Christian Lanng is the Founder & CEO @ Tradeshift, the startup with the vision to transform the way businesses work together. With 250+ people, offices in 9 countries and over $200m in funding from some of the best including Data Collective, HSBC and Intuit, they are likely one of the biggest and best startups you might not have heard of. As for Christian, he is one of the most visionary European entrepreneurs of the last decade having grown from digitising invoices in Denmark when he was at Uni to working on digitizing the EU later.

In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:

1.) How Christian made his way from Denmark to founding one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley?

2.) What does Christian mean when saying, "we should be discussing the globalization of technology"? How will we see the evolution of manufacturing over time? What is the bottleneck for automation?

3.) Christian has previously stated that his competitors have 'hostages not customers'. Why does he say this and how does that affect his view of competition and customer service?

4.) Christian has raised over $200m in varying fundraising climates, how did the rounds differ? What were Christian's keys to fundraising success? What does he know now that he wishes he had known in the beginning?

5.) How does Christian approach networking in a very unconventional style? What are the benefits of doing so? What does Christian advise startup founders looking to expand either their founder network or their investor network?

Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:

Christian’s Fave Book: The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck

Christian’s Fave Blog: SaaStr

As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Christian on Twitter here!

Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

But before we dive into the show today, there are some products that you simply cannot remember what life was like before them—for me that is x.ai. They bring you Amy and Andrew, the AI-powered personal assistants who schedule meetings for you. The beauty of Amy or Andrew is that you interact with them just like you would any other person, in plain English. You hand over meeting scheduling, and they get the job is done. Which means that you can avoid the tedious hours of email ping pong usually required to schedule a single meeting. Even better though, there is no sign in, no password, nothing to download. All you do is cc [email protected] Beautiful! And you can check it out now on https://x.ai/20vc/ It really is a must!

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