Village Global Podcast

In this episode Erik and co-host Miles Snyder of Multicoin Capital talk to Ameen Soleimani (@ameensol), CEO at SpankChain, and Jehan Tremback (@JTremback), founder of Althea Mesh. Ameen is one of the inventors of a token-curated registry. He discusses what a token-curated registry is, what the current use cases for them are and what they could possibly be in the future. They talk about AdChain and...

Erik's co-host for this episode is Myles Snider (@myles_snider), research associate at Multicoin Capital. They talk to Haseeb Qureshi (@hosseeb) who is a GP at MetaStable Capital. They discuss where stablecoins are now and envision what they could be in the future. They compare and contrast stablecoins and fiat and explain why someone would hold a stablecoin that's indexed to fiat. They talk about...

Saifedean Ammous (@saifedean), the author of The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking, joins Erik for a very interesting and highly quotable interview. He expands on a number of topics from his book but also gets into a lot that isn’t in the book. He recounts the story of money from an Austrian perspective and describes why the world never really had a complete gold s...

Vijay Boyapati (@real_vijay), software engineer, crypto thinker and proponent of Austrian economics, joins Erik on this episode to talk about a number of interesting topics. They start with a primer on Austrian economics, what makes it different from other schools of economics, and why economics is a unique science with different schools of thought — “there isn’t a Chicago school of physics or a M...

Erik is joined by two very exciting guests for this episode — Bill Tai, venture capitalist and director at Bitfury, and Derek Hsue (@derek_hsue), investor at Blockchain Capital. The three have a very engaging discussion about the mining landscape in cryptocurrencies, the similarities and differences between now and the early growth of the semiconductor industry, as well as the issues, obstacles an...

Erik and his co-host Tony Sheng (@tonysheng) of Decentraland interview Nic Carter (@nic__carter), partner at Castle Island Ventures and co-founder of Coinmetrics.io. Nic explains why Bitcoin might end up like gold, where everyday people have little day-to-day interaction with it but it has a big influence on the monetary system, and how Bitcoin can be a check on the behavior of central banks. He e...

Trent McConaghy (@trentmc0) returns for another interview with Erik. He’s the founder of Ocean Protocol and BigchainDB. In this episode, he starts by explaining Ocean Protocol’s mission and gives us a history of how the overall philosophy of the web has changed over the years, going from what could be called Web 1 to Web 2.0 to the yet-to-be-written story of Web 3. He explains how the web started...

Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), CTO of Coinbase, joined Erik on stage in San Francisco at the Founders Embassy Borderless Summit in June 2018 for a fascinating conversation about the coming impact of blockchain technology. They discuss how the world will change as work and entertainment — but especially finance — become virtual. Balaji explains why governments will need to compete for the best indiv...

Today’s guest is Jimmy Song (@jimmysong), crypto developer and teacher. He is a venture partner at Blockchain Capital and creator of the Programming Blockchain course. Jimmy has been a crypto developer for a long time now (in crypto terms), teaches programming blockchain, and has written a number of influential posts on crypto. He talks about how he got into crypto and what about it was so appeali...

In a first-ever two-hour episode for Venture Stories by Village Global, Erik talks to two of the most interesting crypto thinkers around: Arjun Balaji (@arjunblj), crypto investor, trader and incubator, and Murad Mahmudov (@MustStopMurad), crypto analyst and angel investor. In this wide-ranging and mind-expanding interview, the three discuss a number of topics relating to cryptocurrencies, effects...

Joining Erik for this episode are Felix Feng (‪@felix2feng)‬, founder of Set Protocol and Nadav Hollander (@NadavAHollander), founder of Dharma Protocol. Felix and Nadav explain their respective companies and what they are looking to do for the open financial system. They talk about how the coming wave of decentralization in financial services will bring the same accessibility and ease of use that...

Alan Curtis of Radar Relay, a Village portfolio company, joins Erik to talk about what Radar Relay is working on and to discuss what is needed to get bring the world into the token economy. Alan explains the four main categories of tokens: utility, security, collectible and currency. He then compares and contrasts centralized and decentralized exchanges for those tokens. Alan gets into what a rela...

Amitt Mahajan (@amittm), co-founder and CTO of Rare Bits and investor at Presence Capital, joins Erik and his guest co-host Tony Sheng of Decentraland for this episode. They dive into all things non-fungible tokens, explaining how they work, why they matter, and why they have so much potential. They explain why you you really only have tenuous ownership of the virtual goods that you purchase onlin...

In this episode, Erik talks to Ryan King (@frothcity), co-founder of FOAM protocol, and Jehan Tremback (@jtremback), founder of Althea Mesh. They explain how the blockchain makes it possible to know for certain where exactly somebody is at a given time and how that enables new technologies. For example, in the area of smart contracts, if someone bought a train ticket and the train is late, they ca...

With Erik for this episode are: - Aaron Batalion (@abatalion), formerly partner at Lightspeed and founder of LivingSocial - Vinny Lingham (@VinnyLingham), CEO of Civic and GP at Multicoin Capital and Newtown Partners - David King (@dksf), angel investor and crypto curator They have a wide-ranging and lively discussion about a number of topics around the state of crypto in 2018 and make some bold p...

Erik is joined by Josh Stein, CEO of Harbor, Stephen McKeon (@sbmckeon), finance professor at the University of Oregon, and Parker Thompson (@pt), seed-stage investor, partner at AngelList and token skeptic. The guests give an overview of all things tokenized securities. Josh tells us why he’s so enthusiastic about the rise of the blockchain and recounts the origin story of Harbor. They talk about...

Erik and guest co-host Tony Sheng (@tonysheng) of Decentraland interview managing partners of Multicoin Capital Tushar Jain (@TusharJain_) and Kyle Samani (@KyleSamani). They explain why many people are underestimating the potential impact of blockchain on the web and on the world in general. In their words, “tokenizing shares of Apple stock and putting it on the blockchain will be akin to PDF’ing...

Erik is joined by Tim Swift and Ariel Poler on this episode of the podcast. Tim Swift is founder and CEO of Roam Robotics and Ariel Poler (@ariel) is an angel investor. They discuss how the human body could be engineered for the better and discuss a number of ways to do that, including exoskeletons, brain-computer interfaces and nootropics. They fill us in on who the founders and companies are who...

This special live episode was recorded at the Atrium offices in San Francisco on June 20 2018. Village Global co-founder Erik Torenberg hosted a fireside chat with Daniel Kan, co-founder and COO of Cruise Automation and Qasar Younis, former COO of YCombinator. They discussed all things fundraising, providing an inside look into the world of VC funding and exposing some of the subtler points of fun...

Simon de la Rouviere (@simondlr), crypto developer and thought leader, and Trent McConaghy (@trentmc0), founder of Ocean Protocol, join Erik for an enlightening discussion of crypto. They explain the vast societal transformation that will be brought by blockchain, sometimes in ways that are hard to imagine today. They tell us why we are just at the beginning of a new revolution and how it compares...

Robin Hanson, associate professor of economics at George Mason University, joins Erik for a primer on prediction markets. He explains how prediction markets work and why they are one of the best methods of forecasting the future that we have.
 Robin explains how useful prediction markets can be in a wide variety of fields, including some unexpected ones. Robin and Erik speculate on why prediction...

Joining Erik for this interview are Joey Krug (@joeykrug) of Augur and Tony Sheng (@tonysheng) of Decentraland. Erik and Tony interview Joey about the process of building Augur, his new startup that launched on July 9 2018. Joey explains what he envisions for Augur, why it’s “the future of forecasting” and how the process of building it has unfolded over the past two years. He talks about the wide...

This is a special live episode that was recorded at Village HQ in San Francisco on June 14 2018. The event was put on in partnership with Xoogler, a network of former Googlers who have come together to help each other with their startup ambitions. Village Global co-founder Erik Torenberg (@eriktorenberg) chatted with Jo Varshney (@jo_getter), founder and CEO of VeriSIM Life and Kiran Bellubbi (@sm...

Joining Erik on this episode are Maia Bittner (@maiab), co-founder of Pinch, and Sheel Mohnot (@pitdesi), FinTech partner at 500 Startups. They go over the variety of sectors being disrupted by FinTech companies these days, including insurance, credit reporting, personal financial management, capital markets, financial planning, international finance and even banking in the developing world. Erik...

Erik is joined by Nicole Quinn (@Nik_Quinn), Investing Partner at Lightspeed and Lee Edwards (@terronk), former CTO of Teespring and active angel investor. They explain why they’re bullish on consumer packaged goods startups and which industries they see startups disrupting in the future. They also discuss why they think there will be so much growth in the space, especially in e-commerce. They deb...