Venture Capital Episodes

We’ve got a special crossover episode this week courtesy of our friends at the Irish VC podcast, with a big shout-out to Finn Hatherell for producing the initial episode on the Irish VC podcast channel over the summer.  The Irish VC podcast is produced by BVP, an Ireland-based venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Elliott Griffin.

Alejandro Gutierrez joins the show as guest co-host in this Money Talks segment. Alejandro is the CEO of Defactor Labs, providing all the required technological and financial tools for traditional companies to tap into alternative sources of financing using tokenized Real World Assets as collateral. Congratulations to Defactor Labs for taking home the gong at the inaugural National Fintech Awards in Ireland for ‘Best Crypto, Blockchain or Digital Asset Offering’.

After intersecting stories of meeting Vitalik Buterin and Bono, Pete Townsend and guest co-host Laura Walsh take a look at the recent SEC ruling in favor of Grayscale that many expect will open up the floodgates for the trillions of institutional capital currently on the sidelines of crypto.

Joining Pete this week are Liang Wu and Dan Herrera from Eleven26 Capital, an early-stage VC firm investing in diverse founders on the evolving Internet across web2 and web3. In this episode, we get into how Liang and Dan originally got together and stayed close through the years, their Evolving Internet thesis across web2 and web3, building a platform for investing through content creation and community into a flywheel, and a ‘so-what’ look at the intersection of web3 and AI.

We’ve been on a bit of a hiatus this summer, as we took a break to recharge after a few mad months, as sometimes, you need to go away for a while and dream it all up again.  In this episode we recorded on the Fourth of July, we pull the curtain off our upcoming plans, with a big announcement from longtime co-host Eoin Fitzgerald that brings him and Pete Townsend to a fork in the road with MoneyNeverSleeps. But before we get into all that, Eoin and Pete take a look back at Pete’s experience with the Techstars Web3 class of 2023 founders and their ‘distributed demo day’ at the end of June with 3 investor events across 3 cities in 2 countries in 5 days, and an epic journey in the spirit of  Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

This episode features a rundown of the 12 web3 founding teams that form the Techstars Web3 accelerator class of 2023, along with an intro to each of their CEOs.

Patrick Pinschmidt is a General Partner and Co-Founder at MiddleGame Ventures, a financial technology venture capital fund focused on early-stage investments in Europe.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend take a quick look at the triumvirate of bank failures in the US with Silvergate, Silicon Valley Bank, and Signature Bank before Eoin asks Pete about his lessons learned from seeing over 1,000 deals in the last 18 months, so they riff on easy-to-remember mental models, investing in lines not dots, building relationships with founders, how those relationships evolve post-investment, and the founder having the most credible voice in the room.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend look at the outsized gender gap in web3, then riff on the realities of venture capital ‘dry powder’ and crypto VCs, before stepping through what’s wrong with Revolut’s neo-profitability, an unfortunate slip switch for railsr and WhatsApp B2B payments in Brazil as a WeChat-like foundation.

Liang Wu is the Co-founding Managing Partner at Eleven26 Capital, an early-stage VC fund investing in diverse founders on the evolving Internet across Web2 and Web3. In this episode, Liang riffs with Pete Townsend on his one-year reflections on writing his weekly Life in Color blog, including thoughts on chasing his curiosity, growth and flywheels in content creation, shamelessness as a superpower, and how all of these experiences inform his journey as an investor.

In this special segment, we’re featuring web3 investors, founders and mentors such as Joey Krug from Pantera Capital, Matthew Graham from Sino Global Capital, Teana Baker-Taylor from Circle, Sam Williams from Arweave, John Wu from Ava Labs, Clarisse Hagege from Dfns, Sean Lee from Odsy, Tim Bos from ShareRing and Michelle Tsing from GRI.

Eoin and Pete talk through the aftermath of the Ethereum Merge, some pandas and goofy songs, an early-morning Bankless livestream of the Merge, and critically, a 99% more energy-efficient blockchain. We also look at the new Revolut BNPL product live in Ireland, two new funding deals that a16z did on this side of the pond in Sequence and Sardine, opportunities for bored yacht owners, and how it feels like 2002 all over again with builders still building.

Nik Milanović is the founder of This Week in Fintech, a global digest of fintech news, and General Partner at The Fintech Fund, an early-stage venture capital fund. In this episode, Pete Townsend and Eoin Fitzgerald talk to Nik about what influenced his modus operandi, the big opportunity with fintech to provide financial services to even more people around the world, how Nik ramped up from a newsletter to a syndicate to a venture fund, the blurred lines between fintech and crypto…and how Nik managed to make the most of his love of music!

Joey Krug is the Co-Chief Investment Officer of Pantera Capital, the first institutional investment firm focused exclusively on bitcoin, other digital currencies, and companies in the blockchain tech ecosystem. Joey joins Pete Townsend on this episode originally recorded as part of the Techstars Web3 Convo Series of fireside chats powered by the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator program in Ireland.

Matthew Graham is the CEO of Ryze Labs (formerly Sino Global Capital), which provides 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 as part of the Techstars Web3 Convo Series of fireside chats.

Laura Walsh is the COO of Launchpool, a digital asset platform with a mantra of egalitarian investing in blockchain projects.  In this episode, we talk through how Laura’s incredibly unique foundation as a teacher of English as a second language, as an international development operative, and as someone with a deep interest in how things work, led to her entry point into the blockchain ecosystem in 2017. We also dive into the mission of Launchpool and Launchpool’s impact as a platform for investing in blockchain projects, and also where things are headed with the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator landing in Dublin in 2022.

This is our latest Money Talks segment, where we get into the onslaught of crypto’s mainstream moments in the past two weeks featuring Elon Musk’s antics and Charlie Munger’s view on bitcoin, we dig into BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) for the first time with a look at Klarna, we pick though Tiger Global’s supersize appetite for deals previously just the purview of VC, and we hear from Rory Galvin from Navirum on the Finsight Series.

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 fintech startups…and the joys of barefoot water skiing behind the Cheddar Curtain!

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.

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!

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!

Brian McDonald from Bay Advisory joins the show for Part 1 of a 2-part series on M&A and raising capital for SMEs and talks through the intersection of experiences that drove him to launch Bay Advisory, market trends impacting early-stage entrepreneurs in Europe, and helping entrepreneurs think about their options in taking money off the table.

Brian Mac Mahon, Head Honcho at Expert DOJO, joins us to riff on solving America’s entrepreneurship problem, the Israeli model as best practice for a startup nation, his objective to scale those solutions globally….and starting fires for the betterment of all!

This week, Pete and Eoin take look at what to do about the condemnation of Big Tech’s alleged monopoly powers according to US lawmakers, the catch-22 of consumer fintech, Apple One and ‘Rundles’, getting something from VCs if not a check….and godspeed, Eddie Van Halen.