In this interview, Jean and Joe speak to Mihkel Stamm - COO of EstateGuru, a real estate crowdfunding platform established in 2014, with more than €300m loans given so far. This makes it one of the oldest and most successful platforms in Europe. In this wide-ranging interview, we go into details about how the platform operates as well as general real estate investing trends that Mihkel has been observing over the past years. Links EstateGuru
Feb 17, 2021•1 hr 4 min
In today's episode, we interview Allan Martinson from Xolo. Xolo helps people open companies in Estonia and also invoice for their services from Estonia without needing to register a company there, thanks to an innovative solution whereby Xolo is the company invoicing clients. Over 40,000 solopreneurs globally have signed up with Xolo. They are launching either their fully-owned, Estonian-registered companies or using Xolo’s unique partnership-based virtual company model. Xolo manages a third of...
Feb 09, 2021•50 min
In today's episode, we interview Maxime Pallain, the co-founder and CEO of Raizers. Raizers is a real estate crowdfunding platform that currently offers several investment opportunities in France. Raizers' competitors when it started were private banks, family offices etc. Raizers' innovation was in digitizing the way to give loans to entrepreneurs. This platform offers loans to real estate developers, with a maximum 24 months and average of 21 months. There is currently a 0% default rate on Rai...
Feb 02, 2021•1 hr 6 min
In today's episode, we speak to Chandan Lodha from Cointracker.io, one of the leading crypto portfolio trackers and tax preparation tools. Cointracker offers two main products: Cryptocurrency portfolio assistance - see all crypto holdings in one place, both hot wallets on exchanges and cold wallets on hardware or paper wallets. The free tier allows unlimited wallets while the premium tier adds tax-loss harvesting strategies, DeFi and further detailed reports. Tax reporting - reconciled ledgers o...
Jan 26, 2021•50 min
In today's episode, we speak with Nikita Goncars, the CEO and co-founder of LendSecured. This is one of the newest lending platforms in Europe, however, it's worth noting that it's an offshoot of an existing lending business that has been operating successfully for several years. The team has considerable experience in Latvia and they want to expand to the rest of Europe, with Germany and Spain being one of the first big markets they are targeting. We spent some time discussing their upcoming fo...
Jan 19, 2021•59 min
In today's episode, we meet Tomas Medeckis from Nordstreet, where you can invest in business and real estate loans. We talk about why they are based in Lithuania and the pros/cons of that, as well as their great track record with loans so far. We also talk about investing in the Baltic region as well as Nordstreet's plans on expanding beyond the region. This platform has been returning 10-14% for its investors, although according to market fundamentals the expected returns in the next year shoul...
Dec 15, 2020•55 min
In this episode, Jean sits down with Rob Dix, who is well known for his several projects in the UK real estate space. Together with his wife Mish, he also ran the popular digital nomad blog Making It Anywhere. His journey shares quite a few similarities with Jean's, so it was interesting to discuss several of the topics that interest both of them, including parenting, property and other investments, as well as other life choices. *We apologize for the sound quality in Jean's part of the recordin...
Nov 24, 2020•1 hr 10 min
In today's episode, we have Anthony Cerullo from YouHodler joining us to explain how this platform enables crypto hodlers to earn interest on their holdings via the YouHodler savings account, or even obtain crypto-backed loans and even gain big from crypto movements using the Turbocharge and Multi Hodl products. You can check out Jean's review of YouHodler if you'd like more details on the platform, the article is a perfect accompaniment to this podcast episode. If you like the content we're put...
Nov 10, 2020•1 hr 14 min
Today's episode features Martins Sulte, the CEO and co-founder of the biggest European P2P lending platform Mintos, as our guest. Lending and alternative lending is not a new industry at all, but many European investors only became aware to this asset class in recent years, also because before there was no real way they could get involved since it required insider knowledge, contacts or big sums of capital. Mintos itself start out with the founders and 4 developers, and it has not grown to over ...
Nov 03, 2020•1 hr 6 min
In this episode, Joseph and Jean interview Chris Roper from MyConstant, a platform that offers crypto-backed lending and borrowing facilities. As an investor, one may use several products available on the MyConstant site to obtain interest on their fiat currencies or stable currencies. On the other hand, you can also act as a borrower, by depositing crypto as collateral and obtaining a loan from MyConstant. The platform focuses a lot on educating investors about crypto-based lending and borrowin...
Oct 27, 2020•1 hr 15 min
In today's episode, Jean sits down with Chris Osborne from KintuLabs. Chris is one of the first digital nomads and has been living this lifestyle for 15 years already. He is also a serial entrepreneur with multiple online businesses built and sold. His latest project involves building 15 newsletters in different niches and then selling them. We talk about work and travel, homeschooling, building newsletter businesses, and Chris' favorite locations around the world for spending a few months a yea...
Oct 20, 2020•1 hr 6 min
In this episode, we interview Hassan Daher from Qardus. Qardus is a sharia-compliant lender to small and medium-sized enterprises to help with their cashflow needs. They provide short-term halal business loans, or halal business investments. As an investor, you provide the capital to lend to the business, and get paid as the business pays that money back. The kinds of businesses Qardus go for are well-established, strong-revenue companies, typically in stable markets such as the medical or pharm...
Oct 14, 2020•1 hr 17 min
In this episode, Joe and Jean meet Frank Steffen, the CEO and co-founder of Lendary.net. We discuss the Lendary platform, which consists of a system to optimize the yield on lending to traders on the Bitfinex platform. We go into the nitty-gritty of how this type of high yield lending works, including the risks involved. I liken their system to that of a crypto trading bot, but applied to lending instead. You can choose from various strategies that have different risk/reward numbers. Results ove...
Aug 25, 2020•1 hr 12 min
In this episode, I speak to Johannes Larsson, a Swedish entrepreneur who I met for the first time in Malta around a decade ago. He began his entrepreneurial journey at quite a young age and moved from his native Sweden to Malta to be around other entrepreneurs and have a better lifestyle. Eventually, he moved to Cyprus, another Southern European country that is similar to Malta but also offers some interesting tax advantages, which we talk about it in the show. We talk about the divided between ...
Aug 11, 2020•1 hr
In today's interview, we take a look at another real estate investment platform from the Baltics: Bulkestate. Joe and Jean chat with founder Igor Puntuss about the reasons for starting this platform and how investments work. We delve into the case for investing in Latvia as well as Bulkestate's unique group buying feature, where investors can buy apartments instead of just invest in crowdfunding campaigns. Links Jean's Bulkestate review Bulkestate website
Aug 04, 2020•1 hr 35 min
Real estate is one of the most popular types of investment worldwide, and is deemed a secure long-term investment. In today's episode, we learn how Estonian platform Crowdestate is making this asset class accessible to the smaller investor, and the challenges they have faced over the years. We speak with CEO And founder Loit Linnupold, who I feel is one of the few honest characters in this "wild west" space of online investment platforms. He doesn't hold back on sharing his experience on how thi...
Jul 14, 2020•1 hr 15 min
In today's interview, we talk to Jan Nieuwenhuijs from Voima. Jan has been a very vocal researcher in the gold space for many years. We take different angles on the gold topic and discuss the main reasons for holding hold and the different ways you can do it. One of my biggest takeaways from this episode is that gold is not an investment per-se, but a protection against the loss in value of conventional assets like fiat currencies. To put a simple example, if you have saved €25,000 now and that'...
Jul 08, 2020•59 min
In today's episode, Jean and Joe meet Cormac Leech from AxiaFunder to discuss how investors can make money from litigation cases. This is a really new asset class with the biggest advantage being that it has very little correlation with other asset classes. We discuss the legality and ethical background behind litigation funding (it is still illegal in some European nations) and the future for this asset class, as well as how investing works in practice. This includes what returns we can expect,...
Jun 30, 2020•1 hr 3 min
In this episode, Jean and Joe speak to Jose Maria Pascual from Brickstarter, a vacation rental property platform based in Estonia. By registering as an investor on this platform, you are able to invest in vacation rental properties (currently only in Spain) and benefit when they are rented out. This was an interesting and eye-opening chat with Jose, who was very open and honest about how the platform operates, the challenges faced by this asset class during these months, and their plans for the ...
Jun 23, 2020•1 hr 7 min
Today's guests are Oleg Giberstein and Gabriele Musella, the co-founders of Coinrule.io, a platform that empowers crypto traders to compete with professional algorithmic traders and hedge funds with no coding skills required. I find the entire field of crypto assets incredibly fascinating as it really is one deep rabbit hole. One of the aspects that has captured the imagination of millions worldwide is crypto trading. We've all seen stories of young people who found incredible riches through tra...
Jun 02, 2020•45 min
In today's episode I sit down with fellow Maltese entrepreneur Philip Camilleri, who recently made his exit from Smartasset.com, a company he co-founded in 2010 and through which he achieved tremendous success in the United States over the past 10 years. He is now hard at work on his new project Founderslist.com. We discuss the differences in the fintech spaces of Europe and the United States, his journey with Smartasset.com, why he decided to create Founderslist and what are the problems that f...
May 26, 2020•24 min
Kris Gunnars is the founder and ex-CEO of the world's most trafficked nutrition site Authority Nutrition. He went on to sell that website to Healthline.com, which then became the world's biggest nutrition site. Kris now dedicates his time to investing the handsome returns from the acquisition and runs Stockanalysis.com where he shares the results of his research and learning. In this conversation, we talk about the personality traits and skillset needed to build a successful authority site. We a...
May 05, 2020•52 min
In today’s episode, I sit down for a chat with Chris Grech, one of my classmates from high school who has gone on to attain success as a CPA working with international clients and based out of Malta. We touch on various topics, including: Malta’s advantageous corporate tax system Whether Malta really is a “blockchain island” Investing in COVID-19 times and beyond Cryptocurrencies Real estate investing Diversification I enjoyed catching up with Chris and having some of my ideas challenged; this i...
Apr 22, 2020•1 hr 17 min
On this week's show, Jean is joined by Gabriella Galea, his sister, and Yoran Brondsema, a European index investor and entrepreneur. Gabriella is new to the investing world and is trying to figure it all out, while Yoran has been researching the best way to invest and allocate assets in a sensible portfolio for several years. He developed a tool for Europeans to backtest different portfolios and thus help decided which portfolio they want to adopt. In this episode, we focus on index investing, w...
Feb 04, 2020•50 min
In this week's episode we interview the CEO of Reinvest24, Mr Tanel Orro. This platform is one of my favorites as they are growing organically and doing things the right way. I like their updates on the properties they are working on as they record videos of the progress, and it seems that they are very responsible towards their investors, which is always good to see. We discuss many aspects of investing in real estate, including the hottest trends in real estate investment in Europe, why invest...
Nov 19, 2019•54 min
This week we have Gustas from Evo Estate with us. This platform is different from the majority of online real estate investment platforms in that it is a curated aggregator of deals from various platforms. It is a platform that is dedicated to serving the investors' needs, as Gustas emphasizes. In this episode, Jean is joined by his dad Joseph, an experienced finance expert and together they discuss Evo Estate and online real estate deals in general with Gustas. We thoroughly enjoyed our discuss...
Oct 25, 2019•51 min
In today's episode, Jean is joined by Sterling from P2P-Millionaire.com. Sterling is one of the biggest investors in peer-to-peer lending and has an active portfolio of over a million euros invested across several P2P platforms. We discuss how he built the initial capital that he now invests, thoughts about living in China, and how he goes about choosing P2P platforms. We touch upon setting up an auto invest strategy on these P2P lending platforms, and what would happen in an economic downturn. ...
Aug 06, 2019•1 hr 1 min
In today's episode, Jean is joined by Jørgen Wolf who is documenting his journey towards financial freedom on his blog. He promises to bare all: his income, his expenses and his investments. In our chat, we talk about the FIRE movement and differences between the European movement and the US movement, how he evaluates P2P platforms, living in Denmark, how to raise a financially intelligent kid, real estate investments and much more. Definitely an episode that will be useful for all those who wan...
Jul 24, 2019•1 hr 12 min
In this episode, Jean interviews Matthew Melbourne from Republic.co, a platform where investors from all around the world can invest in US startups. Deal flow has been hard to come by for small investors in the US or investors outside the US with no contacts or physical presence in hotbeds for startups like San Francisco. Republic's mission is to change all that and make investing easy and open to everyone, whichever net worth they have. This means that you don't need to be an accredited investo...
Jul 09, 2019•28 min
The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. In this episode Mark is joined by Stephan Venter from WooCrew to discuss WooCrew, a WooCommerce maintenance and technical support service. The conversation delves a bit deeper into the most common struggles WooCommerce users face, what kinds of users are opting for WooCommerce today, and what tests and tools are being used to keep WooCommerce stores up and running (and growing!). Links WooCommerce Website: WooCrew.net Twitter: @stephanvent WordCamp...
Jun 25, 2019•53 min
