EWOR

European VCs called Wiktor Stanislawek’s pitch deck a red flag for naming OpenAI as a competitor. In San Francisco, investors called it ambition. In Episode 16 of Been There, Done That, the Co-founder and CEO of Reactive AI tells Daniel W. Dippold how his team of AI researchers and university dropouts from Poland, none of whom had worked at an AI lab before, set out to build one, from Europe. As Wiktor puts it, how can we reach superintelligence if models have Alzheimer's. They forget everything and reread the entire conversation every time you prompt them. Reactive AI builds the first Large Awareness Model with internal memory, enabling self-improvement at 25× lower costs than traditional LLMs. YC passed on them twice. EWOR said yes after a one-minute demo: Reactive AI's token count stayed flat as other LLMs kept climbing exponentially after a few messages. When Wiktor approached a founding OpenAI researcher to join the team, the researcher asked to invest instead, and wired the money 24 hours later. Today, the underdogs from Poland are taking on Silicon Valley's Frontier Labs with Large Awareness Models. Full episode live now, link in comments.

🔴 Live on etn. today: EWOR's co-founder an CEO, Daniel. Watch now to hear the story behind our new team in the USA, why the next Silicon Valley will not be a physical place and what's Daniel's vision for EWOR in the decades to come. Rewind stream to 2:00 PM CEST: https://lnkd.in/e79gyQbv

Join EWOR Partner Paul and Fellow Dila on Oct 7 in Berlin at The Founder's Story we co-host with Google. Expect us to dive deep into how AI changes building startups today – from latest stack and architecture to the next frontier models. See you there!

Noah Campana and Florian Koller could have built yet another AI agent for freight forwarding. They didn't, and it's why nemox is beating the competition today. A year ago, they were two engineers who had never worked a day in logistics. So they did something almost nobody building an AI startup bothers to do anymore: they showed up in person. For weeks, they sat at desks at Cargo Movers in Frankfurt, next to the people who write the quotes and check the invoices. They watched people fight with five programs at once, every one of them bought to make the job easier but failed miserably. That's when Noah and Florian killed their original plan to build an AI agent. The people at those desks didn't need another tool. They were already navigating five just to send one email. As Noah puts it: "They spent a few seconds making the decision, but then 30 minutes executing it." So, nemox sits between those tools and does the executing. When a customer emails asking what it costs to fly a shipment somewhere, nemox's AI assistant reads the email and works out the price, directly in Outlook. The person at the desk checks it and hits send. From there, the same shipment runs through nemox in operations and accounting, all the way to the final invoice. At Cargo Movers, 54% of quotes now go out without a single change. And yet not one person has lost their job over it! Less than a year in, freight forwarders in five countries already use nemox. A lot of agentic AI startups in logistics will end up where Noah and Florian started, sitting next to their customers and listening. These two EWOR Fellows just got there first. Link in the comments.

7 of Daniel W. Dippold's 50 angel investments became unicorns. He says the difference was never the idea. It was who the founders hired, and in what order. The pattern he sees fail: founders delegating their strengths and holding onto their weaknesses, when it should be exactly the reverse. His rule is blunt: Own what you are great at and delegate what you are bad at entirely. And never make a hire in your weakest area without someone world-class judging the candidate, because you cannot recognise excellence in a skill you do not have. But strength alone doesn't tell you what to hand over. Some of your best work drains you. Some of your worst work you love. So he plots every task on two axes – edge and energy – and the quadrant it lands in decides which roles to hire, when, and how. He calls it the Energy/Edge Matrix. Full framework in the comments.

The founders in the room at Outlier One built companies worth more than most countries' GDP. Together with Allocator One, we brought together 25 unicorn founders, 50 GPs and 25 EWOR Fellows building what comes next last week in London. Two of the tightest filters in the market, one invite-only room. The first of many to come! Many thanks to Felix, Michael, and Keyvan, Iliana and team for the epic collab. 

We went to San Francisco for the first time 1.5 years ago and saw our Fellows raise $2M on average. Today, they raise $10M. As a result, our US applications - purely driven by word of mouth - spiked 237%. When we first arrived in SF, we realised, without a doubt, that this city has the best ecosystem for raising capital. It still concentrates 25% of global VC today despite being a city of only 800K. Soon after, it became obvious that we needed a kickass US team on the ground, which Forbes announced today: Charles Ferguson sold FrontPage to Microsoft and won an Oscar for Inside Job, his account of the 2008 financial crisis. He was among the first to invest in Etched, Perplexity, CopilotKit and Paradigm. Charles has spent his career spotting the people everyone else overlooked. That's what he's doing for EWOR now, from SF. Katie Madding was CPO and the third US hire at Adjust before AppLovin bought it for $1B+. She still remembers the lonely nights as a pre-seed CEO at Emhance, sitting with decisions no one else could make. She's here so our Fellows never have to face customer acquisition alone. Gigi Brett scaled a health company past 60 people and built a sperm-donor database now covering roughly 10% of US registered donors. Her whole career has been about optimising new beginnings, and as our new Chief Investment Officer, she supports founders from the most fragile beginning of all: the idea. Don’t get us wrong. We’re proud to be a European organisation with European values that aims to build a global #1 category winner. What excites us is how global company building has become. Today’s founders sell in the US, where buyers spend 5x more per employee on software. They build in Oxford or Munich, where a brilliant engineer costs $60K rather than the $5M they’d burn in Silicon Valley. None of that requires moving to the US. It requires a way in, which is what EWOR’s new US Leadership team represents – people who’ve already sold, scaled, and invested there.   As Daniel W. Dippold puts it: the US is one piece, a very important one, of the global network we're building so EWOR Fellows can be as successful as they possibly can in fundraising, hiring and customer acquisition from wherever they're located. There's still so much more to come. Read more in Forbes below.

Chris could have raised millions for Nimbus. He chased profitability instead, and scaled from $1.6M to $2.5M ARR in weeks. He refuses to start a company until he knows the one channel that will make it profitable. For Nimbus, that channel is referrals. Most founders get growth wrong by going an inch deep in ten channels at once. Chris turned off all marketing spend at his previous company to go deep on one channel. That decision alone allowed him to grow from Seed Stage to Series B. In this episode of Been There, Done That, he tells Daniel why the build-to-PMF window has collapsed from 18 months to 30 days, and why distribution, not technology, is the only real moat left in 2026. Listen now: https://lnkd.in/ehRDxwq5

Exciting career update: I’ve been selected as an EWOR fellow! At the beginning of our journey, me and Krish were two neuroscience researchers with the drive to democratize medicine. After working for some of the biggest life sciences companies in the world, researching under a Nobel laureate, and scaling products to tens of thousands of users, we set our sights on the hardware that powers modern healthcare. When we cold emailed Daniel Dippold, he connected with our vision immediately; we had an industry-defining product that needed to be scaled and distributed as quickly as possible. EWOR was the perfect place to make this happen.  Since then, EWOR has introduced us to other world-class entrepreneurs from all around the world, given us mentorship from countless unicorn founders, and helped us get our product into the hands of real clinics with thousands of patients. Incredibly grateful for the EWOR team and Daniel for backing and supporting us as we change healthcare for the better. This is just the beginning!