Around The Coin

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Sohaib Zahid, Chief Executive Officer at Railz. Sohaib is a serial entrepreneur with a decade of successful experience in building teams, products, and companies. He focuses on Sales and Marketing. Prior to founding Railz, Sohaib founded Vanhawks, where he led product, sales, and operations. Vanhawks was acquired in 2016. Originally from Pakistan, Sohaib dropped out of medical school to pursue entrepreneurship and is a strong believer in open access to data. Outside of work, Sohaib enjoys time with his family, and nerds out on air-cooled engines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Tron Black, President of Ravencoin Foundation. Tron is a freedom advocate, crypto developer, entrepreneur, and founder of two startups that were sold to publicly traded companies.  Tron holds a BS in Computer Science and a Master's of Business Administration.  Since early 2013, Tron has been working in the cryptocurrency space as a miner, developer, investor, and trader. He was one of the first five employees of t0 (tZero), and helped issue the first publicly traded SEC acknowledged parallel crypto-equity for Overstock.com, and issued the world's first crypto bond offering. He worked for ANX International, a crypto-fintech company located in Hong Kong. Tron was a Principal Developer for Medici Ventures which invested in a portfolio of blockchain companies including TZero, Bankorus, Bitt, Voatz, Minds, Chainstone Labs, Ripio, SettleMint, Vinsent, and Spera.  Tron has given away crypto-currencies to hundreds of people in order to increase awareness of how value now moves as easily as e-mail. He's written articles about Bitcoin, Monero, Dash, Financial Regulations, Security Tokens (STOs) and Ravencoin, and has been featured on many crypto-currency podcasts. He's the inventor of a number of patents in the crypto space and regularly gives talks on crypto-currency topics worldwide.  Along with serving as the President of the Ravencoin Foundation, Tron is also an advisor to TZero, TUSC, Realio.fund, EquaStart, and supporter of RVN which is both a top cryptocurrency and a leading crypto-asset platform.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Richard Groome, executive chairman, and CEO at ALT 5 Sigma. He leads the firm’s global business and support to clients worldwide including financial institutions, institutional investors, and corporate clients. After 36 successful years in the securities industry, starting two leading securities firms from scratch, completing over 600 financings raising over $4 billion, and sitting on 30+ boards, today Mr. Groome is applying his expertise to grow companies seeking to make a difference in the world. He believes this is achieved through innovation, perseverance, and good governance scaled to a global level.He is a market disrupter across a variety of industries including technology, agriculture, food and beverage, medical and biotech, new mineral discoveries, and electric vehicle metals.His past experience includes: Started two securities trading and underwriting houses from scratch each achieving best in class status within 3 years, one traded publicly on the TSX.Managed and participated in over 600 financings representing some $4 billion of small-cap deals. Several of Mr. Groome’s companies have succeeded in becoming billion and some multi-billion-dollar companies.Past Director of the CDNX, predecessor of the TSX-Venture Exchange.Mr. Groome is known as one of the preeminent financiers in Canada for small and medium-sized emerging growth companies over the last 36 years. His previous firms were sold and taken over by Desjardins and Dundee respectively.Served on over 30 board of directors of junior and mid-sized emerging growth companies; very well versed in corporate governance and early start-up situations.Mr. Groome was born and raised in Montreal. He graduated from McGill University in 1981 with a Bachelor’s in Economics. He keeps very busy with numerous activities including watersports and barefoot skiing. He enjoys reading about innovations, world leaders and economics. He supports charitable causes for underprivileged children, wildlife and natural habitats. He and his wife enjoy traveling and learning about local cultures and traditions. Mr. Groome has been married for 30 years and has two adult children.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Michael Weisz, Co-founder and President of Yieldstreet, the only multi asset alternative investment platform for retail investors. As a seasoned Alternative Investments expert, Michael has created access to investments spanning art, real estate, private business credit, litigation and marine financing, structured notes, and more previously only available to ultra high net worth individuals and institutions. At Yieldstreet, Michael has led the company’s investment strategy and product development as well as the strategic vision of Yieldstreet from inception to 325,000 members on the platform, with more than $2.2B invested and $1B returned to investors in principal and interest. He has held a variety of positions across the specialty finance spectrum including founding Soli Capital and American Medical Concierge. Previously, Michael was Vice President at a New York-based credit opportunities hedge fund with $1.2 billion under management. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In our latest episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Weiwu Zhang, CTO of Smart Token Labs. Zhang has over 9 years of experience in blockchain technology, alt currency design and trading algorithms. He has served as blockchain architect for CBA (largest Australian bank), held the R3 global architect office, and also architected 3 altcoins and 7 ICO projects.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Toby Russell, Co-CEO of Shift, the platform to make buying and selling cars simple and accessible to everyone. Previously, he was Managing Vice President of Digital at Capital One, where he led the bank’s consumer technology transformation, including building the mobile capabilities that drive the majority of Capital One’s new customers and interactions. In 2007 Toby co-founded Taxi Magic, the first on-demand mobile transportation booking technology. He also led a $12 billion renewable energy and efficiency investment program for the US Department of Energy and has been a Project Leader at the Boston Consulting Group. He has a Doctorate from Oxford University.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Brad Levy, CEO of Symphony, the leading financial markets’ infrastructure and technology platform. A driven and dedicated leader with decades of experience in the financial services industry, Brad has played an integral role in the growth of Symphony, and particularly in establishing Symphony’s platform as critical market infrastructure in financial services, in an unprecedented time. Under his leadership, as well as that of former CEO David Gurlé, Symphony saw record growth as the company swiftly supported the world’s leading financial institutions in their transition to remote work without interrupting their operations.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Ben Jorgensen, CEO, and Co-Founder of Constellation Network, the first scalable decentralized base layer zero infrastructure built for speed, security, and economical and technical scalability. Constellation Network is a framework that allows everyone to build and conduct a business on the blockchain. Their focus is to be the first decentralized ecosystem that enables developers to build web 3.0 applications with added security to data transportation and security. Existing blockchain technology does not support the speed, scalability, and economic incentive needed to build applications with robust business logic. Constellation is its own ecosystem, comprising Hypergraph-a feeless network with a reputation-based consensus mechanism, the peer-to-peer Stargazer Wallet, and a decentralized finance platform called Lattice Exchange. Constellation's L_0 state channel token standard is an evolution of smart contracts that defines the rules of any business while tapping into Constellation's Hypergraph, powered by rewards. $DAG is the native cryptocurrency that runs on the Constellation Network. Ben is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and originates from Fort Wayne, IN. His focus is to develop sustainable and scalable businesses while optimizing human creative innovation. With an academic background in Anthropology, Economics, and Political Science he weaves a humanistic cultural perspective with economic viability throughout his visions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Andrew Jamison, the CEO, and Co-Founder of Extend, a fintech that provides digital payment infrastructure for financial institutions to enable modern card experiences. Prior to Extend, Andrew was the head of B2B Corporate Payments Products at American Express with a mandate to drive digital payment innovation and adoption. Over the course of six years at Amex Andrew doubled B2B payment volumes by launching and scaling new capabilities and platforms.  Prior to American Express, Andrew spent eight years managing global SAP deployments for large multinational corporations.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Brett Goldstein, Co-Founder of Launch House, a community for founders and creators. Prior to Launch House, Brett was a Product Manager at Google, where he worked cross-functionally with engineering, design, marketing, machine vision research, and art as well as served as an M&A strategy analyst for the CEO of Google. He then took the role of Senior Product Manager at Clearbit where he was responsible for Platform (APIs & Infrastructure) and Integrations teams. Here, he took two products from concept to launch that drove 90% retention for >60 enterprise customers accounting for over $1.5M ARR and streamlined product development processes such as improving bug triage efficiency 5x, introduced product critiques, and built UX research process. Brett then co-created Accenture Ventures where he launched and operationalized an early-stage venture capital and corporate innovation team.In his free time, he writes a newsletter called Social Studies. It has two parts: monthly roundups of news and discussions from Tech Twitter and analysis using principles from the (social) sciences. Brett has also been writing, producing, and mixing music as Monte Del Monte for over a decade. Along the way, Brett has taught music to kids in refugee camps and was a Computational Cognitive Science researcher at UC Berkeley. He believes that graph theory, game theory, and group psychology can be used to understand just about everything (in the world and in business).He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Cognitive Science & Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices