Future Ventures: Scaling with Clarity
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.
Episodes
45 episodes
Jan Poetsch — Turning Power Into Profitability | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 45
Jan Poetsch spent almost twenty years working on some of the world's most complicated energy projects. He then realized that the biggest hidden opportunity in industrial energy was right on the income statement: the power bill. His career took ...
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Jeremy Funk — The New Rules of Growth in the AI Era | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 44
Jeremy Funk has spent more than two decades doing the one thing most people in tech were told to stop prioritizing: building real relationships. As founder and CEO of Funk Futures — a fractional sales, recruiting, and marketing firm rooted in t...
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Emilia De Stasio - The Democratization of Wealth Through Art | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 43
Emilia de Stasio spent years working in finance at places like the European Central Bank and Moody's, but she later turned her focus to a market that has very little data. As a long-time art collector, she often found it hard to get reliable in...
Dave Guttman — From Terminal Diagnosis to 9-Figure Exits | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 42
Dave Guttman has spent more than three decades building, scaling, acquiring, and exiting businesses — racking up multiple 8- and 9-figure outcomes along the way. But the thing that shaped how he operates wasn't a deal. At 24, fresh off an accep...
Samir Musayev — How Inmigrants Drive Canada's Entrepreneurial Future | FV Podcast Ep. 41
Dr. Samir Musayev has built a career helping businesses think well beyond their home turf. As Commercial Account Director at Export Development Canada (EDC), he works hands-on with Canadian companies navigating the messy reality of global trade...
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Nicola Redi — Why Europe’s Deep Tech Moment Is Just Beginning | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 40
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 Ita...
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Tom Milar — Turning Waste into Capital Building Circular Systems That Scale | FV Podcast Ep. 39
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. ...
Mathew Jackson — Building Circular Systems That Scale | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 12
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-gro...
Stanley Wei — AI That Actually Gets Things Done: The Future of Autonomous Agents | FV Podcast E. 37
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 subscriptio...
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Stan Christiaens — The Billion-Dollar Problem Behind AI | Future Ventures Podcast Episode 37
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 ...
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Neeraj Singh — Building Sustainable Software in the Age of AI | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 36
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 g...
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Hubertus Hofkirchner — The Future of Money and Trade Infraestructure | FV Podcast Ep. 35
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 ...
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Dave Hertig — High Tech, High Touch: The Future of CEO Performance | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 34
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...
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Omar Sahyoun — AI-Powered Commerce and the Reinvention of Main Street | FV Podcast Ep. 33
Omar Sahyoun has spent two decades building at the edge of where consumers, technology, and physical commerce meet. He co-founded TeamBuy and DealFind, two of Canada's earliest daily-deal platforms that collectively scaled past 4 million member...
Andrew Ackerman — Where Venture Capital is actually Betting | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 32
Andrew Ackerman has sat in nearly every chair around the startup table. He's a serial entrepreneur, an angel investor, a venture capitalist, an accelerator operator at Dream Adventures and Reach Labs (the venture arm of the National Association...
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John Cowan — Founder-Aligned Capital in the Era of Autonomy | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 031
John Cowan was about to do what he'd done a hundred times before — make the calls, set the meetings, walk a young founder into the venture capital fundraising process. In a split second, he backed out. He couldn't morally send another kid into ...
Sam Hasty — Building Venture-Scale Returns While Solving Planet-Scale Problems | FV Podcast Ep. 030
Sam Hasty, partner at Active Impact Investments — Canada's top climate tech seed fund — has supported early entrepreneurs in energy, logistics, farming, materials, and resilience over eight years. He started as a Memphis math teacher, helped la...
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Joyce Shin— Why AI Will Make Leadership More Human, Not Less | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 29
Joyce Shin, founder of The Human Edge and ex-head of design operations at Dropbox, helped scale teams and systems there. Trained in neuroscience and raised across Texas, Ohio, Seoul, and Tokyo, she studied resilience and effectiveness, first af...
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Shahin Nabavian — The Future of Mobility, Operations & Intelligent Infrastructure | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 028
Shahin Nabavian, a computer scientist turned venture builder, has worked across operations, infrastructure, and transformation for the past decade. His experience includes a London-based financial startup, venture-building at Shell's maritime d...
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Dr. Sylvain Charlebois — Inflation, Supply Chains, and the Reinvention of Grocery | FV Podcast Ep 27
Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, the "Food Professor," is the Senior Director of Dalhousie’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab, lead author of Canada's Food Price Report, and a prominent researcher in food supply chain management. He’s the go-to expert for food i...
Tim Fung — Why Human Skills Still Win in an AI World | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 025
Tim Fung, Founder and CEO of Airtasker, leads one of the world's top local services marketplaces. Since launching in Sydney in 2012, it’s now a publicly listed company operating across Australia, the UK, and the US, facilitating over a billion ...
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Michael Allen Feinman — Selling the American Dream | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 026
Mike Feinman is the Managing Partner at Texas Business Brokers, a top M&A advisory firm for the lower mid-market and main street. His career began at PepsiCo's Taco Bell division and includes leadership at Yum! Brands across 16 countries. H...
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Sarah Romanko — How Grit, Brand, and Deal Flow Win | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 024
Sarah Romanko, an investor at Geek Ventures, backs immigrant-founded AI and robotics startups. She entered venture without traditional credentials, relying on persistence like cold outreach, online events, and paying it forward. Her approach sh...
Nikola Borisov — Why the Real AI Battle Isn’t Training—It’s Deployment | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 023
Nikola Borisov is CEO and co-founder of DeepInfra, offering open-source models like DeepSeek, Llama, Kimi, GLM, and GPT-OSS via APIs. He previously scaled IMO Messenger to over 200 million users, handling up to a million new users daily with ch...
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Grant Blaisdell — Turning Space into an Investable Asset Class | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 022
Grant Blaisdell, CEO of Copernic Space, is developing space's financial infrastructure by tokenizing payloads, satellite data, computing, and lunar rights, turning space into a liquid market. A serial entrepreneur and blockchain pioneer, he cof...
