Scouting for Growth

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Paul Austin, a pioneer in the world of psychedelics and a leading voice in leveraging these substances for intentional personal growth and enhanced leadership. Today, Paul joins us to delve into how psychedelics are revolutionizing personal transformation and professional success. We'll explore how these tools can be harnessed to navigate the complexities of leadership, spur innovation, and drive growth in both personal and entrepreneurial realms. We will delve into the implications for insurers and pharmaceutical companies. KEY TAKEAWAYS I grew up pin a place where psychedelics, cannabis and all sort of illicit substances were frowned upon. But, at the age of 16, I was introduced to cannabis, and I started to experiment with it. My parents found out and were very disappointed in me. A few years later at university I started experimenting with psylocibin and it was much more profound and life changing. It inspired me to travel abroad and became a digital nomad, experimenting with microdosing. In 2015 I started an educational platform called Third Wave, because there wasn’t a lot of great educational information on the internet about psychedelics and I wanted to help people learn about the history, recent scientific studies as well as the risks sop that they could use it safely and effectively during their work. Back then it was still highly stigmatised, there weren’t a lot of people who understood some of the benefits and risks. Simply by being a first moved, providing free educational content, starting a podcast allowed me to help steer people when they came into the space. My focus then was mostly on microdosing. In our current climate that we live in, we’re very disconnected from the natural environment and we’re seeing the negative consequences of that. When people have psychedelic experiences they feel more connected to the natural environment. Psychedelics can be used as a tool, when used with intention and responsibility, to help us wake up to the fact that how we relate to the environment is how we relate to ourselves. The wider mission is how we step into a mode of environmental regeneration and how can psychedelics help leaders to recognise this? BEST MOMENTS ‘Life is what you make of it, we’re all sort of making it up as we go along, there’s massive creative potential to live life on your own terms.’ ‘Microdosing 2-3 times a week helped me to stop drinking alcohol and find more flow and creativity in my every-day life.’ ‘When psychedelics are done with intention, responsibility, in a safe way, they can have really productive outcomes for those who choose to take or work with them.’ ‘My intention has always been to make psychedelics accessible to more people. Microdosing is like getting in the shallow end of the pool before you jump in the deep end.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Paul Austin is the founder of Third Wave, an educational platform dedicated to the responsible use of psychedelics, Paul has empowered millions to explore safe and meaningful experiences. With a focus on microdosing and intentional psychedelic use, Paul specializes in helping entrepreneurs, executives, and creatives unlock their full potential. He believes that psychedelics, when used responsibly, can enhance leadership abilities, creativity, and overall well-being. By combining scientific research with practical application, Paul guides individuals to become better communicators, recognize emerging patterns, and foster innovation in their respective fields. Psychedelic Coaching Institute ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook TikTok Email Website

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Beate Chelette, known as the Growth Architect, about her journey from being a broke single mom immigrant with $135,000 in debt to selling her business to Bill Gates for millions. In this episode, Beate shares her hard-won wisdom on what it really takes to pressure-test your idea, build a solid foundation, and scale your business sustainably. She reveals the most common pitfalls she sees founders making at each stage and how to avoid them. KEY TAKEAWAYS I trained to be a photographer and ended up as photo editor at Elle Magazine. I always liked working with creative, non-conforming, colourful people who had great ideas and needed somebody to help them. I later moved to LA to do something new and that would put me in charge of my own life. After an economic recession I became an entrepreneur on my own with a 6-month-old baby. It was a rough road. I went through a lengthy and expensive lawsuit, my Dad died, multiple natural disasters impacted my clients and then 9/11 happened. I had to file for bankruptcy. Then I got a letter from the White House that put me in touch with a small business administration that helped with funding for small business owners. They helped my find a bank to restructure my debt into a single loan that freed up my line of credit. Three months later I broke even and 18 months later I’m the world leader in my category. Next thing I know I’m doing a transaction with Bill Gates after his company agreed to buy my business. I became a self-made multimillionaire 18 months after the worst moment of my life. As a creative, the reality is that you’re in your creativity 30% of the time and in business 70%. Creatives want to be in the creative world because they don’t want to be in the business side of things. But the successful creative has to be creative and they have to understand business. Somebody who isn’t creative and is only in the business only has to master one skill, so the creative has two strikes against them to be successful. The idea of being a Growth Architect came from the fact that when you’re building something you’re architecting it, you’re deciding where it’s going to be, how big it will be, which way it faces for the sunset/rise, what it’s built from, who it’s for, etc. I build the blueprint so you can build your house any way you want, but I advise you every step of the way. BEST MOMENTS ‘I left Germany to find adventure and I’ve not had a boring day since.’ ‘Before you need to be right, be very careful of what you’re getting yourself into. A fight for your life could end up being a fight for nothing.’ ‘A good idea is nothing unless somebody else wants to buy it.’ ‘If you look at AI and image creation, creativity has taken a new route. It’s no longer about taking something that exists and making it look good, it’s an imaginary world and a completely different business.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Beate Chelette is the Growth Architect and Founder of The Women's Code. She equips visionaries and leaders with proven strategies, blueprints and growth maps to improve business systems, strengthen leadership skills and scale their impact. Beate believes success resides at the intersection of strategy and spirituality, a philosophy she infuses into her work as the Growth Architect. Her mission is to empower others to embrace strategic thinking, unlock hidden opportunities, and build sustainable business models, especially in challenging times. LinkedIn Quiz ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook TikTok Email Website

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Marinela Profi, a leading expert in AI and the Global AI and Generative AI Marketing Strategy Lead at SAS. Marinela has a wealth of experience at the intersection of data science, artificial intelligence, and strategic marketing. At SAS, she has been instrumental in crafting global marketing strategies for cutting-edge AI solutions, helping organizations worldwide leverage AI to drive innovation, enhance productivity, and achieve operational efficiencies. Today, Marinela will share insights from the recent SAS Generative AI Global Research Report, and we will both delve into how organizations are approaching generative AI, the benefits they're seeing, and the challenges they're facing in areas like governance, compliance, and skill gaps. KEY TAKEAWAYS The SAS Generative AI Global Research Report interviewed 1600 organisations from 16 different countries from all continents so the data would be as diverse and include as many voices as possible. The results found that the top 2 players are China and the US. China leads the world with usage (83% said they have adopted the technology and are experimenting with it) while the US leads in implementation and maturity. Generative AI truly allows organisations to enhance operational efficiency while improving employees’ experience through more personalise, streamlined, accessible resources. Ultimately what generative AI is doing, at a high level, is creating a more agile, responsive and engaging workplace for employees. However, there are things we need to think about. Generative AI is not delivering the same value to all employees, from business users to business analysts, data scientists, IT people, marketers. They each see different kinds of benefits, but at the same time they need to be aware that there are different kinds if risks and they are asking themselves different kinds of questions. Having governance in place is one of the top challenges between winning and failing with generative AI. When you don’t have governance frameworks in place (and the report shows that the majority of organisations are not thinking about this) there’s a lot of risks that you could incur. Ethical risks, compliance and legal issues, intellectual property risks, security vulnerabilities. BEST MOMENTS ‘Higher adoption and implementation doesn’t necessarily equate to effective implementation and effective returns.’ ‘Banking is one of the top markets for generative AI implementation even though you may think it would face the most challenges because of being a highly regulated industry.’ ‘AI’s answers may sound convincing, but how do users ensure accuracy? By prompting more effectively.’ ‘Generative AI is being used worldwide in either sharing information that is right or creating positive engagement, or misinformation. Governance allows to make sure that we are not incurring any ethical concerns.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Marinela Profi: When it comes to data and analytics investments, organizations are looking to achieve better and faster decisions. Data science/IT teams need to effectively collaborate to quickly prototype and industrialize solutions. Conversations are no longer about what tool or specific technology to use. Expectations are being elevated to increased productivity/cost savings, privacy and security. At SAS, my role as Principal Product Marketing Lead for AI has been instrumental in global marketing strategies, particularly for cutting-edge artificial intelligence solutions like Machine Learning and Generative AI. With an MBA and a Master's in Statistics and AI, I've been able to translate complex technical concepts into strategic marketing initiatives that resonate with our diverse clientele. ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook  TikTok Email Website

On this episode of the Scouting For Growth podcast, Sabine VdL talks to Adrian Mendoza, founder and general partner of Mendoza Ventures, whose inspirational journey sees him go from first generation Mexican-American who turned a successful tech-exit into a platform for empowering others. He’s a living embodiment of the power of perseverance and vision. On this episode, Adrian shares his insights on everything from pitfalls to how to deal with corporate life, and building corporate innovation lab to the art of securing strategic investments. KEY TAKEAWAYS It was very rare to find an operator/founder that was also an investor in 2015, but we had a lot of experience meeting people with domain expertise who would come to us because they’d invested in us through funds. VC was a black box that would never connect to founders. We theorised there was incredible potential success in breaking that black box open and connecting incredible investors that had operational and domain expertise with founders. Venture has been very localised. When we first looked at the landscape we realised there was an opportunity to find incredible talent that wasn’t the kids that went to Oxford or Stanford because you’re missing out on everything in between. One of our first investments was two Latinos that were working at RSA security and left because they had an idea, they didn’t have Ivy League educations, they were domain experts. That company returned 10x in 5 months back to us. For us, DE&I is not just black, brown and female, but also age diversity, veterans, those coming from rural areas. If you’re going to look at equity and inclusion it can just be within a sub-segment because then it’s incredibly hard to find talent. We want to find talent no matter where it is and what it looks like. In order to create the best outcomes you cannot be a passive investor, you have to help find customers, investors, help mentor these individuals because they’ve never run a company with 80-100 people before, help them find the talent and the ways into mainstream financial institutions or corporates.  BEST MOMENTS ‘No one looked like us, there were no women or Latinos writing venture cheques, we didn’t know that we were one of the first Latinx Venture Funds on the East Coast until individuals in private equity told us.’ ‘There’s incredible talents at corporates in rural areas in middle America that no one’s touching that is out there having ideas and building companies. We invest in this talent because we look like that talent.’ ‘60% of California is Latino, if we’re looking at being representative of that area then 60% of the capital should be going to Latinos. Most states are 50% women, 50% of capital should be going to women.’ ‘Our references aren’t just the investors, they’re the founders that we backed and those that we’ve had exits with.’ ABOUT THE GUEST Adrian Mendoza is the founder and general partner at Mendoza Ventures which is both Latinx and woman-owned and the first Latinx-founded VC fund on the east coast. His firm focuses on investments in Fintech, AI, and Cybersecurity, with diversity playing an important role in their investment decisions—about 80% of their portfolio consists of startups led by immigrants, people of colour, and women. Since its founding seven years ago, Mendoza Ventures has raised two funds and had two successful exits. The firm is currently raising its third fund, a $100M fintech fund anchored by Bank of America, focused on early growth funding rounds. In 2022, Axios Magazine listed Adrian as one of the five most influential people in Boston and the LA Times honoured Adrian as a DEI visionary as one of California’s most prominent game-changers and thought leaders in the business world today. Adrian is also a regular contributor on CNBC on the state of Venture capital in the US and the firm has recently been covered in Forbes, Bloomberg, and The Boston Globe. Website ABOUT THE HOST Sabine is a corporate strategist turned entrepreneur. She is the CEO and Managing Partner of Alchemy Crew a venture lab that accelerates the curation, validation, & commercialization of new tech business models. Sabine is renowned within the insurance sector for building some of the most renowned tech startup accelerators around the world working with over 30 corporate insurers, accelerated over 100 startup ventures. Sabine is the co-editor of the bestseller The INSURTECH Book, a top 50 Women in Tech, a FinTech and InsurTech Influencer, an investor & multi-award winner. Twitter LinkedIn Instagram Facebook  TikTok Email Website