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.
In this episode, Chris Fox, serial entrepreneur and Co-founder and CEO of Nimbus, talks with Daniel Dippold about treating profitability from day one 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.
