MoneyNeverSleeps

Robert Alice, artist and creator of the ‘Portraits of a Mind’ project, shares his story on how bitcoin - and to quote Robert – “and its essential ties to the past instead of the perpetuated perception of its radical severance with it,“ was a catalyst for a melting pot of inspiration for his mesmerizing artwork Portraits of a Mind, the crossover from physical art into digital art with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the intersection of artistry and entrepreneurship…and the joys of life as a triplet!

MoneyNeverSleepsis sponsored by PAT Fintech, the training partner that demystifies fintech and digital finance for financial services professionals.

Robert Alice founded his project in 2018 to promote blockchain culture within the visual arts. The completion of Portraits of a Mind spanned 3.5 years and resulted in a 40-painting work of art. Each of the 40 paintings is the size of a small but circular garage door and each represents one of the first 40 blocks of the bitcoin blockchain.  ‘Block 21’ was recently auctioned at Christie’s and had a guide price of $12,000-15,000, but sold for $131,250 in October 2020.

Each ‘block’ is as intricately crafted as a cuneiform tablet with the original source code of the relevant block carved into paint, with specific numbers on each block embossed in gold. When combined, the gold digits become global map coordinates tied to a location on Earth where a significant event occurred in the 5,000 year history leading up to the creation of bitcoin.

Accompanying each painting is a non-fungible token (NFT) including a digital version of that piece of the artwork. The full story of Portraits of a Mind can be found on Robert Alice’s website.

Episode title inspired by Ten Thousand Hours from Macklemore & Ryan Lewis.

Leave a review and subscribe on Podchaser | Apple Podcasts | Spotify| Google| Overcast

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

Subscribe to our newsletter on Substack

Follow us on Twitter Podcast| Twitter Pete | Twitter Eoin

Get in touch at [email protected]

In this Money Talks segment, Pete and Eoin trip through the wires of Starling Bank’s latest fundraise, investing in Roblox’s direct listing, Walmart’s SuperApp vs. ‘The Bank of Walmart’, the Square-Tidal / Jack Dorsey-Jay Z tie-up, and Ireland's new national startup accelerator, international startup accelerators and pre-accelerators.

MoneyNeverSleeps is sponsored by PAT Fintech, the training partner that demystifies fintech and digital finance for financial services professionals.

MAIN STORIES WE COVERED:

Starling raises £272mn at £1.3bn valuation (Sifted, 8-Mar-21)

Pete’s overall thoughts on Starling Bank at this point in time: “Monzo, Revolut and N26, have all raised at higher valuations than £1.2bn. Starling now outpaces all of them in terms of value per user at £650 per user. Out of this entire story, after reading Anne Boden’s book ‘Banking on IT’, I think that’s the thing that she would point to and be the proudest of.”

Roblox direct listing gets $45 reference price from NYSE (Marketwatch, 9-Mar-21)

Eoin’s parallel between Robux and crypto: “Something like Robux, which is the in-game currency, to me is the prime example of a digital currency's potential usage. You see Bitcoin becoming more widely adopted, but here's a currency within a game that's being used by 32 million people every day – it’s the potential for that, and to me, is what digital currency could become.”

Walmart’s Fintech Ambition: A Super App, Not The ‘Bank Of Walmart’ (8-Mar-21, Forbes, by Ron Shevlin)

Square acquires Tidal (TechCrunch, 4-Mar-21)

RELATED STORIES:

JPM Kills ChasePay (Finextra, 9-Mar-21)

Applications for the Expert Dojo accelerator are open with the next cohort kicking off on 5th April (Expert Dojo, Spring 2021)

Applications are now open for NDRC’s new accelerator (Silicon Republic, 5-Mar-21)

Applications are now open for the Startup Boost 2021 Spring cohort (StartupBoost, Spring 2021)

LINKS:

Leave a review on Apple Podcasts | Podchaser

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify| Google| Overcast

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

Subscribe to our newsletter on Substack

Follow us on Twitter Podcast| Twitter Pete| Twitter Eoin

Get in touch at [email protected]

Cian Prendergast, founder and CEO of Ortus joins the show to share his story on the origins of Ortus in Ireland, sharing his story on how there’s a lot more to providing cloud and managed IT services to SMEs than what you’d expect, entrepreneurial leadership during a pandemic, surrounding yourself with brilliant people….and a past life of having every job under the clouds!

MoneyNeverSleeps is sponsored by PAT Fintech, the training partner that demystifies fintech and digital finance for financial services professionals.

Cian spent 8 years in the IT sector before launching Ortus in 2007, inspired by his ambition to build a client-centric business based on his own values and vision. Ortus provide cloud and managed IT services for over 300 small-to-medium-sized businesses in Ireland, and more recently in Continental Europe, in the financial, healthcare and legal sectors.

HIGHLIGHTS:

On Cian’s inspiration to launch Ortus: “It was this notion that there were some people sitting upstairs, making decisions that weren't actually connected with the clients, but I felt like I was the one that was connected to the clients. I found it more stressful to work for other people who I felt were doing it wrong than to work for myself, as petrifying as it was looking down the barrel of a recession in 2007.”

On getting traction at the inception of the Global Financial Crisis in 2008: “I realized we were coming into a recession, but people liked our message when we visited them as we were totally going down the road of cloud computing.  We would say ’During a recession, do you want to spend twenty-grand on a server or do you want to give me 500 euros? And for that 500 euros a month, I will put your stuff in the cloud.’”

On adapting to the work-from-home realities of the pandemic for Ortus’ clients: “If you have 300 clients in a managed environment with a managed network and managed internet connections and there are 20 or 30 people in each of those businesses, when they all go home, you've got 20 or 30 times the amount of internet connection problems. So, it was a disaster, but we were ready for it.”

On surrounding yourself with great people: “I think it was a Steve Jobs quote, ‘You don't hire great people and then tell them what to do, you hire great people so they can tell you what to do’. I think all I've really done is hire people that are better than me at different things. So, if I see someone and I think ‘She's better than me at that’, then I'm probably going to hire them. If you keep on doing that, you end up with a great balance of people that are all brilliant at something.”

Leave a review and subscribe on Podchaser | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google | Overcast

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

Subscribe to our newsletter on Substack

Follow us on Twitter Podcast | Twitter Pete | Twitter Eoin

Get in touch at [email protected]

On the show this week we’ve got Gerry Fahy and Andrew Quinn with the story of the PAT Group and PAT Fintech, the Irish opportunity with the growth of fintech and regtech, achieving product-market fit in learning and education, and teaching the way you would have loved to have been taught.

Gerry Fahy is the founder of the PAT Group, who are at the forefront of online education and digitally enhanced learning in Ireland. Through Gerry’s origin story, his launching of PAT in 2017, and Andrew Quinn joining to head up PAT Fintech in 2020, we explore continuous learning and education as critical components of Ireland’s ambition to become a global center of excellence for fintech and regtech.

HIGHLIGHTS:

On one of Gerry’s earliest thoughts: “It struck me that we should be embracing technology as a medium of delivery. Should learners have to fight the traffic and come into a classroom tired after a hard day? Shouldn’t they actually consume their education,training and skills digitally?”

On Gerry’s inspiration to launch PAT: “It was governed by a conviction that the market hadn't changed very much from the chalk and talk of the late eighties, right up to the mid-teens. It was still a classroom centric delivery platform.”

On an insight from a chat on the sideline of his kid’s football game: “If you don't like change, you’lllike being irrelevant even less.”

On the Irish industry-level opportunity conveyed to Gerry by a former student, pre-Brexit: “In a post-Brexit environment, Ireland is the only remaining English speaking country within the EU.  There will be fallout in London with the displacement of financial services, and some of them will migrate to the continent, but some will come to Ireland. We needed to plan for that and build a talent pipeline for that. Fintech, regtech and cybersecurity are going to be the major growth areas in financial services. That was the catalyst for PAT to adapt to where the market was going.”

On solving adjacent problems in learning and education to respond to the opportunity: “We’ve added the whole aspect of compliance in a fintech environment, money laundering in a fintech environment, data protection, cybersecurity, regtech and data analytics - the whole suite of solutions that you bring into a potential customer.”

On what’s at the core of Andrew’s beliefs about learning and education: “It’s all about demystification - you need to break it down into a language that people can understand. Let them go down the rabbit hole, encourage people's curiosity, get them to really believe in their own potential.”

LINKS:

Episode title inspired by ‘Lot to Learn’ by Luke Christopher

Leave a review on Apple Podcasts | Podchaser

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify| Google| Overcast

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

Subscribe to our newsletter on Substack

Follow us on Twitter Podcast| Twitter Pete| Twitter Eoin

Get in touch at [email protected]

In this Money Talks segment, Pete and Eoin riff on Pete’s first experience with Clubhouse, Jay Z and Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin Trust for Africa and India, fintech valuations and SPACs, Citi’s fat finger, efficient crypto markets and grief for Revolut over raising fees.

MoneyNeverSleeps is sponsored by PAT Fintech, the training partner that demystifies fintech and digital finance for financial services professionals.

MAIN STORIES WE COVERED:

Why can’t Europe build a Clubhouse? (Sifted, 17-Feb-21)

Thoughts from the author, Nicholas Colin, pointed to a fragmented European market (we agreed), a lack of experience with scaling social media platforms (we agreed here too), and perhaps a less favorable European mindset towards social media (we’re too snobby in Europe? Really? Not the Irish, at least!).

Jay Z and Jack Dorsey's Bitcoin fund for Africa and India (TechCrunch, 12-Feb-21)

Jay Z and Jack Dorsey are getting together to start up a Bitcoin Trust and putting 500 Bitcoin into it between the two of them, which is currently worth $23.6 million. The fund will be set up as a blind trust, and Jay and Jack won't be giving any direction, but they are looking to hire three board members. So, Pete Townsend applied for the job, and we’ll let you know in upcoming episodes how that all goes down.

Fintech valuation multiples with SPACs (Fintech Blueprint/Long Take Newsletter, Lex Sokolin, 15-Feb-21)

What company is going to turn down an approach from the likes of a Chamath Palihapitaya with a SPAC and the funding to bring it public, as opposed to traditional routes. The valuations on the upcoming fintechs going the SPAC route are very high, but comparing the market valuations to those of a bank is non-sensical.

Citi loses legal battle over $0.5 billion funds transfer gaffe (Finextra, 17-Feb-21)

Arca’s “That’s Our Two Satoshis” newsletter (Jeff Dorman, 16-Feb-21)

Fast-growing Revolut to increase its fees in blow to its 1.2 million users (Irish Independent, 16-Feb-21)

LINKS:

Subscribe or leave a review on Apple Podcasts | Spotify| Google| Overcast | Podchaser

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

Subscribe to our newsletter on Substack

Follow us on Twitter Podcast | Twitter Pete| Twitter Eoin

Get in touch at [email protected]

Deborah Brock, founder and CEO of Nua Fertility, joins the show to share her story on the origins of Nua Fertility in Ireland, why it made so much sense to add in educational elements and a community ethos to the value proposition, finding global partners….and rugby as an analogy for startup life!

MoneyNeverSleeps is sponsored by PAT Fintech, the training partner that demystifies fintech and digital finance for financial services professionals.

Deborah spent 15 years in the non-profit and education sectors, and then after her own experience with solving infertility, was inspired to start Nua Fertility in 2017. Nua Fertility launched its first product in 2020, NuaBiome for Women, which is the first-of-its-kind, natural pre-natal fertility supplement specially developed to help support female fertility.

HIGHLIGHTS:

On launching her own business: “When you've been through fertility treatments, you suddenly have a PhD in fertility because you go from one extreme to the other. It just naturally led me into thinking about moving into this space as an entrepreneur. I hear a lot of people talking about, ‘I always wanted to start my own business,’ but that wasn't me. I happened to fall into this because I wanted to be able to help others.”

On getting started: “So I approached Enterprise Ireland and I applied for an innovation voucher and rocked down to Cork to APC Microbiome, one of the biggest research centers in the world. I went into them and said, ‘I think there's this connection here between the gut microbiome and fertility’. We started looking at an R&D partnership, then product development, and that's where our first proprietary product was born.”

On making it real: “The first thing was to find a manufacturer who wanted to take me on. I was approaching people as an unknown startup with a product formulation that potentially hadn't been looked at before and I had to get them to buy in, and it’s a big jump.

On how there’s no easy answer: “There isn't a magic doctor. There isn't a magic pill. There isn't a magic clinic that's going to get you pregnant. But what there is, is being able to support yourself, be armed with information and education.”

On prioritizing as an entrepreneur: “You have to be thinking constantly about visibility and credibility. If what we're doing doesn't drive either of those, they get dropped. Because it's wasting my time.”

On thinking about investors: “We’d like to find somebody who's going to add that extra value, work with us in a mentorship capacity - someone who will invest in us, but also believes in what we’re doing.”

Episode title inspired by Perfect To Me by Anne Marie

Leave a review on Podchaser and subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify| Google

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

Subscribe to our newsletter on Substack

Follow us on Twitter

Get in touch at [email protected]

Yoann Turpin, co-founder and Head of Business Development at Wintermute, joins the show to talk about the parallels between competitive swimming, derivatives trading and crypto, creating liquid markets for digital asset trading platforms, cross-pollination of business opportunities across the digital assets universe…and visiting less countries than languages he can speak!

MoneyNeverSleeps is sponsored by PAT Fintech, the training partner that demystifies fintech and digital finance for financial services professionals.

Pete Townsend and Yoann Turpin connected in late 2020 after an intro from the intro-king himself, Graham Rodford with some expected involvement in the intro from Ivailo Jordanov from 7Percent Ventures as well. As Yoda would say, “Small universe the digital asset space is.”

HIGHLIGHTS:

On parallels between life experiences: “With both competitive swimming and trading, there is a binary outcome with marginal wins. When you hit the wall, even if you’re fast, you might just be a few milliseconds behind whoever finished first. I saw that in business school, in getting my first job, and again when I started trading FX.”

On the earlier days of crypto: “I came across crypto in 2013 when my business partner thought we should be market-making bitcoin, but I thought that taking 3 weeks to get 30,000 out of Mt. Gox was too long.”

On applying a VC mindset to assessing crypto projects: “Figuring out if a crypto project is interesting is about asking if the problem they’re solving is big enough, and are they solving it the right way? If they’re not solving it the right way, are they the right team to pivot and solve it a different way? These things tend to hold true in the VC world, and also very much in the crypto space.”

On building trust in the crypto space: “I have a view of sharing best practices and sharing long term opportunities but staying as far away from anybody doing anything that would be forbidden in traditional markets like pump-and-dump or wash trading. Essentially, anything that would imply fake pricing might imply that the team behind the price is fake, and this doesn’t help build any form of trust.”

On choosing your investors wisely: “When we launched Wintermute in 2017, it wasn’t too farfetched for us to do an ICO, but we made a very conscious decision to only take equity investors to have the long-term alignment.”

On how to pitch your startup: “You just really simplify, you do not explain how you do what you do, you just sell the vision in about 5 minutes. Don’t get lost in the detail, because people start to think they understand what you’re doing, and then they don’t, which means they might not trust you. But if they buy into the vision and think you’re the best team to solve that problem, then you end up with an investor.”

Subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google | Podchaser

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

Subscribe to our newsletter on Substack

Follow us on Twitter Podcast | Twitter Pete

Get in touch at [email protected]

In this Money Talks segment, Pete and Eoin try to make sense of GameStop and WallStreetBets, the aftermath of the failed Plaid-Visa deal, who might buy Monzo, a Cambrian explosion at the intersection of money and society and RIP Hammerin’ Hank Aaron.

This episode of MoneyNeverSleeps is sponsored by PAT Fintech, the training partner that demystifies fintech and digital finance for financial services professionals.

MAIN STORIES WE COVERED:

What the Hell Is Going On With GameStop’s Stock? (Slate, 26-Jan-21)

What does it mean for the future of publicly traded equities where you have groups like WallStreetBets, who on a whim, can turn against you and drive the stock up or down? When a market is 24/7, whether that’s in crypto or with after-hours trading on public equities, you’ve got to get your head around all of these new channels where market sentiment is effectively created and observable in real time.

The hedge funds need to get smarter, because the crowd now has the ability to move the price, almost on its own whim.

European fintechs spy opportunity in Visa’s failed Plaid deal (Sifted, 20-Jan-21)

From a Plaid perspective, they’re pretty happy about this. The market is moving so fast, tech is moving so fast, revenue growth is on fire, especially in the digital world, and Plaid is now likely worth multiples of the $5.3bn they agreed with Visa 12 months ago.

Some people are saying that the Plaid founders left a lot of money on the table by walking away, but they would’ve left a lot more money on the table by doing the deal. Are all of these banking infrastructure players getting too big where any incumbent that tries to buy them will have their deal struck down for anti-competitive reasons?

Monzo founder Tom Blomfield is departing the challenger bank (TechCrunch,  20-Jan-21)

Who would buy Monzo? Not a big bank, they’d just kill it, and one of the big tech players wouldn’t find Monzo deal compelling enough. It might be the next tier of tech players, someone looking to pick up a banking solution as part of a wider play.

Visa have loads of money to throw around now that they’re not buying Plaid, maybe they’ll buy Monzo? Could you take the assets of the Monzo tech stack itself, and turn that into a product licensed on a banking-as-a-service basis?

OTHER STORIES WE MENTIONED:

What DeFi Has in Common With Cubism (Lex Sokolin, CoinDesk, 27-Jan-21)

Baseball mourns death of long-time home run king Hank Aaron (The42, 28-Jan-21)

LINKS:

Subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google | Podchaser

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

Subscribe to our newsletter on Substack

Follow us on Twitter

Get in touch at [email protected]

Matt McAllister from Mortgage Propeller joins the show to talk about bringing a new fintech to life in the middle of a pandemic, buying a house with a credit card, making lives easier for mortgage brokers and borrowers, talking to your customers way before they become your customers, life lessons from Bebo…and working through the night with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on in the background!

This episode of MoneyNeverSleeps is sponsored by PAT Fintech, the training partner that demystifies fintech and digital finance for financial services professionals.

Matt is the founder and CEO of Mortgage Propeller, a UK-based fintech that makes mortgage brokers more efficient and their businesses more profitable, by addressing compliance and lead generation. He’s got a firm belief that the mortgage application process shouldn’t take the joy out of buying a home. Matt is an entrepreneur and a fintech veteran armed with an MBA, and his 20-year career has spanned financial derivatives, property, online gaming and retail entertainment. Matt and Pete met back in 2017 while working together in another fintech startup, so this MoneyNeverSleeps interview is our longest to date at just over an hour as it’s been brewing for years!

HIGHLIGHTS:

On the word ‘entrepreneur’: “For most of 2020, I was an unemployed entrepreneur! The word doesn’t sit well, we didn’t use it when we were kids, and maybe social networks made it popular. The word itself, park it – I feel like you’re not an entrepreneur until you’ve done something. If you’re always trying to duck and dive, hustle and make something happen, and you haven’t achieved it yet, and you haven’t built a company, then it feels like you’re cheating [by calling yourself an entrepreneur].”

On figuring out what to do with his life while listening to a guru guest speaker in his MBA program: ”Think of the thing you do, whatever it is, that you lose track of time when you’re doing it. That’s what you’re meant to be doing with your life. Mortgage Propeller is the only thing I could be doing. It’s not 'work', it’s just something I should be doing. Working for someone and doing a normal 9-to-5 is not for me.”

On early validation: “We started talking to firms across the UK, and lo and behold, people were really interested in what we were showing them. We were talking to the problems that they have – compliance, lead generation, speed and inefficiencies of completing an application process – and slowly but surely we started to get interest and some soft commitments. We just kept grinding and grinding through the summer until we felt like we had enough validation to start raising money.”

You can get in touch with Matt McAllister at [email protected]

Episode title inspired by ‘Props’ by Pete Rock

Leave a review and subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Podchaser | Spotify | Google

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

Subscribe to our newsletter on Substack

Follow us on Twitter Podcast| Twitter Pete |Twitter Eoin

Get in touch at [email protected]

Brian McDonald from Bay Advisory joins the show for Part 2 of a 2-part series on M&A and raising capital for entrepreneurs and talks through the logic of exit plans, focusing on outcomes rather than actions when taking money off the table, balancing your gut instinct with valuations, the tendencies of different kinds of buyers after the sale…and the potential for doing a deal in the Irish language!

This episode of MoneyNeverSleeps is sponsored by PAT Fintech, the training partner that demystifies fintech and digital finance for financial services professionals.

Brian is the Managing Director at Bay Advisory, a team of corporate finance specialists who apply their knowledge and expertise to the tech sector, helping these small and medium enterprises sell and fundraise at the best value. In Part 1 on episode 118, Brian talked through his origin story and the Bay Advisory approach, so check out that episode first.

HIGHLIGHTS:

On the importance of an entrepreneur’s long-term view: “If you’re starting a business and you don’t ever see yourself exiting, and you’re going to hand this business onto your kids, you better make sure your investors are aligned. In other words, if you never want to exit this business, don’t take in money from angels or VCs.”

On the impact of an exit plan: “I think that having an exit plan has no bearing on your passion or drive for your business, it’s simply a reasonable precaution.”

On what to do when an entrepreneur’s mindset shifts into sell mode: “The very first thing you should do is talk to someone you trust. I don’t want to hear the action; I want to hear the outcome you want as an entrepreneur. It’s not that you want to sell the business, it’s where you want to get to, and then you have options. Always focus on what result you want, and then back-solve from there.”

On the importance of recurring revenue to a valuation: “We always dig down into what’s true recurring revenue, particularly in software businesses that may be closer to a consulting business wrapped us as a SaaS business.  We always look for ‘passive’ income, with the perfect example being Microsoft Office, and the other end of the spectrum is Accenture. The question is, are you more like Microsoft or Accenture?”

On the entrepreneur focusing on driving the business during the sale process: “The biggest factor in getting that top valuation is that the seller focuses on the business during the process because they need to drive EBITDA. What can destroy a valuation is overestimating the performance at the point of sale, because that gives all of the negotiating leverage to the buyer.”

On one of the big challenges with buyers: “What’s really hard for a founder is when there is someone that they really like and really want to sell the business to, but their offer is considerably lower than another party. It’s really difficult for the founder to balance the two offers when they want to continue driving the business after the deal.”

You can get in touch with Brian McDonald at [email protected]

Leave a review on Apple Podcasts | Podchaser

Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website

Subscribe to our newsletter on Substack

Follow us on Twitter Podcast | Twitter Pete | Twitter Eoin