Episodes

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend dive headfirst into insights from the first AMA session on the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator, then look at Stripe’s re-entry into crypto and what they’d miss if they stayed on the sidelines, Pete shares some stories from the Token 2049 conference last week in London, and Eoin tees up some unique insights on embedded finance through the lens of NerdWallet’s IPO filing and Productfy’s $16mn Series A.

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.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend dive into the big news for Ireland’s startup ecosystem as Techstars come to Ireland with the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator, along with the news on Pete leading the program, then we get into how we think Chase’s digital bank might fare in the UK, and also AngelList’s announcement of AngelList Stack and their opportunity to monetize their massive user base through fintech.

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!

Sophie Guibaud is the Chief Growth Officer at OpenPayd and she’s spent the last 10 years designing and executing the go-to-market of banking-as-a-service (BaaS) and embedded finance propositions in Europe, building teams and operations from scratch, and integrating financial services into customers’ existing products to create new revenue streams. We talk through Sophie’s entrepreneurial journey to date, some real-world applications of embedded finance, the benefits of her extracurricular activities with podcasts and advisory boards feeding her creativity….and her past life as a competitive boxer!

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 rules-based mind and the merits of quant investing, finding co-founders and building the A team, raising a $1mn seed round from angels and a US VC, and the parallels between building a scalable fintech platform and alpine climbing.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend walk through Amazon’s new partnership with BNPL (buy-now-pay-later) player Affirm and what this means for the Amazon flywheel, and then answer the question ‘what’s a stablecoin?’ in the context of USD Coin and the Centre Consortium, before diving into the world of NFTs through Visa’s $150,000 purchase of a CryptoPunk NFT and the big opportunity for monetizing the metaverse.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend unpack the shiny new $24bn valuation for Chime in the context of the American neobank landscape, Ron Shevlin’s concept of neobank-driven deposit displacement through the lens of Bank of America, Facebook’s relaunch of their crypto project, the potential impact of Amazon hiring a crypto lead, the LendingClub turnaround and a sampling of Lex Sokolin’s poetic fintech prose.

Recorded during the recent Finsight Series virtual event that Pete Townsend moderated (hosted by Navirum and Salesforce), this episode features an all-star cast with Rory Galvin from Navirum, Bryan Clagett from Moven, Cory Haberkorn from Salesforce and Niall Twomey from Fenergo. The main theme we covered is this: The demand for digital financial services goes far beyond the domain of neobanks - how do we become truly digital upstream of consumer banking, especially in institutional banking and wealth management?

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 truly knowing your first ten customers, analogies between startups and marathons, and the importance of balance and human kindness.

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend dive deep into the annual results from UK neobanks Starling and Monzo and what’s next for both, before getting into Square’s deal for BNPL (buy now, pay later) player Afterpay and how the integration will lead to a ‘fintech flywheel’. They then dive even deeper into their developing fintech flywheel thesis with a look into how Amazon and Shopify built their flywheels around a B2C to B2B bridge and ‘doing one thing well’, before tying it all back together with a look at Revolut’s travel plans.

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, then into the lessons learned from marketing and strategy direction for big brands before launching the Islandbridge business, how building bridges between businesses and customers drives growth for businesses of all sizes….and almost becoming a priest!

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 the haves and the have-nots of the investing world, and the life-long lesson of the benefits of hard work.

Ernest Cantillon (CEO of DramEx) and Brian Elders (Founder of SORS Digital Assets and advisor to DramEx) join the show this week to talk about DramEx, a community governed digital whiskey marketplace. We get into the genesis of the DramEx business through Ernest’s life story as a hospitality entrepreneur and Brian’s path through finance and into digital assets, why the timing is right to bring DramEx into the $63bn global whiskey market, the bridge between whiskey and digital assets through NFTs…and training to be a chef and a mathematician!

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 recent reporting of their 2020 results and the potential to roll Revolut into a Rundle - the recurring revenue bundle.

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 a CTO before becoming an entrepreneur, the founding principles of Women in Digital, and how she has been able to train 10,000 women in 8 years.

In this Money Talks segment, Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend start with their insights on what Stripe’s latest product could mean for their long-term plan, then they think through flywheels with Netflix finally getting into merch, before heading south to Miami for the outtakes from Bitcoin 2021.

Mark Boylan, CFO at Trustap, joins the show this week to share his story about his leap out of Big 4 and into startup life, finding the right distribution channels to get Trustap into the end users’ hands, the benefit of strong relationships with your early investors, what’s next for Trustap…and being sports mad!

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 Africa.

Steve Ritter, CTO of Mitek, joins the show this week to share his story on fueling his passion for problem-solving with technology, how he thinks about creating safe digital environments to build trust, achieving the careful balance of friction and convenience in consumer fintech, the reality of defending against deep fakes, digital infrastructure priming the pump of inclusiveness…and rebuilding a 1972 Ford Bronco!

This week, Joseph Chang and Gray Webb join the show to share their story on Liquibit Capital, a quantitative-driven investment management and technology company focused on producing consistent yield-like returns. In this conversation, we get into the converging paths that brought Joseph and Gray together with Liquibit, each of their respective ‘awakenings’ on crypto, how arbitrage works across the 24/7 crypto markets, how they’ve merged the benefits of their careers in institutional finance and technology into an institutional investment platform in a new asset class….and merging interests in aqua-scaping and wine!

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.

This week we welcome back Andrew Mullaney, CTO of Premind AI, sharing his story on the last 2+ years of building Premind, streaming 57,000 stock prices into a million news stories a day, the impact of high-speed information flow on age-old market theory, the differences between his last startup NewsWhip and Premind AI, surviving in the startup desert…and still trying to be relatively innocuous!