Venture Capital Episodes

Containerized: How Tokenization Restacks Finance Justin Swart is a Partner at BITKRAFT Ventures, a venture capital fund investing from seed through Series B across gaming, digital assets, and decentralized infrastructure. He joined Pete for a panel back on episode 240, and this is his first solo sit-down. In this episode, Justin makes the case that tokenization is doing to finance what the shipping container did to global trade, and Pete pushes back on whether that containerization is actually h...

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.

Brian McNulty has been building toward this moment for a decade. When he co-founded the Post Trade Distributed Ledger Group with the London Stock Exchange back in 2015, he was helping the industry imagine what tokenized funds might one day look like. On April 21st 2026, he rings the bell at that same exchange to launch DVF — Lingfeng Capital's Digital Venture Fund — and the circle closes.In this episode, Brian and Pete trace the journey from FAC to the Apex exit to DVF, and dig into what VC 3...

Alejandro Gutierrez joins me to talk Solana in Ireland, stablecoins, and tokenized securities - plus I share the launch of Norio Ventures Fund I and what’s ahead for Episode 300.

This week, I sat down with my longtime Techstars colleague and friend Allard Luchsinger, Managing Director of the ABN AMRO + Techstars Future of Finance Accelerator in Amsterdam.

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, I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down with Fergal McGovern, founder and CEO of VisibleThread, for one of the most enlightening founder chats I’ve had in a while. Fergal’s been building for decades—starting with enterprise systems in the '90s, then launching and selling his first startup SteelTrace, and eventually pivoting VisibleThread through the 2008 crash into a trusted platform serving global leaders like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Comcast, and government agencies across th...

Anthony Rose is the co-founder and CEO of SeedLegals, the #1 platform for startup funding and legals in the UK. But long before he was helping tens of thousands of founders raise capital and avoid legal potholes, Anthony was in the digital trenches – first turning the music industry on its head with Kazaa, then helping reinvent online streaming at the BBC with iPlayer, before building and selling a few startups of his own.

This week, we’re taking a look back at some of my favorite moments from the past year—the conversations that stuck with me long after we hit stop on the recording. If you missed them the first time around, now’s your chance to catch the highlights, chock full of startup smarts and web3 wisdom!

This week, I interviewed serial entrepreneur Nigel Eccles. Known for his role as co-founder and former CEO of FanDuel, Nigel shares his incredible journey of launching and scaling multiple ventures, including his latest projects BetHog and BetDex. Nigel dives into the pivotal moments that defined his career, lessons learned from raising over $450 million in venture funding, and his insights into the evolving landscapes of crypto, Web3, and gaming. Nigel’s candid reflections on timing, co-foun...

We're diving deep into the fundamentals of fundraising for Web3 startups and early-stage ventures navigating their first capital raise. Fundraising is always challenging, but in web3, it’s a whole new frontier with unique hurdles. This session, originally presented at a Techstars Web3 Accelerator event, is packed with actionable insights that apply to most tech startups, especially those aiming to raise their first round.

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.

Alejandro Gutierrez, CEO of npayme Labs and co-founder of ETH Dublin joins me again as guest co-host this week. We start with Alejandro's Token2049 Dubai ‘tsunami-in-a-yacht’ story, the upcoming ETH Dublin 2024, and the Techstars Web3 demo day on June 6th in NYC.

This week, I’m sharing an episode of the ‘Venture with Hesus’ podcast that I recorded in late 2023 with the unstoppable Hesus Inoma, as he interviews me on lessons learned from being part of the startup ecosystem the last 8 years.

Paul Smyth and I look at Sam Bankman-Fried’s 25-year sentence before jumping to the brighter side of things with BlackRock’s new tokenized money market fund.  We then time travel back to 2017 with Copper’s sushi party (or so we thought), and close things out by questioning the correlation between fintech funding and the crypto bull run.

Brian Zwerner is the President and Founder of W3 Studio, and a VC and Founder of Beyond the Game Network.  As the President and Founder of W3 Studio, a 501c3 non-profit venture studio, Brian and his team help diverse founders in Atlanta build startups in web3. W3 Studio partners with corporations and provides grants to startups to fund the launch of their first products.

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.

Pete gives a quick update on the Spot Bitcoin ETF approval followed by a roundup of Messari's Crypto Theses 2024 with guest co-host Alejandro Gutierrez.

Paul Smyth joins me as guest co-host this week, and he is a specialist executive recruiter and executive coach within the fintech industry.  As a founder of two startups, Paul has a unique view on the startup ecosystem.

This week’s episode is from a session Pete Townsend hosted with Alex Tapscott, author of ‘Web3: Charting the Internet's Next Economic and Cultural Frontier’ (Harper Collins). Alex and Pete were joined by venture investors Justin Swart from BITKRAFT Ventures and Sterling Campbell from Blockchain Capital.

Lou Kerner is the founder of the Crypto Oracle Collective, a decentralized web3 advisory firm, and also the DAO for Crypto Mondays, which is the largest crypto meetup in the world with active chapters in 54 cities.

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.

Joining Pete as guest co-host this week is Pet Berisha from Sporting Crypto, the number one Web3 Sports business exploring the intersection alongside 3000+ subscribers from the biggest sports and crypto brands in the world.