Beginner's Mind

Blueprints for Builders and Investors Hosted by Christian Soschner From pre-seed to post-IPO, every company—especially in deep tech, biotech, AI, and climate tech —lives or dies by the frameworks it follows. On Beginner’s Mind, Christian Soschner uncovers the leadership principles behind the world’s most impactful companies—through deep-dive interviews, strategic book reviews, and patterns drawn from history’s greatest business, military, and political minds. With over 250 interviews, panels, and livestreams, the show ranks in the Top 10% globally—and is recognized as the #1 deep tech podcast. With 35+ years across M&A, company building, board roles, business schools, ultrarunning, and martial arts, Christian brings a rare lens: What it really takes to turn breakthrough science into business—how to grow it, lead it, and shape the world around it.

Beginner's Mind is a business podcast hosted by Christian Soschner, with 227 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Christian Soschner hosts Beginner's Mind, a business show with 227 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #16

  EP 183: Marie Schroeder | Send the Rough Deck, Not the Perfect One

  Sep 27, 20262h 6mS7

  A seed investor at Novo Holdings would rather read your rough idea than your finished pitch deck. Most founders spend a year building the deck, forming the team and waiting until the story holds together. By the time it is ready the science has moved, the money has gone somewhere else, and nobody told them the fund they were preparing for creates companies out of raw material. Marie Schroeder is a Principal on the Seed Investments team at Novo Holdings, the investment company owned by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Before that she spent five years at Novo Nordisk in cardiovascular drug development. Before that, a doctorate at Oxford and research work in Toronto. Beginning with what a seed investor watches at the start of a year, the conversation becomes a practical guide to building and funding early biotech: the question her chief scientific officer put to every project until it hurt, what to do in the first hour after a negative readout, why the founder who discovered the science is often the wrong person to run the company, and how her team tracked one Swedish heart failure company for three years before a single risk cleared and the money moved. WHAT LISTENERS CAN EXPECT TO LEARN Why defining what good looks like before the experiment runs decides whether a failed program gets funded twice How to break a plan into killer experiments so each tranche of money buys one specific answer What a board wants to hear on the day something fails, and how early it wants to hear it Why team quality beats science quality in early biotech, argued on commercial grounds What a seed fund actually wants in a cold approach, and why a rejection is usually about timing BEST QUOTES (00:14:09) "Defining what good looks like before you start the experiment is absolutely paramount." (00:22:42) "The target failing is one of maybe five things that could have gone wrong." (00:52:36) "He only has time to give the negative feedback. Every other paragraph was good." (01:15:58) "You can have great science, and if you don't have the right team, it will fail." (01:35:47) "I would rather somebody send a rough concept than spend half their life making a pitch deck." TIMESTAMPS THE YEAR AHEAD (00:00:00) Intro (00:02:35) What is on top of a seed investor's mind this year (00:05:43) The muscle loss problem inside the obesity story RESILIENCE AND FAILURE (00:10:45) What resilience means to a biotech investor (00:14:09) What does good look like, the question behind every project (00:18:42) Killer experiments and what has to be true next (00:22:03) The first hour after a negative readout (00:27:19) Learning resilience without joining Special Forces FEEDBACK, BOUNDARIES AND BAD NEWS (00:45:52) Compromise, burnout and anger out of proportion (00:51:18) The Oxford professor who wrote nonsense on the draft (00:57:25) Jensen Huang, no firings and torture them to greatness FROM OXFORD TO NOVO HOLDINGS (01:02:15) Academics are the true scientists, the belief she dropped (01:07:51) Novo Nordisk, Novo Holdings and the foundation explained (01:12:26) Two lessons from five years inside Novo Nordisk WHO BUILDS THE COMPANY (01:15:49) Why diverse teams are non-negotiable in biotech (01:21:31) Why the scientific founder should not be CEO GETTING FUNDED (01:33:54) The minimum a cold pitch deck needs (01:39:55) The company they watched for three years (01:50:46) Venture capital as a self-fulfilling prophecy WHAT COMES NEXT (01:55:13) Two directions pharma has to run at once (02:01:28) Closing thoughts Marie Schroeder at Novo Holdings: https://novoholdings.dk/people/marie-schroeder Newsletter: https://lsg2g.substack.com/ Follow Beginner's Mind for long-form conversations on leadership, capital, technology, and the people shaping what comes next. Ranked in the global top 10% of all podcasts, named #1 Deep Tech Podcast in 2025 , and #8 Deep Tech Podcast in 2026 Send us Fan Mail Join Christian Soschner for expert coaching. 50% Off - With 35+ years in deep tech, startups/scaleups, and public companies, Christian offers power video sessions. Elevate strategy, execution, and leadership. Book Now. Support the show Join the Podcast Newsletter: Link

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  Episode #15

  #182 - How to Lead When You Don't Know Where You Are Going: 4 Lessons from Ben Horowitz (Part 2 of 2)

  Sep 8, 202658 minS7

  What does it mean when the most respected adviser in Silicon Valley tells you that you are the best chief executive he works with, while your company is heading straight into a wall? Bill Campbell said exactly that to Ben Horowitz. Campbell was advising Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt at the time, so Horowitz assumed the compliment was absurd. Campbell explained himself: there are plenty of good peacetime chief executives and plenty of good wartime ones, and almost nobody who can do both. Horowitz's own accounting of his career: peacetime chief executive for three days, wartime chief executive for eight years. This is the second half of a review of The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Part one covered how to survive the worst weeks. This half is about the job itself, and the way it changes underneath you while you are busy doing it. [ AFFILIATE LINK TO THE BOOK ] Four lessons, and two places where I part company with the book. Wartime CEO, peacetime CEO. Two situations that reward opposite behaviour, and the sixteen contrasts Horowitz draws between them. My first disagreement: his wartime leader is loud, and the ones I have watched save companies are calm, well dressed and listening. Volume is not decisiveness, and a generation of founders read that list and concluded otherwise. My second: Horowitz treats wartime as an episode. In deep tech and life science it is the standing condition, for decades. Moderna, BioNTech and Katalin Karikó are the evidence, and the numbers are in the episode. Ones and Twos. The chief executive's job splits into knowing what to do and getting the company to do it, and founders reliably come apart on the second one. Where I push back: at scale, the first skill is not knowing the answers. It is judging who has them, and holding one story that points a hundred expert answers in the same direction. Horowitz's own book says so in two passages he files under a different heading. Why the impressive senior hire produces nothing. Three new initiatives a quarter in a large company. Eight to ten a day in a small one. Rhythm mismatch, skill mismatch, the three interview questions that expose both, and what Berkshire Hathaway did when it faced the biggest succession in modern corporate history. Look for a market of one. Thirty investors say no and one says yes, and the round is closed. Why most of those thirty were never a judgment about your company, how to tell a fit rejection from a real one, and the discipline that keeps this from becoming permission to stop listening. This is a practical review for founders, chief executives, board members, investors and senior executives who build or finance hard companies, particularly in deep tech and life sciences. Part one is the previous episode, and it stands on its own if you want to start there. Chapters (00:00) Introduction: Two Chief Executives, Two Different Jobs (01:30) Lesson 4: Wartime CEO, Peacetime CEO, and Why Running the Wrong One Kills Companies (16:38) Lesson 5: Ones and Twos, and the Half of the Job Founders Get Wrong (28:26) Lesson 6: Why the Impressive Hire From the Big Company Produces Nothing (40:26) Lesson 7: Look for a Market of One, and What a Rejection Really Means (50:16) Key Takeaways and Wrap Up Follow Beginner's Mind for long-form conversations on leadership, capital, technology, and the people shaping what comes next. Ranked in the global top 10% of all podcasts, named #1 Deep Tech Podcast in 2025 , and #8 Deep Tech Podcast in 2026 Send us Fan Mail Join Christian Soschner for expert coaching. 50% Off - With 35+ years in deep tech, startups/scaleups, and public companies, Christian offers power video sessions. Elevate strategy, execution, and leadership. Book Now. Support the show Join the Podcast Newsletter: Link

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  Episode #14

  #181 - When Things Fall Apart: 3 Lessons from Ben Horowitz on Leading Through the Struggle (Part 1 of 2)

  Aug 30, 202649 minS7

  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 closing dinner. On the plane home, Horowitz turned to his director of finance and said they had done it. The reply was that the company was still in very serious trouble. He was right. What followed was a share price of thirty-five cents, three rounds of layoffs, four hundred people gone, and business magazines running cover stories on the collapse. Six years later the same company sold to Hewlett-Packard for 1.6 billion dollars. The distance between those two moments is The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and it is the rare book about building companies written from inside repeated near-death rather than reconstructed afterwards from the winner's chair. [AFFILIATE LINK TO THE BOOK] Horowitz opens by attacking the genre he is writing in. Most management books offer a recipe. He argues that the situations which decide a company have no recipe, and that hunting for one is itself the failure. He then organises the book around that claim, putting the endgame material first, and explains the choice by quoting the first principle of the Bushido: keep death in mind at all times. Part one of this review covers the three lessons that belong together. The Struggle. Horowitz names the psychological state every founder recognises and almost nobody describes out loud, and then refuses to sell a way out of it. What he offers instead is a set of survival habits and one instruction: find the move. CEOs should tell it like it is. Shielding a team from bad news feels like leadership and works like sabotage. Trust is communication bandwidth. A brain cannot solve a problem it does not know about. And a healthy culture is one where bad news travels faster than good news. Lay people off yourself. The hardest act in the book, executed as a written procedure rather than improvised on the day. Why the manager has to do it rather than HR, why a layoff and a performance firing are two different acts that companies constantly blur, and why the message is always for the people who stay. Along the way: what Jensen Huang at Nvidia and Roland Busch at Siemens have in common, why Dale Carnegie's most famous principle has aged into something he never intended, and where Reed Hastings and Ben Horowitz disagree about what you owe the person you are letting go. This is a practical review for founders, CEOs, board members, investors and senior executives who build or finance hard companies, particularly in deep tech and life sciences, where the conditions Horowitz calls wartime are the default rather than the exception. Part two covers the remaining four lessons: wartime and peacetime leadership, the two halves of the chief executive's job and the half where founders reliably come apart, why the impressive executive you hire out of a large company so often produces nothing, and the rule about raising money that changes what a rejection means. Chapters (00:00) Introduction: The Least Celebratory IPO in History (02:26) The Big Idea: Keep Death in Mind at All Times (04:16) Who Is Ben Horowitz, and Why Trust Him (08:55) Lesson 1: The Struggle, and Why No Formula Exists (20:37) Lesson 2: CEOs Should Tell It Like It Is, and Why Trust Is Bandwidth (32:26) Lesson 3: Lay People Off Yourself, Because the Message Is for the People Who Stay (45:21) What Comes in Part Two Send us Fan Mail Join Christian Soschner for expert coaching. 50% Off - With 35+ years in deep tech, startups/scaleups, and public companies, Christian offers power video sessions. Elevate strategy, execution, and leadership. Book Now. Support the show Join the Podcast Newsletter: Link

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  Episode #13

  EP 180: Eric Ries | Why Good Companies Go Bad After Success

  Aug 3, 20261h 4mS7

  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 theory has a name, shareholder primacy, and nobody voted for it. It hardened in courtrooms and boardrooms about forty years ago. Founders sign it into their own charter on day one without reading the line, and by the time the gap between the mission statement and the legal purpose becomes visible, the exit has been engineered. Eric Ries, founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange and author of The Lean Startup, explains how corporate purpose disappeared out of the legal documents and what can be put back in its place. He shows why protection alone makes an extractive company worse, why independent directors are not neutral, and why a mission guardian belongs above the board rather than inside it. Beginning with the pattern he watched destroy company after company, the conversation becomes a practical guide to governance: the three-legged stool of 19th century corporate law, what actually killed Sears, why Novo Nordisk, Patagonia, IKEA and Grundfos outlive their competitors, and how the Public Benefit Corporation restores something far older than it looks. It ends on the question neither of us could fully answer. If a guardian protects the mission, who guards the guardian? WHAT LISTENERS CAN EXPECT TO LEARN Why shareholder primacy is a recent legal theory rather than a permanent feature of capitalism How the phrase "any lawful act or activity" removed purpose from corporate charters, and what quietly replaced it Why structure protects an ethos but cannot create one, and what has to be real before the protection is added How industrial foundations, purpose trusts and public benefit corporations keep a mission alive across generations Why independent directors have incentives of their own, and what to look for in a board instead BEST QUOTES (00:04:10) "A company is just a financial instrument, designed to enrich itself and its shareholders." — Eric Ries (00:14:12) "If you go to your local park, you'll find trees older than shareholder primacy." — Eric Ries (00:25:28) "Somebody took over Sears and managed to extract for himself $1.5 billion, at a time when the company lost $11 billion." — Eric Ries (00:40:09) "Who would you rather die than betray?" — Eric Ries (00:48:12) "Being a leader is much more like being a mother than a slave owner. We birth these things. We do not own them." — Eric Ries TIMESTAMPS (00:00:00) Why Good Companies Go Bad After Success (00:02:43) What Made Eric Ries Write Incorruptible (00:04:10) A Company Is Just a Financial Instrument (00:07:03) The Pill You Swallow and the Shareholder Calculation (00:15:48) The Three-Legged Stool of Corporate Law (00:19:31) How "Any Lawful Act or Activity" Erased Purpose (00:25:28) What Actually Happened to Sears (00:30:38) Stainless Steel for Organizations That Last (00:34:39) Why Foundation-Owned Companies Outlive the Rest (00:37:59) The Public Benefit Corporation Explained (00:44:40) Why Every Company Needs a Mission Guardian (00:50:22) Why Independent Directors Are Not Neutral (00:53:11) Who Guards the Mission Guardian (00:56:18) What AI Changes for Governance (00:59:58) Closing Thoughts Eric's book, Incorruptible: https://amzn.to/3S4n4BN If you'd like to keep talking about these topics, you're welcome to join Eric's free Incorruptible community here: https://community.incorruptible.co/ Follow Beginner's Mind for long-form conversations on leadership, capital, technology, and the people shaping what comes next. Ranked in the global top 10% of all podcasts, named #1 Deep Tech Podcast in 2025 , and #8 Deep Tech Podcast in 2026 Send us Fan Mail Join Christian Soschner for expert coaching. 50% Off - With 35+ years in deep tech, startups/scaleups, and public companies, Christian offers power video sessions. Elevate strategy, execution, and leadership. Book Now. Support the show Join the Podcast Newsletter: Link

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  Episode #10

  EP 177: Alberto Chalon | Liquidity Before the IPO Window Opens

  Jun 22, 20261h 44mS7

  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 with Alberto Chalon , Co-Founder of Giano Capital, about the rise of single-asset secondary investments and why they have become an important part of the European innovation ecosystem. Topics include: • What secondary transactions are and why they matter • Why many companies now stay private far longer than before • How founders, employees, and early investors can access liquidity before an exit • The differences between venture capital, private equity, and late-stage secondary investing • Europe's challenge with risk capital, fragmentation, and scaling companies • Lessons from investments such as Revolut, GetYourGuide, and Deliveroo • The role of resilience, sport, and long-term thinking in business and investing Alberto also shares his personal journey from entrepreneurship and building businesses with his brother to launching Giano Capital and creating a new asset class focused on late-stage technology investments. 5 OUTSTANDING QUOTES / LESSONS 1. "Failure in America is part of the learning process. In Europe, failure is a disaster." Lesson: Europe's challenge may be cultural as much as financial. 2. "The due diligence is the beginning of the journey, not the end." Lesson: Great investors keep working after the deal closes. 3. "Everything has to be already tested before we invest." Lesson: Giano seeks to eliminate execution risk before investing. 4. "The loneliness of the entrepreneur is real. I lived that." Lesson: The best investors bring empathy, not only capital. 5. "You need to reach the top, and then you have the descent." Lesson: Investing and endurance sports both reward patience and resilience. TIMESTAMPS (00:00:00) Intro (00:03:00) Why secondaries suddenly matter (00:07:19) Why IPOs are no longer enough (00:12:44) Where Giano fits between VC and PE (00:17:06) Why private information changes returns (00:21:41) How Giano helps founders beyond capital (00:26:19) Not pre IPO but three years earlier (00:31:23) Europe must think beyond countries (00:37:56) Alberto Chalon on loss and entrepreneurship (00:42:12) From search engines to professional investing (00:46:21) How fashion arbitrage shaped his investing (00:53:47) Building a privacy search engine in Europe (01:00:51) Ruthless focus without forcing others (01:07:38) What late-stage governance requires (01:11:50) Why Giano chose late-stage secondaries (01:15:32) Inside Giano Capital's deal funnel (01:19:07) Why community matters in secondaries (01:24:29) GetYourGuide and Revolut as examples (01:27:29) How long a secondary deal takes (01:29:11) Cycling as leadership training (01:36:23) Giano Capital's ten-year ambition Send us Fan Mail Join Christian Soschner for expert coaching. 50% Off - With 35+ years in deep tech, startups/scaleups, and public companies, Christian offers power video sessions. Elevate strategy, execution, and leadership. Book Now. Support the show Join the Podcast Newsletter: Link

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