Startup Europe — The Sifted Podcast

This week we're bringing you a longer form interview with Meri Williams, CTO at Pleo and formerly CTO at Monzo and Healx. Meri's got a reputation for being one of the best in the business at growing and sustaining technical teams at startups and scaleups, and in this episode she gave her opinion on Elon Musk firing half his tech team, how to get engineers to learn soft skills and how to hire developers from around the world.
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This podcast is brought to you by Zendesk for Startups. Zendesk helps startups build lasting customer experiences from day one. With the Zendesk for Startups Program, startups get Zendesk customer support software and CRM for six months FREE of charge. You’ll get access to expert advice and a community of likeminded founders and CX leaders to help you build the foundation for long-term growth. Learn more and claim your 6 months free at zendesk.com/sifted.

This week we discuss:
01:45 What are the new EU policies startups should watch out for in 2023?
08:26 Nuclear fusion: The bet that Europe should have won
18:21 Why are VCs getting so excited about generative AI?
This podcast is brought to you by Zendesk for Startups. Zendesk helps startups build lasting customer experiences from day one. With the Zendesk for Startups Program, startups get Zendesk customer support software and CRM for six months FREE of charge. You’ll get access to expert advice and a community of likeminded founders and CX leaders to help you build the foundation for long-term growth. Learn more and claim your 6 months free at zendesk.com/sifted

This week we discuss:
01:10 How much RingCentral paid for those Hopin assets
Was Hopin really such a failure?
03:41 Dutch startup Meatable raises $35m to scale cultivated pork products
07:58 Build-a-bot workshop: deepset.ai raises $30m for personalised AI models
10:58 Who's going to buy Babylon?
19:20 The machines have eyes: How GenAI is giving warehouse robots vision

This week we're talking about a single story that Sifted reported this week: serious allegations of workplace misconduct at one of Europe’s leading VC firms.
Seven people who worked at DN Capital — an investor in Shazam, Remitly and Auto1 — allege that its founder Nenad Marovac sexually harassed and bullied colleagues, creating a culture of misogyny at the fund.
Marovac has denied all the allegations. DN Capital has opened an independent investigation into the allegations, which it said do not reflect its culture.
Read the story here.

This week we discuss:
Shareholder upheaval and a $630m debt burden: end of the road for Cazoo?How a corruption scandal has left dozens of Polish startups facing bankruptcyThe Family Files: Inside France’s ugliest startup fightToxic bosses and unhealthy cultures: Why Europe’s VCs are tired and burnt out