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MoneyNeverSleeps
MoneyNeverSleeps episodes
- 076: Replay | Money Made Me Do It | Elaine Deehan and Pocketwire
In a special replay of one of the best episodes of 2018, Pete Townsend talks to Elaine Deehan about her entry into fintech, her startup ambitions....and her love of the Spanish language!
This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.
This week we're doing a special replay of Pete Townsend's chat with Elaine Deehan from Season 1 of MoneyNeverSleeps. When we recorded this in 2018, Elaine was in the midst of bringing her labour of love Pocketwire to market as a startup founder, CEO and Head of Product. For a number of reasons driven by the phenomenon of "when one door closes, another one opens" and that we'll explore in an upcoming episode, Elaine is now the Ireland Country Manager for Starling Bank, a challenger bank whose entry into the Irish market that we are certainly eagerly awaiting.With some recent feedback from listeners and a tide of positive change we're feeling in Irish fintech since Brexit happened, we wanted to go back to our roots this week, and what better way to do that than by replaying the compelling story of Elaine Deehan. In this episode, Elaine talks through:
- How working in a big innovation lab with people from a lot of backgrounds and disciplines opened her mind to the possibilities of the combination of technology and banking.
- How working with fintech startups in Ireland whet her appetite for fintech and led her to working on a blockchain project in the FX space.
- Why knowledge and experience of bringing offline processes online are universally applicable.
- Working closely with founders and getting access and exposure to every aspect of the business when you're with a startup, compared to corporate silos.
- How fintech propositions should be global, as we're living in a digital age and all of the problems we're attempting to solve are global problems.
- Having grit, determination and fire in the belly, and how self-belief can get you through the tough days.
To listen to more, to listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow for updates and more information.
---Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneyneversleeps/support32 min - 075: Spiritual | Erin Grover and Life in Crypto
Erin Grover joins Pete Townsend to talk about her journey into crypto and digital assets, opening up the niche space of crypto hedge funds to professional investors, being guided by her own human nature of wanting to help others...and the massive opportunity in replacing ballot boxes hauled by nomad-guided donkeys!
This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.
Erin Grover is the founder of Altai Digital Capital, which connects investors to hedge funds and traders specializing in cryptocurrency and digital assets. The company provides guidance, transparency and reassurance typically found in traditional investment firms, affording clients easy access to the investment potential of cryptocurrency.She is a strong advocate for the potential of blockchain technology to bring efficiency and transparency to the delivery of funds for international aid. Prior to her work in blockchain, she worked for the United Nations, USAID and other international NGOs as a content producer and media strategist.Her previous work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Mashable, The Times of India and many other international news sources. Her digital strategy has raised over $2 million in crowdfunding for various tech and business ventures, as well as millions in views for numerous online campaigns. All of Erin's social media links are accessible via her website:Â https://www.eringrover.com/.On this episode, Pete and Erin talk through:
Her early career with the UN and spending time in the warzones of Afghanistan and in Cambodia.
Bringing her guerrilla-style 'Crypto 101' roadshow across the USA to educate people on trading cryptocurrency.
Inspiration from appreciative clients that don't have the resources to perform due diligence on crypto hedge funds.
Being guided by her own human nature of wanting to help others and living up to a higher purpose.
The opportunity for blockchain-based delivery of humanitarian aid.
The importance of the acceleration and support from the AKASHA Innovation Hub in Dublin, Ireland.
Working with Frank Gehry and Andy Shallal on an art installation paying homage to Iraqi war refugees.
To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow for updates and more information.
---Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneyneversleeps/support36 min - 074: Crossover | Rudi Falat and Voice of Fintech
Rudi Falat from the Voice of Fintech podcast joins Pete Townsend to riff on crossing over from the corporate world into the startup ecosystem, learning by doing, startup and corporate collaboration....and flipping the table with the final question on every MoneyNeverSleeps episode!
This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.
The Voice of Fintech is a podcast mapping out the Swiss and European fintech ecosystem, with the aim of inspiring entrepreneurs to launch their new ventures and connecting them with incubators, accelerators, investors and incumbents. Rudi runs the podcast from Zurich, Switzerland and has expanded beyond the spoken word with focused events connecting people across the fintech ecosystem in his neck of the woods.On this episode, Rudi and Pete cover the below topics:
-Rudi's inspiration and his affinity for people who understand and believe in the imperative of growth, fueling innovation and relentless new product development.
-Teaching entrepreneurship versus learning by doing or from those who have done it before.
-Raising capital outside of your home market when you're from a small country but have global ambition.
-The rational or irrational approach of dealflow sourcing by VCs.
-Corporates engaging in "open innovation" and what startups should look out for to reduce "innovation theater" to a minimum.
To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow for updates and more information.
---Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneyneversleeps/support35 min - 073: Positivity | Ivailo Jordanov and 7Percent Ventures
Ivailo Jordanov from 7Percent Ventures joins Pete Townsend to share his story of powering the search engine pioneers of the dotcom era, his incurable optimism, becoming an early-stage tech investor....and being yet another person on the show admitting to not being able to swim!
This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.
Ivailo Jordanov is a venture partner at 7Percent Ventures, a London-based VC investing in early stage tech companies that represent billion dollar opportunities. After an invitation from Graham Rodford from Archax who was on episode 37 of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend met Ivailo at an investor dinner in London in October 2019 following CordaCon, the two-day conference put on by the enterprise DLT software firm R3. Through telling his story, Ivailo gets into the following themes:How it's much harder to distribute a product than it is to build a product.
Asking questions like "are the [startup's] product people good at understanding marketing," and "are the marketing people good at understanding product?"
How all of the problems that startups need help with, someone else has had them before, and how a network of mentors and advisors can be incredibly helpful in solving these problems.
How he sees a lot of startups that have a great product, but no one is using it - it's not because the product isn't useful, it's because they're not putting it in front of the right people in the right way.
How you can get sucked into customer research and doing it forever, and how that's’s a sign of procrastination.
Finding the right balance between how long you want to talk to customers and when you start building.
To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow for updates and more information.
---Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneyneversleeps/support35 min - 072: Money Talks #8: Blockchain Predictions 2020 - Part II
This is Part II of a two-part series featuring Matthew LeMerle from Blockchain Coinvestors and Pete Townsend talking through Matthew's predictions for how blockchain will impact the world in 2020, focusing on pro traders embracing sophisticated exchanges, momentum with enterprise blockchains and emerging blockchain unicorns.
This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.
Matthew LeMerle is the Managing Partner of Fifth Era and Keiretsu Capital, who combined are the most active early-stage venture investors backing almost 200 companies a year. Matthew is also the co-founder and managing partner of Blockchain Coinvestors, who are investing in the leading blockchain venture partnerships.In December 2019, Matthew featured on a Blockchain Coinvestors webinar where he walked through his ten predictions on blockchain for 2020. The ongoing conflation of 'enterprise blockchain' and 'blockchain-inspired' developments for corporates and institutions, with the merits of the original bitcoin blockchain and the 'crypto-first' mentality, means that a lot of discussions on blockchain can get as excitable as a dog in a butcher shop. What we've found is that the substitution of the word "blockchain" with "blockchain-inspired" tends to unite competing views on the role of distributed ledger technologies in replacing the world's financial infrastructure. In this episode, we talk about both crypto-first topics as well as enterprise blockchain, as both are playing a role in the continued digitalization of financial markets and money.Given the length of the discussion between Matthew and Pete, we split this feature into two parts, with Part I covering Matthew's first six predictions, along with Pete's reflections on each one. This episode covers Matthew's final four predictions, which are #7-10 in the list below.We covered the first six predictions in Part I on episode 71 released on January 17, 2020, so check that out for the rest of the list.
1 - G7 / EU nations will announce digital monies2 - Developing nations will embrace bitcoin
3 - Banks will offer crypto access and custody
4 - Hybrid wallets will become available everywhere
5 - Asset players first deploy blockchain in back offices
6 - No ETFs but indices and funds will gather assets fast
7 - Pro traders will embrace sophisticated exchanges
8 - Enterprises will utilize hybrid blockchains
9 - More than [another] 5 blockchain unicorns will emerge
10 - Highest returns will still come from early-stage (acknowledged by Matthew as more of a fact than a prediction!)
To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow for updates and more information.
---Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneyneversleeps/support28 min - 071: Money Talks #7: Blockchain Predictions 2020 - Part I
Matthew LeMerle from Blockchain Coinvestors joins Pete Townsend for a two-part series on his predictions for how blockchain will impact the world in 2020, with Part I focusing on central bank-issued digital currencies, embracing bitcoin in developing nations, and institutional adoption of digital assets.
This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.
Matthew LeMerle is the Managing Partner of Fifth Era and Keiretsu Capital, who combined are the most active early-stage venture investors backing almost 200 companies a year. Matthew is also the co-founder and managing partner of Blockchain Coinvestors, who are investing in the leading blockchain venture partnerships.In December 2019, Matthew featured on a Blockchain Coinvestors webinar where he walked through his ten predictions on blockchain for 2020. The ongoing conflation of 'enterprise blockchain' and 'blockchain-inspired' developments for corporates and institutions, with the merits of the original bitcoin blockchain and the 'crypto-first' mentality, means that a lot of discussions on blockchain can get as excitable as a dog in a butcher shop. On this episode, we talk about both crypto-first topics as well as enterprise blockchain, as both are playing a role in the continued digitalization of financial markets and money.Given the length of the discussion between Matthew and Pete, we split this feature into two parts, with Part I covering Matthew's first six predictions, along with Pete's reflections on each one.1 - G7 / EU nations will announce digital monies
2 - Developing nations will embrace bitcoin
3 - Banks will offer crypto access and custody
4 - Hybrid wallets will become available everywhere
5 - Asset players first deploy blockchain in back offices
6 - No ETFs but indices and funds will gather assets fast
We cover the last four predictions in Part II on episode 72 released on January 24, 2020, so check that out for the rest of the list.
To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow for updates and more information.
---Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneyneversleeps/support39 min - 070: Life Through My Eyes | Dermot Walsh
Dermot Walsh from Each & Other talks with Pete Townsend about delivering delightful user experiences, leading through people, putting yourself into the shoes of the customer...and his moonlighting gig as a community radio DJ!
This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.
Dermot Walsh is the CEO of Each & Other, a Dublin-based strategic design firm dedicated to helping organisations grow online revenue by designing and building compelling digital customer experiences. With a totally diverse client base, Each & Other specialize in delivering game-changing, high-value business outcomes in a digital world.In this episode, Dermot and Pete talk about:
- Dermot's career trajectory including his love of sales, embracing change and how an unexpected experience with painting furniture opened his eyes to the business world. Â
- Dermot's inspiration for leading through change by channeling JFK: " Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
- His experience with helping startups and seeing so many great ideas and feature-rich products, but whose designer forgot to ask the customer what they actually wanted.
- Having a much greater understanding of the "cash is king" mentality to managing your business after launching his own business and then becoming CEO of Each & Other.
- Becoming CEO of a business with an incredibly talented team, stellar clients and a great track record and figuring out a way to make a difference.
- Dermot's moonlighting gig as a DJ on the Sunday Brunch slot on Radio Larne.
To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow for updates and more information.
---Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneyneversleeps/support43 min - 069: Technologic | Lambert Despaux and Schema Capital
Lambert Despaux talks to Pete Townsend about empowering entrepreneurs building in the distributed ledger technology space, the startup ecosystem in Israel, societal impacts of DLT....and his love of electronic music!
This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.
Lambert is the founding partner at Schema Capital, who are investing at the pre-seed and seed stage in entrepreneurs building in the distributed ledger technology ('DLT') space. If you would like an intro to Lambert, please click here.
Schema Capital focus on finding early-stage projects active in digital securities infrastructure, blockchain interoperability, decentralized finance and cybersecurity applied to blockchain.In this episode, we dig into Lambert's inspiration for moving into venture capital, the impact of being part of the startup ecosystem in Israel during his coming-of-age in VC, the societal impacts of a new backbone for the financial markets, and a left-field parallel between electronic music and DLT. See below for a few soundbites from Lambert and a final one from Pete Townsend:
- It sounds a bit naive, but I discovered the possibilities of a smart contract, securitization and this beautiful piece of technology in an industry ripe for disruption in financial services, but I would say that the technology is even more in its infancy than I thought."
- "Efficiencies and cost reductions are one side of it, but DLT can also enable new revenues on segments where you’re either losing market share or not present at all."
- "I think it's very interesting to be able to combine into a portfolio some companies that are addressing cost cutting and efficiencies, which is more defensive, and companies that are fostering entrance to new markets and additional revenue. which is more aggressive, all using the same technology in DLT."
- "We've been in the battlefield, we've been in the trenches and we see from the inside that there is a lot of opportunity for change in the financial services industry. Someone that has never worked in a bank or insurance company, I don’t think they can really see what we see. What makes us a little bit more unique is that I now live in Israel so I have access to this thriving startup environment and it is really fascinating."
- "Now is a really great time to be around if you want to try to change how financial services operate, while at the same time knowing that we’ll end up impacting sectors beyond financial services as well."
- From Pete Townsend, "DLT is your new techno, Lambert! You're talking about the same thing - you said that with electronic music back in the 70's and 80's you needed all these wires and all these different platforms to pull it together. Now you can just do it so simply, and you can look at the financial markets that will unfold with DLT in the same way."
To listen to more from MoneyNeverSleeps, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for our full catalog of episodes.
---Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneyneversleeps/support34 min - 068: Money Talks #6: The Seed 2.0 | Pete Townsend on Seed Investing
"Pete Townsend goes solo" would have been a better headline in the '70's, but our Pete takes the mic in this episode to unpack the realities and economics of funding pre-seed and seed-stage startups through the lens of Finn Murphy from Frontline Ventures.
This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.
'Round about the same time that Pete Townsend was finishing a VC project in August 2019, there was something missing for him in the context of placing bets on pre-seed and seed-stage startups. Could you just "sprinkle the infield" and dole out half of a $10mn seed fund to the first 25-30 founders that fit your investment thesis? With the known odds of 1-2 venture capital home runs out of every 25-30 investments, something didn't fit with a venture capital strategy that expected anything less than a home run from every founder before investing in them.Conveniently, a blog post on pre-seed investing by Finn Murphy from Frontline Ventures in Dublin helped Pete to crystallize his thoughts and refine his own framework for helping founders craft their pitch. But it's about way more than a slide deck and a hockey stick, as founders need to truly believe in themselves and convince a whole bunch of people that they have the right vision, conveyance and hands-in-the-dirt determination to build a substantial and sustainable business. You need an audience first though, and you need a compelling story to draw that audience closer.Beyond the framework that Pete covers in this episode and Finn's blog post, here's what he shares with founders to get them started on crafting their pitch and getting VC meetings:Episode 31 of The Full Ratchet show notes on Deconstructing the Elevator Pitch - published in 2015, but it's timeless, as it helps to craft a concise and impactful elevator pitch and a slidedeck that focuses on what matters. If you can build this pitch perfectly, not just in Powerpoint but as the 'story' of your business that you can live and breathe, you've got your first VC meeting.
Examples of 18 startup pitch decks from names you should recognize, courtesy of Erika Desmond at Cirrus Insights. The early-stage decks are the most relevant, but the later-stage decks give you a good idea of the picture you need to paint in the VC's head of what your business can achieve.
16 Non-Obvious Fundraising Lessons on Pitching, courtesy of James Currier at NFX - read the blog post but also take the 20 minutes to watch the videos, as the vignettes really drive things home.
Top 100 early-stage venture capital investors in Europe - it's not a perfect list, but it's a start. Do your homework first on the pre-seed vs. seed vs. Series A investments the VC has done to make sure you're a potential match for the VC's risk appetite and thesis.
To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow for updates and more information.
---Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneyneversleeps/support16 min - 067: Startup Insights #2: The Unexpected | Martin Brown | Lizzy Hayashida | Andrew Mullaney | Paul Smyth
In this special segment, we feature four founders sharing how they dealt with one thing they didn't expect to face as a founder - Martin Brown from Unitek, Lizzy Hayashida from Change Donations, Andrew Mullaney from Premind and Paul Smyth from Top Tier Recruitment.
This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.
As a startup founder, there are tons of challenges thrown at you every day of the week, and no one can anticipate before taking the leap the level of adversity that you're going to face as an entrepreneur. Depending on how many other founders you talked to before launching your venture, you may have heard some of the war stories, or perhaps not. We asked four founders to share with us an unexpected challenge they faced and how they dealt with it:- Martin Brown, founder and CEO of Unitek (also featured on episode 55)
- Lizzy Hayashida, co-founder and CEO of Change Donations (also featured on episode 56)
- Andrew Mullaney, co-founder and CTO of Premind (also featured on episode 57)
- Paul Smyth, co-founder of Top Tier Recruitment and Possible.ie (also featured on episode 61)
To listen to more, please visit https://www.moneyneversleeps.ie/ for all of our other episodes. Also, follow us on Twitter @MNSShow for updates and more information.
---Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneyneversleeps/support12 min
About MoneyNeverSleeps
From the publisher's feed
A weekly podcast that looks inside the minds of entrepreneurs and at the crossover of startups, enterprise, finance, technology and life as we know it. Co-hosts Pete Townsend and Eoin Fitzgerald.…
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneyneversleeps/support