55. Lukas Waeschle - Decentralised Innovation: The Unveiling of Node42

Episode notes

Lukas Waeschle is co-founder and CEO of Node 42, an AI-native startup that comes out of stealth on this episode. His path here was anything but linear. He dropped out of mechanical engineering, switched to political science, then spent years in industry across sales, sales management and product management, carrying what he describes as a long-running inferiority complex about lacking a business or engineering degree. That shifted when a corporate venture project inside a large medtech company pulled him into business innovation, where he finally found his footing.

Three realisations shape what he's building now. Every company chasing adjacent growth runs into the same structural walls. Everyone reinvents the wheel, even though decades of evidence-based frameworks are readily available. And those frameworks are nearly impossible to apply in practice, let alone scale. Node 42 builds them into software, jobs-to-be-done above all, using knowledge graphs to give mid-sized companies a digital twin of their market.

He set up in Ravensburg, near Lake Constance, on purpose: close to the German Mittelstand hidden champions he's serving, far from the noise. At 42, with a family and a quarter of a million in pre-seed raised, he's an unapologetic Clayton Christensen believer and proof that experience can be an asset rather than a delay.