product list keeps growing, and the marketing budget stays at zero. 

This con...

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Hubertus Hofkirchner has spent four decades operating at the intersection of trade finance, technology, and monetary theory. He started his career at Citibank International in Vienna, designed a securities system that rolled out across smaller city banks throughout Europe, and later served as Director at Kreditanstalt Investment Bank. As a serial entrepreneur, he built one of the first online brokerages for Central and Eastern Europe, founded what he believes was the first true options exchange (sold to a British bank in 2008), and famously took over Austrian telecom operator Telering as a loss-making vehicle...

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Dave Hertig has spent his career watching CEOs up close — first as a business journalist who interviewed more than 100 of them for UBS alone, then as the founder of Boom, where he now focuses on CEO performance under pressure. Along the way, he developed a conviction that became the spine of his work: the people the rest of the company looks up to have blind spots like everyone else, but those blind spots carry outsized consequences. Get the CEO right and the whole system compounds. Get it wrong, and no strategy, market, or pr...