Entrepreneurial Realities

Entrepreneurial Realities is everything about Entrepreneurship that you absolutely need to know but you cannot learn at any university.Entrepreneurial Realities is a TUM Venture Lab Podcast. Presenting interesting stories from leading and promising entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and other thought leaders within the entrepreneurial ecosystem.tum-venture-labs.de

Entrepreneurial Realities is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 103 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Entrepreneurial Realities, a business show with 103 episodes published.

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  Entrepreneurial Realities

  #102 - From Physics Professor to Quantum Startup Founder, with Christopher Eichler (Quint Computing)

  Aug 9, 202622 min

  Christopher Eichler spent over a decade in academic physics, a PhD at ETH Zurich, a fellowship at Princeton, a senior scientist role back at ETH, and now a professorship at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. Then he decided a university lab wasn't the right vehicle anymore, and founded Quint Computing to build the next generation of superconducting quantum processors. In this episode, Michael Machold, Operational Director of the Quantum & Semiconductor Lab, talks with Christopher about the exact moment academic research hits its limits, why he chose a startup over staying in the lab, and what building a company has taught him that a physics PhD never could. They also get into the physics itself , why quantum computing matters now as AI pushes conventional chips toward a physical limit, what early quantum computers will realistically be used for, and how the Bavarian ecosystem (including the Max Planck Institute and Munich Quantum Valley) shaped his decision to build in Europe instead of the US. If you're a researcher wondering whether your work belongs in a company, or a founder curious about the deep-tech path from lab to startup, this one's for you. Entrepreneurial Realities is the podcast of TUM Venture Labs. Subscribe for more conversations with the founders and researchers building Europe's deep-tech future.

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  Entrepreneurial Realities

  # 101 - Martin Giese, Founder, Business Angel, Professor and B2B Sales expert

  Jun 28, 202630 min

  Martin Giese has spent 25 years at the centre of Munich's deep tech ecosystem — and he thinks most European founders have a blind spot that no incubator programme will fix: they can't sell. As Managing Director of XPRENEURS (now UTUM Accelerator) and guest lecturer at Stanford GSB, Martin has seen founders across three continents make the same mistake. In this episode, we dig into what Stanford founders understand about customers that TUM founders typically don't, why the Europe-US gap is more cultural than financial, and what it actually takes to build a B2B company that scales past the first few customers. Join me as I speak with Martin Giese — investor, incubator director, and one of Europe's most clear-eyed voices on what it really takes to sell deep tech.

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  Entrepreneurial Realities

  # 100 - Five Years of Building - Special episode with Three Amazing Founders,

  Jun 21, 202640 min

  This is our 100th episode — and we are not celebrating with a retrospective. We are celebrating with three founders who came back to tell us what actually happened. Flora Geske co-founded SUMM-A I , a GovTech company using AI to make public administration more accessible and efficient, and winner of the TUM Presidential Award. Pablo Palafox co-founded HappyRobot , a Y Combinator-backed agentic AI platform for logistics that has raised $44 million and counts the world's biggest freight brokers among its customers. Kevin Berghoff co-founded Quantum Diamonds , a TUM spin-out that has just raised €152 million and deployed its quantum sensing systems in the US, with nine of the world's top ten chipmakers already engaged. Three very different sectors. One starting point: Munich, TUM, five years ago. Join us as we look back at five years of building — and forward at what comes next.

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  Entrepreneurial Realities

  # 99 - A Conversation with Adrian Locher, Co-Founder and General Partner of Merantix Capital

  Jun 15, 202628 min

  Adrian Locher co-founded Merantix Capital in Berlin in 2016 with machine-learning researcher Rasmus Rothe . What started as an AI studio has become one of Europe's most distinctive AI organisations: a venture studio that incubates companies from scratch, a campus hosting an entire ecosystem, and — as of June 2026 — a €100 million plus fund backing AI ventures across the continent. In this conversation, Adrian traces his path from founding his first company at fourteen and selling the Swiss flash-sale platform DeinDeal to Ringier in 2012, to building Merantix's combined studio-fund-campus model. We discuss what it actually means to build AI-native companies in Europe, where the structural obstacles remain, how to evaluate teams when technology moves faster than any due diligence, and what a thriving European AI ecosystem could look like by 2031.

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  Entrepreneurial Realities

  # 98 - Tech at War: Lessons from Ukraine for the Next Generation of Defense Entrepreneurs — with Dimko Zhluktenko, Soldier, Founder, Entrepreneur

  Jun 9, 202624 min

  Defense tech is being rewritten in real time — not in labs or conference rooms, but on the frontlines of Ukraine. Join me in my conversation with with Dimko Zhluktenko — soldier, drone pilot , founder of Dzyga's Paw ($6M raised, 70+ countries), analyst at Ukraine's 413th Unmanned Systems Regiment RAID, and now founder of Hasta , a DefTech VC fund. Dimko has lived every dimension of defense tech at once: as a soldier who uses the technology, as a founder who sources and funds it, and as an analyst who extracts lessons from it. What he shares about drone warfare, and what actually matters on the battlefield, his analysis of Ukraine, Europe, ... is something no conference panel can replicate and a must for all defenders of liberty and democracy.

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