Episodes

Francesco Agosti is an ODF alum and  co-founder and CTO of Phantom - a wallet for the Solana blockchain. We’ve had many web3 guests on the show in the past year, but none have focused on the wallet. Wallet applications are one of the primary ways in which users interact with blockchains directly. They come in many different forms - some are custodial, meaning they are managed by third parties like Coinbase. Others are non-custodial, meaning nobody owns the public-private keys other than the wallet’s user. Because of how central these applications are to the user experience, we figured it was time to have a leader in this space come on the show. Phantom is the leading wallet on the Solana blockchain. The Solana ecosystem had its breakout moment last summer and builders like Francesco are continuing to develop infrastructure to create a consumer-friendly experience. In this episode, Francesco highlights how the current status quo requires users to not trust, but to verify. He talks …

Jimmy Soni is author of "The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley." The book hit shelves yesterday. In 2022, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered one of the technology industry’s most powerful alumni networks. Since leaving PayPal, these players have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names are as controversial as they are admired. Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. In this episode, we discuss the key differences between a mafia and a diaspora, the psychologically jarring effects of the dotcom bubble burst, and the competitive work ethic that fuels the alums of PayPal to this day. You can find out more about The Founders, and some of Jimmy’s other books by v…

Alexander Harmsen is Founder & CEO of Global Predictions. Global Predictions has created a wealth optimization platform to help make its users better investors. Alex leaned on his experience in both On Deck Founders and On Deck Investing to make the early product and has now grown a sophisticated Deep Tech company that has built a digital twin of the economy to make unbiased forecasts into the future using hyperconnected simulations, economic modeling, diverse data streams, and machine learning. We chat about how this platform can add an extra layer of analysis to investment making decisions, in addition to understanding what millennials really want and how to challenge assumptions you may be making with some subconscious bias. Alex also reflects on recent financial crises. Whether it’s the dot com bubble burst, the subprime mortgage crash, or the fallout from COVID, Alex emphasizes the learning opportunities that these moments provide. Hosted by Marshall Kosloff and produced …

Minn Kim is a Partner at ODX - the community back accelerator and fund that Erik & David previewed on the show back in October. ODX’s first cohort kicked off last month and we were excited to bring someone from the team on, though much of the episode focuses on Minn’s eclectic interests in the intersecting futures of work, fertility, community, and family. This is Minn’s second time on the show - she briefly joined our 2022 Tech Trends episode and underscored her excitement for spatial audio. We wanted to bring her back on because she’s an A+ player on On Deck’s team but also because we really appreciate her work towards a techno-optimistic future. Hosted by Marshall Kosloff Produced by Jackson Steger

Mark Yusko is the founder, chief investment officer, and managing director of Morgan Creek Capital Management - an investment management firm that advises pension funds, endowments, and wealthy individuals. Today’s episode is far-ranging. We chat about network effects, virtual stages, legacy events like the Olympics, Disney, decentralized creative franchises, and much, much more. The one thread that ties everything together: technology becomes mainstream only after first being a fad. A quick reminder that nothing you hear on today’s episode (or any episode of The Deep End, for that matter) can be considered investment advice.

Last fall, On Deck CEOs Erik Torenberg and David Booth joined the show to announce ODX - a new $100M community fund that allows On Deck to invest in the next generation of founders. Shortly after, we announced "ODX Flexport" - our first vertical accelerator that we created in partnership with Flexport. Flexport is on a mission to make global trade easy for everyone. They're a worldwide leader in supply chain logistics and we're thrilled to be working with them. Today's episode is with Ben Braverman who joined the Flexport team early on and grew their annual revenue to $1.3 billion. This recording is a syndicated episode of On Deck's new show "Execs" which is hosted by Erik. This is the last time we'll be syndicating an episode for awhile, so if you like what you hear, be sure to check out "Execs" wherever you get your podcasts.

Jen Phan is the co-founder and CEO of Passionfroot. She’s also an alum of On Deck No Code, which past Deep End guest KP runs. This conversation builds off of past creator economy tool discussions that we’ve had with other guests like Joe Albanese and Josh Kaplan. Passionfroot helps creators manage back-office operations so that creators can focus on their content. Our discussion today considers European creators - Passionfroot is based in Berlin and Jen is aware of how many creator tools to date have been US-centric. We also chat about helping creators think of themselves as startups, the disconnect between tech twitter and a creator’s day to day, and much, much more.

Joining Marshall this week in the Deep End is ODF alum Ben Rollert, CEO and Co-Founder of Composer. Composer allows its users to easily build a portfolio of hedge fund-like strategies. After we ended last year talking about DeFi and other blockchain innovations with cypher, it was refreshing to have a conversation about innovation in traditional finance, particularly in the retail investment space. The rise and sustained success of apps like Robinhood have enabled the manifestation of a legitimate counterculture among retail investors, including those like Ben, who work in finance. In this episode, we discuss that counterculture, the advantages of optionality created by something like Composer, nuance in regulation, and why Ben stays crypto aware even when he’s not a crypto evangelist. This was a good one. If you’d like to learn more about democratizing hedge fund strategy, check out composer.trade or follow Ben on Twitter @Benrollert

The Deep End returns in full on Monday. Until then: we're excited to announce Execs. Execs is a new On Deck show for founders who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks and tactics that leading technology companies today have used to scale. Guests are experienced, non-founding tech executives in key roles at top companies with firsthand experience solving hard and rare problems for a fast-growing business. On Execs, they share their hard-won ‘earned secrets’ to pass on their knowledge and help leaders at high-growth companies scale faster. Execs is hosted by Erik Torenberg and produced by On Deck - where top talent goes to start companies, find their next roles, or invest in their careers

Today is the last episode of the year, and so we’re celebrating by doing something a little different. Rather than have a single guest on, we invited 11 senior On Deck employees to answer a single question: What trend do you expect to change, emerge, or accelerate in 2022? To help them answer honestly, we were very clear that these aren’t necessarily predictions. Instead, my colleagues were instructed to think about patterns they’ve noticed this past year and project how they might shift or continue in 2022. Next year, we’ll revisit this analysis and ask our colleagues where they were right, where they were wrong, and why. Here are the guests: First up is Andreas Klinger- On Deck’s CTO and a seed investor on the side. Andreas is based in Berlin. You can find him on Twitter @andreasklinger Minn Kim is a partner at ODX based in San Francisco. ODX is On Deck’s community-backed fund and accelerator program. In her role, Minn’s job is to help the best founders in the world by removin…

Anna Gat is Founder and CEO of Interintellect. Interintellect describes itself as having reinventing the french salon for the 21st century. The salons of Early Modern Revolutionary France played an integral role in the cultural and intellectual development of France. The salons were seen by contemporary writers as a cultural hub, for the upper middle class and aristocracy, responsible for the dissemination of good manners and sociability. The interintellect team has built a curated marketplace for online salons to engage a now global audience. Trained hosts are able to monetize their talent and skills to curate conversation between well-meaning citizens in the public arena. Anna and I discuss how she has effectively built something that is half virtual city, and also half highly curated live conversation.Interintellect is a full-attention product - meaning participants are fully engaged, as opposed to something like a Twitch stream or a Twitter space, which would be more of a part…

This is probably our most in-the-weeds web3 episode yet. If you’re newer to crypto, we recommend you scroll back through your feed and listen to any of our episodes with Patrick Riera, Cooper Turley, and several others to give yourself a background to enjoy this one fully. As a bonus, you can also listen to our episode with Stephen Sikes from Public to build a background in traditional finance. Joining Marshall this week in the Deep End is Barrett. Marshall introduces Barrett by first name only because, like past guest Bored Elon Musk, he is operating relatively pseudonymously. Barrett is one of the core contributors behind the Cypher Protocol. Cypher is a futures protocol built on the Solana blockchain that wants to bring a new set of traditional finance opportunities to decentralized finance. They are doing this at a time when crypto users are quickly acclimating to concepts and tools traditionally used by Wall Street We discuss this collision of crypto and “tradfi,” what a synth…

A reminder that we’re still looking for a researcher in residence. If you want to be a personal trainer of the mind for On Deck’s CEOs, head over to beondeck.com/researcher Nikhil Krishnan is the author of the Out of Pocket newsletter. Out-of-Pocket is making the business of healthcare easy to understand. Nikhil writes in plain English and compliments industry analysis with memes and humor. We haven’t done a true digital health episode yet, and Nikhil was the perfect person to provide us with an overview of the space. The first question we asked was probably the hardest for Nikhil to answer. Marshall asked “What the is the problem?" in US healthcare right now, and Nikhil laughed. The American health system is uniquely complicated. Everyone thinks everyone else is the bad guy and an obtuse system means that nobody knows what the best direction to row in is. Nikhil points out how healthcare is more emotionally charged. The industry has a fundamentally different risk-reward dynamic …

Vance Roush is Founder of Overflow. Overflow is building the infrastructure to make generosity frictionless across every major asset class. Vance is on a mission to democratize philanthropy to the masses. Through his experience with churches and other non-profits, he has become keenly aware of how the top percentile has leveraged wealth management tricks and tips to donate stock (instead of cash) for decades. There are huge tax and savings benefits to doing this. Vance knows that that benefit can be extended to others via technology. This conversation is about  why and how philanthropy can be diversified across asset classes. At On Deck, we have an obsession with access because we believe that talent is broadly distributed but opportunity is not. In 2020, we created the On Deck Access Fund to enable more people from around the world to participate in our programs by removing financial barriers. In 2021, we’ve awarded scholarships to more than 1,000 Fellows, totaling more than $1,…

On Deck is hiring a Researcher in Residence to be a "personal trainer for the mind" for our two co-CEOs. To learn more, please visit beondeck.com/researcher Hot off last week’s episode about helping extend human life, this episode is about how to bring certain long-gone animals back to life. This week, Ben Lamm (Founder & CEO of Colossal Biosciences) joins The Deep End. Colossal describes itself as a genetic engineering company interested in extinct species restoration through radically new genomic technologies. They have landed a ton of press and attention for their ambitious goal to resurrect a woolly mammoth in the next few years by sequencing the genome of mammoths and editing genes of their closest living relatives - the Asian elephant. We spend a little time on the hard science of this and discuss how closely this resurrected proxy would be related to the original mammoth. But we also discuss the why, the when, and the bioethics. Ben is quick to say that there’s no silver…

This week, we are joined in the Deep End by James Sinka - cofounder of On Deck’s Deep Tech program. Some of our past Deep End guests (and many On Deck fellows) are working at the bleeding edge of technology. So far, we’ve talked to founders of biotech companies, space manufacturers, and more. Deep Tech is a category of innovation that exists at the intersection of many different fields under the technology umbrella. Modern advancements in computer infrastructure enable new sophisticated methods of tackling tough problems in the world of atoms. James Sinka joins the show to share how world-class scientists, card-carrying PHDs and engineers can commercialize their deep knowledge in hyper-specific fields to unlock vibrant futures for humanity. The sophistication of some of these tough technologies might sometimes be thought of as miraculous. If we can master protein folding, for example, we might be able to revolutionize drug design and otherwise heal cells with more ease than we mi…

Dr. Kristen Fortney is CEO & cofounder of BIOAGE - a company working on slowing aging and chronic disease. Figuring out how to live longer is an age-old problem. For as long as humans have studied medicine, we have tried to learn which remedies, habits, and environments best position us to have a chance of long life. Recent developments in the last few decades have, for the first time in human history, opened up the door for serious progress into understanding how humans and animals age. Last season, we had Celine on the show to talk about the work that her team is doing to improve the health of dogs. Lessons that might one day be applied to humans. Now, Kristen joins us to give us an overview of the aging field. She also shares how BIOAGE is using machine learning to develop a pipeline of therapeutic assets that increase healthspan & lifespan. Aging may be the core cause of many of the cancers and chronic diseases that wind up killing us. If we can leverage AI to help identify fla…

Abe Choi is a prolific angel investor and CEO of Simple Dealer. Abe has partnered with another high-profile angel investor named Olumide Soyombo to create Voltron Capital - a Pan African venture capital firm. This is our first pure VC episode in awhile and it was refreshing to hear about some of the dynamics on the venture side as opposed to the founder side. Africa is massive. One of our first questions that we ask Abe was about how his firm expects to develop a consistent thesis for the continent, given that Africa is so large, diverse, and spread out. He helps us learn how to think about the industries primed for growth and the regions that have developed innovative hubs throughout the region. We discuss different private & public sector partnership models that are emerging and why fin-tech startups are especially booming. Abe also contrasts investment from his firm with investment from Chinese firms or firms from Europe. This was a live episode recording and we had other angel i…

Sahil Lavingia is CEO of Gumroad and author of The Minimalist Entrepreneur. Many of our recent guests are recently-forged pioneers in the creator economy space, but Sahil has been building the passion economy since before it was cool. In 2011, Sahil founded Gumroad to help creators sell content directly to consumers. He was 19 at the time. But this episode isn't strictly about the passion economy, though we do chat about ideas like gatekeepers and shifting creator incentives. Much of today's discussion is Sahil reflecting on his ambitions to build a billion dollar company. Though Gumroad today is widely used by creators of all different sizes, its success story is not without growing pains. A decade ago Sahil raised venture-backed money to try to scale Gumroad at light speed. He details the lessons he learned trying to keep up with the aggressive timeline of venture capital firms. For better or for worse, he found that Gumroad only grew as quickly as the market determined they would…

Tina He is an investor with Pace Capital and is also on the founding team at Station - which bills itself as building the rails for web 3. Her work with Pace & Station has helped her identify the myriad mental shifts that builders need to make when migrating from web 2 to web 3. Today's conversation is about those mental shifts. For example, the legal infrastructure that exists today has not caught up to technology's most recent community-organizing abilities. As DAOs gain more credibility and sophistication, there will also need to be clearer distinctions made between companies and communities. Contracts will look different too. Will employees and 1099 contractors have the same kind of benefits as community contributors? Tina also breaks down human-centric ideologies of web 3. The most talented builders are asking how we might redistribute value to the long-tail, as opposed to the FAANG behemoths who own so much of the overall value in web 2. The language we use in web 3 moving fo…

Recently, many of our guests have been pioneers in the web3 space. Patrick Rivera provided a particularly helpful framework for understanding different eras of the web when he was on the show. From him, and other guests like Cooper Turley, we've learned that web3 is special because it enables users to have ownership of their different networks. Today's guests share the optimism of our past guests, but also note that the web3 is still in its infancy and is very much a work in progress. Those guests (Clarke & Jeff McKinnon) are building what they call "the reusable web." Like past guest Peer Richelsen, they believe that the internet works best when it's open-sourced and composable. To that end, yesterday they launched "The.com" to make it simple for website builders to create, 'remix,' and launch websites while getting paid and earning credit for their work. This is one of our favorite episodes we have ever done. We were struck by the balance that the McKinnon brothers are able to fin…

A few weeks ago, our show carried a special announcement that On Deck had raised a $100 million fund to fuel the next generation of entrepreneurs. Swapstack, cofounded by Jake Singer & Jake Schonberger, is the first company to be accepted into an ODX cohort and receive a check for $125k check from the fund. Swapstack is positioned to be the premier newsletter advertising marketplace, connecting brands with writers to help the latter be able to become full time creators. The inbox, as the Jakes claim, is an intimate space. Newsletter creators want to make sure that they choose advertisers that align with their content so as to not pester their audience and risk losing carefully cultivated trust. This was a well timed conversation. It follows our discussion with Josh Kaplan about Creator Operators and builds off of last month’s discussion with Nathan, who runs a newsletter bundling company. We get into the nitty gritty of the newsletter business specifically. Swapstack wants to build…

Primer cofounders Ryan Delk & Maksim Stepanenko join the Deep End after meeting through On Deck. They are currently building a community for curious and ambitious kids to find and explore their interests together. Education is deeply personal, and so our conversation begins on a personal note, with a discussion of Ryan's background growing up homeschooled & Maksim's experience with highly structured curriculum back home in Kyrgyzstan. Both of them look back on their own learning experience and lament an education system designed with the  assumption that all children should move at the same pace. Kids' talents & interests vary wildly. Ryan and Maksim came to the realization  with Primer that they could build educational treadmills for kids to run as fast or as slow as they would like towards their particular interests. Our conversation centers on how to augment the education system to create more Michaelangelos and Albert Einsteins. How might we enable self-guided homeschooling wi…

Today conversation with Stephen Sikes (COO of Public) is about how millions of Americans are entering the stock market for the first time with mindsets and behaviors unlike any generation that has come before. New investors, particularly those who have started recently via a mobile app, believe they're part of a movement that's making investing more inclusive and accessible. Public exists to help these people get started investing and become better, more thoughtful investors too. In that vein, we talked about how to build community through investing, how to build financial literacy especially in regard to meme stocks, and the benefits of fractionalization. Stephen labels the stock market as the greatest wealth creation engine ever known to humanity, but we also examine that statement through the lens of crypto markets over the last decade. Stephen's built much of his own success through good timing - he started investing when the market was at a low point during the financial crisis…