What have been your biggest learnings at Dawn Capital and HV Capital and how have you applied them to your roles at Portfolio companies such as Exein, LeanIX, Fonoa and Templafy?
Where to start… The biggest two are related. Number one, most of the big problems and eureka moments in a scaling company can fundamentally be traced down to people. It sounds so obvious, but it’s worth reiterating again. You either have great people in the right place in the organisation and things move forward or you have the right people in the wrong place or the wrong people altogether. What makes this hard is that this picture – who and where is “right” – can change rapidly as the company grows. Managing this while doing everything else that a founder needs to do is challenging and, also, many founders hate it or maybe don’t see the value until something has gone very wrong and needs urgent fixing.
Number two and related, no one teaches founders how to do this and the role of a founder evolves massively from the early days. That is, a founder must evolve from building an outstanding product, signing on the first customers, being in the details, etc. to essentially managing this “right person in the right place” cacophony and every now and then switching back to Graham’s now famous “founder mode”. Note that the objective of switching to founder mode is- to figure out what “right person in the right place” actually means, so the founder can then step away as soon as possible and focus on strategy, product, customers, etc…
My passion is to help founders navigate this dynamic and save their energy for what they are truly world class at, while orchestrating the rest of the organisation from cacophony to symphony.
In December 2025 Exein announced EUR 100M in new funding by way of equity and a financing facility. What did you see in Gianni Cuozzo and embedded cybersecurity that led you to invest in his leadership style and the business?
Exein is a singular company that combines a deep technical moat with extremely scalable distribution and a relentless founder who is always 3 steps ahead in his vision for the Company and the future of embedded security. Once we understood the leading position that Exein occupies in runtime embedded security and the enormous tailwinds propelling them forward, it was a no-brainer investment. Embedded security is essential for protecting our critical infrastructure, including data centres, as well as for making reliable, safe physical AI a reality. As to Gianni himself, he is utterly relentless, thoughtfully contrarian and right, and an exceptional judge of character. It was very clear that he wants to build an enormous company and he and his team have continued to push the envelope since we invested.
Do European founders still need to move to the US to build a global company?
It is very clear that you can build a global company out of Europe, that is hopefully not a discussion we need to have any more. So do they NEED to move – no. Does moving to the US come with huge benefits for certain cases – absolutely. Especially when building in AI, I think it is an enormous advantage to be in San Francisco and a) know where the bar is and b) be properly integrated into the ecosystem, talent, M&A conversations, etc. So while you don’t necessarily need to move, my advice would still be to go there early and define a plan that is more than “we will do it after the Series B”. We see the transatlantic model of keeping a strong research, product, and engineering base in Europe and building a strong commercial team in the US as a well-established path for AI and software businesses. This is what Exein, n8n, and Framer are doing to name a few in our HV portfolio and what my previous investments like Fonoa, LeanIX, AccessFintech and others have all done. What is interesting to see now is that thanks to product-led growth and open-source models, you may be able to skip the initial commercial team set up stage entirely and only invest in this once the Company is at scale and starting to push a more corporate and enterprise sales motion, which derisks your entry.
In a world where anyone can theoretically build software at the pace of AI, what makes a company VC backable?
I see the VC business as a business of scarcity and velocity. If you have something that is scarce and valuable, you can reap a high economic reward for it, if you move with sufficient velocity to get big enough before others come and outcompete whatever it is that you have that is scarce (essentially your moat). In the pre-AI world, coding was a fairly scarce skill set and velocity was restricted by our human bodies and minds. Clearly with AI this source of scarcity is gone and velocity is just breakneck. So – what is scarce and what makes velocity effective? The greatest source of scarcity is the person, the founder. I am stealing someone’s words, here, but essentially “There is only one Elon.” Other sources of scarcity are trust and brand (very hard to cut through the noise and build that these days), proprietary insight, stature or domain expertise in a given industry (which goes back to the founder / team as a source of scarcity), or specific deep tech IP.
The velocity point is interesting, because people confuse velocity and speed. Velocity is speed combined with a specific direction – a combination of speed of execution and soundness of judgement. AI solves the speed part. I recently had a very interesting conversation with an extremely successful founder and asked her what a surprising lesson was she’s learned. She answered that she realised that she just needs to get 1 or 2 critical things right every year and everything else is either less consequential or fixable. In a world where speed is essentially unlimited, judgement becomes the limiting factor.
What investment conviction do you hold today that most other VC’s disagree with and what advice do VC’s give founders that you believe to be wrong?
I should preface this by saying that there is a lot out there that I don’t get to read or listen to, so I don’t know if this is still a contrarian view or more of a niche one. I think that the LLM labs really missed a trick with regulation early on and will live to regret it. It’s hard to see what the long-term moat is for OpenAI and Anthropic and regulation could have helped them lock in the status quo and become that (the same way regulation helped establish a secure and thriving airline industry in the 1930s or, to this day, protects the banking industry from too much disruption). I get the argument of competition from China, but I am still fundamentally convinced that a different policy stance was possible without inhibiting competitiveness. Maybe tech leaders have realised this too by now, but the cat is too far out of the bag. What it means for me on the investment side is that I am still very bullish on AI model-agnostic applications, especially in high trust industries with significant regulations.
On the topic of bad VC advice: having seen the fallout from 2021 live, I really think it’s terrible advice to push founders to raise at sky high valuations long before the business justifies it… The valuation feels like a win on the day, but the fallout can be brutal: down rounds, recaps, painful conversations with people who came in at the top eat years of energy and goodwill. So much harder to fix than to avoid.
Finally, “Move fast and break things” is generally a terrible idea in Enterprise. Much better to move fast and fix things, if you ask me.
