Been there. Built that.
We started Follow the Gradient because we couldn't find the resource we needed when we were scaling. So we built it.
Melanie Gabriel
Melanie Gabriel is co-director & COO of the ETH AI Center. In this role, she recently co-initiated Relativity Collective: a highly selective pan-European founder programme connecting Europe's most ambitious AI talent early.Previously, she was co-founder and CMO of Yokoy, a FinTech and AI company that was successfully acquired by Perk in early 2025. In her podcast and newsletter Follow the Gradient, Melanie and her guests discuss how to scale a business from Europe while staying sane.Melanie lectures on entrepreneurship at ETH Zurich and the University of St. Gallen, serves on the boards of Switzerland's largest angel investor club SICTIC and the startup Moodtalk, and is active as an angel investor and advisor.
Christian Woese
Christian Woese spent five years scaling go-to-market teams across European SaaS companies. At Predium, he led the growth unit, owning marketing, sales, and customer success for a proptech platform. As a founding employee at Yokoy, he built the entire post-sales organization from scratch, growing it from two people to a 35-person team serving 500+ enterprise clients across six European offices.Today, Christian works at the intersection of GTM strategy and AI systems, building intelligence infrastructure that automates what used to require entire departments. Behind Follow the Gradient sits a system he built from scratch: tracking 7,000 European startups, monitoring 207 VC portfolios, and running AI agents across content planning, production, and quality control.
How we met
We met at Yokoy. Melanie was co-founder; Christian was one of its earliest employees, the person who built the entire post-sales organization from the ground up. We worked closely together through the messy, exhilarating, occasionally chaotic years that come with scaling a company fast. When Yokoy was acquired in early 2025, we'd already started asking ourselves the same question: where was the resource we'd wished existed during all of it? The honest, practical, no-fluff guide to building a business from Europe, told by people who'd actually done it. We didn't find it. So we built it.
