Around The Coin

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

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Oded Zehavi, the Founder & CEO of Mesh Payments, and board and advisory board member of several Israeli FinTech companies. Previously, he served as Payoneer's Chief Revenue Officer. Prior to Payoneer, Oded served as the business development director for PayPal, where among other responsibilities he led the inception of the PayPal services in the Middle East and Africa. He also held leadership roles at several technology, banking and software companies, focusing on sales and customer relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Steve Berneman, the CEO and Co-founder of Blueprint. He is a former practicing attorney and a serial entrepreneur. Prior to starting Blueprint, Steve was the Co-founder and CEO of Overdog, a gaming company acquired in 2016. Steve formed the thesis for Blueprint while an Entrepreneur in Residence at Vanderbilt.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Paul Garibian, President of Nota. Fintech expert, entrepreneur, and executive Paul has spent nearly 20 years helping financial institutions drive product development and grow revenue and market share. Nota is an innovative legal industry fintech solution powered by M&T Bank that adds value through increased productivity and decreases compliance risk. Built primarily for small law firms and solo attorneys, Nota helps simplify trust account management, making it seamless and efficient for attorneys to adhere to accounting requirements.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Brenda Loya, the CEO and one of the founders of Tellor. She's an economist and a self-taught solidity developer. Previously, she was an economist and supervisor at the U.S. Department of Labor, developing and leading teams to develop statistical software for principal economic indicators. She joined the space initially by helping to develop a derivatives protocol, Daxia, which had an oracle problem. We couldn’t find one that was decentralized so we built one and it became Tellor!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Stephen Stonberg, CEO of Bittrex Global, one of the most reliable and secure cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. Stephen has spent his entire 25-year career working in financial markets in London and New York. He left the traditional world of finance to get involved in the crypto and blockchain industry.Prior to Bittrex Global, Stephen joined the Investment Management Division of Goldman, Sachs & Co. Stephen advised executives, entrepreneurs, and foundations on all items of economic impact to their balance sheet. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, he advised some of the world’s most sophisticated investors as a Partner and US CEO at Brevan Howard, Head of the New York office at Winton Capital, and Managing Director at Credit Suisse Asset Management.Prior to this, Stephen worked as a Managing Director in Fixed Income Sales and Trading at JPMorgan, and in Mergers and Acquisitions. Stephen holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Columbia University. He has served on several public companies and non-profit boards.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with the architect of the Supra BFT Consensus Algorithm. Blockchain Designer & Developer, Joshua Tobkin is a Meta-Game Theorist behind projects such as Unitychain.io's venture projects and more recently SupraOracles.comA lateral thinker, creative, and curiously dyslexic, Josh has been building SaaS companies for the last 10 years. Josh is a well-known distributed ledger technology architect.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices