Searching for Mana with Lloyd Wahed

This week’s guest on the Searching for Mana show is Head of Plaid Europe, Ripsy Bandourian. A journey from Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Apple and Booking.com has led Ripsy to her most recent role at Plaid, helping to strengthen a Trans-Atlantic bridge for the open-banking leader. How does open-banking enable the goal of accessible fiscal liberty for everyone, and what are Plaid doing to achieve that? ...

On a pathway to hiring Apple CEO Tim Cook? Pascal Gauthier is the CEO and co-founder of Ledger, a global leader in security and infrastructure solutions for cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications. Now one of the most respected, outspoken and well-known leaders in web3, Lloyd walks us through Pascal’s founding journey and how he has scaled Ledger from zero to over 1000 employees.  Pascal disc...

Joining Lloyd this week is Floww CEO & FinTech expert Martijn de Wever. Partnered with The London Stock Exchange, Floww provides data to increase transparency & liquidity across private markets. Former Venture Capitalist and trader Martijn sheds brilliant light into the state of UK FinTech, the pros and cons of private vs public companies, and how his contrarian style has fuelled his succe...

This week’s podcast episode guest is Bolt Financial CEO Maju Kuruvilla. A former executive at Amazon, where he helped launch Amazon Fresh, Maju has taken over at Bolt to help build the future of e-commerce.   Searching for Mana is about finding future category leading tech firms in real-time. Almost every business goes through ups and downs, and the path to the top is never completely smooth. Bolt...

Joining Lloyd this week, is Austin Allison, CEO of Pacaso, the fastest-growing tech unicorn of all time. From humble beginnings, and an unusual path, Austin Allison, founder at Pacaso, has taken an unconventional path to the top. A self-proclaimed “troubled teen” and near high-school drop-out, Austin, on the back of an epiphanical moment, turned his life around to become a top performer at college...

Joining Lloyd this week is Solana Founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, in this fascinating, candid and eye-opening episode. Solana really needs no introduction. One of the most prominent and popular blockchain platforms, particularly amongst developers, Solana is able to run over 6,000 transactions per second and 30 million app transactions per day. For context, that’s more than all other blockchain...

Amy Wu, Head of Ventures, M&A and Gaming at FTX represents one of the best-known and most successful Venture Capitalists in the crypto and web3 spaces. Having had FTX’s US President Brett Harrison on as our opening guest of the series, Amy is another individual leading this generational business, with a mandate of investing in further generational businesses. Formerly a Partner at Lightspeed,...

Few others’ experiences and career path have left them so destined to found their business, with Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Chris Dixon coining “perfect founder-market fit” to describe him, than this week’s guest, Diogo Monica, Co-Founder of Anchorage Digital. With a resume boasting a PhD in Network Security, working as an early employee at Square, and rounding out his skill-set at Docker...

Mike Weissman, CEO of music and tech giant SoundCloud needs no introduction. Leading one of the most prominent and well-known consumer tech companies on the planet, SoundCloud sits at the forefront of innovation within the music industry. Empowering the next generation of artists to launch their tracks and musical career, SoundCloud is connecting communities of fans and artists to transact directl...

David Shriver, Head of Communications at Ocado Group, knows how to formulate and tell a story. Exceptionally eloquent and adept at forming narratives within high-growth tech businesses,  David joins Lloyd to walk through the cruciality of telling consistent and coherent stories. With over 35 years of experience in communications, this episode represents an absolute  masterclass in storytelling, so...

Illia Polosukhin, Founder & CEO of NEAR Protocol, is this week’s guest on Searching for Mana. Following on from the brilliant earlier episode with Marieke Flamant, Lloyd gets to the bottom of building a company sitting at the forefront of this potential paradigm shift to web3. Lloyd and Illia guide us through the technical intricacies of the platform, the wider NEAR ecosystem, building a leadi...

From discussing the meaning of life, to the cruciality of atomic habits, to genuinely aiming to change the world, this week’s guest, Michael Gronager - CEO of crypto behemoth Chainalysis - shares fascinating insights. With a valuation of upwards of $8 Billion, following their latest funding round in May this year, Chainalysis is providing critical financial data to enable governments, banks and bl...

Sendi Young is the European Managing Director for global crypto payments leader Ripple, with  an extensive background across payments with traditional corporate powerhouses. Growing up  in Istanbul in the 1980s, Sendi’s background has helped her acclimatize to the volatility of the crypto world, becoming accustomed to cycles of economic growth and rapid declines, sparking  her curiosity and passio...

Eileen Burbidge is the founding partner of Passion Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund  that has backed FinTech giants including the likes of Monzo, Tide and GoCardless among  others. As part of Mana Search’s event presenting their State of Diversity report, Eileen joins  Lloyd to walk through the homogeneity and inequality within the current Tech and Venture  Capital industries. From the...

Arik Shtilman heads up global payments solution Rapyd – one of Europe’s most highly valued fintechs.  Arik’s first rung on the career ladder was the Israeli army, which taught him a ‘carpe diem’ approach to business that has since helped him win over investors and turn Rapyd into  Israel’s most valuable private company (it recently achieved a 15bn dollar valuation).Arik explains that the genesis f...

The Searching for Mana show with Lloyd Wahed has featured several ‘one of a kind’ guests – and this show is no exception.  Wei Lei is not only a global leader for one of the biggest companies on the planet, she is also a two-time mathematical Olympiad who enjoys karaoke sessions, ran a marathon without training for it and overcame her fear of public speaking by taking part in an open mic comedy ni...

Being paid to get fit may sound too good to be true, but it’s exactly what this week’s Searching for Mana guest Ole Fomenko is doing for his app’s more than 70 milllion users.  Sweatcoin tracks a user’s steps and this summer will covert them into free crypto currency.  Watching a movie with his children was the inspiration for the app; his motivation for driving it lies in repenting for previous p...

As CEO of the NEAR protocol foundation, Marieke Flament is currently one of the most successfulfemale leaders working in fintech. But it took some convincing for her to give up an established,super successful corporate career; she was even told she was ‘full on crazy’ for considering it. As shetells presenter Lloyd Wahed in this episode, she defied her critics to join Circle in 2015 where shestaye...

Rodolphe Ardant, CEO of French unicorn Spendesk, is this week’s guest on the Searching for Mana podcast.  Rodolphe enjoyed a peripatetic childhood moving around the world every three years due to his father’s career, and says this instilled in him a ‘sense of curiosity’.  Combined with the ‘autistic boredom’ he felt growing up, Rodolphe had a desire to create and build things from an early age, sk...

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsCfKLN1u1cL_luwY5qR4YwApple Podcast: https://apple.co/2Hhg4gB​​ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3kKZQKlSearching for Mana is a UK-based podcast which focuses on tech innovation in finance, and features interviews with influencers, leaders and founders in the fintech space, from unicorn companies to financial disruptors. Previous guests have included the Directo...

In the first episode of season 4 of the Searching for Mana podcast, Brett Harrison, US president of leading crypto exchange platform FTX, talks to presenter Lloyd Wahed about the importance of regulation but also the need to take more risks; how staying small has helped FTX to play big; how he balances being a father and an enthusiastic pet owner (six dogs and five cats) with running one of the mo...

This is quite a story, listen to Zilch CEO and Co-Founder, Philip Belamant, British Entrepreneur of the year 2021, who has taken the business from series A to Unicorn faster than anyone else in Europe has managed with any other company. He and his team still have control of more than 50% of the equity, and their international expansion starts next year. Philip sat down with Lloyd Wahed CEO of Mana...

On this week’s Searching for Mana Lloyd Wahed CEO of Mana Search met with Arthur and Kathleen Breitman, the co-creators of the Tezos blockchain to discuss the development of the Tezos ecosystem and how it uses creativity, collaboration and a degree of democratisation to evolve this open-source platform. They see themselves very much as match makers and facilitators, bringing together developers wi...

Building anything that is going to survive and prosper requires a solid foundation and that is what Sean Lee CEO of the Algo Foundation described when he met Lloyd Wahed in this week’s Searching for Mana Podcast.  The Algo is the native token of the Algorand blockchain, and the Algo foundation helps users solve real-world problems using the Algo ecosystem which is based on four basic principles: S...

Ben Chemla CEO of Shares and Lloyd Wahed of Mana Search met to discuss how Shares is making share dealing a social activity and how Ben has learnt how to grow a company fast in a new market. The idea for Shares came from social investing, seeing friends chatting about their ideas and sharing views, having fun and learning from each other. He saw the opportunity to enable communities around making...