This week, I’m sharing an episode of the ‘Venture with Hesus’ podcast that I recorded recently with the unstoppable Hesus Inoma, as he interviews me on lessons learned from being part of the startup ecosystem the last 8 years, the power of networks, 2022 token sale aspirations, customer validation, building for users vs building for yourself, usability vs. security in crypto, funding your go to market, pre-seed rounds vs seed rounds, what I look for in founders, mental models, flywheels, how to be successful in an accelerator, how to get excited about regulation, real-world assets and more! As ..read more

I’ve brought together 4 of the founders from the Techstars Web3 class of 2024 to help me dispel some of the common misconceptions about web3 with the general public, including Julia Kemp, founder and CEO of Pawpass, Daniel Uribe, founder and CEO of  GenoBank. Tiago Ferreira, co-founder and CEO of FairAI, and Tom Daniel, co-founder and CEO of Ember AI. Even with an estimated 500 million crypto users around the world, the number of daily active users of crypto is less than 20 million, compared to 2 billion daily active users of Facebook, for example.  So, for those around the world who ..read more

Niall Mackey, the Commercial Director at Topsec Cloud Solutions, joins the show this week as we take an inside look at how businesses cope in the aftermath of a hack.   Niall is a tech industry veteran with over 35 years of experience with Topsec, Nokia, Interoute (now GTT) and Bank of America.  With Topsec, Niall looks at commercial opportunities and influences the direction of service development to ensure they continue to bring value to their customers.  Topsec have been pioneering cloud-based email and web security for more than two decades, servicing the government, he ..read more

In this Money Talks segment, Paul Smyth and I kick things off with a look at Sam Bankman-Fried’s 25-year sentence before jumping to the brighter side of things with BlackRock’s new tokenized money market fund.  We then time travel back to 2017 with Copper’s sushi party (or so we thought), and close things out by questioning the correlation between fintech funding and the crypto bull run. Paul Smyth is a specialist executive recruiter and executive coach within the fintech industry.  As a founder of two startups, Paul also has a unique view of the startup ecosystem. Paul and I met bac ..read more

Joaquim Matinero Tor joins the show this week as guest co-host as we look at the likely paths to the adoption of CBDCs (or Central Bank Digital Currencies) in the different countries around the world making progress with these digital versions of fiat currencies.   Joaquim Matinero Tor, or just “Quim” as he’s known to friends, is a lawyer with expertise in blockchain, digital assets, and web3 and a depth of experience in venture capital, mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, derivatives and securities markets in general. Quim is a counsel at Ceca Magan in Barcelona, he serves as ..read more

Laura Walsh joins the show again this week as guest co-host as we explore the potential link between digital identity and decentralized social media through the lens of the Forecaster protocol, its challenges, user growth, and the future potential of a decentralized online ecosystem. Laura is the Chief Marketing Officer and part of the founding team of Kaskade Finance, and we worked together closely for the past two years on the Techstars Web3 accelerator.  Laura is a Techstars All-Star Mentor, advisor, founder, web3 O.G., and friend. LINKS: Learn more about Kaskade Finance:  https ..read more

Brian Zwerner is the President and Founder of W3 Studio, and a VC and Founder of Beyond the Game Network.  As the President and Founder of W3 Studio, a 501c3 non-profit venture studio, Brian and his team help diverse founders in Atlanta build startups in web3. W3 Studio partners with corporations and provides grants to startups to fund the launch of their first products. With his role as a VC and Founder at Beyond The Game Network, Brian teams up with a venture group of athletes that invest in Seed to Series B consumer startups in sports, media, web3, and fitness. Brian Zwerner was previo ..read more

This week’s guest is Connor Murphy, the CEO of Bridge. I met Connor at a Techstars event in Dublin in 2019 as he was just getting his latest venture off the ground in Bridge, and I started using the Bridge app within seconds of meeting him to help me bridge my network. Connor Murphy is an all-around good guy, and in every conversation I have with with him, I end up connecting way more dots than I ever could have expected.  Connor has a background in computer science, startups, venture capital, and management consulting.  He was previously the Managing Director of the Techstars SAP.iO ..read more

We've remastered and packaged up two of our most popular episodes from 2023 that were originally going to be one episode looking at the venture capital mantra of ‘investing in lines and not dots’. Both of these episodes were recorded in March 2023, after my team and I had just completed another 12 investments through Techstars, and I was itching to share some of the lessons learned.  Eoin Fitzgerald set the stage for me to do just that, and then we brought Patrick Pinschmidt from Middlegame Ventures onto the show two weeks later to dig deeper into this idea of investing in lines and not d ..read more

We've got a special treat for you this week, as we've remastered and packaged up two of our most popular episodes from 2023 that were originally going to be one episode looking at the venture capital mantra of ‘investing in lines and not dots’. Both of these episodes were recorded in March 2023, after my team and I had just completed another 12 investments through Techstars, and I was itching to share some of the lessons learned.  Eoin Fitzgerald set the stage for me to do just that, and then we brought Patrick Pinschmidt from Middlegame Ventures onto the show two weeks later to dig deepe ..read more