

Around The Coin
Stephen Sargeant and Mike Townsend
Around The Coin is a podcast exploring finance, fintech, and the future of money. Hosted by industry experts, it features deep dives into payments, crypto, banking, and disruptive innovations shaping the global economy.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Nov 2, 2021 • 58min
Pat White, Co-Founder and CEO of Bitwave
In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Pat White, Co-founder and CEO of Bitwave, the world's first Enterprise Digital Assets Platform bringing cryptocurrencies, tokens, and other digital assets to the world's largest companies. Bitwave helps with accounting, taxes, AR / AP, secure DApps, and more.Pat was formerly a principal engineer and chief architect on Cisco Spark. Formerly, he was the CEO of Synata, a San Francisco startup that provides enterprise search software to cloud-enabled businesses. Pat has spent the last decade building software at companies such as Intuit, Microsoft, Ally Software, VistaConnect, S3/Diamond Multimedia, Fortify Software (now HP Security), and CyberArts.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oct 31, 2021 • 1h 3min
Ekaterina Romanovskaya, CEO and Founder of A.ID
In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Ekaterina Romanovskaya, CEO and Founder of A.ID, an Identity & Compliance platform with a focus on high-risk customers. She has previously co-founded Nimb, a ring with a personal security system embedded into it.Before diving into entrepreneurship Ekaterina had been doing marketing communications, then started in a retail bank as a PR manager, and a few years later ran Public and Investor Relations in a private equity fund. She assisted key IPOs, co-founded a successful satirical project on Twitter (persona @kermlinrussia) but never stopped exploring.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oct 21, 2021 • 55min
Kendall Cole, Head of Product at NEAR Protocol & Co-Founder of Proximity Labs
In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Kendall Cole, Head of Product at NEAR Protocol, a base-layer blockchain designed to provide the ideal environment for dapps by overcoming some of the limitations of competing systems—such as low throughput, low speeds, and poor cross-compatibility. Kendall is in the process of transitioning out of his current role with NEAR to co-found Proximity Labs, a private incubator and research firm focused on the ecosystem of the NEAR Protocol.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oct 20, 2021 • 1h 5min
Matthew Schultz, Chairman of CleanSpark Inc
In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Matthew Schultz, Chairman and Director of CleanSpark. He served as the Company’s Chief Executive Officer from 2014 through October 2019 and has been involved in many capacities with several publicly traded companies. He served as the President and CEO of Amerigo Energy, Inc., creating multiple syndicated offerings of developmental oil production programs, as well as overseeing the operations from permitting through production. Since 1999, he has assisted numerous development and early stage companies to secure financing and experience significant growth. As the President of Wexford Capital Ventures, Inc., he was instrumental in funding companies both domestically and abroad. While serving as the Chairman of Pali Financial Group, Inc., he assisted in the market development of dozens of public corporations. He was a founding member and the Vice President of the Utah Consumer Lending Association. A native of Lander, WY, he studied management and finance at Weber State University.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oct 8, 2021 • 44min
Dan Martell, CEO/ Founder of SaaS Academy
In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Dan Martell, CEO, and Founder of SaaS Academy. Dan is a serial entrepreneur having built several multi-million dollar technology companies starting at the age of 17. He's also an award-winning angel investor, having invested in companies like Intercom, Udemy, Hootsuite, Unbounce. Today he's an executive coach focused exclusively on B2B SaaS working with the founders from ClickFunnels.com, Proposify.com, Carrot.com, and many others to help scale their businesses. He lives in Kelowna, British Columbia with his wife, Renee, and two boys.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oct 6, 2021 • 58min
Micha Benoliel, CEO and Co-Founder at Nodle
In this episode, Mike Townsend speaks with Micha Benoliel, the CEO and Co-Founder of Nodle, a privacy-first, decentralized wireless network for connecting Internet of Things devices and sensors to the Internet, and Coalition Network, a non-profit foundation that provides open-source, secure exposure notification solutions for governments and enterprises to protect their citizens during pandemics. The Coalition App, the open-source Whisper Tracing Protocol, and the award-winning Nodle M1, a social distancing wearable device, were developed by Micha, the Nodle team, and a few independents. Previously, Micha enabled Skype to launch Skype In And Skype Out and built several ventures and products in the space of telecommunications, networking, and the Internet: Open Garden; FireChat App, which was (10M+ downloads) a peer-to-peer Bluetooth-based messaging technology used to stay connected and communicate in areas without internet access, including during the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella Revolution; Replika.ai and PiperChain (Sold to RightMesh).Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oct 5, 2021 • 54min
Matt Marcus, Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder of Modern Treasury
In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Matt Marcus, Chief Product Officer & C0-Founder of Modern Treasury. Matt was responsible for building the payment operations system at LendingHome, which has funded over $3 billion in mortgage loans. When they really started to scale, the number of payments we made exploded — from hundreds to tens of thousands per month — and that’s when they started uncovering the many issues that we now call “payment operations.” Realizing that thousands of companies build similar, often under-supported systems, Matt and two friends (Dimitri Dadiomov and Sam Aarons) launched their company, Modern Treasury.In operation since 2018, Modern Treasury’s payment solutions automate the full cycle of money movement—from payment initiation, through approvals, to reconciliation—and are accessible through web application or API. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oct 4, 2021 • 1h 7min
Marcus New, CEO of InvestX
In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Marcus New, CEO of InvestX. Marcus New has an accomplished career in the private and public financial markets that spans over three decades and is a pioneer in the pre-IPO asset class. He is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of InvestX Capital, a trading platform that delivers access and liquidity to the growth equity asset class and empowers the sell-side to invest and trade in institutional-quality private equity. InvestX's investment portfolio includes Palantir, Airbnb, Sofi, Lyft, Uber, Pinterest, Spotify, Dropbox, DocuSign, 23&me, and other global category leaders. Through Mr. New’s family office, he has led more than 200 private placements into early-stage private and public companies.Marcus is also the Founder and Chairman (and previously the CEO) of Stockhouse Publishing – one of North America’s leading online financial communities and a global hub for accredited investors. Prior to launching Stockhouse, Marcus built Stockgroup Media, an online information company whose client base consisted of the top Canadian brokerage firms, global institutional sales desks, and hedge funds.Marcus is passionate about entrepreneurship and has made it his life’s mission to be at the forefront of innovation and leadership in the financial markets. He has served as the past President of the Vancouver Chapter and Canadian Conference Chair for the Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) and was a finalist for Ernst & Young’s “Entrepreneur of the Year” Pacific Region. Marcus is an alumni of MIT’s “Birthing of Giants” program and holds a B.A. with a Business Major from Trinity Western University.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oct 3, 2021 • 1h 2min
Victor Zhang, CEO of AlphaWallet
In this episode, Mike Townsend sits down with Victor Zhang, the CEO of Alphawallet. Alphawallet is the maker of AlchemyNFT, an attestation and remixing protocol for NFTs. One of its first iterations is AutographNFT.io, a platform where anyone can request a verified autograph, authenticated via Twitter profile. The technology that makes this happen is TokenScript, which transforms NFTs by adding utility so that anyone can remix, combine or otherwise iterate NFTs. Investors include Mark Cuban, Crypto.com Capital, Framework Ventures and Mechanism.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sep 28, 2021 • 48min
Charlie Silver, CEO of Permission.io
In this episode, Mike Townsend interviews Charlie Silver, CEO of Permission.io. Charlie is a successful entrepreneur who has founded and exited 5 startups in technology, media, and finance. He co-founded Onramp Invest, Blockforce Capital, and Reality Shares which created 7 publicly traded ETFs including the first Blockchain equity ETF(BLCN). In the dot-com era, he built RealAge which was successfully sold to Hearst for over 9 figures.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices


