Episodes

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 creators. Whether you’re a fou…

Ben Kuhn is the CTO at Wave, a mobile payment company whose mission is to make Africa the first cashless continent by building ways for unbanked people to send and save money. Our discussion today covers a wide variety of topics — everything from how going cashless can help lift people out of poverty in sub-saharan Africa, to how social enterprises differ from tech companies. to why soccer balls don’t make good lamps. We also spend time diving deep on why startups should only spend their “innovation points” on things that directly impact the core business problem they’re trying to solve and use “boring” solutions for other things. Ben’s mental model for this is fascinating — the way he sees it, departures from the status quo are almost always more costly than people realize, and so it’s only worth doing when it’s mission critical.

Alex Kantrowitz is a reporter who contributes to CNBC, hosts the "Big Technology" Podcast and writes the "Big Technology" newsletter, which includes reports & analysis of big tech firms like Amazon, Google, Microsoft Apple, and more. Alex is an independent reporter with a background working at media orgs like BuzzFeed. He's optimistic about the impact of tech on the world. As such - he occupies a unique vantage point as a member of both tech AND media (two groups that don't always get along). Our conversation explores this dynamic by diving into how the relationship between tech and media evolved over time and resurfacing some of the more overlooked reasons why media coverage of tech has soured. We also explore the state of tech media today in a world when many companies are attempting to tell their own stories, and why it's harder to do this than most companies realize. We also discuss the business of content creation. Alex is a big advocate of building quality relationships with …

Our discussion today centers on the “market for solutions”, a mental model that guest Charles Cushing explored in a 2020 essay he wrote where he wondered if there was a way to improve the market for solutions in order to make all downstream problems easier to solve. In Charles' view, On Deck’s mission is to help improve the market for solutions by bringing together capital, talent, and customers all into one place to make company formation happen. We get into the evolution and history of On Deck’s Founder fellowship through its different phases and iterations, and how On Deck became the place to go for founders to develop conviction, find co-founders, and validate their idea. We also get a look into some future offerings including “belief checks” for talented people who are pre-conviction that will help would-be founders get off the sidelines and into the arena starting companies.

Anand Chandrasekaran is a full-time angel investor & advisor with extensive executive experience at some of the biggest names in tech, including Five9, Facebook, and Yahoo. He has also started several of his own companies. Today’s episode is about the startup ecosystem in India, where Anand has invested in dozens of up-and-comers. We discuss first the phase-by-phase evolution of India’s startup ecosystem, followed by how users today have a different Internet starting point than those from 5 and 10 years ago, as well as what the Indian startup ecosystem can teach the world. We also touch on how web3 levels the playing field. You can read Anand’s thoughts in more detail @ anandc on Twitter.

This week's guests are Ian Cinnamon and Lucas Bagno. Ian and Lucas are the co-hosts of Village Global’s new Solarpunk podcast, which focuses on space, technology, and defense. The theme of the conversation today is Solarpunk. It was interesting that, although they say they’re inspired by the aesthetic of Solarpunk, Ian and Lucas emphasize that they have their own interpretation of what Solarpunk means that isn’t tied to the online Solarpunk community. Instead, for them, it’s about technology as a force for progress and human thriving over the long term. Beyond the definition of Solarpunk, we discuss a wide range of topics including how there is more capital and talent flowing into space tech today than before, why time is short for defense innovation and we need to act now to address a changing geopolitical situation, why the CCP represents one of the biggest threats that America has ever faced, and why Lucas considers Anduril to be the most inspiring company name of all time. …

This week's guest is Eli Dourado, an economist who says that all he wants is for GDP per capita to reach $200k in 2050. Marshall's conversation with Eli today centers around how to get economic growth back on track after the Great Stagnation, which was a slowdown of total factor productivity growth from 2% annually in the post WW2 period to .3% by 2005. We discuss the causes of economic stagnation and the way to get to faster growth, including genuine hard tech advances like the MRNA vaccines or faster air travel. We also talk about why institutional and regulatory changes — what Eli calls “social technologies” — are just as necessary as pure technological innovation. It’s a far-ranging discussion that covers everything from the details of what led to the mothballing of the Concorde project, to how it might be possible one day to travel to the other side of the earth on your lunch break. We also discuss why the “promiscuous distribution of veto powers” have slowed our ability to…

Today's guest is "Default Friend," an internet personality who writes about internet culture and digital communities. Our discussion starts by using the recent Taylor Lorenz controversy regarding her story on Libs of TikTok to launch into a broader discussion of how the internet and tech are reported on, and why there’s a one-dimensional focus on fear mongering or trend analysis in media coverage of internet culture and digital communities. We then broaden our conversation to the different eras of the internet and its evolution through time, including the cultural effects of digital communities migrating from one platform to the next, the reversal of the sex-positive movement online, and why big tech vs. crypto vs. luddites may soon replace the culture wars. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the past and the future of the internet which highlights the increasing convergence between the internet and “real life”.

Fred Stutzman is founder and CEO of Freedom - a company developing a toolset for the future of focused work in a distraction-first world. Our discussion is about what the future of work will look like in a world where the things that enable remote collaboration, like Slack and email, are the very things which make it hardest to focus. We talk about fighting the negative externalities of social media with tools like Freedom, which blocks distracting websites and apps across your devices. We talk about how social media creates time displacement and how good work hygiene, creating guardrails, and pre-committing to take advantage of your best intentions can be used to create a better working environment. The conversation also gets into why high quality work is more mentally taxing in an era of what Fred calls “distraction machines," how knowledge work resembles an endurance sport, and how the next generation entering the labor force will relate to the technologies they use to work. …

Rachel Sanders is co-founder and CEO at Rootine, a company focused on optimizing health and performance through precision nutrition. Rootine is focused on what they call precision health and nutrition, which involves looking at hundreds of data points to identify your nutritional deficiencies and sending you tailored supplements to optimize your health, along with a way to track if it's working. Our discussion focuses on why there’s no one-size-fits all solution to health and wellness, what cellular nutrition means and how it supports overall health, and what the future of health will look like now that consumers have access to more data than ever before. This conversation was especially energizing because it offers us a window into the way that tech-enabled health and nutrition is likely to progress over the next ten years: a future that is more data-driven, precise for every individual, and incorporating tight feedback loops to determine what really works and what doesn’t.

Julien Smith is co-founder and CEO at Practice. He's also a bestselling author and executive coach. Today’s discussion focuses on Julien’s journey from starting as an online author and creator and then turning into a multi-time startup founder, instead of vice versa. We discuss what it takes to make the leap from talking about something to actually doing it, how publishing has changed and why it remains the same, the evolution and trajectory of the executive coaching industry from Tony Robbins’ era until today, and how to avoid the pressures of shifting from small business clients to enterprise clients over time. The episode also touches on some interesting ground around the growth of executive coaching and the self-improvement industry, and how founders can now learn from each other directly in peer-to-peer networks more now than ever before.

Lukky Ahmed is the founder & CEO of Climate X. Today’s discussion is about understanding climate change from the standpoint of how it affects us and the world around us for generations to come, using data and machine learning. Our conversation covered topics like how climate change can be used to inform risk models for everyone from property holders to businesses to governments, and the variables involved in predicting physical events linked to climate change from flooding to coastal erosion to rainfall changes. Climate X’s mission is to  combat or minimize the human suffering caused by climate change by phenomena such as climate migration, which exceeded war as a cause of migration last year for the first time. It’s a great discussion about climate that comes from a new and fresh angle that we don’t often hear.

Paul Millerd is author of the Pathless Path, which is about his personal journey of leaving the traditional realm of work and finding something holistic and sustainable. In this conversation we discuss what Paul calls “the default path” — a cultural script we grow up with that tells us what to do in order to be a successful adult, like getting a “forever job”, versus what Paul calls the “pathless path”, a new, more flexible way of defining our relationship with work. The discussion centers around topics like how the pandemic has fractured the default path for many people, the so-called “great resignation” and how real the “anti-work” movement really is, why people are re-examining the centrality of work in their lives, why Paul recommends that most people should take one month away from work to reflect on their goals and aspirations, and the importance of shifting from “getting ahead” to “coming alive”. Paul’s perspective on this topic is unique, nuanced, and well-informed in a…

Today you’ll hear On Deck CEO Erik Torenberg interview Emil Michael - Uber’s Chief Business Officer during their hypergrowth period from 2013 to 2017. While he was there, Uber grew from 250 employees to 15,000 and raised $15 billion. He shares the lessons he learned and systems he built during this blitzscaling with Erik. For more tactical episodes like this, you can listen to Execs wherever you get your podcasts.

Muhammad Lila is Founder and CEO of Goodable. He is also previously a Warzone Correspondent, leading global news coverage at CNN and ABC. He has been nominated for 2 Emmy awards. Today’s discussion is around Muhammad’s vision for fixing the news by changing it from one of the biggest drivers of anxiety and depression into a cure. This discussion includes topics like how and why more than 90% of news coverage is negative, what this does to our mental health, and how the current news environment would be the equivalent to our physical health of living in a town where McDonald’s was the only restaurant option. Goodable’s mission is to change this by offering the first “Whole Foods” alternative to the current fast-food-dominated news ecosystem. It’s a news platform designed to make you calmer and healthier by avoiding bias, politics, and negativity. Muhammad has a fascinating, ambitious underlying vision for this that we dig into in our conversation. We also discuss some powerful…

Rob Paddock is co-founder & CEO of Ahead Wind. Ahead Wind was one of the first companies admitted into ODX and is currently technology that reduces human involvement in 3D printing. Today’s conversation is about the future of 3D printing automation. Rob outlines how the general public is usually under the assumption that 3D printing is a push-button process. He underscores how it isn’t actually that simple in most commercial use cases - human involvement is often needed to calibrate printer settings. We discuss how 3D printers need their own kind of operating system in the same ways that personal computers do. Rob brings great examples to the table for us to digest. Our conversation spans 3D applications for wind turbines, rocket ships, and much more. For more information about what Rob & his team are building, visit aheadwind.com or follow Rob on Twitter @paddock_rob

Jonny Price is VP of Fundraising at WeFunder. WeFunder describes themselves as Robinhood for pre-IPO startups. In May 2016, the Obama administration made it legal for everyday people to invest as little as $100 in startups or other businesses. On today’s show, Jonny and Marshall talk about how to level the investment playing field. They chat about why it’s a problem that 77% of venture capital has gone to just three states and brainstorm how to build wealth for some of a company's earliest cheerleaders. They also discuss what it means to raise a community round, which is a big part of what On Deck has done for ODX. As part of this movement to “fix capitalism,” WeFunder has also released an impact report on its website. Jonny talks about it during the episode but you can read the full thing for yourself at https://wefunder.com/pbc. You can also find Jonny on Twitter @JonnyCPrice

Trevor Martin is founder & CEO of Mammoth Biosciences. Mammoth is building the platform for CRISPR applications of the future. They currently have technologies built for diagnostics, genome editing, and protein discovery. CRISPR is a novel system that enables geneticists and medical researchers to edit parts of the genome by removing, adding or altering sections of the DNA sequence. Trevor joins the show to discuss real applications of this technology. He highlights the speed with which CRISPR has rivaled decades old technologies to diagnose COVID, despite being a much more nascent technology. He shares his excitement for other near-future applications to combat genetic disease. We also chat about the line between fantasy and reality - what kinds of CRISPR applications are too far towards science fiction, and which are grounded in reality. To learn more about Mammoth, visit https://mammoth.bio/

Dan Miller is Founder & CEO of Spora Health. Spora Health is a radically inclusive, virtual-first telemedicine provider focused on health equity and providing culturally competent care. Today’s conversation is about disparities in health care. Dan shares a little bit about his family’s experience with the healthcare system and outlines how technology can help alleviate some of the challenges that others in similar boats may experience. We also discuss social determinants of health, undiagnosed depression in black men, and health concern narratives shared by different cultures. To learn more about Spora, you can visit their website at http://sporahealth.com

Ish Baid is Founder & CEO of Virtually. He's also the host of the popular podcast "Reshaping Education. Virtually is building what it envisions as the Shopify for online schools. Ish and I spend the episode enthusiastically discussing the ongoing disruption of the higher education system. On Deck and Virtually have both built their businesses on the back of cohort-based courses. Ish outlines why they’re here to stay, highlighting how engaging it is for students when everyone else is on the same journey as you. To learn more about how Virtually can run the back office for your own online education business, you can head to tryvirtually.com or follow Ish on Twitter @IshBaid

Nikolaus Redl is co founder and CEO of Colorful.app . Nikolaus and the Colorful team are changing how photos are created. Their virtual, drag & drop 3D photo studio allows creators to build stunning photos in minutes. We talk about why this is useful, the future of 3D modeling, and the European tech scene, among many other topics within the future of photography.

Dr. Clea Kolster is a partner and Head of Science at Lowercarbon capital. Lowercarbon backs companies that make money slashing CO2 emissions and removing carbon out of the atmosphere. Clea leads the firm’s technical research, development, diligence, and scientific strategy efforts. She’s also a founding fellow of On Deck’s Climate Tech programs. Last July, On Deck’s climate director Candice Ammori gave us a sense of how climate tech has moved from a 1.0 era to its 2.0 moment on the heels of evolving policy, innovation, and cultural ambition. Today, Dr. Kolster elaborates on the science informing that quickening pace. She underscores the significance of cheaper renewables, lower battery storage costs, and other trends informing our ability to combat climate change. For more on how On Deck is enabling talented builders to address climate problems, visit beondeck.com/climate

This week, we figured we’d give you a peek under the hood of On Deck’s programs. Every week, dozens of amazing events take place in our programs across sectors (like climate tech, health tech, and longevity) as well as across professional verticals like business development engineering, and many more. Most of these events happen behind closed doors, but this week we’re releasing one of our favorite sessions from the past seven days to provide a taste of what one kind of On Deck event looks like. Listeners will remember that we syndicated an episode of Execs with Ben Braverman - who led revenue at Flexport during their hypergrowth years. Now, we’re joined in a fireside chat by Flexport’s CEO - Ryan Petersen. Ryan joined our ODX fellowship to share lessons learned fixing the global supply chain crisis. Ryan is a fascinating character. When California ports experienced a slowdown in port processing this October, he visited ports in long beach to better understand the bottlenecks at pla…