Investing Episodes

Pete Townsend is joined by Sal Ternullo, CEO of SVRN and Managing Partner at A100x Ventures, for a conversation about how to tell the difference between a token that represents ownership of the value-creating thing and one that's an accelerant bolted onto something else.

Dan Gold is founder and CEO of Stratiphy, and as far as anyone knows, the only platform offering tax-efficient crypto exposure to UK retail investors right now.

DeFi transparency means every onchain trade is visible. Which means the moment a strategy works, the market can copy it. In this episode of MoneyNeverSleeps , Pete Townsend speaks with Matteo Manzi , co-founder and CEO of Orion Finance , about a structural challenge emerging in onchain asset management: the same transparency that makes blockchain markets verifiable can also expose the intellectual property behind trading strategies. Matteo describes this tension with a simple phrase: “transparen...

This week, I’m joined by Scott Ashmore and Rob Halligan, co-founders of Shuttle - a platform giving individuals access to venture capital deals that have traditionally been reserved for the ultra-wealthy.

This week, we’re tapping into the intersection of hip-hop, technology, education and startups with a true pioneer—Arabian Prince.If you know your rap history, you know Arabian Prince as one of the founding members of N.W.A, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rap group that redefined music and culture. But what you might not know is that he’s also a lifelong technologist, entrepreneur and futurist—a kid from Compton who got his hands on a computer early and never looked back.

Pranav Kanade is the Portfolio Manager of VanEck's Digital Assets Alpha Strategy. VanEck is an American investment management firm headquartered in New York City with over $100bn in assets under management. Although they’re well known for their passive exchange-traded funds or ETFs, they also manage active portfolios such as Pranav’s Digital Assets Alpha Strategy.

This week’s guest is Connor Murphy, the CEO of Bridge. I met Connor at a Techstars event in Dublin in 2019 as he was just getting his latest venture off the ground in Bridge, and I started using the Bridge app within seconds of meeting him to help me bridge my network.

We've remastered and packaged up two of our most popular episodes from 2023 that were originally going to be one episode looking at the venture capital mantra of ‘investing in lines and not dots’ with VC investing insights from Patrick Pinschmidt from Middlegame Ventures and my lessons learned from my first 1,000 deals.

Arry Yu is a 23+ year emerging technology industry veteran, serial founder and strategic operator with expertise in scaling businesses from "zero to one" with a consistent track record building high-performing teams.

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.

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.

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.

Michael Quartey and Lukas Bruell, founder and co-founder of Eczodex, join the show this week to riff on how Eczodex are enabling investors to unlock more returns with traditional investments through DeFi (decentralized finance).

On the show this week, we’ve got Victor and Lee and Alvin Foo, co-founders of Securo Finance (formerly DAOventures) who are building a compliant, secure and easy to use DeFi (decentralized finance) investment platform for regular investors.

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!

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend are back with the first Money Talks segment of 2022 with a big bump in consumers spending crypto on Visa cards, the story of Ireland’s latest unicorn, Wayflyer, the UBS deal for Wealthfront, Walmart doubling down on their superapp strategy and the pummeling of PayPal’s stock price as a bellwether for the post-pandemic era.

This episode is from the second edition of the Finsight Series virtual event that Pete Townsend moderated recently hosted by Navirum and Salesforce. In this conversation, we’ve got an all-star cast with Rory Galvin from Navirum, Kerry Ryan from Salesforce, Christian-Maynard Philipp from Pattern and Joe Parkin from BlackRock.

Isaac Kato, who leads the Filecoin Techstars Accelerator program in Seattle 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. In this chat, Isaac and Pete riff on the differences and similarities between Web2 and Web3 startups, the Lego blocks of Web3, defending your turf, incentivizing your users, keeping your community close, building your team, fundraising strategies ...and the Gaelic sport of hurling.

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.

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 Galvin from Navirum back onto the show to give us some quick insights on the next edition of the Finsight Series ‘Beyond WealthTech’ virtual event coming up on November 17th.

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 lockdown in 2020, what’s at the core of his entrepreneurial mindset, quieting the always-on mind of the founder, an innovative approach to raising capital for new hedge funds, along with a shallow dive into crypto and sovereign currencies…and being the elder statesman in a family of 7 kids!