Rehan is the Founder and CEO of Chptr, a startup fixing the way the world remembers people who have passed away. Prior to creating Chptr, he had a long career in music, founding the “Life is Beautiful” festival, and led marketing teams at high-profile Las Vegas hotels. Rehan and his team at Chptr are vying for the memorialization space, which up until now has been owned by legacy media obit pages and Facebook timelines. The broader death tech industry is estimated to reach over $128B this year and steadily growing, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rehan’s soulful vision for Chptr is a model for community building around death, based on user behaviors trained by precursor social networks built to chronicle lives.In this conversation, we discuss how Chptr can reimagine how we memorialize loved ones, the maturation of the social media space, and how On Deck helped him on his founder’s journey.This episode is for anyone interested in the future of social networks, identifying new problem areas in less-talked-about spaces like deathtech, or anyone, regardless of industry and age, who is interested in being a founder. Download and discover Chptr hereFollow Rehan’s founder journey on Twitter

Julian Weisser is the co-founder of On Deck, partner at our Founders and Angels programs, and investor at Other Ventures. He is a prolific startup investor and has backed over 100 companies ranging from asteroid mining to dog longevity and decentralized museums. He’s often one of the first angels that founders seek out for guidance on how to construct their fundraise.Our discussion today covers how Julian started investing with just $1k in multiple companies, while building his investment philosophy and portfolio track record. We debate about the new evolution of how founders start companies, what is momentum capital in startups, and why Julian feels like now is the best time to start a company. We also get into details from Julian’s experience working with founders and how to align on the fundamentals when looking for a co-founder. Hosted by Marshall Kosloff.Show links:On DeckFounder Fellowship: https://www.beondeck.com/Angel Fellowships: https://www.beondeck.com/angelsJulian Weisser’s links:Twitter: https://twitter.com/julianweisserPersonal Website: weisser.ioCompanies MentionedTraba - Reliable on-demand staffing. Co-founders met via On Deck. Podcast episode with CEO with Mike ShebatPrimer - Education for ambitious and curious kids. Co-founders met via On Deck. Podcast episode with CEO with Ryan Delk.People MentionedSander Daniels - Co-founder of Thumbtack and LP in Other VenturesRyan Delk - Founder of Primer

Emmanuel Straschnov is the Co-CEO and Founder of Bubble, an online tool to build web applications without code.Our discussion is about the state of No Code: what it is, where it came from, and where it's going. The pandemic saw a huge growth of interest in No Code in mid-to-late 2020 as people everywhere began looking for cheap and fast ways they could start building from their own homes.We also talk about how and why Emmanuel chose to bootstrap when he was starting Bubble, and why a lot of Bubble users choose to bootstrap their own companies too: with the ability to build a web app cheaply and quickly at your fingertips, there isn’t as much of a need for fundraising or having a technical co-founder as there was before. With No Code tools like Bubble, will technical founders, or even coding itself, eventually become obsolete?This episode is for anyone interested in starting their own venture, or anyone, regardless of industry, who is looking for No Code tools to build their first product.Follow On Deck on Social Media for the latest on the future of work and education:https://twitter.com/beondeck/https://linkedin.com/company/beondeck/https://facebook.com/ondeckhq/https://instagram.com/beondeck/

JD Ross (@justindross) and Justin Blau (@3LAU), co-founders of Royal, join Erik Torenberg and co-host Ian Cinnamon for this episode of Venture Stories web3 series. Takeaways: - Royal stems from their vision to invest in talent early on. - Streaming increased by 60-70x in about 5 years from 2015 on. - The barrier to entry for artists is much lower — they no longer need a studio, they just need a laptop. - Royal is trying to enable the fan-artist relationship to be more of a partnership. - When fans own a part of an artist’s song, they are tied for life. - Justin has sold a ton of tickets in his career but he has zero idea of who those fans are and doesn’t have the ability to contact them. The data layer built into Royal helps artists connect with their fans. - In the future, music labels will become much more competitive for artists than they have been in the past.

Eugenia Kuyda is the founder and CEO of Replika, an AI companion company.Our conversation today centers around the different use-cases of AI, from task-oriented chatbots to emotionally-supportive AI companionship. We delve into the current state of conversational tech, including how chatbots can become good listeners, and why Replika used a mixture of scripted retrievals and generative AI models for their product. We also talk about the differences between an AI companion, virtual assistant, and chatbots.We also discussed the past and future of AI and chatbots. Eugenia explains why task-oriented chatbots like a restaurant booking bot she had worked on previously didn’t catch on in the past, and the future she envisions where you can have an AI co-pilot of your life, like Jarvis from Iron Man, and how this can interact with her conception of the metaverse which she calls the “embodied internet”.This is a great episode for anyone who’s interested in possible futures of how AI can become a part of our lives, not only in helping us do things but in supporting our emotional and social lives.Hosted by Marshall Kosloff and produced by Jackson Steger

Today, we’re syndicating an episode from the Village Global podcast hosted by On Deck co-CEO Erik Torenberg. The guest on the show is Mike Shebat  - CEO & Co-founder of Traba and a member of Forbes 30 Under 30. Mike participated in the 8th cohort of our On Deck Founder fellowship. He and the team at traba recently closed a $20M to match contractors with events and warehouse work. He met one of his co-founders, Akshay, through On Deck. Prior to starting Traba, Mike was a founding member of the Uber Eats team. For more stories like Mike’s, check out beondeck.com/stories

A year ago, we launched The Deep End with Balaji Srinivasan as one of our first three guests. In the episode, he discussed the impending arrival of The Network State. Flash forward to this Monday on the fourth of July when Balaji released his book “The Network State: How to Start a New Country.”In a single sentence, a network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.In this episode, Saagar Enjeti (another past guest of the show) and Marshall revisit some of the themes from last year’s Deep End episode and try to better understand Balaji’s frameworks for understanding the futures of tech and nation states. Let’s dive in to this syndicated episode from The Realignment, Marshall's other podcast.

Mark Switaj is co-founder & CEO of Roundtrip Health. Roundtrip is driving better health by providing a full suite of non emergent transportation options to patients in different care settings across the country. After exploring the India and health tech market in India last week, we wanted to revisit  healthcare in the US.  Today’s conversation is about social determinants of health. Social determinants of health (SDOH) are the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.Roundtrip specifically is focusing on transportation - 4 million people miss appointments every year because of a transportation barrier. But Mark is able to speak to how organizations more broadly must lean on data insights in order to improve health outcomes.We also talk about how the pandemic has affected the domestic health tech and telehealth landscapes. Mark’s comments echo some of the observations that Nikhil Krishnan highlighted in our episode on overcoming the six stages of health tech grief that we released back in December.Hosted by Marshall Kosloff and produced by Jackson Steger

Amrit Singh is a co-founder of Loop Health, the fastest-growing health insurance startup in India. Our discussion today is about what it’s like to be a founder in India, and what the startup ecosystem there looks like relative to the US. India is an interesting paradox because although it’s a massive country in terms of population which contains almost 1 in 5 living people, that doesn’t always equate to huge market sizes in terms of available spend. We also talk about the state of healthcare in India in a world where medical inflation is leading to the cost of care doubling every five years even though quality isn’t getting 2X better, and how the fee-for-service model perpetuates perverse incentives in healthcare all around the world. We discussed Loop’s mission to help change this with a philosophy around value-based healthcare that focuses on preventing sickness instead of reacting to it. This episode is for anyone interested in company-building in emerging markets like India, or for those just looking for valuable insights on being a founder and what it takes to succeed. Let’s dive in.Hosted by Marshall Kosloff and produced by Jackson Steger

Joel Alexander is the founder and CEO of Crowdpad, a tokenized community-building platform for creators whose goal is to help creators monetize on day one. Our conversation today centers around web3 and the future of the creator economy. We discuss how the path to monetization on traditional creator economy platforms like YouTube is so long and onerous that most people give up, and how allowing creators to launch their own token to distribute out to their fans and building token-gated communities might help resolve this. We also discuss the disparity of earnings between the average web3 creator and the average creator on a platform like Meta, the best way of empowering independent artists with recognition and remuneration, how funding creators via social tokens vs. cash donations aligns incentives and makes the “hundred true fans” thesis viable, and how TikTok is one of the most discovery-friendly mechanisms in the world right now for all kinds of creatorsWhether you’re a founder or investor interested in the next iteration of the creator economy, or you’re just an aspiring individual creator looking to understand the landscape and the best tools available to reach and monetize an audience in 2022, this is the episode for you.Hosted by Marshall Kosloff and produced by Jackson Steger