Around The Coin

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Des Martin, Chief Marketing Officer at Outlier Ventures where he sets marketing goals and objectives for the business, driving change and growth across the organization. Des joined Outlier Ventures from Brave, where he served as VP of Growth and Marketing for almost three years. Responsible for growing their daily active users from 800k to 11M, Des was key in positioning Brave as a breakthrough Web3 project. Prior to this, Des led marketing teams at two high-growth tech companies, Perkbox and Qualtrics, through periods of rapid growth. Perkbox gained recognition from both Linkedin’s Top UK Start-Ups and the National Business Awards under his direction. Des continues to actively invest and mentor Web3 companies.

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Michael Safai, Managing Partner of Dexterity Capital, a quantitative trading firm focused on solving the hardest problems in finance. By combining brilliant people, world-class technology, and rich proprietary datasets, Dexterity has built an algorithmic execution engine that trades billions of dollars every day.Dexterity Capital specializes in market-neutral strategies. That means they thrive regardless of whether the bulls or bears are winning. With offices in Seattle, San Francisco, and London they run their strategies 24/7 around the globe.

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Thomas Mattimore & James Glasscock, Head of Platform (Protocol) and Head of Ecosystem at Reserve.Thomas Mattimore is Head of Platform (Protocol) at Reserve, a protocol and application that helps people fight inflation with stable currencies. The platform enables anyone to create asset-backed currencies that fight inflation, share revenue, are censorship-resistant, yield-bearing, and have proof of reserves on-chain, 24/7. Thomas has a decade of experience in product and engineering, including roles at Web2 companies focused on expanding access to better financial products.James Glasscock is the Head of the Ecosystem at Reserve. James is a 20-year veteran of tech investing, starting at KPMG and Zone Ventures. He also led digital strategy and operations for media companies Turner Broadcasting, Machinima, and Warner Bros. 

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Stephany Kirkpatrick the founder and CEO of Orum, the simplest API integration for instant payouts. A digital executive and seasoned entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience in companies across a variety of industries, from startups to Fortune 100 corporations, Stephany founded Orum in 2019 on the belief that consumers should have immediate access to their money. A CFP by training, Stephany has spent the last decade of her career building technology to optimize financial outcomes for Americans – first at LearnVest and Northwestern Mutual where she helped design its financial planning software and now at Orum where she is leading a team that is building the new financial infrastructure that allows money to move immediately and automatically across accounts, products, and financial institutions. To date, Orum has raised $82M from investors, such as Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Homebrew, SVB Capital, and American Express Ventures. Orum's customers include a range of leading fintechs across, lending, investing, crypto and insurance, including Public.com, Coinflow (FKA Phantasia), Kalshi, Nth Round, Dots, and Ponto. 

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Alex Harris, Founding Partner of Fiat Growth and General Partner at Fiat Ventures. Prior to Fiat, Alex led paid growth and partnerships at Chime, flexing his innovation skills and data-driven approach. His deep knowledge of the Fintech market provides superior marketing, business development, and growth strategies for Fiat’s clients.

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with MacLane Wilkison, Contributor to Threshold Network, the home of tBTC, the only decentralized and permissionless Bitcoin bridge to Ethereum. He is a co-founder of NuCypher, which combined with Keep Network in the first-ever decentralized network merger to form Threshold.

In this episode, Mike Townsend chats with Scott Dykstra, CTO and Co-Founder of Space and Time, and Purandar Das, CEO and Co-Founder of Sotero.Microsoft-backed Space and Time is the first decentralized data warehouse. Scott also serves as a Strategic Advisor to Sotero and was formerly the VP of Cloud Solutions at Teradata.Sotero is a Web2 data security platform that ensures your sensitive data is never left unprotected. Purandar previously served as CTO at Infogroup and CTO at Epsilon.

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Miles Parry & Cat Le-Huy, Co-founders of MPCH Labs, the team behind Fraction.Miles Parry has extensive experience building highly secure solutions to protect sensitive data and assets. Miles has worked as a trusted consultant for a variety of government organizations, such as the Ministry of Defense, the Financial Conduct Authority, and the Foreign Commonwealth Officer. Before MPCH, Miles founded and built Vo1t (now Genesis), a high-security service that safeguards valuable digital assets trusted by some of the world’s largest companies. At MPCH, Miles is focused on delivering military-grade security infrastructure and cryptographically approved business process management across economic sectors.As a software engineer by trade, Cat Le-Huy has experience working with some of the largest organizations in the world across numerous sectors, like defense, investment banking, MarTech, and FMCG, to help them achieve digital efficiency through various digital systems and strategies. As a veteran with over 20 years of experience and a uniquely creative approach to development, Cat brings together technology, product design, and business strategy. At MPCH, Cat is focused on designing military-grade security infrastructure and cryptographically approved business process management across economic sectors.

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Eric Shoykhet, Founder of Link Financial Technologies and Atom Finance, venture-backed software companies that collectively have raised $100mm. Previously, he was an investor at Governors Lane, an event-driven hedge fund. At Governors Lane, Eric worked on investments across a variety of sectors including industrials, financials, technology, and consumer staples. Prior to this, he worked in the Restructuring and Reorganization group at Blackstone. Eric graduated from the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business at the University of Pennsylvania with degrees from both the Wharton School and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Justin Rice is the Vice President of Ecosystem at the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), a non-profit organization that supports the development and growth of Stellar, an open-source network that connects the world's financial infrastructure. In this role, he represents developers building on the Stellar network and coordinates members of the Stellar ecosystem, with an ultimate focus on the growth, development, and ongoing health of that system. Prior to his current role, Justin worked in Stellar product development, where he helped build the StellarX exchange, which utilizes Stellar open-source technology. He holds a Bachelors of Arts degree in Comparative Literature from Harvard University.