Founder Episodes

Matthew Graham is the CEO of Sino Global Capital, who are providing strategic investment to best-in-class companies that are moving the blockchain and digital assets ecosystems forward, and then help them to thrive in the Asia market. Matthew joins Pete Townsend on this episode originally recorded …

John Wu is president of Ava Labs, an a16z-backed technology company building the next-generation blockchain platform, Avalanche. In this episode, John shares insights on bringing passion to projects, building teams and communities in Web3, the sheer joy of bringing hundreds of companies onto Avalan…

Teana Baker-Taylor is the Chief Policy Officer of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, the longest established trade body representing blockchain and digital assets. In this episode, Teana shares her story with Pete Townsend on her journey into blockchain and digital assets, her view on the critical fo…

Suzanna Hayek from Irish Tech News interviews Pete Townsend on Pete Townsend on financial trends, digital finance and investing in startups. This interview was originally aired on Irish Tech News in early September, and they kindly gave us permission to share the content. We also brought Rory Galv…

Michelle Tsing joins Pete Townsend in a special segment from the Techstars Web3 Convo Series of fireside chats driven by the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator program kicking off in Dublin in March 2022. Michelle is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in addition to wearing many hats as a …

Referring to Colm Lyon as an Irish fintech ‘O.G.’ is just the tip of the iceberg, as at the core, he’s an entrepreneur who’s built indigenous Irish businesses into international players. Currently the CEO and Founder of Fire.com, we walk through Colm’s journey from the early days of banking IT to b…

Our guest this week is Gershie Vann, Founder and CEO of Magma Capital Funds, a Chicago-based quantitative hedge fund firm. We talk through the long iterative climb involved in launching a business, finding alternative skillsets outside of finance when building his team during the first pandemic loc…

Shane Monks O’Byrne, founder and CEO of Aikido Finance, joins the show this week to talk about the Aikido Finance mission of democratizing quant investing, how he went from a grad with a Computer Science degree to a fully empowered startup founder in less than two years, the similarities between a …

Brian Kenny is the CEO and Founder of MiniCorp. Brian left the Lego behind at an early age and started building through code. We go deep into how Brian thinks about leading MiniCorp and what makes MiniCorp unique, how his modus operandi has evolved during his career in tech, the critical task of tr…

Gerard Tannam, Strategic Brand-Builder at Islandbridge, tells us all about the use of storytelling as a framework in bridging the gap between buyers and sellers, businesses and their markets. In this episode, we weave through Ger’s own story that takes him from Ireland to Hong Kong and back again, …

Eoin and Pete mine a motherlode of fintech hotspots this week starting with insights into Revolut’s latest $33bn valuation, Square’s quest for crossover between creators, crypto and small businesses, then we dive deep into the upcoming Robinhood IPO and our developing thesis on fintech flywheels.

Ankur Mohan, Founder & CEO of MarketXLS, joins the show to share his story on his entry point into Galway in the West of Ireland to launch MarketXLS, how a certain demographic just prefers the simplicity and control of Excel for managing personal and professional portfolios, closing the gap between…

In this Money Talks segment, Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend start with some insights on Visa’s deal for Tink and how the European context of Tink differs quite a bit from the US context of Visa’s dead deal with Plaid, then we look at Binance’s recent troubles before rounding out with Revolut’s r…

Achia Nila, Founder & CEO of Women in Digital, joins the show to share her story on Women in Digital, an all-star team of female technologists dedicated to bringing more Bangladeshi women into the digital economy. In this chat, we get into Nila’s earliest inspirations, proving herself and becoming …

In this Money Talks segment, we take a deeper look at the startup ecosystem on this island that we call home, then head south to Europe for a constructive look at the European Payments Initiative, and then head further south to Africa for the story of Chipper Cash and the fintech opportunity in Afr…

Oli Cavanagh and Charles Dowd, the co-founders of Strike, tell the story of the confluence of experiences and ideas that brought them together to launch Strike, getting a product live and raising an angel round in less than 3 months, the benefit of having done it before when you need to build a tea…

This is a special bonus episode welcoming back Ollie Walsh, co-founder and CEO of Pipit Global, a for-profit social impact fintech based in Galway here in Ireland. Ollie was on the show back in July 2019 in episode 52, and as Pipit's crowdfunding campaign on the Spark Crowdfunding platform here in …

Mike Cavanaugh, Managing Partner at Regiment Alpha, shares his story on lessons learned in the open outcry commodity trading pits, his multiple entrepreneurial ventures amidst a life in fintech, having things thrown at him for saying ‘blockchain’, advising and helping to raise investment for fintec…

Fiona Edwards Murphy, co-founder and CEO of ApisProtect, shares her story on channeling her technology expertise into a passion for helping beekeepers, her transition from academia into the life of a startup founder, raising ApisProtect’s first round, building a customer base looking after 20mn bee…

Barry Darmody, founder and CEO of Search4Less and ENKI, shares his story on the life experiences that were the catalysts for him becoming a startup founder, getting the Search4Less product to market in the early days, keeping the faith through the lean years, making yourself expendable through buil…

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 mesmeri…

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 …

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.

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!