Future Ventures: Scaling with Clarity

Maxim Atanassov
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Future Ventures: Clarity at Scale is the podcast for founders, operators, and investors who are building companies worth owning for the long term — and who need to think clearly about capital, structure, strategy, and growth to get there. Each episode cuts through the noise around scaling: how to structure a deal, how to position a business for institutional capital, how to build operational leverage without losing control, and how to make the high-stakes decisions that compound in value long after the moment has passed. Hosted by Maxim Atanassov — a four-time founder and the Managing Partner of Future Ventures Corp. Since 2018, FVC has invested in, incubated, and scaled companies across sectors — with a focus on platform opportunities that compound in value. Maxim's background spans executive leadership inside Canada's largest energy companies and senior advisory at Deloitte and EY. He's a CPA-CA who has sat at the table where capital gets deployed, governance gets built, and hard decisions get made. Now he helps founders get there faster.  New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

  1. Nicola Redi — Why Europe’s Deep Tech Moment Is Just Beginning | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 40

    5D AGO

    Nicola Redi — Why Europe’s Deep Tech Moment Is Just Beginning | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 40

    Send us Fan Mail Italy is known for sun, food, and culture. What it isn't known for — and should be — is being one of the top research nations on the planet. Nicola Redi has built his career on closing that gap. As Managing Partner at Obloo Ventures, one of Italy's leading deep tech VC firms, he spends his days translating breakthroughs in AI, quantum, aerospace, and computational science into companies that can actually scale. With nearly three decades spanning venture capital, corporate innovation, and research commercialization — including 15 years inside multinational corporations — Nicola sees the entire pipeline from lab bench to market in a way few investors can.  This isn't just an Italian story. Europe and Canada both produce world-class research, then watch a lot of it get commercialized somewhere else — usually the US. Nicola is direct about why that keeps happening and what would actually have to change to stop it. He's also clear-eyed about where the real money in deep tech will be made next, and how to tell that apart from whatever everyone happens to be hyping this quarter. If you're building, operating, or investing, that filter alone makes this one worth your time.  Key Topics Covered  Italy's hidden research strength — Why a country famous for tourism quietly ranks among the world's top research nations, and how that output is now becoming startups. The technology-transfer model — How Obloo acts as a bridge between research labs and corporations, functioning almost like a third-party corporate venture arm. Europe's single-market problem — Why fragmented rules across 27 member states hold back scaling, and what unifying the market would unlock. The physical AI thesis — Where Nicola believes Europe can win even after losing the initial AI race, and why specificity beats hype. What founders actually need — The skills, humility, and language scientists must learn to become operators who can build and lead companies. Key Insights  Technology is a small part of the job. One of Nicola's founders — a top bio-robotics researcher — came back years after launching his company to admit the technology was only about 5% of the work. Market adoption, team-building, and execution are where companies actually win or lose.  The real value is in the specifics. The categories everyone's talking about are usually overpriced just because everyone's talking about them. What Nicola actually gets excited about is deep tech aimed at narrow industrial problems — simulating new materials, running predictive maintenance through digital twins, and quantum built for one specific job. That's where the valuation reflects what a company can really do, not just the hype around it.  Government's most powerful lever isn't incentives — it's buying. Nicola argues the biggest shift isn't more grants or funds-of-funds, but governments and corporations acting as launch customers for startups. As competitive pressure rises, the relationship between incumbents and early-stage companies is becoming a matter of survival: either you engage, or you get left behind.  Links & Resources  Obloo Ventures: https://obloo.vc/ Nicola Redi on LinkedIn: https://it.linkedin.com/in/nicolaredi Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp About the Guest  Nicola Redi is Managing Partner at Obloo Ventures, one of Italy's leading deep tech venture capital firms focused on translating frontier science into scalable companies. He brings nearly three decades of experience across venture capital, corporate innovation, and research commercialization, with deep roots in scientific entrepreneurship and 15 years inside multinational corporations. His work sits at the intersection of advanced research, industrial transformation, and venture creation across AI, quantum computing, aerospace, biotech, and computational science.

    50 min
  2. Tom Milar — Turning Waste into Capital Building Circular Systems That Scale | FV Podcast Ep. 39

    6D AGO

    Tom Milar — Turning Waste into Capital Building Circular Systems That Scale | FV Podcast Ep. 39

    Send us Fan Mail Tom Milar has spent over a decade building infrastructure for private companies — first through incorporation services out of Hong Kong and Las Vegas, and now through Eqvista, a valuation and equity management platform serving 23,000 startups. After a successful acquisition, Tom took five of his most important team members and set out to fix a problem he kept running into himself: founders were managing ownership and valuation off static PDFs and Excel sheets, working from data that was already months out of date by the time it landed. Eqvista's answer is a real-time valuation engine that now values $4 trillion in assets and gives founders, employees, and investors a live look at what their company is actually worth — like a stock ticker for private companies.  This conversation matters because valuation sits underneath almost every consequential decision a founder makes — raising, hiring, issuing equity, planning an exit — and most founders are working with a number that's stale, opaque, or both. Tom brings a rare combination of product obsession and financial discipline to the table, having bootstrapped Eqvista to scale on roughly half a million dollars rather than chasing rounds. For any founder thinking about their cap table, their next raise, or how to give their team real liquidity, this episode is a clear-eyed look at where private markets are heading.  Key Topics Covered  The problem with PDF valuations — Why the months-long lag between financials and a finished valuation report leaves founders making decisions on outdated numbers. Real-time valuation at scale — How Eqvista's engine continuously values 20,000+ companies and the data behind a $4 trillion valuation engine. Controlled tender offers and liquidity — How company-led tender offers let founders set the price and structure liquidity for employees and investors on their own terms. Bootstrapped, product-led growth — Why a free cap table, paid valuations, and relentless customer support drove scale without heavy fundraising. The most common cap table mistakes — What early founders get wrong with paid-up capital, adjusted cost base, and overcrowded cap tables. Key Insights  Valuation is a byproduct, not the prize. Tom and Maxim align on the idea that a strong valuation flows from belief in the founder, the idea, and the market size — not the other way around. Founders who chase the number rather than the fundamentals are optimizing for the wrong thing. De-risk before you raise. Tom's view is that founders should build a product that works, reaches real revenue, and approaches profitability before going to investors — so capital becomes fuel for acceleration rather than a bet on whether the business works at all. He's openly skeptical of early-stage bridge rounds as a sign that the original plan stalled. The story behind the price is the product. What separates a defensible valuation from a guess is the ability to explain why the number is what it is. Eqvista's edge isn't just the figure it produces — it's the pricing narrative built on hundreds of billions in valued assets that auditors and shareholders can actually rely on. Links  Eqvista: https://eqvista.com/ Tom Milar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasmilar Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp About Tom Milar  Tom Milar is the Founder and CEO of Eqvista, a platform for company valuation, equity management, and private-market liquidity serving 23,000 startups. Originally from the Czech Republic, he moved to Asia in 2009 and built incorporation-services businesses before launching Eqvista with a core team carried over from a prior successful exit. He is a product-first founder who scaled the company through bootstrapping, freemium adoption, and a real-time valuation engine that now values $4 trillion in assets.

    48 min
  3. Mathew Jackson — Building Circular Systems That Scale | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 12

    6D AGO

    Mathew Jackson — Building Circular Systems That Scale | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 12

    Send us Fan Mail Matthew Jackson is the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Alimentary Systems, a New Zealand company rethinking how the world handles organic waste and sewage. An Edmund Hillary Fellow with a track record of building and scaling high-growth ventures across global markets, Matthew has helped drive billions in market value creation — including bringing Netflix to New Zealand and triggering a wave of industry convergence that reshaped the local media landscape. But what makes this conversation matter isn't the resume. It's the way Matthew thinks about impact, risk, and the responsibility of building something that outlasts you.  This episode switches between two styles, which makes it interesting. First, it honestly tells the personal story of the founder — his childhood, losing his father at 15, studying process philosophy, and the daily habits that help him stay steady during tough times. Then, it explains one of the smartest business ideas we've discussed: a system that turns sewage and industrial waste into fertilizer, energy, and carbon credits, all at a lower cost than landfills. If you want to see what real product-market fit looks like — where investors, cities, residents, and the environment all benefit — this is a good place to start.  Some of the key topics covered in this episode were:  From media changes to climate projects — Matthew's first business helped Netflix start in New Zealand, increased its value by $2.1 billion, and led to a lawsuit that taught him what true commitment costs. The Alimentary Systems model — Why combining two waste streams into one unlocks five distinct revenue lines and a 2.4x value multiplier over the traditional landfill. The economics of impact — How the company hits roughly 30% IRR while saving municipalities money and lowering household costs, proving environmental gains and returns aren't a trade-off. Carbon credits as arbitrage — The four-year effort to get onto compliance markets, and why the same credit can sell for $45 in New Zealand or $127 into the UK. Founder psychology — Managing ego, mental health, and presence as the real infrastructure behind sustained execution. Key Insights  Being right and being effective are two different things. Matthew argues that when you treat the person across the table as the obstacle, your ego takes over, and progress stalls. Real change comes from meeting people where they are and moving forward together — not winning the argument. The term "risk-taker" is often misunderstood. What seems like bold risk-taking from the outside is usually careful planning—trying different approaches to reduce risks before making a big move. Matthew knows exactly what his current risks are, how much they cost, and has a clear plan for how to back out if needed. Capital allocation is the number one risk every company faces. Working on the right things with the wrong people — or pointing capital at the wrong priorities — is what sinks ventures. Helping founders sharpen their capital allocation framework is the highest-leverage support you can offer. Links & Resources  Alimentary Systems: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alimentary-systems/ Matthew Jackson on LinkedIn: https://nz.linkedin.com/in/matthewjackson Future Ventures LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp About the Guest  Matthew Jackson is the co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Alimentary Systems, where he's building circular waste-to-energy infrastructure across global markets. A four-time founder and Edmund Hillary Fellow, he has helped generate billions in market value, from pioneering media access in New Zealand to advancing climate-positive sanitation technology. He works closely with Indigenous communities on water security and is driven by a single conviction: that the best ventures make an impact and return the same thing.

    1h 13m
  4. Stanley Wei — AI That Actually Gets Things Done: The Future of Autonomous Agents | FV Podcast E. 37

    MAY 20

    Stanley Wei — AI That Actually Gets Things Done: The Future of Autonomous Agents | FV Podcast E. 37

    Send us Fan Mail Stanley Wei is the Founder and CEO of Pine AI, an autonomous agent platform that doesn't just answer questions — it picks up the phone, fills out the forms, and gets things done on behalf of consumers. Pine negotiates bills, cancels subscriptions, files complaints, resolves disputes, and navigates insurance claims autonomously. Before launching Pine, Stanley held leadership roles at Gore and invested in AI through Hillhouse Capital, watching the space evolve from the early deep learning era through the DALL-E inflection point that convinced him AGI was no longer a question of if, but when.  This conversation is important because Stanley is developing a seldom-touched part of the AI stack: the unstructured, voice-based interface between agents and the physical world. Most AI products operate in digital spaces, like drafting or querying databases, but Pine trains proprietary voice models on real phone calls. This enables agents to interrupt naturally, manage silences, negotiate, and complete tasks. Understanding this reveals the future of consumer AI and how to compete against giants like OpenAI and Anthropic.  Key Topics Covered  The Matrix thesis for voice agents — Why the phone call is the channel that lets AI cross from the digital world into the physical one, and why this is fundamentally different from what ChatGPT or Copilot do. Building an AI company in 2024 vs. now — How model capability went from "100% hike to build an agent" to "everything is possible" in roughly twelve months, and what that means for product velocity. The unsustainable economics of AI customer acquisition — Why building product is now the easy part, why only Google and Meta own the demand side, and why hitting critical user mass has become survival-level urgent. Defending against the LLM giants — Why Pine trains its own voice model bottom-up on proprietary phone-call data instead of building on top of OpenAI or Anthropic, and where the foundation labs leave room for vertical specialists. Running a company without meetings — How Stanley designed Pine to be agent-friendly from the inside out: no code ownership, async by default, agents talking to other people's agents to coordinate work. Key Insights  The biggest barrier to consumer AI adoption is not capability — it's trust and education. Most consumers don't yet know what AI can do, don't believe it can do it, and have to be walked through all three layers (pain, solution, proof) before they will pay. The structural shift in the AI economy has happened on the supply side, not the demand side. Coding agents made it cheap to build, but they did not create new distribution channels — so growth, not product, is now the binding constraint for almost every AI company. People have found some of the coolest ways to use Pine that the team never planned for. For example, one user who was laid off in 2025 used Pine to make money by buying rental cars cheaply and selling them for more, earning $3,000 on one deal. Another user used Pine to cut down a $5,000 credit card bill to $1,500. The product allows users to do things the creators never expected. Links  Pine AI: https://www.19pine.ai/  Stanley Wei on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stanleywei  Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp  About Stanley Wei  Stanley Wei is the Founder and CEO of Pine AI, an autonomous AI agent that takes action on behalf of consumers in the physical world — from negotiating bills to managing insurance disputes. Before Pine, he held leadership roles at Gore and was an AI investor at Hillhouse Capital, where he tracked the field through the deep learning era and the generative AI inflection point. He started Pine in 2024 out of personal frustration with the chores of being an international operator, splitting time between the US, Singapore, and the UK.

    57 min
  5. Stan Christiaens — The Billion-Dollar Problem Behind AI | Future Ventures Podcast Episode 37

    MAY 20

    Stan Christiaens — The Billion-Dollar Problem Behind AI | Future Ventures Podcast Episode 37

    Send us Fan Mail Stan Christiaens is the Cofounder and Chief Data Citizen of Collibra, one of the companies that helped define the modern data governance category. What began in 2008 as a spinoff from a semantics research lab at the Free University of Brussels has grown into a global platform used by some of the world's largest enterprises to manage data trust, lineage, governance, and increasingly, AI oversight. Eighteen years in, Stan has a vantage point most operators do not — he has watched governance get sidelined every 5 to 10 years by the next shiny technology, and he has watched the same data problems resurface every time.  This conversation matters because AI has changed the math. Companies that treated data as exhaust instead of as an asset are now discovering that their AI ambitions are bottlenecked by foundations they never built. Stan and Maxim get specific about what those foundations actually look like, why the Chief Data Officer role is at an inflection point, and why the iceberg of unstructured data — roughly 80 to 90 percent of an organization's information — is suddenly the biggest question on every data leader's desk. If you are building, advising, or selling into enterprises right now, this is the conversation about why data discipline is no longer optional.  Key topics covered  Data as asset vs. data as exhaust — why most organizations are still "growing up" to treat data as an asset, and why fragmentation from every shiny new technology makes the problem worse. The foundations of governance done well — find it, understand it, trust it, with assigned responsibility, a repeatable process, and a system of record sitting underneath. The evolution of the Chief Data Officer role — Gartner's five versions from defensive posture to data products to "startup person," with version 6 due, and why the AI moment is the CDO's biggest opportunity. Data confidence and the AI brain — why five-nines reliability for agents is achievable but requires scaffolding around the model, and why asking an LLM not to hallucinate misses the point. Selling into enterprise as a founder — why enterprises are slow by design, why they are never greenfield, and how to find the innovation pockets that let you accelerate. Three key insights  You cannot fix data after the fact. Organizations that treat data as a byproduct for years and then suddenly need AI cannot retroactively make that data useful — they have to start treating it as an asset first, which is a cultural shift before it is a technical one.  The model is not the problem. No matter how smart the frontier LLM gets, it will not make the right decision without the right context at the right time. The work is building the harness around the model — the responsibility, processes, and curated context — not chasing the next model release.  Patience is the entrepreneur's hardest skill. Plan for a 10-year journey, not a three-year sprint, and make sure your business ambitions and your life at home stay in harmony — because the overnight successes everyone admires were a decade in the making before they looked obvious.  Links  Collibra: https://www.linkedin.com/company/collibra Stan Christiaens on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stijnchristiaens/ Future Ventures on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp About Stan Christiaens  Stan Christiaens is the Cofounder and Chief Data Citizen of Collibra, which he helped spin out of a computer science research lab at the Free University of Brussels in 2008. Over 18 years, he has built Collibra into one of the defining companies in the data governance category, working with many of the world's largest enterprises on how they organize, trust, and use their data. He is a recognized voice on the intersection of data governance, AI, and enterprise transformation.

    56 min
  6. Neeraj Singh — Building Sustainable Software in the Age of AI | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 36

    MAY 19

    Neeraj Singh — Building Sustainable Software in the Age of AI | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 36

    Send us Fan Mail While most of Silicon Valley argues over whether SaaS is dead, Neeraj Singh is quietly running the experiment that might answer the question. He's the founder and CEO of BigBinary, a 15-year-old remote-first software consultancy, and Neeto, a growing suite of affordable alternatives to the bloated enterprise tools founders begrudgingly pay for every month. NeetoCal goes head-to-head with Calendly at $30 a year — less than a single month of the competition. NeetoSign takes on DocuSign. NeetoForm takes on Typeform. The product list keeps growing, and the marketing budget stays at zero.  This conversation matters because Neeraj has spent his career doing the opposite of what most founders are told to do. He went remote 15 years before the pandemic forced everyone else into it. He refuses VC money and refuses to "go all in." He treats Slack as a place where nothing important should happen. He keeps engineers on the bench instead of maximizing utilization. He prices like a commodity in markets the gurus call winner-take-all. And he's still in business — profitable, growing, and building. For any founder rethinking pricing, team design, or what sustainable growth actually looks like in an AI-saturated market, this conversation is a different lens on what works.  Topics Covered  Remote-first before remote was a category — How Neeraj built BigBinary's writing culture by watching colleagues take remote calls between Oracle Tower 1 and Oracle Tower 2. Why GitHub is the source of truth, and Slack isn't allowed to hold anything important — The tool stack and the philosophy behind it. Bench time over utilization — Why creative work breaks under 60-hour weeks and what billable-hours culture gets wrong about engineering output. The 31st scheduling tool problem — Why entering a crowded market is fine, why "race to the bottom" is the wrong frame, and what Henry Ford, Honda, and Samsung teach about followers winning markets. The real reason SaaS prices keep climbing — Public SaaS companies spend 50%+ of revenue on sales and marketing, then raise prices to fund it; here's the alternative. Key Insights  Commodity pricing is not a weakness; it's an honest read of the market. If you're the 31st product in a category, you are a commodity by definition. Pretending otherwise and charging luxury prices alongside competitors with deeper pockets is the actual mistake. Your biggest competition is your own costs. Borrowing a tip from Jason Fried of Basecamp: as long as your expenses are less than your income, no competitor can beat you. Most founders worry too much about their rivals when they should be focusing on controlling their own spending. AI hasn't lowered software prices — it's been used to justify raising them. Developers are demonstrably more productive than they were five years ago. The math says prices should fall. They aren't. That gap is the opening for founders willing to take it. Links  Neeto suite of products: https://www.neeto.com/ BigBinary: https://bigbinary.com/ Neeraj on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neerajsingh0101/ Future Ventures Linkedin: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp About Neeraj Singh  Neeraj Singh is the founder and CEO of BigBinary, a remote-first software consultancy he's been running for close to 15 years with a team of senior engineers based in India. He's the creator of Neeto, a growing suite of affordable SaaS products built to replace the bloated, overpriced tools founders are stuck paying for — NeetoCal, NeetoSign, NeetoForm, NeetoTicketing, and more. A longtime Ruby on Rails open-source contributor, Neeraj writes and operates in public on LinkedIn, X, and through Neeto's customer support — where every reply still comes from him or his team, not AI.

    54 min
  7. Hubertus Hofkirchner — The Future of Money and Trade Infraestructure | FV Podcast Ep. 35

    MAY 19

    Hubertus Hofkirchner — The Future of Money and Trade Infraestructure | FV Podcast Ep. 35

    Send us Fan Mail Hubertus Hofkirchner has spent four decades operating at the intersection of trade finance, technology, and monetary theory. He started his career at Citibank International in Vienna, designed a securities system that rolled out across smaller city banks throughout Europe, and later served as Director at Kreditanstalt Investment Bank. As a serial entrepreneur, he built one of the first online brokerages for Central and Eastern Europe, founded what he believes was the first true options exchange (sold to a British bank in 2008), and famously took over Austrian telecom operator Telering as a loss-making vehicle hemorrhaging hundreds of millions per year — turning it around and selling it to T-Mobile for €1.5 billion in 2005.  This conversation is important because Hubertus isn't just another crypto supporter promising big changes from the sidelines. He's an Austrian-school economist and ex-investment banker who knows the traditional banking system inside out. Now, he's creating open-source tools to bring back something the world quietly lost in 1913—a peer-to-peer credit system that allows global trade to happen without banks acting as gatekeepers. With the Bitcredit Protocol now live, founders and investors should understand what's being built, why it’s happening now, and what it could mean for trade, investing, and the future of money.  Key Topics Covered  Why the Fiat experiment is failing — How political money since 1971 has produced asset bubbles, currency manipulation, and a $2.5 trillion trade finance gap that's strangling emerging markets. SWIFT as a geopolitical weapon — The Swiss trading company that got de-banked over legal Cuban sugar trades, and why hundreds of thousands of European businesses have lost banking access. The lost technology of bills of exchange — How world trade ran smoothly without internet, intermediaries, or persistent trade imbalances on the gold standard pre-1913, and why the UN's 2017 Model Law revived the legal foundation. What Bitcredit Protocol actually does — How E-cash technology, Bitcoin main chain settlement, and a decentralized mint network ("wildcats" operating in "cowders") combine to create a self-liquidating currency layer on top of Bitcoin. Four ways capital can be deployed in the new system — From buying bills of exchange and money-market lending to mints, to providing guarantee capital and running a mint yourself. Key Insights  Banks should never have been allowed to create money. Money creation belongs with the productive sector — companies shipping real goods through supply chains — not with central banks issuing currency against war bonds or commercial banks expanding credit against equities and real estate. Every major monetary distortion of the last century traces back to this single category error. El Salvador's plan to use Bitcoin isn't fully complete. While making Bitcoin legal money helps store its value, it doesn't cover how businesses extend credit. Without a way to measure trade credit in Bitcoin, the country still depends on the politics of the fiat currency that supports its economy. Bitcoin helps keep energy grids stable instead of causing problems. Research shows that countries with active Bitcoin mining can cut energy costs by 20–30 percent because miners turn on and off based on supply. This means there's no need for expensive equipment that only runs during peak times and often sits idle. Links  Bitcredit Protocol: https://www.bit.cr/ Hubertus on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hofkirchner/ Future Ventures on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp About the Guest  Hubertus Hofkirchner is the founder of Bitcredit Protocol, a Bitcoin-native trade finance protocol focused on rethinking trust, credit, and global commerce infrastructure. A serial fintech entrepreneur, he is the former CEO of Austrian telecom operator Telering (acquired by T-Mobile for €1.5 billion) and an economist focused on the intersection of monetary systems and trade finance. He leads monthly seminars at the Hayek Institute in Vienna.

    1h 2m
  8. Dave Hertig — High Tech, High Touch: The Future of CEO Performance | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 34

    MAY 18

    Dave Hertig — High Tech, High Touch: The Future of CEO Performance | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 34

    Send us Fan Mail Dave Hertig has spent his career watching CEOs up close — first as a business journalist who interviewed more than 100 of them for UBS alone, then as the founder of Boom, where he now focuses on CEO performance under pressure. Along the way, he developed a conviction that became the spine of his work: the people the rest of the company looks up to have blind spots like everyone else, but those blind spots carry outsized consequences. Get the CEO right and the whole system compounds. Get it wrong, and no strategy, market, or product can save you.  This conversation matters because most of what's written about CEO performance is written for the Fortune 500 — the leaders who get six-month onboarding handlers, custom briefing teams, and curated executive networks. The CEOs running companies between 50 and 1,000 staff are running on a fraction of that support, often with no one in the building willing to push back on them honestly. Dave has built a system to fill that gap, and the principles behind it apply whether you're leading 30 people or 3,000.  Key Topics Covered  1. The blind spots that quietly shape every CEO's decision — Why "why aren't more people like me?" is the most common — and most dangerous — pattern Hertig sees in founders and hired CEOs alike.  2. Hire for your weaknesses, not against them — The Steve Jobs / Tim Cook arc as the definitive case study in pairing vision with execution, and why trying to fix a weakness rarely beats hiring around it.  3. The adversarial gap — Why genuine pushback is the single hardest thing for a CEO to get inside their own company, and what happens to the people who try to give it.  4. Accountability vs. outcome in the eyes of investors — The distinction between what a founder can control (input), partially control (output), and never guarantee (outcome) — and why integrity and transparency matter more than hitting the number.  5. The CEO Sparring System — How a boxing-inspired protected room lets CEOs stress-test Board decks, investor pitches, firing decisions, and press interviews before they go live in the real world.  Three Key Insights  Judgment is more important in the AI era, not less. AI can help analyze data, compare options, and speed up decisions. It can even imitate emotional understanding. But it can't develop real emotional intelligence, read a room, or replace the human responsibility that leaders have. The polished answers from large language models make a CEO's judgment more challenging — and more valuable — than ever before.  Authenticity is not the same as showing everything you are. The strongest CEOs Hertig has worked with put on a "uniform" when they walk into the role — measured, deliberate, strategic about what they say — while still ensuring the job genuinely matches their strengths and what gives them energy. That gap is professionalism, not inauthenticity.  A progressive CEO wants to keep growing — personally and commercially. The CEOs worth working with are still curious, still hungry for pushback, still aware that their business sits inside a larger system. The ones who have hit a personal ceiling and stopped growing are the ones whose companies stop growing too.  Links  Dave Hertig on LinkedIn: https://ch.linkedin.com/in/davehertig Boom — CEO Sparring System: https://boom.ceo/sparring/ Future Ventures Corp: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp About Dave Hertig  Dave Hertig is the founder and CEO of Boom, where he focuses on CEO performance under pressure and works with leaders of medium-sized businesses navigating high-stakes moments. He is the creator of the CEO Sparring System, a boxing-inspired format that gives CEOs a protected room to pressure-test their most important pieces of work before deploying them in the real world. Before founding Boom, Dave spent years as a business journalist and content strategist, interviewing hundreds of CEOs across industries — work that gave him the pattern recognition behind his current focus on identity, judgment, and the human side of executive leadership.

    1h 2m
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About

Future Ventures: Clarity at Scale is the podcast for founders, operators, and investors who are building companies worth owning for the long term — and who need to think clearly about capital, structure, strategy, and growth to get there. Each episode cuts through the noise around scaling: how to structure a deal, how to position a business for institutional capital, how to build operational leverage without losing control, and how to make the high-stakes decisions that compound in value long after the moment has passed. Hosted by Maxim Atanassov — a four-time founder and the Managing Partner of Future Ventures Corp. Since 2018, FVC has invested in, incubated, and scaled companies across sectors — with a focus on platform opportunities that compound in value. Maxim's background spans executive leadership inside Canada's largest energy companies and senior advisory at Deloitte and EY. He's a CPA-CA who has sat at the table where capital gets deployed, governance gets built, and hard decisions get made. Now he helps founders get there faster.  New episodes every week. Subscribe wherever you listen.

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