MoneyNeverSleeps

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 UBS deal for Wealthfront, Walmart doubling down on their superapp strategy, the story of Ireland’s latest unicorn, Wayflyer, and the pummeling of PayPal’s stock price as a bellwether for the post-pandemic era. This episode of MoneyNeverSleeps is spon...

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 . The key idea with this discussion is that so many pieces of the wealth...

Joining the show this week is Tim Bos, founder and CEO of ShareRing , a blockchain-based company that's focused on changing the landscape of the fragmented sharing economy. In this chat, Tim and Pete Townsend talk through Tim’s crystal ball-like experiences in deep tech in the ’90s, how being a third-time founder has shaped his view of the blockchain space, adapting all of this incredible technolo...

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend are back with their last Money Talks segment of the year with their review of their top stories for 2021.  From GameStop and Wallstreetbets, to Roblox and Coinbase going public, to Chamath and SPACs, to Charlie Munger on Bitcoin, to BNPL with Klarna, Square and Afterpay, to our spinning of the fintech flywheel, to CryptoPunks, stablecoins, the metaverse, Tech...

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, defendi...

Joey Krug is the Co-Chief Investment Officer, 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 Irel...

Matthew Graham is the CEO of Sino Global Capital, who are providing 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 powered by the Launchpool Web3 Techstars...

John Wu is president of Ava Labs, an a16z-backed technology company building the next-generation blockchain platform, Avalanche. John 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 episode, John shares insights on bringing passion to projects, build...

Teana Baker-Taylor is the Chief Policy Officer of the Chamber of Digital Commerce , the longest established trade body representing blockchain and digital assets. In this episode, Teana shares her story with Pete Townsend on her journey into blockchain and digital assets, her view on the critical focal points for the digital asset industry over the next few years, how she gives back as a mentor an...

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 Fin...

Michelle Tsing joins Pete Townsend in a special segment from the Techstars Web3 Convo Series of fireside chats driven by the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator program kicking off in Dublin in March 2022. Michelle is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in addition to wearing many hats as a lawyer, artist, entrepreneur, startup advisor, and self-described futurist, she mentors founders thro...

Referring to Colm Lyon as an Irish fintech ‘O.G.’ is just the tip of the iceberg, as at the core, he’s an entrepreneur who’s built indigenous Irish businesses into international players. Currently the CEO and Founder of Fire.com , we walk through Colm’s journey from the early days of banking IT to bootstrapping and scaling his first fintech Realex Payments before it was even called fintech, and bu...

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...

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 ecosy...

157: Money Talks #42:  Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator in Ireland | Chase Goes UK | AngelList Gets Stacked 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 some news of how Pete will be leading the program, then we get into how we think Chase’s digital bank mig...

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...

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 t...

Shane Monks O’Byrne, founder and CEO of Aikido Finance , joins the show this week to talk to Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend 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-...

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...

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...

Recorded during the Finsight Series virtual event that Pete Townsend moderated recently 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 -...

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 o...

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 flywhe...

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...

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. MoneyNeverSleeps is sponsored by PAT Fintech , the training partner that demystifies fintech and digit...