A five-year-old is a useful person to put in front of a startup founder. She has little patience for jargon. She is unlikely to be impressed by a funding round. And, in the original announcement for The Sifted Podcast, she had something to invest: marshmallows. Eliza, daughter of launch host Michael Stothard, would quiz founders about their businesses. Could the pitch survive a listener who wanted it to make sense?
- The product: free audio about European startups, mixing interviews with newsroom conversations.
- The advantage: reporters who cover the companies can explain the story behind an announcement.
- The useful habit: listen for a decision and its constraints, then bring a better question to your next meeting.
The marshmallow test
Sifted announced its audio experiment in October 2021: four pilots, supported by Zendesk for Startups. The proposed subjects were wonderfully specific. Psychedelics. Audio erotica. Neobanks courting wealthy customers. The point was to bring the people affected by startup businesses into the same conversation as the people building and reporting on them. A sector could be explained through a human encounter.
That approach addressed a familiar problem. Startup news arrives in discrete packets: a raise, a launch, a departure. Each packet tells you something happened. It does not necessarily explain how the pieces fit together. Audio gives a journalist room to ask a second question, pause over an assumption or let an answer unfold. For someone following European technology between meetings, that is an appealing use of headphones.
The publisher had already made a geographic bet. John Thornhill and Caspar Woolley launched Sifted in January 2019, with Financial Times backing. Europe’s startup ecosystem was the subject, rather than an occasional overseas dispatch. The podcast extended that choice into another medium. Its audience could follow companies across borders without starting every conversation from a Silicon Valley frame.
Two seats at the microphone
Today, Startup Europe’s homepage describes a weekly show with John Thornhill and Freya Pratty. Thornhill interviews founders, operators and investors; Pratty talks with Sifted journalists about their reporting. Amy Lewin appears throughout the interview archive, too. Following the episode credits makes more sense than expecting one permanent voice.
Those two approaches serve different purposes. A founder can explain what they intended, why a product took a particular shape and which choices seemed available. A reporter can put that account beside the market around it. The listener gets access to both a participant’s explanation and a newsroom’s judgement. The interesting material often sits in the distance between them.
A general technology show can range more widely. An investor’s podcast can spend more time inside a fund’s thinking. Startup Europe’s editorial proposition is narrower: European companies discussed by people who follow them professionally. Its connection to Sifted’s reporting matters more than the microphone. Without that reporting, the format would be much easier to reproduce.
Free listening, paid homework
The podcast is available through its own website, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Listening does not require a Sifted Pro subscription. Sponsorship appeared at launch, while the publisher also operates a commercial content studio producing partner-funded work. These are related parts of a media business, with different products and different reasons for a customer to pay.
Pro sells deeper access to reporting, briefings and startup intelligence. Its individual plan is advertised at £1,750 a year as of October 2026. Investors, founders, advisors and consultants are named audiences. Someone trying to understand a conversation can begin with audio; someone tracking deals or benchmarking companies may want searchable information and downloadable tools.
Listen to Startup Europe
Annual individual Sifted Pro plan
Building that wider operation required money. In November 2021, Sifted raised £4m from ScaleUp Capital. The investment announcement described a publisher that had grown from one journalist and one newsletter to 40 employees, with plans to expand its operations. The round financed the company’s ambitions across departments. Treating it as a podcast budget would miss how the business works.
Listen for the constraint
Consider the November 2025 interview with Nothing founder Carl Pei. Its title advised aspiring hardware builders to spend time in China. The discussion explored prototyping, the hardware ecosystem and the difficulty of building a globally competitive European device company. That is more useful than a success story organised entirely around valuation.
“If you’re serious about hardware, you should spend time in China.”Carl Pei / Startup Europe, November 2025
The question to carry away is what access changed his understanding. Which suppliers, manufacturing experience or practical feedback does a founder need before a plan becomes credible? A software team might require a different environment. The transferable habit is to investigate where the expertise lives, then test whether your own company has access to it.
Use the same approach elsewhere in the archive. Before pressing play, write down the decision you are facing. During the episode, note what the guest tried, what they could afford and what made them reconsider. Afterwards, separate a tactic you could test from an advantage you cannot reproduce. A well-funded company’s hiring choice may be interesting without being affordable for a team of three.
Sifted’s most-downloaded selection for 2025 ranged from Vinted’s Thomas Plantenga to Lovable’s Anton Osika and investor Dinika Mahtani. These are different businesses and careers. Their interviews make good starting points for questions; they cannot determine your company’s demand, economics or operating conditions. Keep the enthusiasm. Do the arithmetic yourself.
From the headphones to the room
The podcast also carries live conversations, including a 2025 Sifted Summit discussion with Eric Schmidt. The publisher’s events business expanded in July 2026 when it acquired Onstage, adding Demo Day and Deploy. Sifted said the move would help it reach founders earlier in their company-building journey. The Onstage Fund and associated investment vehicles remained outside the deal.
That gives the audio a place within a larger business: journalism attracts attention, intelligence supports research, and events bring people together. For the listener, the immediate benefit is smaller and quite practical. You can arrive at a conversation knowing enough to ask something beyond how much a company raised. Eliza’s marshmallow test had the right instinct. A pitch becomes more useful when somebody asks it to explain itself.