The Deep End by ODF

Joining Marshall this week in the Deep End is ODF alum Ben Rollert, CEO and Co-Founder of Composer. Composer allows its users to easily build a portfolio of hedge fund-like strategies.

After we ended last year talking about DeFi and other blockchain innovations with cypher, it was refreshing to have a conversation about innovation in traditional finance, particularly in the retail investment space.

The rise and sustained success of apps like Robinhood have enabled the manifestation of a legitimate counterculture among retail investors, including those like Ben, who work in finance. 

In this episode, we discuss that counterculture, the advantages of optionality created by something like Composer, nuance in regulation, and why Ben stays crypto aware even when he’s not a crypto evangelist.

This was a good one. If you’d like to learn more about democratizing hedge fund strategy, check out composer.trade or follow Ben on Twitter @Benrollert

The Deep End returns in full on Monday. Until then: we're excited to announce Execs.

Execs is a new On Deck show for founders who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks and tactics that leading technology companies today have used to scale.

Guests are experienced, non-founding tech executives in key roles at top companies with firsthand experience solving hard and rare problems for a fast-growing business.

On Execs, they share their hard-won ‘earned secrets’  to pass on their knowledge and help leaders at high-growth companies scale faster.

Execs is hosted by Erik Torenberg and produced by On Deck - where top talent goes to start companies, find their next roles, or invest in their careers

---

Our first guest on Execs is Jared Fliesler. Most recently, Jared was COO at Scribd. Prior to Scribd, Jared was a VP at Square, and director at Google, and a GM at Slide, where he worked closely with Keith Rabios and Max Levchin

In this episode, we discuss symmetry in execs’ ability to hire and fire, how to build world-class onboarding experiences, what it means to be vulnerable as an exec, and much more.

---

Execs is a show for founders, operators, and pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale.  To engage further:

Check out the On Deck job board

Share your thoughts with us on Twitter:

Hosted by: @eriktorenberg

Produced by: @jacksonsteger

Brought to you by: @beondeck

Today is the last episode of the year, and so we’re celebrating by doing something a little different. Rather than have a single guest on, we invited 11 senior On Deck employees to answer a single question: What trend do you expect to change, emerge, or accelerate in 2022? 

To help them answer honestly, we were very clear that these aren’t necessarily predictions. Instead, my colleagues were instructed to think about patterns they’ve noticed this past year and project how they might shift or continue in 2022.

Next year, we’ll revisit this analysis and ask our colleagues where they were right, where they were wrong, and why.

Here are the guests:

First up is Andreas Klinger- On Deck’s CTO and a seed investor on the side. Andreas is based in Berlin. You can find him on Twitter @andreasklinger

Minn Kim is a partner at ODX based in San Francisco. ODX is On Deck’s community-backed fund and accelerator program. In her role, Minn’s job is to help the best founders in the world by removing obstacles, opening doors, and creating customized programming for each startup in the program. She’s had some exposure to some incredible companies this year through her amazing work at On Deck. You can find her on twitter @minney_cat

Eric Friedman is also an ODX Partner and has served as On Deck’s interim COO. He helps founders push rocks uphill and can be found in New York City and on Twitter @ericfriedman

Anne Bosman just joined On Deck to be the General Manager of our Careers division. She joins us from Boston after 5 years leading operations at General Assembly and multiple COO/operations leadership roles at other organizations. She can be found on twitter at @anneolough

We welcome back Atlanta-based KP to the show after he joined us in October to chat about building in public. We thought his perspective would be an interesting one to share immediately after Anne’s comments to provide that contrast. As a reminder, KP is Director of On Deck’s No Code program and can be found on twitter @thisiskp_

Julian Weisser is a cofounder of On Deck and has helped bring many functions of our company from 0 to 1, including this podcast. He is currently helping founders get involved with our ODX accelerator program. His Twitter DMs are open @julianweisser

Shriya Nevatia is another return guest after joining us alongside Gaby Goldberg in our Citizens of the Metaverse episode. Shriya joins us from New York City and is the Director of On Deck Catalyst. ​​Catalyst helps ambitious students and early-career people start their first company or break into venture capital. She is on Twitter @shriyanevatia 

One of On Deck’s two CEOs, David Booth, joins us from New Zealand. You can find David’s thoughts about how to organize the world’s ambition on Twitter @david__booth 

Katya Delaney is an Editorial lead on our Growth & Content team. Her recommendations to this podcast over the last few months have been most welcome.

Earlier in the episode, Andreas mentioned that he expects more competition between different countries for remote talent. We wanted to make sure we spoke to Gonz Sanchez about this too. Gonz is the Head of Growth for our Startups division. He’s based in Argentina and also writes about European tech for his newsletter @seedtable. You can find him on Twitter @gonsanchezs

Last, but not least, Eade Bengard is On Deck’s Director of Brand Marketing. In the past, Eade has worked with brands like AirBnb, Audi, Ideo, Levi’s and more. She joins us from Austin and can be found on Twitter @eade_bengard

Marshall shared his thoughts too. If there are any guests you think we should have on the show or topics you think we should cover, please DM @makosloff or @jacksonsteger on Twitter. Thank you as always, for listening.

Anna Gat is Founder and CEO of Interintellect. Interintellect describes itself as having reinventing the french salon for the 21st century.

The salons of Early Modern Revolutionary France played an integral role in the cultural and intellectual development of France. The salons were seen by contemporary writers as a cultural hub, for the upper middle class and aristocracy, responsible for the dissemination of good manners and sociability.

The interintellect team has built a curated marketplace for online salons to engage a now global audience. Trained hosts are able to monetize their talent and skills to curate conversation between well-meaning citizens in the public arena. 

Anna and I discuss how she has effectively built something that is half virtual city, and also half highly curated live conversation.Interintellect is a full-attention product - meaning participants are fully engaged, as opposed to something like a Twitch stream or a Twitter space, which would be more of a partial attention product.

The community on interintellect is deeply engaged with their salons and with each other. This episode provides yet another example of how lines between the metaverse and reality continue to blur.

For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more, visit thedeepend.substack.com

This is probably our most in-the-weeds web3 episode yet. If you’re newer to crypto, we recommend you scroll back through your feed and listen to any of our episodes with Patrick Riera, Cooper Turley, and several others to give yourself a background to enjoy this one fully. As a bonus, you can also listen to our episode with Stephen Sikes from Public to build a background in traditional finance.

Joining Marshall this week in the Deep End is Barrett. Marshall introduces Barrett by first name only because, like past guest Bored Elon Musk, he is operating relatively pseudonymously. Barrett is one of the core contributors behind the Cypher Protocol.

Cypher is a futures protocol built on the Solana blockchain that wants to bring a new set of traditional finance opportunities to decentralized finance. They are doing this at a time when crypto users are quickly acclimating to concepts and tools traditionally used by Wall Street

We discuss this collision of crypto and “tradfi,” what a synthetic good is, the analogs for IDOs and pretoken markets, and end with discussion on culture differences between web2 and web 3 companies.

A quick note: another core contributor to the Cypher Protocol named Izzy had originally planned to sit in on the episode recording just to listen. But after she chimed in with an interesting aside to Barrett, we decided to actually bring her fully on stage and into the conversation. So you may not hear her at the beginning, but we’re thrilled that she joined to provide the nuance that she did.

For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more, visit thedeepend.substack.com

A reminder that we’re still looking for a researcher in residence. If you want to be a personal trainer of the mind for On Deck’s CEOs, head over to beondeck.com/researcher

 Nikhil Krishnan is the author of the Out of Pocket newsletter. Out-of-Pocket is making the business of healthcare easy to understand. Nikhil writes in plain English and compliments industry analysis with memes and humor.

We haven’t done a true digital health episode yet, and Nikhil was the perfect person to provide us with an overview of the space.

The first question we asked was probably the hardest for Nikhil to answer. Marshall asked “What the is the problem?" in US healthcare right now, and Nikhil laughed. The American health system is uniquely complicated. Everyone thinks everyone else is the bad guy and an obtuse system means that nobody knows what the best direction to row in is.

Nikhil points out how healthcare is more emotionally charged. The industry has a fundamentally different risk-reward dynamic when the stakes are quite literally life and death. 

Still, there is reason for hope, amid all the grief. Nikhil helps identify all the areas where health tech entrepreneurs might be able to create meaningful change in an industry that has been particularly ravaged by COVID during the past two years.

For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more, visit thedeepend.substack.com

Vance Roush is Founder of Overflow. Overflow is building the infrastructure to make generosity frictionless across every major asset class. 

Vance is on a mission to democratize philanthropy to the masses. Through his experience with churches and other non-profits, he has become keenly aware of how the top percentile has leveraged wealth management tricks and tips to donate stock (instead of cash) for decades. There are huge tax and savings benefits to doing this. Vance knows that that benefit can be extended to others via technology. 

This conversation is about  why and how philanthropy can be diversified across asset classes.

At On Deck, we have an obsession with access because we believe that talent is broadly distributed but opportunity is not. In 2020, we created the On Deck Access Fund to enable more people from around the world to participate in our programs by removing financial barriers. In 2021, we’ve awarded scholarships to more than 1,000 Fellows, totaling more than $1,000,000. And this is just the beginning. We recently announced “ODF Advance” a program to provide up to $25,000 in funding to would-be founders who are exploring a startup idea. Through our Access Initiatives we are unlocking opportunities for thousands of high potential entrepreneurs. If you’d like to learn more about our Access Initiative, visit www.beondeck.com/access-initiative

For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more, visit thedeepend.substack.com

On Deck is hiring a Researcher in Residence to be a "personal trainer for the mind" for our two co-CEOs. To learn more, please visit beondeck.com/researcher 

Hot off last week’s episode about helping extend human life, this episode is about how to bring certain long-gone animals back to life. This week, Ben Lamm (Founder & CEO of Colossal Biosciences) joins The Deep End. Colossal describes itself as a genetic engineering company interested in extinct species restoration through radically new genomic technologies.

They have landed a ton of press and attention for their ambitious goal to resurrect a woolly mammoth in the next few years by sequencing the genome of mammoths and editing genes of their closest living relatives - the Asian elephant. 

We spend a little time on the hard science of this and discuss how closely this resurrected proxy would be related to the original mammoth. But we also discuss the why, the when, and the bioethics. 

Ben is quick to say that there’s no silver bullet for climate change or ecosystem restoration. Still, there is a strong conservationist argument for at least learning how we could create genetic backups for species. The arctic tundra could also potentially see its grasslands return if large animals like the mammoth return to their ancestral home to eat the overgrown bushes and trees.

For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more, visit thedeepend.substack.com

This week, we are joined in the Deep End by James Sinka - cofounder of On Deck’s Deep Tech program. 

Some of our past Deep End guests (and many On Deck fellows) are working at the bleeding edge of technology. So far, we’ve talked to founders of biotech companies, space manufacturers, and more.

Deep Tech is a category of innovation that exists at the intersection of many different fields under the technology umbrella. Modern advancements in computer infrastructure enable new sophisticated methods of tackling tough problems in the world of atoms.

James Sinka joins the show to share how world-class scientists, card-carrying PHDs and engineers can commercialize their deep knowledge in hyper-specific fields to unlock vibrant futures for humanity.

The sophistication of some of these tough technologies might sometimes be thought of as miraculous. If we can master protein folding, for example, we might be able to revolutionize drug design and otherwise heal cells with more ease than we might have ever imagined.

Of course, common modern technologies like the iPhone or X-Rays were also deep tech miracles when they were first created.

This conversation provides a broad overview of Deep Tech, and examples of how interdisciplinary application of advanced technology can go to market. To learn more about On Deck’s Deep Tech program, visit beondeck.com/deeptech

Dr. Kristen Fortney is CEO & cofounder of BIOAGE - a company working on slowing aging and chronic disease.

Figuring out how to live longer is an age-old problem. For as long as humans have studied medicine, we have tried to learn which remedies, habits, and environments best position us to have a chance of long life.

Recent developments in the last few decades have, for the first time in human history, opened up the door for serious progress into understanding how humans and animals age. Last season, we had Celine on the show to talk about the work that her team is doing to improve the health of dogs. Lessons that might one day be applied to humans.

Now, Kristen joins us to give us an overview of the aging field. She also shares how BIOAGE is using machine learning to develop a pipeline of therapeutic assets that increase healthspan & lifespan. Aging may be the core cause of many of the cancers and chronic diseases that wind up killing us. If we can leverage AI to help identify flawed genes, we can make lifespan truly malleable.

Plenty of exciting discussions ensue - including what the differences are between healthspan and lifespan, what it would take for the healthcare industry & regulatory bodies to approve anti aging drugs, and how we might otherwise learn how to live as long as 200 year old whales or 1000 year old trees.

For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more, visit thedeepend.substack.com