Startseite Podcasts Beginner's Mind
Beginner's Mind

Beginner's Mind

Christian Soschner 226 Folgen Aug 30, 2026

Beginner’s Mind, hosted by Christian Soschner, is a deep-tech podcast exploring the frameworks and leadership principles behind impactful companies, from pre-seed to post-IPO. It features interviews with founders and investors, strategic book reviews, and lessons drawn from business, military, and political history. The show focuses especially on deep tech, biotech, AI, and climate tech, examining how breakthrough science can scale from lab to IPO. Soschner brings decades of experience in M&A, company building, and board roles, along with perspectives from ultrarunning and martial arts.

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#181 - When Things Fall Apart: 3 Lessons from Ben Horowitz on Leading Through the Struggle (Part 1 of 2)
#181 - When Things Fall Apart: 3 Lessons from Ben Horowitz on Leading Through the Struggle (Part 1 of 2) Aug 30, 2026 2953 What do you do on the morning when there are no good moves left?In March 2001, Ben Horowitz took Loudcloud public in the middle of the dot-com collapse. The bankers cut the price from ten dollars a share to six in the week of the offering. The day before the deal, Yahoo announced its chief executive was stepping down. Neither of the two banks that took the company public offered the traditional cl
EP 180: Eric Ries | Why Good Companies Go Bad After Success
EP 180: Eric Ries | Why Good Companies Go Bad After Success Aug 3, 2026 3821 What happens when the moment a company finally succeeds is the moment it becomes most likely to be destroyed? Most founders assume the market rewards the better product and protects what they built. The legal reality runs the other way. The dominant theory of the corporation treats a company as a financial instrument designed to enrich its shareholders, and treats everything else as optional.That
EP 179: Joško Bobanović | Why Venture Capital Fights Human Instinct
EP 179: Joško Bobanović | Why Venture Capital Fights Human Instinct Jul 25, 2026 8340 What happens when the instinct to help a struggling company is exactly what prevents the strongest companies from succeeding? Venture capital forces investors to make decisions that can feel deeply uncomfortable: stop rescuing the weakest, concentrate scarce capital behind the most promising, and accept that most investments will fail.Deep tech intensifies this conflict. Investors must commit capi
#178 - The Elon Musk Method: 7 Rules for Building What the Market Thinks Is Impossible
#178 - The Elon Musk Method: 7 Rules for Building What the Market Thinks Is Impossible Jul 12, 2026 3371 How can a company have the right numbers and still reach the wrong strategic conclusion?In 2017, Volkswagen’s chief executive mocked Tesla as one of the “world champions of big announcements.” At the time, Volkswagen sold roughly eleven million cars a year, while Tesla sold fewer than eighty thousand. The facts supported the criticism, but the conclusion missed the change already underway.That mom
EP 177: Alberto Chalon | Liquidity Before the IPO Window Opens
EP 177: Alberto Chalon | Liquidity Before the IPO Window Opens Jun 22, 2026 6232 Private companies are staying private longer, and that changes who gets liquidity, when, and why.Founders, employees, and early investors can wait a decade or more for an IPO or acquisition. Meanwhile, venture funds face growing pressure to return capital, and many of Europe's best companies struggle to access the growth capital needed to scale.In this conversation, Christian Soschner speaks
Alasdair Milton, KPMG | Why Precision Medicine Still Fails Patients (SPARK20 – 168)
Alasdair Milton, KPMG | Why Precision Medicine Still Fails Patients (SPARK20 – 168) Mai 25, 2026 1542 Only one in three eligible lung cancer patients receives the targeted therapy they should get.That is not a failure of science.It is a failure of delivery.After more than two decades of precision oncology, biopharma has never had better tools: cell and gene therapy, in vivo CAR-T, antibody-drug conjugates, AI-enabled diagnostics, organoids, multi-omics, and global clinical data.Yet too many breakt
#176 - Why Smart People Say Yes: 7 Lessons from Influence by Robert Cialdini
#176 - Why Smart People Say Yes: 7 Lessons from Influence by Robert Cialdini Mai 17, 2026 3618 Some books explain how the world works.Influence explains why people move.Why someone takes the meeting.Why an investor leans in.Why a customer trusts.Why a team follows.Why a board stays stuck.Why a founder keeps defending a decision that stopped making sense months ago.Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is one of those books that becomes more valuable the longer you build,
EP 175: Stefanie Schubert | Why Smart People Lose Negotiations Before They Start
EP 175: Stefanie Schubert | Why Smart People Lose Negotiations Before They Start Apr 25, 2026 6997 Most leaders think negotiation begins when both sides sit down to talk numbers. By then, trust, incentives, timing, internal alignment, and first impressions have already shaped the outcome. That is why smart founders, executives, investors, and board members can have the right facts and still walk away with the wrong result.In this episode of Beginner’s Mind, Stefanie Schubert explains why negoti
EP 174: Wanwipa Siriwatwechakul | Funding the Next Industrial Era
EP 174: Wanwipa Siriwatwechakul | Funding the Next Industrial Era Apr 11, 2026 7501 Most people still treat climate solutions as a cost.Wanwipa Siriwatwechakul argues that this is exactly why so many leaders miss the real opportunity.The next industrial era will not be built by patching old systems, but by redesigning them from the ground up.In this episode of Beginner’s Mind, Wanwipa explains why industrial decarbonization is not mainly about sacrifice, compliance, or adding exp
EP 173: Bret Kugelmass | The West Bet on the Wrong Energy Future
EP 173: Bret Kugelmass | The West Bet on the Wrong Energy Future Mär 28, 2026 3812 Power demand is rising faster than the systems meant to support it.AI, electrification, and industry all need stable energy, but the dominant story sold to the public was far simpler than reality. In this episode, Bret Kugelmass explains why the real bottleneck was never just climate ambition, but how the West misunderstood energy itself.For years, nuclear was framed as too dangerous, too slow, to
#172 - Fast Forward Thinking: Why Most Investments Fail — And How Elite VCs Think Differently
#172 - Fast Forward Thinking: Why Most Investments Fail — And How Elite VCs Think Differently Mär 8, 2026 3597 Most investors think they’re rational.Most founders think they’re disciplined.Most boards think they’re strategic.They’re usually wrong.In this episode, we unpack Fast Forward Thinking by Luis Pareras — a physician turned deep-tech venture capitalist who distilled decades of investing under scientific uncertainty into 40 brutally structured rules.This is not a summary.It’s a decision upgrade for f
EP 171 - Björn Cochlovius: Why Brilliant Biotech Breaks at Manufacturing
EP 171 - Björn Cochlovius: Why Brilliant Biotech Breaks at Manufacturing Feb 3, 2026 3989 Most biotech breakthroughs don’t fail in the lab.They fail when science meets manufacturing reality.And by the time this bottleneck appears, tens of millions are already sunk.This episode examines the most under-discussed failure point in modern biotech: the gap between scientific discovery and scalable, usable healthcare solutions.While science has never been stronger—and big pharma excels at mar

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