LONDON - Entrepreneurship Festival Startup Confessions: A Fireside Chat with Perlego's founder
Most founder stories are polished: the pitch, the raise, the exit. This one isn't.
Join us for a candid fireside chat with Gauthier Van Malderen, founder of Perlego, the "Spotify for textbooks" that scaled internationally. He is also the author of Startup Confessions: A Founder's Guide to Getting It Wrong (and Sometimes Right), and we're hosting this conversation just ahead of the book launch.
Part of the Entrepreneurship Festival: ESCP's month-long celebration of entrepreneurs and the challenges they face.
This year's theme is "Walk the Talk"; a true depiction of what ti takes to start and grow a business, the realities of being an entrepreneur and putting your money where your mouth is.
We'll talk about what building a company actually looks like:
Starting and scaling in a tough, incumbent-heavy industry
Staying alive when the economic climate shifts
Keeping investors happy without losing the plot
Convincing users to change a habit they've had for decades
The hiring mistakes, pointless projects and rejections nobody puts on LinkedIn
Expect honest answers, a few laughs and practical lessons, whether you're one week or ten years into your venture. There will be time for audience questions, then drinks and networking afterwards.
Who it's for: founders, aspiring founders, operators, students, alumni, and anyone curious about the reality behind the startup headlines.
YOUR SPEAKER
Gauthier Van Malderen is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Perlego, the global digital learning platform that has raised over $90M. He is an active angel investor, and a mentor and adviser to founders across Europe. His book Startup Confessions draws on eight years of scaling Perlego, with no clichés and no sugarcoating.
YOUR HOST
Alice Ivanoff is Head of Blue Factory London, ESCP's European startup incubator. A former founder (she co-founded and led Kokoon AI, a B2B SaaS startup) with operations, product and strategy experience at Amazon and WeWork, she will be interviewing Gauthier on stage.