Ramzi Rizk / WIP Capital

Ramzi Rizk is the Founder and General Partner of Work in Progress Capital, a €10M fund in Berlin backing scientists and engineers building the future he wants to live in.

He left Lebanon on his 21st birthday looking for his tribe, landed in Germany, and dropped out of a PhD on privacy and social media to build a photography platform. It grew to 25 million photographers, pioneered computational aesthetics and computer vision, and went public on the Swiss Stock Exchange in 2021 after an 11-year journey. He started angel investing in 2020 and quickly noticed a pattern that the founders he liked best were scientists and engineers who looked different than what European VCs were used to seeing.

Our conversation gets into what drew Ramzi to build a fund around that instinct. Work in Progress Capital is targeting 35-40 companies at pre-seed and seed, writing €150-250K checks. Ramzi's thesis starts from a place that by almost every measurable standard, we're living in the best time in human history. Ramzi believes technology finishes the job. He's backing founders digitizing the human brain, building implantable neuromodulation devices, and rethinking cancer diagnostics. He doesn't want one shot on goal for any of these problems but multiple bets across different approaches.

Full episode below, or on Spotify / Apple Podcasts