Larissa Holzki
Editorial Head of TECH; Moderator
Sessions (3)
Sessions featuring Larissa Holzki at Bits & Pretzels 2026 | Founders Festival in Munich
Turning the 10x individual into the 10x organisation
The core message of this fireside chat was that AI can make individuals faster, but organisations only become “10x” when leaders redesign teamwork, decision-making, and shared context around AI rather than simply multiplying output. Larissa Holzki opened by challenging the AI productivity narrative with the problem of “slop grenades”: inboxes filled with AI-written emails, synthetic social media, and presentations where the presenter appears to have outsourced the thinking. Grisha Pavlotskyi responded that, in his organisation, AI is treated as “a reasoning tool and nothing more.” He argued that people may outsource parts of reasoning to a machine, but they cannot outsource understanding; when someone brings him an AI-looking presentation, his key question is not what is on the slide but how they got there, what mental model they used, and whether they can explain their thinking process.
Investing in Defense: Where's the Opportunity, and Where's the Line?
The core message of the provided session segment is that European defense investing has moved from a niche, ethically contested category into a structural venture opportunity, but investors must understand where the market is in its cycle, how procurement works, and how sovereignty concerns shape capital and scaling. The moderator opened by framing Munich as Europe’s “de facto defense capital,” noting that more than half of Munich’s venture money last year went into defense, security, and resilience, while Europe’s sector attracted a record EUR 8.7 billion. She immediately paired the financial momentum with an ethical shift: four years ago, 7% of LPs accepted purely military applications; now, the figure is one third.
Battle-Tested Tech: Investing in the Future of Defense
The session’s core message was that investing in Ukrainian defense technology is not a conventional venture theme retrofitted for wartime; it is a mission-driven response to an immediate survival problem, where battlefield urgency can translate into exceptional company-building outcomes. Eveline Buchatskiy explained that her fund was launched directly because of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. With a venture capital background, she and her team concluded Ukraine could not win through conventional systems alone and needed an “asymmetrical technological advantage.” Because no traditional VC was willing to operate on the ground in Ukraine at the time, they opened an office in Kyiv and raised capital from American and European investors, deliberately signaling that Ukraine was investable.