The Deep End by ODF

Minn Kim is a Partner at ODX - the community back accelerator and fund that Erik & David previewed on the show back in October. ODX’s first cohort kicked off last month and we were excited to bring someone from the team on, though much of the episode focuses on Minn’s eclectic interests in the intersecting futures of work, fertility, community, and family. This is Minn’s second time on the show -...

Mark Yusko is the founder, chief investment officer, and managing director of Morgan Creek Capital Management - an investment management firm that advises pension funds, endowments, and wealthy individuals. Today’s episode is far-ranging. We chat about network effects, virtual stages, legacy events like the Olympics, Disney, decentralized creative franchises, and much, much more. The one thread th...

Last fall, On Deck CEOs Erik Torenberg and David Booth joined the show to announce ODX - a new $100M community fund that allows On Deck to invest in the next generation of founders. Shortly after, we announced "ODX Flexport" - our first vertical accelerator that we created in partnership with Flexport. Flexport is on a mission to make global trade easy for everyone. They're a worldwide leader in s...

Jen Phan is the co-founder and CEO of Passionfroot. She’s also an alum of On Deck No Code, which past Deep End guest KP runs. This conversation builds off of past creator economy tool discussions that we’ve had with other guests like Joe Albanese and Josh Kaplan. Passionfroot helps creators manage back-office operations so that creators can focus on their content. Our discussion today considers Eu...

Joining Marshall this week in the Deep End is ODF alum Ben Rollert, CEO and Co-Founder of Composer. Composer allows its users to easily build a portfolio of hedge fund-like strategies. After we ended last year talking about DeFi and other blockchain innovations with cypher, it was refreshing to have a conversation about innovation in traditional finance, particularly in the retail investment space...

The Deep End returns in full on Monday. Until then: we're excited to announce Execs. Execs is a new On Deck show for founders who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks and tactics that leading technology companies today have used to scale. Guests are experienced, non-founding tech executives in key roles at top companies with firsthand experience solving hard and rare problems for a fast-gr...

Today is the last episode of the year, and so we’re celebrating by doing something a little different. Rather than have a single guest on, we invited 11 senior On Deck employees to answer a single question: What trend do you expect to change, emerge, or accelerate in 2022?  To help them answer honestly, we were very clear that these aren’t necessarily predictions. Instead, my colleagues were instr...

Anna Gat is Founder and CEO of Interintellect. Interintellect describes itself as having reinventing the french salon for the 21st century. The salons of Early Modern Revolutionary France played an integral role in the cultural and intellectual development of France. The salons were seen by contemporary writers as a cultural hub, for the upper middle class and aristocracy, responsible for the diss...

This is probably our most in-the-weeds web3 episode yet. If you’re newer to crypto, we recommend you scroll back through your feed and listen to any of our episodes with Patrick Riera, Cooper Turley, and several others to give yourself a background to enjoy this one fully. As a bonus, you can also listen to our episode with Stephen Sikes from Public to build a background in traditional finance. Jo...

A reminder that we’re still looking for a researcher in residence. If you want to be a personal trainer of the mind for On Deck’s CEOs, head over to beondeck.com/researcher  Nikhil Krishnan is the author of the Out of Pocket newsletter. Out-of-Pocket is making the business of healthcare easy to understand. Nikhil writes in plain English and compliments industry analysis with memes and humor. We ha...

Vance Roush is Founder of Overflow. Overflow is building the infrastructure to make generosity frictionless across every major asset class.  Vance is on a mission to democratize philanthropy to the masses. Through his experience with churches and other non-profits, he has become keenly aware of how the top percentile has leveraged wealth management tricks and tips to donate stock (instead of cash)...

On Deck is hiring a Researcher in Residence to be a "personal trainer for the mind" for our two co-CEOs. To learn more, please visit beondeck.com/researcher  Hot off last week’s episode about helping extend human life, this episode is about how to bring certain long-gone animals back to life. This week, Ben Lamm (Founder & CEO of Colossal Biosciences) joins The Deep End. Colossal describes itself...

This week, we are joined in the Deep End by James Sinka - cofounder of On Deck’s Deep Tech program.  Some of our past Deep End guests (and many On Deck fellows) are working at the bleeding edge of technology. So far, we’ve talked to founders of biotech companies, space manufacturers, and more. Deep Tech is a category of innovation that exists at the intersection of many different fields under the...

Dr. Kristen Fortney is CEO & cofounder of BIOAGE - a company working on slowing aging and chronic disease. Figuring out how to live longer is an age-old problem. For as long as humans have studied medicine, we have tried to learn which remedies, habits, and environments best position us to have a chance of long life. Recent developments in the last few decades have, for the first time in human his...

Abe Choi is a prolific angel investor and CEO of Simple Dealer. Abe has partnered with another high-profile angel investor named Olumide Soyombo to create Voltron Capital - a Pan African venture capital firm. This is our first pure VC episode in awhile and it was refreshing to hear about some of the dynamics on the venture side as opposed to the founder side. Africa is massive. One of our first qu...

Sahil Lavingia is CEO of Gumroad and author of The Minimalist Entrepreneur. Many of our recent guests are recently-forged pioneers in the creator economy space, but Sahil has been building the passion economy since before it was cool. In 2011, Sahil founded Gumroad to help creators sell content directly to consumers. He was 19 at the time. But this episode isn't strictly about the passion economy,...

Tina He is an investor with Pace Capital and is also on the founding team at Station - which bills itself as building the rails for web 3. Her work with Pace & Station has helped her identify the myriad mental shifts that builders need to make when migrating from web 2 to web 3. Today's conversation is about those mental shifts. For example, the legal infrastructure that exists today has not caugh...

Recently, many of our guests have been pioneers in the web3 space. Patrick Rivera provided a particularly helpful framework for understanding different eras of the web when he was on the show. From him, and other guests like Cooper Turley, we've learned that web3 is special because it enables users to have ownership of their different networks. Today's guests share the optimism of our past guests,...

A few weeks ago, our show carried a special announcement that On Deck had raised a $100 million fund to fuel the next generation of entrepreneurs. Swapstack, cofounded by Jake Singer & Jake Schonberger, is the first company to be accepted into an ODX cohort and receive a check for $125k check from the fund. Swapstack is positioned to be the premier newsletter advertising marketplace, connecting br...

Primer cofounders Ryan Delk & Maksim Stepanenko join the Deep End after meeting through On Deck. They are currently building a community for curious and ambitious kids to find and explore their interests together. Education is deeply personal, and so our conversation begins on a personal note, with a discussion of Ryan's background growing up homeschooled & Maksim's experience with highly structur...

Today conversation with Stephen Sikes (COO of Public) is about how millions of Americans are entering the stock market for the first time with mindsets and behaviors unlike any generation that has come before. New investors, particularly those who have started recently via a mobile app, believe they're part of a movement that's making investing more inclusive and accessible. Public exists to help...

Nathan Baschez joins the Deep End to discuss the passion economy, the realities of building a media business, and gets real with Marshall about  the realities of embarking on the founder journey as a creator. The two also chat about Every, which Nathan describes as a writer collective for productivity, strategy, leadership, & culture. This conversation with Nathan blends a few different threads th...

Joining the Deep End is Doug Ludlow, CEO of Mainstreet. Today's conversation is about the unbundling and re-bundling of the smart bank and how the 35 million small businesses in the US can benefit from aggregating their business identity data in one place. We talk about helping small businesses navigate PPP loans during COVID, discuss how startups can earn tax credits easily for things like resear...

At On Deck, we believe that startups are the building blocks of a better future. Startups drive global economic growth by creating jobs, improving quality of life, and making meaningful progress to solving society's biggest problems. We also believe that the the biggest constraint on startup creation is the number of founders - for each person starting a company today, there are hundreds more sitt...

Joining Marshall in the Deep End is Sara Du - cofounder & CEO of Alloy Automation,  a no-code tool for automating e-commerce stores. The conversation begins by discussing how the line between commerce and e-commerce is blurring as e-commerce penetration continues to accelerate across the consumer economy.  This trend was certainly accelerated by the pandemic, but Sara notes that Black Friday shopp...