Moneyneversleeps

In another crossover episode, this time with Your Pursuit of Happiness, Paul Smyth and Pete Townsend talk through how to keep things running in your work life and your home life, two things that have become one since the world caught fire.  They dig into VC funding, hiring, startup decisions, transformational projects and more....with a guest appearance in the intro from Pete's kids! This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here. This week we've produced another Money Talks segment with friend of the show and sponsor Paul Smyth from Top Tier Recruitment and Possible.ie. We're looking at the right here, right now this week with the world on fire with coronavirus and how that's impacting business across startups, VCs, funding, hiring, coaching, corporates and new ideas. This episode is also featured on Top Tier Recruitment's podcast, Your Pursuit o

Colin Platt joins the show to talk to Pete Townsend about leaving behind his early career in the capital markets, the crossover of solving entrepreneurial problems and solving global political problems, the professional merits of podcasting, hating and loving writing, his view on economics....and his grasp of the Swedish language! This week we’re catching up with Colin Platt, whose LinkedIn profile describes him as a “crypto performance artist” in addition to being an independent consultant, but where you really want to follow him is on Twitter @colingplatt and on his blog on Medium. Colin works with innovative companies on technology and business strategy with a focus on cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger technologies, and is also a founder of entrepreneurial ventures. Colin and Pete connected after Pete had his own awakening on blockchain and distributed ledger technologies back in 2014, and they were both at BNP Paribas for a while before they met in 2015.   Pete remembers how Colin’s depar

David Chreng from LeadBlock Partners joins the show to talk about how his time as an energy equity analyst influenced his view of the world, investing in blockchain and distributed ledger technologies for sustainability-themed ventures, the development of blockchain and DLT in general over the past 5 years....and using quantum mechanics to model DNA! This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.  If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here. This week we’re catching up with David Chreng, a partner with LeadBlock Partners, a London-based venture capital fund investing in early stage B2B blockchain startups. David and Pete Townsend connected at the Securities Token Realised Summit conference last month in London.  After hearing about Connecting Food, David’s first investment with LeadBlock, Pete was interested in learning more, especially given that LeadBlock venture outside of financial

This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here. This week we’re catching up with Luke Sully, the founder and CEO of Custody Digital Group (CDG), who are providing financial institutions with a single point of governance for securing and managing digital assets. Luke and Pete Townsend connected in early 2019, and they've stayed in touch since then with their mutual interests in all things digital assets and Luke's plans for setting up an Irish operation for CDG. Some of the highlights include: Channeling Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz from a16z - if you try to solve a big problem in a really big market, then you have a great opportunity to build a really scalable business, and that's what we saw with CDG.  As a founder, you have a vision for how you think you can do things and how you think you can solve problems and help create a better

This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here. This week we're doing a special replay of Pete Townsend's chat with Elaine Deehan from Season 1 of MoneyNeverSleeps. When we recorded this in 2018, Elaine was in the midst of bringing her labour of love Pocketwire to market as a startup founder, CEO and Head of Product. For a number of reasons driven by the phenomenon of "when one door closes, another one opens" and that we'll explore in an upcoming episode, Elaine is now the Ireland Country Manager for Starling Bank, a challenger bank whose entry into the Irish market that we are certainly eagerly awaiting.  With some recent feedback from listeners and a tide of positive change we're feeling in Irish fintech since Brexit happened, we wanted to go back to our roots this week, and what better way to do that than by replaying the compelling story of El

This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here. Erin Grover is the founder of Altai Digital Capital, which connects investors to hedge funds and traders specializing in cryptocurrency and digital assets. The company provides guidance, transparency and reassurance typically found in traditional investment firms, affording clients easy access to the investment potential of cryptocurrency. She is a strong advocate for the potential of blockchain technology to bring efficiency and transparency to the delivery of funds for international aid. Prior to her work in blockchain, she worked for the United Nations, USAID and other international NGOs as a content producer and media strategist. Her previous work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Mashable, The Times of India and many other internationa

Rudi Falat from the Voice of Fintech podcast joins Pete Townsend to riff on crossing over from the corporate world into the startup ecosystem, learning by doing, startup and corporate collaboration....and flipping the table with the final question on every MoneyNeverSleeps episode! This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here. The Voice of Fintech is a podcast mapping out the Swiss and European fintech ecosystem, with the aim of inspiring entrepreneurs to launch their new ventures and connecting them with incubators, accelerators, investors and incumbents. Rudi runs the podcast from Zurich, Switzerland and has expanded beyond the spoken word with focused events connecting people across the fintech ecosystem in his neck of the woods. On this episode, Rudi and Pete cover the below topics: -Rudi's inspiration and his affinity for people who understand a

Ivailo Jordanov from 7Percent Ventures joins Pete Townsend to share his story of powering the search engine pioneers of the dotcom era, his incurable optimism, becoming an early-stage tech investor....and being yet another person on the show admitting to not being able to swim! This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here. Ivailo Jordanov is a venture partner at 7Percent Ventures, a London-based VC investing in early stage tech companies that represent billion dollar opportunities. After an invitation from Graham Rodford from Archax who was on episode 37 of MoneyNeverSleeps, Pete Townsend met Ivailo at an investor dinner in London in October 2019 following CordaCon, the two-day conference put on by the enterprise DLT software firm R3. Through telling his story, Ivailo gets into the following themes: How it's much harder to distribute a product than i

This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.Matthew LeMerle is the Managing Partner of Fifth Era and Keiretsu Capital, who combined are the most active early stage venture investors backing almost 200 companies a year. Matthew is also the co-founder and managing partner of Blockchain Coinvestors, who are investing in the leading blockchain venture partnerships.In December 2019, Matthew featured on a Blockchain Coinvestors webinar where he walked through his ten predictions on blockchain for 2020. The ongoing conflation of 'enterprise blockchain' and 'blockchain-inspired' developments for corporates and institutions, with the merits of the original bitcoin blockchain and the 'crypto-first' mentality, means that a lot of discussions on blockchain can get as excitable as a dog in a butcher shop. What we've found is that the substitution of the

This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.Matthew LeMerle is the Managing Partner of Fifth Era and Keiretsu Capital, who combined are the most active early stage venture investors backing almost 200 companies a year. Matthew is also the co-founder and managing partner of Blockchain Coinvestors, who are investing in the leading blockchain venture partnerships.In December 2019, Matthew featured on a Blockchain Coinvestors webinar where he walked through his ten predictions on blockchain for 2020. The ongoing conflation of 'enterprise blockchain' and 'blockchain-inspired' developments for corporates and institutions, with the merits of the original bitcoin blockchain and the 'crypto-first' mentality, means that a lot of discussions on blockchain can get as excitable as a dog in a butcher shop. On this episode, we talk about both crypto-first

Dermot Walsh from Each & Other talks with Pete Townsend about delivering delightful user experiences, leading through people, putting yourself into the shoes of the customer...and his moonlighting gig as a community radio DJ! This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here. Dermot Walsh is the CEO of Each & Other, a Dublin-based strategic design firm dedicated to helping organisations grow online revenue by designing and building compelling digital customer experiences. With a totally diverse client base, Each & Other specialize in delivering game-changing, high-value business outcomes in a digital world. In this episode, Dermot and Pete talk about: Dermot's career trajectory including his love of sales, embracing change and how an unexpected experience with painting furniture opened his eyes to the business world.  Dermot's inspiration

Lambert Despaux talks to Pete Townsend about empowering entrepreneurs building in the distributed ledger technology space, the startup ecosystem in Israel, societal impacts of DLT....and his love of electronic music! This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment.  If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here. Lambert is the founding partner at Schema Capital, who are investing at the pre-seed and seed stage in entrepreneurs building in the distributed ledger technology ('DLT') space.  If you would like an intro to Lambert, please click here. Schema Capital focus on finding early-stage projects active in digital securities infrastructure, blockchain interoperability, decentralized finance and cybersecurity applied to blockchain. In this episode, we dig into Lambert's inspiration for moving into venture capital, the impact of being part of the startup ecosystem in Israel during his coming

"Pete Townsend goes solo" would have been a better headline in the '70's, but our Pete takes the mic in this episode to unpack the realities and economics of funding pre-seed and seed-stage startups through the lens of Finn Murphy from Frontline Ventures. This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. 'Round about the same time that Pete Townsend was finishing a VC project in August 2019, there was something missing for him in the context of placing bets on pre-seed and seed-stage startups. Could you just "sprinkle the infield" and dole out half of a $10mn seed fund to the first 25-30 founders that fit your investment thesis? With the known odds of 1-2 venture capital home runs out of every 25-30 investments, something didn't fit with a venture capital strategy that expected anything less than a home run from every founder before investing in them. Conveniently, a blog post on pre-seed investing by Finn Murphy from Frontline Ventur

In this special segment, we feature four founders sharing how they dealt with one thing they didn't expect to face as a founder - Martin Brown from Unitek, Lizzy Hayashida from Change Donations, Andrew Mullaney from Premind and Paul Smyth from Top Tier Recruitment. This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. As a startup founder, there are tons of challenges thrown at you every day of the week, and no one can anticipate before taking the leap the level of adversity that you're going to face as an entrepreneur. Depending on how many other founders you talked to before launching your venture, you may have heard some of the war stories, or perhaps not. We asked four founders to share with us an unexpected challenge they faced and how they dealt with it: Martin Brown, founder and CEO of Unitek (also featured on episode 55) Lizzy Hayashida, co-founder and CEO of Change Donations (also featured on episode 56) Andrew Mullaney, co-

This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here. Sorcha Mulligan is an expert in driving business development strategies from a blank canvas, raising the profiles of the brands she works with in new markets by building reciprocal relationships through her global network. Sorcha has broad and deep experience in working with small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in a financial and broader business capacity, and has an excellent understanding of their everyday challenges.Through her awakening to the potential for blockchain and distributed ledger technologies to enable significant changes to how SMEs do business, especially in the context of supply chains, she came across a problem. While many big corporates have people working on digitalizing elements of their business (or their entire business!) and how they engage with customers and suppliers, SMEs wi

This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.In this episode, Pete Townsend and Paul Smyth (once again filling in for Eoin Fitzgerald) unpack the November 6th post from Chris Skinner's daily blog where he steps through a talk from Anne Boden, the CEO and Founder of Starling Bank on November 5th at the New Statesman's Fintech Summit in London. During her talk, in addition to talking about the path to profitability for Starling Bank, Anne Boden presented her view on the 'seven myths of fintech'. Anne's seven myths are a blend of social, demographic, competitive and technology themes, and Chris Skinner took a different view on most of them in his blog post the following day. In a world where society's collective grasp on myths and truisms tighten and loosen daily, the different perspectives always make for a better conversation, and we addressed

Eddie Dillon from CreditLogic joins us on the show to talk digital transformation, making the move from corporate to entrepreneur...and his love of skiing! This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here. Eddie Dillon is the founder and CEO of CreditLogic who are powering simplified and scalable mortgage origination. CreditLogic is a mortgage origination platform for both customer-facing advisors and lenders which reinvents application processing. The platform streamlines application data capture, validation, review and integration for compliant scalable origination. If you would like an intro to Eddie, please click here. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts | Podchaser Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Spotify| Google| Overcast Check out our MoneyNeverSleeps website Subscribe to our newsletter on Substack Follow us on Twitter Podcast| Twitter Pete | Twitter E

Recorded live in Dublin at the BFC EU 2019 conference on DLT and emerging tech, Zeeshan Feroz from Coinbase and Pete Townsend took the stage for a fireside chat on Coinbase's institutional presence, custody as a building block of the crypto economy and crypto regulation. This episode is kindly sponsored by Ireland's fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here. Our MoneyNeverSleeps co-host Pete Townsend from Norio Ventures and Zeeshan Feroz, CEO of Coinbase in Europe, sat down on October 9th, 2019 at BFC EU 2019 for a half-hour chat on: How Coinbase are connecting institutions with the crypto economy. Trends in institutional crypto and custody as a building block of the crypto economy. Financial institutions' ongoing acknowledgement that the backbone of the financial system is changing. The infrastructure to support the widespread institutional adoption of digital assets. Engaging with regulator

Kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.Ciaran Walshe joined Fund Recs in early 2016 after 8 years in the investment funds industry, taking his leap into fintech with a business that many refer to as a startup. But after 6 years of operations, Fund Recs are now scaling into an international player in the investment funds industry with clients such as Deloitte, MUFG Investor Services, Link Asset Services and Apex Group. If you would like an intro to Ciaran Walshe, please get in touch here.Along with our MoneyNeverSleeps co-host Pete Townsend from Norio Ventures, FundRecs organize and deliver the Dublin-based annual Adminovate conference for the investment funds industry. Tickets for the 2020 edition are on sale now here!Fund Recs was founded in 2013 when the company founders were approached by a large bank to develop a new reconciliation platform for it

Kindly sponsored by Ireland’s fintech and financial services recruitment specialists, Top Tier Recruitment. If you would like an intro to the team at Top Tier Recruitment, please click here.In 2016, Paul co-founded Top Tier Recruitment and over the last three years, he and his co-founder Laura Smyth successfully built the business through excellent client relationships in Ireland. In 2019, he undertook a coaching skills course spread out over five months and 135 training hours. Paul's idea was to add coaching to Top Tier's overall service offering, and having experienced the transformative power of coaching first-hand and completing the course, he launched Possible Coaching this year. If you would like an intro to Paul Smyth, please click here. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/moneyneversleeps/support