The Curious Learners

My guest is Shanti Bergel . He is a gaming industry veteran with significant experience as an operator and founder. He is now one of the founding partners of Transcend Fund , which is a VC fund for the gaming and digital entertainment space. It was fantastic to hear Shanti's deep insights on the industry and his experience with several transformations that have unfolded in this space. Of cour...

I don't know if you do, but I don't get to speak to inventors of Blockchain very often. Scott Stornetta is the co-author of three out of eight works referenced in the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Initially, Scott's strong view on the need to create immutable records led him to work with cryptographer Stuart Haber and together invent the very first Blockchain. My conversation with Sc...

My guest today is Hasib Malik . He is the co-founder of Creditbook , which is a technology company that empowers merchants and MSMEs in Pakistan. Creditbook was built on the back of a deep market research that identified the biggest pain points for MSMEs in the country. Hasib and I had an insightful conversation about the potential of  Pakistan, what MSMEs need the most and Creditbook's curre...

My guest at The Curious Learners is Federico Travella . As a venture builder, he has been involved in the foundation of very successful start-ups in South East Asia (e.g. Lazada). He then went ahead and started his own company, Novicap , which is an end-to-end financing provider for SMEs. Federico and I had a great conversation about financing SMEs, inefficiency in the market and the opportunity t...

My guest today is Gokul Rajaram . It is hard to find someone who has been as successful in all three of building, operating and investing. He is known as the 'Godfather of Adsense', having built the foundation of Google's advertising business. He then exited his start-up to Facebook and had an amazing career at Facebook, Square and now at Doordash. He is also an investor supporting...

My guest today is Supriyo Roy . He is the co-founder of Hyy.pe , which is a community-centric content platform for NFTs. NFT market continues to grow at a significant pace in trading volumes. And in parallel we continue to search for the next big thing in NFTs, be it new content or evolving business models. Supriyo and I had a rich conversation on a full agenda and touched on many interesting topi...

My guest today is Winston Robson . He is the co-founder of WeMeta , where he and his team are building the data layer for the Metaverse. Winston and I had a great conversation. Below are a few interesting topics that we discussed: - Should we call it Metaverse or Multiverse? - Data is key to "build" and "transact" on the Metaverse - How to interpret on-chain and off-chain data...

For anyone interested in a masterclass in investing in financial services (TradFi & DeFi), here is one delivered by Francesco Filia on The Curious Learners. Francesco is the founder and CIO of Fasanara Capital , which is an alternative investment firm. Francesco and his team have been investing in public and private markets for longer than a decade. He describes his team as a group of 'ge...

My guest today is Calvin Luk from Refinable . It is a decentralised NFT marketplace operating across multiple layer-1 chains. Calvin and I discussed the future of NFT marketplaces, where white-label technology solutions might be more favourable for brands, creators and project owners. Also discussed the following interesting topics: - Difference in customer adoption between Asia and Western market...

I continue to go down the rabbit hole of Web 3.0. My guest is Mark Studholme . He is the founder of Metamundo , which is a marketplace of 3D NFTs and digital assets for metaverse. It is a gateway for the use of artists and creators to build the metaverse. Mark and I discussed all things metaverse. Select topics are listed below: • Difference between 2D and 3D assets and the need for a new platform...

My guest today is Simon Vans-Colina . He was in the founding team of Monzo and is now the CTO of Fronted . Simon has contributed to transformation of financial services during his time at Monzo and is now passionate about DeFi and Web 3.0. Hence, he was a perfect guest to talk about the new wave of transformation in fintech, i.e. convergence with Web 3.0. In fact, he set up TreeDAO , which is a de...

My guest today is Patrick Hansen . He is the Head of Strategy and Growth at Unstoppable Finance . It is a start-up with a mission of financial inclusion and making decentralised finance accessible to the mass market. Patrick and I talked about what it takes to onboard billion users in DeFi and what they are building at Unstoppable Finance to contribute to this goal. Some of the specific topics tha...

My guest today is Aleksi Loytynoja . He is the co-founder of Kleoverse , a platform of work in web 3.0. Aleksi and his co-founders launched Kleoverse very recently. Their initial focus is on building the network of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and helping talent discover DAOs and engage with them. Aleksi and I started the episode with why 2022 would be the year of DAOs and talked...

My guest today is Kaan Eryilmaz . He is the founder of Tinyman , a decentralized trading protocol built on the Algorand blockchain. Kaan is also one of the co-founders of Hipo , where they built several successful fintech products. Kaan and I had a great conversation on all things DeFi and Tinyman. Here are some of the topics that we discussed: - How crypto turned into a real product for Kaan with...

Happy New Year everyone! The Curious Learners is ending 2021 with a special episode on NFTs and web3 with two amazing guests Justin Shenkarow and John Kraski . They are the co-hosts of the wonderful podcast NFT Heat ! Justin is an actor, voice actor, producer and Emmy and Golden Globe winner! He is passionate about NFTs. He started in the NFTs space as a collector and now works with brands, artist...

My guest today is Sinan Koc . He is a co-founder of BiLira , which is a stablecoin pegged to Turkish Lira. I truly enjoyed speaking with him. We discussed the following and many more interesting topics: - why do we need stablecoins? Now and in the future? - do stablecoins remain as a gateway between fiat and crypto? - is there a bifurcation for the use of stablecoins between emerging markets and d...

My guest today is Krishnan Menon . He is the co-founder and CEO of BukuKas . He is building BukuKas as a one-stop-software solution for merchants. His journey into building BukuKas was an outcome of his deep understanding of merchants' problems. Krishnan and I talked about initial company building, finding product market fit, and the early signals that tell founders when to scale up the busin...

My guest today is Hugo Amsellem . Hugo is one of the thought leaders that I look up to for the creator economy. He has been working with entrepreneurs, creators and artists for a long time and he was once a founder himself. He is now with Jellysmack as the VP, Community. Hugo and I talked about the current state of creator economy, the framework that he uses to help out creators and how he sees th...

My guest for the fourth episode of The Curious Learners is Feras Jalbout . He is the founder of commission-free investing platform Baraka . Feras is on a mission to democratise access to investing and enable everyone to participate in markets. Among other things, Feras and I discussed the key pillars of building a customer-first investing platform, their focus on distribution quality research to t...

My guest for the third episode of The Curious Learners is Geri Cupi . He is a serial entrepreneur with a distinctive focus on circular economy. He also quietly built Monochain as one of the first businesses with an NFT utility in real world. He is now building Twig , which is the "Bank of Things". It is a continuum of circular economy with innovative fintech products. Geri and I talked a...

My guest for the second episode of The Curious Learners was Nikita Fadeev . He is a Partner and Head of Fasanara Digital, which is a quantitative investment fund in crypto assets. It is part of Fasanara Capital , which is an alternative asset management firm founded in 2011. Nikita developed a strong interest in crypto in 2017 when he was at college studying mathematics. Since then, he has been le...

I knew Jovan Stojanovic was going to be a perfect guest for the first episode of The Curious Learners. Jovan is the co-founder of Anari AI , an exciting artificial intelligence company, where they are building the AI hardware industry from scratch. He is also the founder of  Wonderland AI Summit , a mission-driven community of AI experts, practitioners and enthusiasts. In his formative years, Jova...