Around The Coin

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Matt Spoke, the Founder and CEO of Moves, a social finance product for independent 'gig' workers across the U.S. Matt founded the company on a belief that the gig economy isn't working for its workers and by building a product that solves their systemic financial challenges, millions of independent gig workers can come together to improv...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Ryan Cantor, Chief Product Officer at Thryv. He leads the Thryv product and engineering teams and is responsible for the vision and execution of platform improvements and enhancements in alignment with corporate strategy. Ryan joined Thryv after working with N2 Publishing leading their product effectiveness and scaling improvement efforts. Prior to his...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Spartak Buniatyan, Founder & CEO of PayEngine where he oversees the business and development operations. Spartak has been in the technology development field for over 20 years with heavy emphasis on developing technologies for large-scale vertical software-as-a-service enterprises with a particular focus on payments infrastructures. Learn more about y...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Ran Goldi, CEO of First Digital, where he has been creating blockchain-related products and services since 2017, focusing on payment acceptance for stablecoins and CBDCs. Prior to establishing First, Goldi co-founded and managed an algorithmic trading company, acted as VP in a company he took public in the London Stock Exchange, and acted as the head of I...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews G. Scott Paterson, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of FutureVault. Mr. Paterson, 57, is a prolific entrepreneur, financier and investor focused on technology and media. He is also the Chairman of QYOU Media (TSXV:QYOU), and Lead Director of Giftagram. Mr. Paterson began his career as a financial advisor in 1985 becoming the head of Dominion Securities...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Nader Al-Naji, creator of DeSo. His interest in crypto began in 2012 when he mined approximately 23 Bitcoins on free campus electricity while studying computer science at Princeton. After that, Al-Naji worked in high-frequency trading at D. E. Shaw and as an engineer on Google Search prior to raising $133 million for Basis, his previous company, which...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Carl Memnon, the COO, and Co-Founder of Grain. Previously, Carl worked at Goldman Sachs, KCG Holdings, and, most recently, as Associate General Counsel at Virtu Financial, a global market-making and execution services firm. Carl's practice focused on Securities, Corporate Finance, and Commercial Transactions in Capital Markets, Technology, and M&...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Chris McCann, General Partner at Race Capital, entrepreneur, and community builder. Prior, Chris founded and led the community program at Greylock Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm with $3.5 billion under management which led investments in Facebook, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Coinbase, among others. Chris has an angel portfolio of over twen...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Pat White, Co-founder and CEO of Bitwave, the world's first Enterprise Digital Assets Platform bringing cryptocurrencies, tokens, and other digital assets to the world's largest companies. Bitwave helps with accounting, taxes, AR / AP, secure DApps, and more. Pat was formerly a principal engineer and chief architect on Cisco Spark. Formerly, he...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Ekaterina Romanovskaya, CEO and Founder of A.ID, an Identity & Compliance platform with a focus on high-risk customers. She has previously co-founded Nimb, a ring with a personal security system embedded into it. Before diving into entrepreneurship Ekaterina had been doing marketing communications, then started in a retail bank as a PR manager, and a...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Kendall Cole, Head of Product at NEAR Protocol, a base-layer blockchain designed to provide the ideal environment for dapps by overcoming some of the limitations of competing systems—such as low throughput, low speeds, and poor cross-compatibility. Kendall is in the process of transitioning out of his current role with NEAR to co-found Proximity Labs, a p...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Matthew Schultz, Chairman and Director of CleanSpark. He served as the Company’s Chief Executive Officer from 2014 through October 2019 and has been involved in many capacities with several publicly traded companies. He served as the President and CEO of Amerigo Energy, Inc., creating multiple syndicated offerings of developmental oil production progra...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Dan Martell, CEO, and Founder of SaaS Academy. Dan is a serial entrepreneur having built several multi-million dollar technology companies starting at the age of 17. He's also an award-winning angel investor, having invested in companies like Intercom, Udemy, Hootsuite, Unbounce. Today he's an executive coach focused exclusively on B2B SaaS w...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Micha Benoliel, the CEO and Co-Founder of Nodle, a privacy-first, decentralized wireless network for connecting Internet of Things devices and sensors to the Internet, and Coalition Network, a non-profit foundation that provides open-source, secure exposure notification solutions for governments and enterprises to protect their citizens during pandemics....

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Matt Marcus, Chief Product Officer & C0-Founder of Modern Treasury. Matt was responsible for building the payment operations system at LendingHome, which has funded over $3 billion in mortgage loans. When they really started to scale, the number of payments we made exploded — from hundreds to tens of thousands per month — and that’s when they started u...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Marcus New, CEO of InvestX. Marcus New has an accomplished career in the private and public financial markets that spans over three decades and is a pioneer in the pre-IPO asset class. He is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of InvestX Capital, a trading platform that delivers access and liquidity to the growth equity asset class and empowers the...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Victor Zhang, the CEO of Alphawallet. Alphawallet is the maker of AlchemyNFT, an attestation and remixing protocol for NFTs. One of its first iterations is AutographNFT.io, a platform where anyone can request a verified autograph, authenticated via Twitter profile. The technology that makes this happen is TokenScript, which transforms NFTs by adding ut...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Charlie Silver, CEO of Permission.io. Charlie is a successful entrepreneur who has founded and exited 5 startups in technology, media, and finance. He co-founded Onramp Invest, Blockforce Capital, and Reality Shares which created 7 publicly traded ETFs including the first Blockchain equity ETF(BLCN). In the dot-com era, he built RealAge which was successfu...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Pat Duffy, Co-founder of The Giving Block. Pat along with Alex Wilson created The Giving Block in 2018, developing the leading solutions that charities, universities and other nonprofits use to fundraise cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. They quickly established themselves as the leading crypto fundraising experts through the explosive growth of their progra...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Alex Adelman, CEO & Co-founder of Lolli, a rewards application that lets people earn bitcoin when they shop online from 1,000+ top merchants. Alex was previously the CEO & Co-founder of Cosmic, the leading e-commerce gateway, which was acquired by PopSugar in ’15 and then by Ebates in ’17. Alex positioned Cosmic and Lolli as high growth, high v...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Shmulik Fishman, the founder, and CEO of Argyle, which provides a universal, trusted platform for accessing employment records with worker consent. He started Argyle in 2018 after experiencing the complexity of work verification for his previous venture STRATIM. Shmulik is a published author and has an undergraduate degree from Hampshire College where he...

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Wagner Ruiz, the Co-Founder and Chief Risk Officer (CRO) of EBANX. Wagner focuses on risk management, strategic partnerships, and regulatory operation, which are the essential pillars in the growth of the fintech company. Prior to being CRO, Wagner served as EBANX's Chief Financial Officer for almost nine years, since its founding in 2012. As CFO,...

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Gershie Vann, the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Magma Capital Funds. Gershie provides vision to the broader organization and implements strategic investment decisions in accordance with Magma’s investment approach and philosophy. Gershie has previous professional experience utilizing data analytics and process design. Gershie holds a BS in Finan...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Craig J. Lewis, the Founder and CEO of Gig Wage, a venture capital backed SaaS company that’s raised $16.45 million to-date to meet the demands of the future workforce and to build modern payment tools for it. Investors have included Steve Case (Founder of AOL) and his Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Venture Fund, Foundry Group, Green Dot Corp. (NYSE: GDOT)...

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Brian Shniderman, CEO of Opy and Chief Strategy Officer of Openpay. With over 30 years focused on payments of every kind, between all types of parties, and in almost every major country, Brian has been a frequent contributor to banking journals, has published numerous white papers addressing trends, threats, and strategic opportunities in banking and paym...