Gray Webb is co-founder and CTO at Liquibit Capital, and we kick things off with a look at what’s happened with BTC since the latest bitcoin halving.  Gray and I then riff on the evolution of bitcoin into a long-term holding with huge opportunities for financial innovation.  We also look at the mainstreaming of stablecoins as the killer app for crypto and how stablecoins have only scratched the surface by nudging past Visa in quarterly settlement volume. Gray Webb is an entrepreneur and...

This week, I’m sharing an episode of the ‘Venture with Hesus’ podcast that I recorded recently with the unstoppable Hesus Inoma, as he interviews me on lessons learned from being part of the startup ecosystem the last 8 years, the power of networks, 2022 token sale aspirations, customer validation, building for users vs building for yourself, usability vs. security in crypto, funding your go to market, pre-seed rounds vs seed rounds, what I look for in founders, mental models, flywheels, how...

I’ve brought together 4 of the founders from the Techstars Web3 class of 2024 to help me dispel some of the common misconceptions about web3 with the general public, including Julia Kemp, founder and CEO of Pawpass, Daniel Uribe, founder and CEO of  GenoBank. Tiago Ferreira, co-founder and CEO of FairAI, and Tom Daniel, co-founder and CEO of Ember AI. Even with an estimated 500 million crypto users around the world, the number of daily active users of crypto is less than 20 million, compared...

In this Money Talks segment, Paul Smyth and I kick things off with a look at Sam Bankman-Fried’s 25-year sentence before jumping to the brighter side of things with BlackRock’s new tokenized money market fund.  We then time travel back to 2017 with Copper’s sushi party (or so we thought), and close things out by questioning the correlation between fintech funding and the crypto bull run. Paul Smyth is a specialist executive recruiter and executive coach within the fintech industry.  As a...

Niall Mackey, the Commercial Director at Topsec Cloud Solutions, joins the show this week as we take an inside look at how businesses cope in the aftermath of a hack.   Niall is a tech industry veteran with over 35 years of experience with Topsec, Nokia, Interoute (now GTT) and Bank of America.  With Topsec, Niall looks at commercial opportunities and influences the direction of service development to ensure they continue to bring value to their customers.  Topsec have been pioneering...

Joaquim Matinero Tor joins the show this week as guest co-host as we look at the likely paths to the adoption of CBDCs (or Central Bank Digital Currencies) in the different countries around the world making progress with these digital versions of fiat currencies.   Joaquim Matinero Tor, or just “Quim” as he’s known to friends, is a lawyer with expertise in blockchain, digital assets, and web3 and a depth of experience in venture capital, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, derivatives...

This episode features an introduction to the 12 founding teams that form the Techstars Web3 accelerator class of 2024, with each of their founder/CEOs giving you a quick look inside what they're building. Meet the companies!  Artizen - Match-funding platform for breakthroughs in human creativity.  Founder locations:  USA / UK | Featured Founder/CEO:  Rene Pinnell The Colony -  Shaping the future of collectibles through blockchain technology. Founder locations: USA / Canada |...

Laura Walsh joins the show again this week as guest co-host as we explore the potential link between digital identity and decentralized social media through the lens of the Forecaster protocol, its challenges, user growth, and the future potential of a decentralized online ecosystem. Laura is the Chief Marketing Officer and part of the founding team of Kaskade Finance, and we worked together closely for the past two years on the Techstars Web3 accelerator.  Laura is a Techstars All-Star...

Brian Zwerner is the President and Founder of W3 Studio, and a VC and Founder of Beyond the Game Network.  As the President and Founder of W3 Studio, a 501c3 non-profit venture studio, Brian and his team help diverse founders in Atlanta build startups in web3. W3 Studio partners with corporations and provides grants to startups to fund the launch of their first products. With his role as a VC and Founder at Beyond The Game Network, Brian teams up with a venture group of athletes that invest...

This week’s guest is Connor Murphy, the CEO of Bridge. I met Connor at a Techstars event in Dublin in 2019 as he was just getting his latest venture off the ground in Bridge, and I started using the Bridge app within seconds of meeting him to help me bridge my network. Connor Murphy is an all-around good guy, and in every conversation I have with with him, I end up connecting way more dots than I ever could have expected.  Connor has a background in computer science, startups, venture...

We've remastered and packaged up two of our most popular episodes from 2023 that were originally going to be one episode looking at the venture capital mantra of ‘investing in lines and not dots’. Both of these episodes were recorded in March 2023, after my team and I had just completed another 12 investments through Techstars, and I was itching to share some of the lessons learned.  Eoin Fitzgerald set the stage for me to do just that, and then we brought Patrick Pinschmidt from...

Mai Santamaria joins me once again as guest co-host as we riff on the intersection of digital ID, digital wallets, blockchain, CBDCs, and how the political regime under which an individual lives influences your senses of trust and risk. We also blow to bits my expectation that the new EU digital identity wallet will have anything to do with blockchain, contrary to what we’re seeing with digital identity frameworks in Latin America.  Mai is one of the most helpful people I know and always has...

Evan Miyazono is founder and CEO of Atlas Computing, a non-profit formed late last year to help scale human control over risky AI capabilities.  I seem to be falling into a number of serendipitous situations recently where I find myself at the intersection of AI and blockchain. This week’s chat with Evan took place at that same intersection, but more at the conceptual level rather than at the hardcore technical level. After finishing a PhD in Applie Physics at Caltech, Evan Miyazono jumped...

Blockchain ecosystem advisor and researcher Simon Brown from Consensys joins me as guest co-host this week. Consensys is a leading blockchain and web3 software company whose products like MetaMask and Infura are well known to the blockchain and crypto community. While overjoyed that spot Bitcoin ETFs finally launched, I felt like something was not quite right about it, and I wanted to go deeper.  There is an element of over-centralization of crypto happening, and I wanted to get an expert...

Alejandro Gutierrez and I recorded this episode 10 hours before the SEC finally approved Spot Bitcoin ETFs, so we start with a quick update on what happened over the last few days.  We then get into the meat of this episode, which is a roundup of Messari’s Crypto Theses for 2024. We riffed on our respective Top 5 out of the 100 or so predictions from Messari CEO Ryan Selkis’s 194-page super-insightful read on key trends, people, companies and projects to watch in 2024. Alejandro Gutierrez...

I’m joined this week by two of the wonderful people I met at the Solana Breakpoint conference in Amsterdam last month, Amira Valliani who is the Head of Policy at the Solana Foundation, and Nick Ducoff who is the Head of Institutional Growth at the Solana Foundation.   Before my trip to Amsterdam in November for the Solana Breakpoint conference, my engagement with the Solana community over the years had been lacking. At Solana Breakpoint, I found a diverse community with a bunch of smart and...

Paul Smyth joins me as guest co-host this week, and he is a specialist executive recruiter and executive coach within the fintech industry.  As a founder of two startups, Paul has a unique view on the startup ecosystem. Paul and I met back in 2017 shortly before I photo-bombed his stand at a fintech event in Dublin, and we’ve collaborated quite a bit since then.  He and his business partner and life partner Laura Smyth from Top Tier Recruitment were the original sponsors of MoneyNeverSleeps...

This week I’m joined by guest co-host Mai Santamaria, who is the Head of the Financial Advisory Unit for the Department of Finance in Ireland. Mai and I met in February 2018 at a meeting of the Irish Blockchain Expert Group which later became the industry group now referred to as Blockchain Ireland.   She’s one of the most helpful people I know and always has a uniquely incisive insight or two on what’s going on at the crossover of finance and emerging tech when she and I catch up.  Mai...

This week’s episode is from a session Pete Townsend hosted with Alex Tapscott, author of ‘Web3: Charting the Internet's Next Economic and Cultural Frontier’ (Harper Collins). Alex and Pete were joined by venture investors Justin Swart from BITKRAFT Ventures and Sterling Campbell from Blockchain Capital.  In this chat, Pete asked Alex to share his thoughts on what to expect next from those building in web3.  Following this, a conversation ensued with Alex, Justin, and Sterling on the critical...

Pete Townsend introduces an insightful line-up of entrepreneurs and investors who share their thoughts on web3. Opinions are gathered around what aspects they hope to see web3 founders solve, focusing on topics such as user experience, digital identity, decentralized finance, AI, regulatory issues, and real-world applications. The diverse panel includes John Hallahan from Fireblocks, Arry Yu from the U.S. Blockchain Coalition, Hesus Inoma from i13 Ventures, Niamh O'Connell from CasperLabs,...

Sean Lee is the senior advisor at the Crypto Council for Innovation, which is a global alliance of crypto industry leaders advocating for responsible and healthy regulations in the digital asset industry. Sean has conducted business in over 20+ countries and two continents across his career, and networked with extraordinary professionals across many industries. As a technology enthusiast, his career started in Internet 1.0 during the mid ’90s, spanning across eCommerce, cloud computing, and...

Lou Kerner is the founder of the Crypto Oracle Collective, a decentralized web3 advisory firm, and also the DAO for Crypto Mondays, which is the largest crypto meetup in the world with active chapters in 54 cities. In addition to Lou’s roles as founder of Crypto Oracle Collective and Crypto Mondays, he’s also a partner at Blockchain Coinvestors, a venture capital fund of funds focused on investing in blockchain since 2014. Lou has a great track record of recognizing emerging trends and...

My discussion with Somi Arian is a deep dive into the entrepreneur's dilemma of solving problems vs. fulfilling desires, customer discovery, product building and pivots, all baked into a live startup mentoring session. Somi is the founder and CEO of InPeak, an innovative platform enabling creators and businesses to build and monetize communities.  Somi is also an award-winning filmmaker, tech philosopher, and author whose work sits at the intersection of AI, blockchain, and the future of...

Arry Yu is a 23+ year emerging technology industry veteran, serial founder and strategic operator with expertise in scaling business from "zero to one" with a consistent track record building high-performing teams. In this episode, Arry shares her story on her path into crypto and blockchain from the roots of her early corporate career into becoming a startup founder, investor and Executive Director and Co-Founder of the U.S. Blockchain Coalition (USBC). Arry also sheds some light on the...