Knight Rider, smashed bananas, and the kind of founder honesty you rarely hear outside closed doors.

What started as a side experiment, cutting through the noise and creating real collisions between founders and funders, has grown into a tradition with its own rhythm. Each edition is different, shaped by the founder in the spotlight. This one belonged to Daniel Gebler, Picnic’s CTO & Co-founder.

🚗 From Knight Rider to Picnic

Daniel’s story began with a childhood obsession: after watching Knight Rider at age seven, he built his first self-driving car. That early spark set the tone for a career defined by curiosity, experimentation, and bold bets.

Nearly a decade into Picnic, his reflections showed that scale doesn’t make things easier, it only changes the shape of the problems. No year looked like the one before, and none came without friction.

One vivid example: analysing customer photos of smashed bananas to trace back process flaws. A small detail that became a diagnostic tool. It captured his larger point: solving hard problems means looking where others don’t.

🔑 Lessons that stayed

Across stories, a few key themes stood out:

• Hard problems first. Easy problems attract competition. Complex ones, with no guaranteed outcome, create true defensibility.
• Iteration beats illusion. Processes rarely fail loudly; they break in small ways. Data, no matter how trivial, can uncover what matters.
• Endurance is underrated. Nearly ten years at Picnic brought constant change, but persistence turned volatility into progress.

These weren’t abstract lessons, but lived ones — earned through trial, error, and persistence.

🚀 Ventures in motion

Alongside the fireside, three Builders ventures  Everyday, Cortena, and Avery — shared their own stories on stage. Each represented a different frontier, from HR to financial intelligence to recruiting. Their pitches highlighted not just individual progress, but the collective ambition running through the Builders Universe.

🌌 A room in motion

True to the Investor House format, the evening didn’t end with the fireside. Fast-paced 1:1 conversations followed, sparking collisions that carried the energy forward. It’s these unscripted moments, when an investor challenges a founder’s assumption, or a founder reframes a problem, that give the night its edge.

Closing

The 11th edition of Investor House was a reminder of why this format matters: entrepreneurs inspiring entrepreneurs, in a setting where candor comes first.

‍Our thanks go to Daniel and the Picnic team for opening their doors, and to the community of founders and funders who keep pushing these conversations forward.

Here’s to the hard problems, and the people willing to take them on.