After a sold-out show musicians often face a phenomenon known as the “Post-Performance Blues.” It is the inevitable "comedown" that follows months of rehearsal and the adrenaline of the stage. For founders, the experience is strikingly similar. The high-intensity rush of a launch or a new feature release is electrifying, but the following morning, the "real work" remains.

The challenge lies in the transition: how do we celebrate these milestones and allow ourselves space to process, while ensuring the engine doesn't stall?

While our previous edition explored the art of defying expectations, this month we shift our focus to Momentum⚡️. We’re looking beyond the breaking point to discover how student ventures are not just surviving the "day after," but are using that energy to push skyward.

I’m especially happy to feature gesus8 as our artist of the month, as his YouTube mixes have been the literal soundtrack to my momentum, getting me through the heaviest study sessions of exam season lately.

Whether you’re in the middle of a launch or refueling for the next leap, we hope this edition inspires you to keep moving🔋.

— Leonard Ulrich (Publisher)

📍University of Oxford

Would you want to work for a medium-sized manufacturing company with 80 employees? 

The money isn't bad, the work is meaningful, and you can actually have a work-life balance. So why not? Well, telling your friends you joined a Mittelstand auto-parts supplier just doesn't land the same way as saying you're working in an agentic AI startup. It's a perception problem that’s costing us more than we think.

After working at such a firm in Germany for over two years, our co-founder Julius (TU Munich), saw the result: manual processes, paper trails, and more bureaucratic layers than you can count. No wonder European businesses are losing market share to fully robotised competitors. Europe’s SMEs, which make up more than half of our economy, are facing an existential threat: without talent, there is no innovation, and without innovation, they can’t compete.

Across the English Channel, our other co-founder, Nils (Oxford), observed the other half of the problem: many smart and ambitious young people are either looking for the next idea or building the 100th AI automation startup, with no idea what problems legacy firms face every day. If only they would build solutions for the struggling businesses.

We asked ourselves how we could bring this talent to the businesses that need it most. 

So we built MunOx, a pan-European network connecting young innovators with legacy businesses. Not another startup accelerator. A bridge between the talent Europe already has and the problems that actually matter.

We do this by organising events, such as hackathons or dinners, as well as challenges. Challenges are open competitions where companies submit real problems they’re facing to our network. Winning teams take home cash prizes. Companies walk away with solutions they couldn't have produced internally. And the strongest ideas can spin out as startups in their own right.

We are still just getting started and expect to launch this autumn. The road has not been and will not be easy. As many of you know, getting traction is a slow and tedious process, especially when you’re dealing with established legacy firms. You write email after email and take call after call just to convince a 55-year-old CEO that he should let students solve structural problems their company has been sitting on for years. 

What keeps us going is a deep belief in our mission. The problem is real. We observed it from two different sides of the equation and are willing to put in the necessary effort to solve it.

So far, we have been getting a lot of confirmation. We are currently in conversation with early partners and customers and are planning our first events.

If you are young and ready to make an impact, we would love to have you with us. Join us at munox.eu.

— Julius Lagies & Nils Kohler

📍Imperial College London (ICL)

Not too long ago, GLP‑1 weight‑loss drugs felt like something people whispered about. Now they’re exploding in the UK markets and media, with prescriptions rising fast and headlines promising “miracle” results.

This isn’t just an abstract social issue: through speaking with numerous patients using GLP‑1s during our early research, we saw that their journeys were anything but straightforward; early excitement, complicated side‑effects, and deep worry about what happens when the injections stop. The hype has arrived but the long‑term support has not, and Kara started as our way of addressing that gap entrepreneurially.

Kara is a tech‑enabled aftercare platform supporting patients in their transition off GLP‑1 medication. We support patients to preserve muscle, stabilise appetite and maintain healthy habits as their dose tapers down.

Instead of leaving patients to figure out nutrition, strength training and habit change alone, Kara breaks the “after GLP‑1” journey into simple weekly goals and evidence‑based routines. We do not aim to replace clinical oversight and care, but to offer a structured, compassionate companion at the exact moment when support often falls away. We’re partnering with distributors and pharmaceuticals to maximise access and ensure that our platform reaches over 2 million GLP-1 users across the country.

Building Kara has been a rollercoaster. We (Bella and Andre), first met on a random Tuesday in a lecture at Imperial and quickly realised we were both thinking about healthcare, prevention, and long-term outcomes in similar ways. Our backgrounds complement each other closely: Bella, an LSE graduate, brings a research-driven mindset and sharp operational execution, while Andre, a Cambridge graduate and former founder, brings cross-sector experience at the intersection of public health, finance and policy.

We later met our technical co-founder Matteo Amata during our Master’s, and he immediately stood out for his engineering mindset. He now leads product development, building and stress-testing the platform as we translate our ideas into something tangible for patients.

Being master’s coursemates at Imperial has shaped Kara from the ground up, giving us the chance to test early versions, and learn directly from clinicians, mentors, and other founders. Through Imperial’s Enterprise Lab, we’re now semi-finalists in the WeInnovate programme for women co-founded ventures, which has been instrumental in accelerating our progress.

Momentum for Kara has rarely been a straight line. We’ve had pilots that were slow to recruit, product ideas that users didn’t care about and weeks where balancing academic workload with a startup felt impossible. Each time, returning to conversations with GLP‑1 users and their families has pulled us forward again. Stories of lost confidence and fear about stopping the drug keep sharpening our focus on building something genuinely useful rather than just impressive on a pitch deck.

We keep our momentum by staying close to patients, learning continuously from their experiences, and holding each other to a high standard as a founding team. In a complex space like the GLP‑1 sector, we can’t promise effortless transformation - but we can commit to supporting patients through the messy, uncertain transition periods, and that’s how we plan to help thousands step off GLP‑1s with confidence.

— Andre Pancholi & Isabella Brankovic

📍London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Last year, we were sitting our A-Levels and ChatGPT couldn't tell us what our examiner actually wanted.

It didn't know our exam board. It didn't know the mark scheme. The gap between a B and an A* isn't intelligence. It's knowing exactly what the examiner rewards. Generic AI doesn't have that.

So what if we trained AI on the brain of an A* student?

We're three LSE and Imperial students with 9 A*s and 29 Grade 9s between us. We trained an AI on past papers, mark schemes, and examiner reports. The exact materials examiners use to decide your grade.

That became A* AI.

A revision platform that marks essays, explains technique, generates diagrams, tracks mistakes, and generates mock exams. Personalised to you, whether you're going from C to B or A to A*.

It wasn't an easy ride. A hackathon in October nearly derailed everything. Judges questioned the defensibility, the tech, the whole idea. LinkedIn gave us early users, but Instagram underperformed badly. So we went back to basics, spoke to people already building in this space, and rebuilt our growth around short-form video.

That's when it clicked.

Six months in, we have 5,000 users, a 10% paid conversion rate, 20 creators and 30 interns.

Students deserve AI that actually understands their exams, not something generic. Something built for them.

Next, we're expanding into personal statements, TMUA, TSA, GCSEs, and schools.

Built by A* students, for A* students.

— Henry Li, James Wingfield & Tanuj Kakumani

📍University College London (UCL)

A friend first told me about this gap in sports technology and I related instantly. I used to kickbox, and training had always felt stagnant, fights blurring into adrenaline without feedback. So I went to gyms and asked boxers what they actually used. The answer was that they had no serious mechanisms in place. The market opportunity and chance to develop the practice of combat sports technologically became clear.

That's not just a me problem, that's a $9 billion industry problem.

Boxing, MMA, kickboxing; they're all judged by humans squinting at speed they can't actually see. F1 has telemetry. Tennis has Hawk-Eye. Football has VAR. Combat sports? Three people at ringside and a hope.

We're building the operating system for combat sports; wearable sensors that measure how fast, hard, and accurately a fighter strikes. Punch velocity, impact force, fatigue, heart rate variability, all captured live. The data makes training measurable today. Tomorrow, it becomes the infrastructure layer for officiating, broadcasting, betting and gaming.

The first prototype was a 9-axis IMU wired to a breadboard with software running on top. Ugly. But it worked, and that first proprietary punch dataset was enough to keep building.

Then the real lesson hit: hardware as a startup is brutal in ways SaaS founders never face. A hydrogen plant blew up, helium prices skyrocketed, our next PCB shipment got pushed back two weeks- supply-chain shocks we had zero control over. IMU noise, battery life, and form factor stopped being engineering tasks and became real barriers to entry. Reaching customers was its own gauntlet too- rejected by gym after gym before we worked out we had to go through coaches, not athletes.

Two trips reset our thinking, giving the momentum to push ahead: Stanford ASES and the Peak Sports Tech conference in Vegas, where we mapped what a real hardware production timeline actually looks like (spoiler: it is nothing like a B2B SaaS timeline). Then YC's robotics hackathon, where we met the hardware mentors who've accelerated our build, and where the vision crystallised: STRYKE isn't a punch tracker. It's the data infrastructure layer for combat sports.

We're now on V2- production-ready hardware with live software output, just won first place at the UCL VC Fund competition (£3K prize), and building industry connections.

The biggest thing we've learned: hardware doesn't reward speed. It rewards survival. Every founder around us was shipping AI agents in a weekend. We were waiting on a printed circuit board. But each delay forced sharper thinking, about the customer, the moat, the actual shape of this device. If this had existed when I was still competing, I wouldn't have quit.

— Sofia Viola

🔍This interview was originally conducted in German and has been translated and edited for length and clarity

How do you maintain momentum in your life? I personally found music to help me a lot as a motivator and a source of concentration to really "dial in". For a long time, I’ve been a big fan of gesus8, who puts out house mixes on YouTube and has managed to quickly gain popularity among students and professionals alike. With 66k subscribers and videos making millions of views, he has tapped into a unique space in the digital music scene. I was very happy to talk to him about his journey. Enjoy the read, Leo.

Leo: Pablo, let’s start at the very beginning. How did the name "gesus8" come about, and who is the person behind it?

Pablo: My real name is actually Pablo Gesus. The "G" in Gesus was actually an administrative error, it was supposed to be the Spanish spelling with a "J," but the office messed it up. There are only eight people in Germany with that specific spelling. My third name is "Saïd", when you say "Gesus Saïd" quickly, it sounds like "Gesus8," so I adopted that as my handle. People often assume I have Spanish roots because of the name, but I’m actually half-German and half-Polish. My father studied Spanish and just wanted a name with that specific flair.

Leo: You just finished your Bachelor’s in Computer Science. How did you balance your studies with a rapidly growing YouTube presence?

Pablo: During my bachelor’s thesis, it was extremely stressful. I was stuck in front of the computer and couldn't do anything else. I’m now working on my master’s, which gives me more freedom and I’m producing more videos now than ever before. It was incredibly motivating to see over a hundred people comment "Congrats on your bachelor" under a mix, even though I only mentioned it in a tiny one-liner in the description. That’s when I realised I’ve built a genuine community of regular listeners.

Leo: Your channel has grown massively in a short time. Your most successful mix is sitting at over two million views. How did this all start?

Pablo: I started producing beats for rappers when I was 16 and also had two songs with a rapper from the US, which felt very big back then. You can look them up on Spotify, they are called 'U' and 'Blame Time' by Ylti. However, making rap beats eventually became too competitive. I actually failed at DJing several times before it stuck. Twice, I bought controllers and sold them out of frustration a week later because Drum & Bass was just too difficult to mix without the right foundations. It wasn’t until the third attempt, this time with House and Techno, that it finally "clicked". I uploaded my first mix just one week after that third try.

Leo: Did you expect this level of success?

Pablo: Not at all. I uploaded the mixes because I used to listen to house sets by DJs like Chris Luno while studying for university. Without any promotion, one video suddenly had 130 views and 15 likes after two weeks. At the time, that completely blew me away. Today, seeing millions of clicks feels surreal. I didn’t do anything fancy to promote the mixes other than post them on my Instagram story to maybe 100 people, most of the viewers have just stumbled across my videos somewhere on YouTube and seemed to enjoy them, which makes me really happy. Because of that I stuck to the organic way of getting my mixes out there, just through random YouTube recommendations and word of mouth of people who found my videos and shared them with friends.

Leo: Our current newsletter theme is "Momentum." How do you maintain your focus and keep your energy up?

Pablo: During my studies, my strategy for "hyperfocus" was actually quite unhealthy: a coffee and two cigarettes in the morning on an empty stomach. When the pressure is on, this helped me enter a flow state and I can program for eight to ten hours straight, completely forgetting to eat or drink. With the mixes, I keep the momentum by simply uploading almost everything I record. I’ve learned not to overthink things, because then nothing would get done. Some mixes I was personally unhappy with ended up becoming my most successful videos.

Leo: What sets your mixes apart from the flood of "AI-generated" content on YouTube?

Pablo: I am extremely picky with song selection. I spend the whole week listening to music on SoundCloud and creating playlists that eventually only have 10 to 15 tracks. In House music, technical DJing is often simple. It’s much more about selecting the right songs to create a cohesive vibe. People notice the love put into the mixes. There are many AI channels posting videos every two days with tracklists that don’t even name the artists, and some even copy my thumbnails. But my covers have become my trademark.

Leo: What does the future hold? Are you looking to commercialise your music or play live?

Pablo: That’s my current focus. I’ve played in a club in Oberhausen before, but that was during a hard techno phase I didn't fully identify with. One time, I also won a DJ contest only to play in front of three people, one of them being my girlfriend, was a bit humbling on one side but overall it was a really fun and interesting experience which I’m really grateful for. DJing in front of people instead of just my laptop at home and made me get out of my comfort zone.

Although making YouTube mixes is really fun, I’m trying to take advantage of finally having such a big crowd of people following my creative endeavours and want to dive into playing more live shows and producing my own music as well. My first single, "let it come to you," has just been released. I’m now working on connecting with promoters to bring this music live.

Leo: Thank you for your insight and the interview, Pablo. eureqa! are excited to see where you go next. 

— An interview with gesus8, by Leonard Ulrich

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