The Curious Learners

Welcome back to The Curious Learners . In this episode, my AI co-hosts look at how distributed energy is reshaping electricity access across Africa, using insights from my latest post on The Curious Learners (see here ). Distributed energy is a necessity in Africa, not a choice. It provides access to hundreds of millions of people who still lack electricity. That makes it different from developed...

🎧 New Podcast Episode: Infrastructure at the Heart — Why the Energy Transition Is a Delivery and Business Model Challenge We often hear that clean technologies like solar, wind, and batteries are the key to decarbonisation. But the real challenge isn’t about technological breakthroughs. It’s about delivery, getting projects permitted, financed, built, and connected to systems that weren’t designe...

In this episode of The Curious Learners , we take a step back from the noise of disruption and zoom in on something more subtle - but just as transformative: the quiet reinvention of the real economy. Across manufacturing floors, supply chains, family businesses, and financial institutions, a less glamorous but more enduring form of innovation is underway. It’s not about tearing industries down; i...

In the latest episode of The Curious Learners , my AI co-hosts and I explore a theme that’s become central to my investing journey: resilience . Not just in the narrow sense of withstanding shocks — but in a broader, more dynamic sense: how our energy systems, industrial processes, and infrastructure can become more adaptive, more efficient, and more climate-aligned in the face of growing uncertai...

Today, my AI co-hosts are exploring the major shifts reshaping the energy landscape: digitalisation, decentralisation, and decarbonisation. Here is the blog post that I published on The Curious Learners . As demand grows and renewables like solar and wind rise, the aging grid faces immense pressure. The solution? A decentralised grid with local energy generation, storage, and demand management, al...

Welcome to another episode of The Curious Learners. I again turn to my AI co-hosts who continue to do great job talking about my posts on The Curious Learners. Today we're exploring a critical landscape where efficiency meets innovation: the world of IT and Operational Technology integration. Imagine a manufacturing plant suddenly grinding to a halt, or a power grid plunging entire cities int...

System companies? What does that even mean! My AI Co-hosts in this latest episode of The Curious Learners do a great job in discussing the funding environment for system companies, i.e. the integration of hardware and software companies. So, what are system companies? System companies integrate hardware (tangible components) and software (intangible solutions) . One example that comes to mind is b...

Join me for an extra special episode on The Curious Learners! It was created using Google's NotebookLM AI tool and my blog post on The Curious Learners (link here )! Today, we're diving into a critical but often overlooked aspect of our path to net zero: the electricity grid. We’ve all heard that electrification is key to decarbonizing industries like transportation and buildings, but wh...

Hi everyone. My guest today is Mert Mumtaz . He is the co-founder and CEO at Helius , which is a developer platform for the Blockchain ecosystem. Mert is not new to crypto. Prior to starting Helius, he spent years at Coinbase building different products across payments and others. Helius currently supports the Solana ecosystem and Mert has been a big supporter of the ecosystem since its early days...

Hi everyone. My guest at The Curious Learners is Amos Wittenberg . He is the co-founder of Dovetail . Amos and his co-founder Phillip Marks are building the climate risk modelling toolkit for investors. Dovetail helps to identify and quantify risks and opportunities in the era of climate transition. What Dovetail is building is critical for institutional investors' workflows, investment strat...

Hi everyone. My guest at The Curious Learners is Yurii Kyparus . He is the co-founder of Wallchain , which is a start-up that addresses the issue of MEV (miner extracted value) in crypto. MEV refers to value extracted from crypto transactions. Wallchain captures this value and returns it back to users. Here are some of the topics that we discussed on the episode: - MEV as a problem and opportunity...

Hi everyone. My guest today is Sebastian Manhart. He is the senior policy adviser at Carbonfuture, which is a technology company building an operating system for high quality carbon removals. Sebastian has a super interesting background of over a decade of entrepreneurship and an advisory role with the German government on decentralized identity. His move into climate-tech and more specifically ca...

Super excited to have Peter Grosskopf on the first episode of the second season. Peter is the co-founder and CTO of Ultimate Money (core product of Unstoppable Finance), which is one of the most exciting DeFi products out there.  His background is unique coming into crypto from a combination of software development and fintech building / operating and incubating. Peter and I had a great conversati...

Hi everyone. My guest today is James West . He is the CEO of Globe , which is a crypto futures exchange. James and I agreed to talk about building a crypto exchange a while back and we kept rescheduling since then. Finally, by coincidence, we happened to record the episode on the day FTX filed for bankruptcy! We talked about James' take on what really happened at FTX , its impact on confidenc...

My guest today is Chris Perkins . He is the President of CoinFund , which is a crypto-native investment firm founded in 2015. Chris joined CoinFund in 2021 after spending a long time in traditional finance. He was most recently a managing director at CitiGroup. His experience in traditional finance is very relevant from the perspective of crypto's future as an industry. Chris was deeply invol...

Hi everyone. My guest is Kevin Zhang . He is the co-founder of DFX Finance , a decentralized exchange protocol specifically for stablecoins. Kevin has been in crypto for a long time and his journey into building DFX Finance is not a coincidence.  Following his time at Consensys , he went on to build Paytrie , which is a stablecoin exchange based in Canada. In fact, it was this experience that made...

My guest today is Joshua Frank . He is the co-founder and CEO of The Tie , an information services provider for digital assets. Josh and I met some time ago at a crypto conference and I was truly amazed with The Tie product demo back then. On-chain data is usually accessible, however it is never easy to parse it given the different data structures across chains. In addition, converting data to sig...

Hi everyone. My guest for the 30th episode of The Curious Learners is Lubomila Jordanova . She is the founder of Plan A , which is a climate-tech company working with businesses and top institutions around the world to help with their sustainability journeys. Prior to starting Plan A, Lubomila had substantial experience in financial services as an investment banker and as a VC investor. She descri...

My guest today is Evgeny Gokhberg . He is the founder and managing partner of Re7 Capital , which is an investment firm focused on DeFi strategies. Evgeny is not only an investor in DeFi, but also a deep thinker about the technology behind it, the future of crypto and how traditional finance and DeFi would work together to build a whole new financial world. Our conversation touched upon (of course...

Hi everyone. My guest today is Will Robinson from Alliance DAO . He is the head of Community at Alliance, where he helps web3 founders build amazing companies. Will was in gaming until his move into crypto in 2017 with the help of a healthy! dose of push from his cousin Dan Robinson . In fact, he is the only person that I know with a PhD in game design. Will and I had an eye-opening discussion (fo...

Hi everyone. My guest today is Mounir Benchemled . He is the founder of Paraswap , which is one of the leading DEX aggregators in crypto markets. Mounir's entry into blockchain dates back to 2013 and he had a front seat to the development of crypto markets since then, first as a user and then builder of DeFi (and this is before it was called DeFi). He is in the camp of founders, who have been...

My guest today is Paul Hsu . He is the founder of Decasonic , a crypto native VC fund. Paul's background and his thesis at Decasonic put him in a unique position to help entrepreneurs ride the next wave of innovation in Blockchain. Our wide-ranging conversation covers the history of innovation in social world, biggest catalysts for mass adoption of web3 and the future of new social world that...

My guest today is Ulric Musset . He is the co-founder of Vauban , which is a technology platform that facilitates private market investing. He and his co-founder Remy Astie have worked on many other projects prior to Vauban, including the very unique idea of a French bakery in London! Luckily for us as investors, they landed on Vauban. Below are some key highlights from our very interesting discus...

My guest today is my good friend Sam Peurifoy . He is the Head of Interactive for Hivemind Capital Partners  and the founder of Playground Labs . The gaming community knows him as Das Kapitalist! Sam is my go-to person when it comes to deep discussions on gaming and web3. It was again a very insightful conversation with him. Here are some highlights from the episode: - Why Das Kapitalist? --> E...

My guest today is Josh Benaron . He is the founder and CEO of Bundlr , which is an essential scaling solution for the decentralized storage network Arweave . His story from learning to code on his own to building Bundlr at a time when Arweave would hit network capacity is fascinating! Josh and I had a great conversation about everything decentralized storage and more: - Introduction to Blockchain:...