The Wavemakers: Women Across the Earlybird Ecosystem
Connecting the Dots of Satellites, Healthcare, Culture, PLG & Circular Economy
Although International Women’s Day should ideally be celebrated year-round, we’re taking the annual opportunity this week to highlight selected people across the Earlybird ecosystem who are making waves in their companies and industries.
Find out what makes them tick and the value they bring to their organizations. Hear their wide range of professional paths, career learnings, and best practices within European startups.
From spacetech to healthtech and product-led growth to the circular economy, we hope their diverse stories inspire you to great new heights!
Read how Stella, Lucia, Kateřina, Elin, Evolena, and Viktoria are making waves.
1. Stella Guillen: Skyrocketing Sales 🚀 📈
Sales is one the best backgrounds you can have in startups because in the end, the ability to convince and retain users is key — and strong sales is all about empathy and effective persuasion. Stella Guillen’s understanding of highly technical sales in the satellite industry and international experience helped her quickly master and successfully sell a wide range of complex products and services. She grasps emerging technologies and trends and is passionate, pragmatic, and creative in her team leadership.
She is also a keen negotiator, trilingual, and COO at Isar Aerospace, an Earlybird Digital West portfolio company. Isar Aerospace develops next-generation rockets for sustainable access to space for small and medium satellites and satellite constellations.
EBVC: How are you personally aligned with Isar Aerospace’s mission?
Stella: One of our core values at Isar Aerospace is “Love what you do”. And while you could easily think that this can be copied for every company, at Isar Aerospace we are really driven by curiosity and passion. Could we build a rocket without passion? Clearly not. We are passionate about building technology that will benefit life on earth and beyond. We need to be passionate to have the courage of tackling the unique hurdles that come with working at an incredibly fast pace. And being passionate about understanding our customer’s business priorities is key to building trust and understanding their focus.
EBVC: What inspires you about the team or technology at Isar Aerospace?
Stella: Our team is free to make bold decisions, take risks, make mistakes, learn from them, and try again. That’s how we innovate and develop our technology. This is the only way to keep moving. What inspires me most about this is that everyone takes full ownership. The team is dedicated, creative, persistent, and aligned with the mission and goals of the company. Everyone is willing to learn from each other and willing to teach each other every day.
EBVC: Any advice to other leaders in startups looking to grow their roles?
Stella: “Don’t give up.” Working for a startup is hard and as the company grows fast, it can be disorienting. Whenever you face a problem or obstacle in engineering, product, marketing, or any other field, you need to take the initiative: not just by generating ideas for potential solutions, but by generating ideas and putting those solutions into action. Growing fast requires patience with yourself and others. Keep moving!
Lucia Zhang: Wellbeing with wellabe 🫀📲
Lucia Zhang is not afraid of diving into new and different challenges. She has assembled operational, hands-on experience as well as strategic expertise in a wide range of functions and leadership positions. She went from COO to Co-CEO of wellabe, an Earlybird Health portfolio company, looking to create products and services that empower people to unlock the healthiest version of themselves.
With health checkups and a personalized, digital follow-on path, wellabe focuses on two things: early identification of chronic disease risk factors and achieving lasting lifestyle changes.
EBVC: The health coaching space is crowded. What makes wellabe stand out?
Lucia: The wellabe journey starts with a detailed, digitized health assessment that we offer through employers and that is carried out personally by our health coaches. The recommendations that follow are thereby personalized based on a data-driven, objective evaluation of your health. Our mission is to make people feel empowered and in charge of their health and lifestyle. To achieve that, we are continuously expanding the personalized solutions we offer to meet specific needs — working closely together with insurance partners and healthcare providers.
EBVC: How do you make the co-CEO model work and delineate the role?
Lucia: It is important to be fully aligned on vision, strategy, and goals with your co-CEO, and to trust each other. We have clearly defined areas of responsibilities in terms of functions and KPIs, and ownership for driving initiatives and decisions. This allows us to play to our strengths, experiences, and personalities to best help the company and our team.
Ultimately, being a CEO is a very demanding role, especially when you are building and growing a business. So for certain organizational structures and startup phases, it can absolutely make sense and work — and be the smartest option for yourself and the company.
EBVC: Any advice for other companies scaling up in the health space?
Lucia: In this regulated multi-stakeholder market, it is critical to never lose sight of who your main customer is, who will be driving your growth, and what their needs are. This should guide your roadmap and make sure you are focusing on creating value.
The second thing I would point out is being very thorough in understanding and drawing the right conclusions from market and stakeholder feedback — and then acting and iterating fast.
Kateřina Smrčková: Creating Culture at Codasip 🫶 📊
Kateřina Smrčková shares Codasip’s belief that you don’t need to be a superhero to design a leading-edge processor core. That’s because Codasip’s design tools and IP enable you to do so. She spent the last 3 years searching for and working with genius minds who stand behind this innovative concept.
Her perspective: although the deep tech industry can be hard to understand unless you have studied it, she enjoys it thoroughly. She believes that loving one’s job and enjoying it each day should be a norm for everybody and that is exactly what it is for her.
As Chief People Officer at this Earlybird Digital East portfolio company, Kateřina manages Codasip’s global company strategy and the processes geared towards building and retaining exceptional professionals. Still quite hands-on, she serves as an advisor and consultant — executing solutions and optimizing people-centered activities. These include hiring, performance management, and organizational development to ensure company growth.
EBVC: How can a company define and develop a strong and healthy culture?
Kateřina: Everyone knows company culture is very important. But how can you best describe it, let alone develop it? I often think about our culture in connection with hiring (because at Codasip we are hiring a lot.) So I consider how to ‘imprint’ it to the newcomers, and how to best convey our common values. Although we do not have our culture written down, I see our employees as an embodiment of it. Our recruiters take time to explain our culture as early as initial interviews and then hire people who they believe can adapt to, and thrive in, that culture. This is paying off. The ultimate goal is to have people feeling comfortable and welcome. Universally, companies should ensure that employees believe the company values are being lived genuinely.
EBVC: What skills (hard & soft) do you need to thrive in a people leadership role within an international startup?
Kateřina: My background is in recruitment. This involves a lot of networking and interacting, so I find it relatively easy to connect with a variety of people. I am a good listener, an incurable optimist, and have always been very empathetic. As we scale, I find myself increasingly supporting as a line manager, negotiator, project manager, mediator and innovator, organizer; I also continually strive to be a role model. Most of all, my intention is never to stop learning. Several times in my life, I witnessed that a mastered soft or hard skill can be easily outperformed with perseverance and a willingness to learn something new.
EBVC: You’ve spent 6 years abroad; how do your awareness and understanding of cultural differences play out in your daily work?
Kateřina: The diversity and variety we have at Codasip is my “nutrient soil”. From the United States, across all of Europe, and as far as Japan, China, and South Korea, we employ nearly 180 employees. I am proud to know every employee by name and many of them on a personal level. In some cases (although usually just at the very beginning) it is only the English language that connects us. It is important to be aware of cultural stereotypes, because sometimes, what we (don’t) or do, can change a colleague’s sense of belonging. What we say can mean the opposite to someone else’s ears. I truly believe that being aware of this diversity prevents communication barriers and helps us understand and respect each other. After all, studies have shown diverse organizations are happier and more productive. This should be the ultimate goal for each People department out there.
Elin Lütz: PLG FTW (Product-led growth for the win!) 🛠 🏆
Elin Lütz made the leap from computer science to startups and software engineering. She loves creating products that people find useful and at Ripe, an Earlybird Digital West portfolio company, she’s doing just that. Ripe helps product-led revenue teams identify and connect with their most valuable customers.
Based in Stockholm, Elin is the Founder & CEO at Ripe where she fights through SaaS acronyms on a daily basis, helping teams operationalize their product-led sales strategy.
EBVC: What is the biggest misconception about product-led growth that you can clear up?
Elin: A lot of people hear the term product-led growth and assume that it only works for businesses looking to attract small customers at low price points. Or, that PLG means you have to offer a free product serving customers without humans in the loop, that PLG would equal no sales or marketing. I definitely get why people always fall in love with the “build it and they will come” narrative. However, the truth is that most fastest-growing PLG companies invest heavily across all go-to-market functions. The key difference is that they’re all focused on demonstrating value for customers early on with the goal of creating in-product outcomes.
EBVC: What patterns do you see young companies struggle with and how do you help them overcome that?
Elin: I often see two common struggles among young companies: 1) not talking to their users and customers enough, and 2) they’re launching way too late. Many founders focus so much on perfecting their products that they neglect the sometimes-hard work of finding and talking to customers. This is where we can help out, enabling young software companies to connect with their best users, so they can get their first sales and iterate toward product-market fit.
EBVC: A new study about top startup-friendly countries, ranks Sweden as number 1! What makes Stockholm uniquely attractive for companies like Ripe, and how does that play out in a world where business happens globally?
Elin: I love this question, thrilled to hear that we’re so startup friendly! I think that of the things that set Stockholm apart is its access to great talent, along with a super supportive ecosystem. Stockholm is still quite a duck pond when it comes to startups, but it’s an exciting time. The people coming out of our recent tech successes are really paving the way for the next generation of builders with an amazing pay-it-forward mentality.
Stockholm is great proof that location is no longer the be-all and end-all for startups. On a deeper level, I think what makes Sweden uniquely well-off in startups and tech is probably that many Swedes are rooted in a fairly creative, and free, school system that fosters tech, innovation, and entrepreneurial spirit. It also definitely helps that most of us Swedes are just a bunch of friendly nerds with a good broadband connection.
Evoléna: Fairplay at Faircado 💻 ♻️
Leading the “second-hand first” revolution is no small feat. It’s a good thing Evoléna de Wilde d’Estmael is both an impact entrepreneur and climate activist. She is no stranger to big tasks, having built and grown successful tech startups in the e-commerce and consumer rights industry. Her background includes expertise from climate-change focused organizations like Generation Climate Europe, Leaders for Climate Action, the UN Action Campaign and the Greentech Alliance, to name a few. Now she is Co-Founder & CEO of Faircado.
Faircado is a startup in Cohort 3 of Earlybird Vision Lab’s program. They are a greentech startup making second-hand purchases as easy and attractive as buying new. They use AI to help consumers save time, money, and CO2 — contributing to a more circular economy and addressing the UN SDG 12 on responsible consumption and production.
EBVC: How do you define circular economy & how can we all be a part of it?
Evoléna: If you look at the natural world, you’ll realize that it’s a hyper-efficient and effective system that’s 100% circular: producing an enormous amount of value but with no negative externalities, no trash, nothing wasted. A circular economy is an economy which promotes elimination of waste and continual safe use of natural resources.
It basically means switching from our current linear economy where we take, make, use and dispose of resources at scale, to a regenerative growth model. We can all help implement it: by reducing our purchases to what we really need and buying second-hand instead of new, reusing what we already have, repairing what’s broken and repurposing when possible, and then of course recycling, but that’s the very last step.
EBVC: People might not see the connection between AI and sustainability. Can you explain more?
Evoléna: AI is a tool that can be used to optimize resource use, reduce waste, and make production processes more efficient. In the case of Faircado, AI is used to automatically find second-hand alternatives to what users are searching for online. By doing so, we are reducing the demand for new products and extending the life cycle of existing ones, which ultimately helps reduce carbon emissions and preserve natural resources.
EBVC: You once said: “Giving your free time can make you rich.” Elaborate.
Evoléna: We live in a society quite focused on money. But there is so much more to life than money. When I said, “Giving your free time can make you rich,” I meant that volunteering and giving back to the community can be extremely rewarding and enriching in many ways. It is not just about positively impacting on society, but also about gaining new skills, expanding networks, and developing a deeper sense of purpose.
I wouldn’t be where I am today without my volunteering experiences: as a scout chief, a climate activist, or a social entrepreneur. It is crucial that we recognize the immense value and impact of women volunteering their time and expertise to support their communities and advance causes they care about.
Vision Lab: An Alumna POV 👖 🌍
In addition to the current Earlybird Vision Lab Cohort 3 which represents 11 countries and 50% female participation, we also have great alumna stories. One of these is Viktoria Kanar, Co-Founder (alongside Revital Nadiv Zivan), of Re-Fresh Global from Vision Lab Cohort 2.
EBVC: You mentioned that by 2050 the fashion industry will be responsible for 25% of global CO2 emissions. What is Re-Fresh Global doing about this?
Viktoria: A big chunk of the polluting impact the industry causes is due to the lack of proper management of the waste that the industry leaves behind. We have spent a lot of time researching all current approaches to address this problem and realized that there aren’t any that are innovative enough to deliver a solution in scale. Our approach looks at textile waste as a source for new materials that can be applied in numerous manufacturing industries, once it undergoes our proprietary biotech transformation process. This is how we can divert at least 60% of textiles that today land in landfills or are being incinerated.
EBVC: What is the biggest opportunity the textile industry is missing out on?
Viktoria: Most of our clothes are still being produced the same way as 100 years ago. The fashion and textile industry still operates in a very traditional manner that doesn’t leave much room for innovation. The higher the pressure to execute climate protection goals, the clearer it will be which fashion and textile companies will survive, and which will be left behind because they haven’t embraced environmental and circular practices for their operations.
EBVC: What are microfactories and what big tech change can they deliver?
Viktoria: Just like the clothes we wear, waste from textiles is ubiquitous. We believe that treating these textiles should be handled locally. Our microfactories are designed as local innovation centers that can be placed in urban areas and allow easy collection of discarded textiles, thus significantly shortening supply chains. The raw materials that will be created in the microfactories will serve local manufacturers and local populations. We see these solutions as a big contribution to the vision of a waste-free, innovative Circular City.
Takeaways for IWD and beyond⚡️
We hope these voices from our ecosystem give you new insights into ways that women in the Earlybird ecosystem are having an impact across industries.
Feel free to reach out to them on these key topics, or share feedback on our social media channels: LinkedIn and Twitter.
Thank you for reading and sharing! 🙌🏽
Edited by Elisheva Marcus VP Communications at Earlybird
