Venture portfolio

Building a company worth investing in

AuthorNina Tudor

DateOct 21, 2021

Welcome to Highway to Scale — a podcast in which we explore the ins and outs of business success.

In each episode, we sit down with CEOs, executives and managers from young successful companies. What they have in common is that their companies are making it big on the market. They raised millions in capital and had a massive growth in recent years. We’ll dig deep into their business beginnings, their ups and downs, management styles and how they are able to sustain their growth.

In this blog post, we’ll go over podcast episodes in which we talked to:

Lubomila Jordanova, CEO of Plan A
Mathijs Eefting, CEO of Moteefe
Massimiliano Squillace, CEO of Contents

So, without further ado, let’s get into the episodes!

Episode #4 How to save the planet by building a successful business

Lubomila Jordanova — CEO of Plan A

Lubomila Jordanova is the founder and CEO of PlanA.Earth, a Berlin-based startup developing an end-to-end platform that enables companies to measure, monitor and reduce their environmental footprint and improve their ESG performance. She is also the co-founder of the Greentech Alliance, a community of 500+ startups that are connected to over 350+ advisors from VC, media and business, who help them monthly with advice and feedback. She was recently announced as Marshall Fund Fellow for 2021 and 100 Top Women in Germany 2020.

Plan A — Software as a Service company that started as a donation platform recently got a 3 million dollar investment which enabled them to start expanding their operations on a much bigger scale.

Be humble as a CEO. Don’t let your ego distract you from achieving the full potential with your company.

— Lubomila Jordanova, CEO of Plan A

In this podcast, Lubomila will tell us more about what it takes to pivot the company in the way she did with Plan A, what are the benefits of embracing sustainability and why is it important for CEOs to be humble.

Listen to the podcast here!

Episode #5 Why is on-demand the future of merchandising

Mathijs Eefting — CEO of Moteefe

Mathijs founded Moteefe in 2014, after finishing his MBA in Business Management. Before embarking on this adventure with Lev and Olivier, the other two co-founders of Moteefe, Mathijs worked at Booz & Company, in his home country – the Netherlands.

Moteefe has raised more than 25 million dollars over the years and with more than 5000 retailers on the platform, they are now spearheading the global adoption of on-demand production in retail. Their mission is simple: they aim to remove all barriers and enable entrepreneurs, brands and influencers to test and scale new product ideas and e-commerce businesses faster and further than ever before by digitalizing traditional print environments stimulating the global adoption of print-on-demand.

Provide your users with top customer support. That’s the difference between exceptional and good companies.

— Mathijs Eefting, CEO of Moteefe

In this podcast, Mathijs will tell us more about the importance of looking at your customers as partners, and why building a business always revolves around testing and learning.

Listen to the podcast here!

Episode #6 What lies behind 5 exits & 50+ successful investments

Massimiliano Squillace — CEO of Contents

Massimiliano Squillace is a serial entrepreneur, who made 5 exits, one of which in the world of digital publishing: Nano Publishing — sold to Excite Populis. He is also the author of the bestseller Successful Startups. He is one of the few Italians who appeared on Forbes and Fortune. He has invested in more than 50 companies and is CEO of one of them.

His company — Contents is a tech marketing company that has developed a proprietary software platform that allows its users, through its advanced data analysis and machine learning algorithms, to rapidly produce digital content on various topics and in a variety of languages, without compromising quality. The platform integrates modules for the analysis of online trends and competitors, for tracking user behavior and thus powers Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Generation modules for the generation of AI-based content.

Don’t get so attached to your ideas that they prevent you from making changes and improvements.

— Massimiliano Squillace, CEO of Contents

In this podcast, Massimiliano will tell us about the mindset of following his own instincts, what investors are focused on when they’re looking to invest in a new company, and what it takes to successfully build and sell multiple companies.

Listen to the podcast here!