Most founders wait until Series A to clean up their cap table. Stef did the opposite - and spent $70K upfront just to get the foundations right.
As co-founder of Cradle, he built a biotech company for global scale from day one: navigating European legal complexity, validating science in skeptical labs, and paying early customers out of pocket to prove it worked.
In this episode, we get into:
Why Cradle paid its first two customers—and how that unlocked top-tier pharma clients
How to structure your company early to avoid massive headaches later
Why European startup culture struggles with ambition—and what needs to change
How to hire ML talent in Europe when OpenAI is knocking on the same doors
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