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.
Julian Rothenbuchner, co-founder and CEO of Tumbleweed, is back for a second episode of Been There, Done That. Since his first episode, he has launched to space for under €500K and closed a $7.7M seed round. Together with Daniel Dippold, he opens up about the week the raise nearly fell apart.
After the EWOR Grand Pitch in March 2026, Julian was taking up to 15 investor calls a day and the round was soon oversubscribed. Then, as signing approached, the lead slowed and the goalposts kept moving. Julian decided to kick them out, and he and Daniel started meeting at 4:35am each morning while at the EWOR San Francisco Residency to find someone new. Within a week, an investor who had never intended to lead stepped in.
In this episode, Nico Dehandschoewercker, Co-founder and CEO of minitap, tells Daniel Dippold why founders chasing product-market fit shouldn't reinvent the wheel. He learned it the hard way, after trying to find PMF his own way cost him months building products no one wanted. Once he and his co-founder Luke switched to design thinking, they found the solution within days. Today, apps used by millions are tested by Mini, minitap’s AI quality assurance co-worker.
The raise followed the same logic. Nico spoke to over 100 funds for an oversubscribed $4.1M round and logged every rejection in a Notion database, sorted by "bullshit" and "not bullshit". Every rejection that held up went straight into fixing the business.
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.
