Last week in The Deep End we spoke with David Booth, CEO of On Deck. Today we're continuing our mini-series on the meta problem of how to help more people start more companies by re-publishing an episode of the Solarpunk podcadst with Erik Torenberg, co-founder and Chairman of On Deck. Erik joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon discuss why startups are the most effective organizations for solving our biggest problems, how governments and startups need to work together, not against each other, the r...
Mar 02, 2023•47 min•Ep. 99
On the latest episode of The Deep End podcast by On Deck, we interview our very own David Booth, CEO of On Deck. Recently, David has announced one of the biggest updates to On Deck since the program went virtual in 2020, with the return of in-person programming and community space in San Francisco. In this conversation, we discuss why On Deck is doubling down on IRL programming, why he believes venture-backed founders need to be deeply connected to the Bay Area, why now is the best time to start...
Feb 22, 2023•53 min•Ep. 98
Vivian Chen is the CEO & Founder of Heyo, a bite-sized pitch platform for professional success. Before starting Heyo,Vivian was an operator who built products across categories from high-growth startups to global enterprises. Vivian is on a mission to build the future of work. Heyo enables users to build profiles online short-form content and video, offering a new way to tell your professional story. In this conversation, we discuss Vivian’s founder journey, how she maintained her vision in the ...
Dec 15, 2022•24 min•Ep. 97
Ani Pai is an investment partner at Dragonfly, where he focuses on highly technical Web3 projects in emerging markets. Ani believes that progress happens on the frontier. Whether it be outer space, the mind/body, and the oceans. He’s focused on using crypto to explore these frontiers and eventually merging crypto networks with analog industries in order to shepherd the next billions users into web3. We discuss the state of the crypto industry in the wake of FTX’s implosion, why he believes the n...
Nov 18, 2022•37 min•Ep. 96
Lauren Self is the founder of Roots Homes, a platform that helps put the dream of homeownership within reach by allowing prospective buyers to effectively pay rent while building equity in their home with fractional ownership. In this conversation, we discuss her founder journey and life experiences that motivate her to build in this space, why the dream of owning a home feels increasingly out of reach, why she believes her model is superior to perma-renting, and how the concept of fractional ow...
Nov 10, 2022•25 min•Ep. 95
Madison Campbell is Co-Founder and CEO of Leda Health, which provides aftercare for sexual assault survivors. Leda Health approaches its space through a survivor-focused lens, developing self-administered DNA collection and testing, while also connecting survivors with professionals and resources. In this conversation, we discuss her founder journey since leaving school to pursue a startup, fundraising in a sensitive product category, and how the nimble approaches required to found and build an ...
Nov 03, 2022•34 min•Ep. 94
Joseph Connor is the CEO & founder of Odyssey, a platform that helps families access state microgrants for K-12 education. Prior to starting Odyssey, Joseph was a former teacher, school founder, and attorney. Joseph and his team at Odyssey are on a mission to empower everyday parents by enabling access to public education dollars. Odyssey’s technology provides states with a turnkey platform to manage microgrant programs. A growing number of policymakers view microgrant programs as a tool to brid...
Oct 27, 2022•39 min•Ep. 93
Andrew Rea is an angel investor and operator, who recently started and organized New York Tech Week. He leads go-to-market at Capital (formerly Party Round) and has invested in over 20 startups, including Motion and Cococart. Before he was at Capital, Andrew was vital in building the community at the On Deck Angels fellowship . Andrew also has founder experience, having co-founded an EV startup, raised $1M, and sold to PE within 2 years. In this conversation, we discuss how New York Tech Week ca...
Oct 20, 2022•32 min•Ep. 92
Erik Torenberg (@eriktorenberg), co-founder and Executive Chairman of On Deck join Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode of Solarpunk. Village Global’s Solarpunk is a podcast series about technology, space, and defense. Takeaways: Startups are the most effective organizations for solving our biggest problems. Startups disproportionately contribute to economic growth. Governments and startups need to work together, not against each other. China has the GDP per capita of Mexico but they hav...
Oct 13, 2022•47 min•Ep. 91
Lawson Baker is the Founder of RARA, a social curation protocol for NFTs that revolutionizes how creators benefit from sharing their art, and how curators interact with and gain value from interacting with artists’ work. Our discussion centers around how web3 will forever change the dynamic between creators and curators. “Likes” and “heart” buttons are remnants of web2 — RARA creates tools to move away from centralized curation to decentralized curation, where fans can be rewarded for recognizin...
Oct 06, 2022•51 min•Ep. 90
Rehan is the Founder and CEO of Chptr, a startup fixing the way the world remembers people who have passed away. Prior to creating Chptr, he had a long career in music, founding the “Life is Beautiful” festival, and led marketing teams at high-profile Las Vegas hotels. Rehan and his team at Chptr are vying for the memorialization space, which up until now has been owned by legacy media obit pages and Facebook timelines. The broader death tech industry is estimated to reach over $128B this year a...
Sep 29, 2022•40 min•Ep. 89
Julian Weisser is the co-founder of On Deck, partner at our Founders and Angels programs, and investor at Other Ventures. He is a prolific startup investor and has backed over 100 companies ranging from asteroid mining to dog longevity and decentralized museums. He’s often one of the first angels that founders seek out for guidance on how to construct their fundraise. Our discussion today covers how Julian started investing with just $1k in multiple companies, while building his investment philo...
Sep 15, 2022•47 min•Ep. 88
Emmanuel Straschnov is the Co-CEO and Founder of Bubble, an online tool to build web applications without code. Our discussion is about the state of No Code: what it is, where it came from, and where it's going. The pandemic saw a huge growth of interest in No Code in mid-to-late 2020 as people everywhere began looking for cheap and fast ways they could start building from their own homes. We also talk about how and why Emmanuel chose to bootstrap when he was starting Bubble, and why a lot of Bu...
Sep 08, 2022•39 min•Ep. 87
JD Ross (@justindross) and Justin Blau (@3LAU), co-founders of Royal, join Erik Torenberg and co-host Ian Cinnamon for this episode of Venture Stories web3 series. Takeaways: - Royal stems from their vision to invest in talent early on. - Streaming increased by 60-70x in about 5 years from 2015 on. - The barrier to entry for artists is much lower — they no longer need a studio, they just need a laptop. - Royal is trying to enable the fan-artist relationship to be more of a partnership. - When fa...
Jul 29, 2022•48 min•Ep. 86
Eugenia Kuyda is the founder and CEO of Replika, an AI companion company. Our conversation today centers around the different use-cases of AI, from task-oriented chatbots to emotionally-supportive AI companionship. We delve into the current state of conversational tech, including how chatbots can become good listeners, and why Replika used a mixture of scripted retrievals and generative AI models for their product. We also talk about the differences between an AI companion, virtual assistant, an...
Jul 21, 2022•45 min•Ep. 85
Today, we’re syndicating an episode from the Village Global podcast hosted by On Deck co-CEO Erik Torenberg . The guest on the show is Mike Shebat - CEO & Co-founder of Traba and a member of Forbes 30 Under 30. Mike participated in the 8th cohort of our On Deck Founder fellowship. He and the team at traba recently closed a $20M to match contractors with events and warehouse work. He met one of his co-founders, Akshay, through On Deck. Prior to starting Traba, Mike was a founding member of the Ub...
Jul 14, 2022•32 min•Ep. 84
A year ago, we launched The Deep End with Balaji Srinivasan as one of our first three guests. In the episode, he discussed the impending arrival of The Network State. Flash forward to this Monday on the fourth of July when Balaji released his book “The Network State: How to Start a New Country.” In a single sentence, a network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition fro...
Jul 07, 2022•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 83
Mark Switaj is co-founder & CEO of Roundtrip Health. Roundtrip is driving better health by providing a full suite of non emergent transportation options to patients in different care settings across the country. After exploring the India and health tech market in India last week, we wanted to revisit healthcare in the US. Today’s conversation is about social determinants of health. Social determinants of health (SDOH) are the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, wor...
Jul 01, 2022•44 min•Ep. 82
Amrit Singh is a co-founder of Loop Health, the fastest-growing health insurance startup in India. Our discussion today is about what it’s like to be a founder in India, and what the startup ecosystem there looks like relative to the US. India is an interesting paradox because although it’s a massive country in terms of population which contains almost 1 in 5 living people, that doesn’t always equate to huge market sizes in terms of available spend. We also talk about the state of healthcare in ...
Jun 23, 2022•41 min•Ep. 81
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 communitie...
Jun 16, 2022•46 min•Ep. 80
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 “innova...
Jun 09, 2022•37 min•Ep. 79
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). Ou...
Jun 02, 2022•50 min•Ep. 76
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...
May 26, 2022•36 min•Ep. 78
Anand Chandrasekaran is a partner at General Catalyst 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 year...
May 19, 2022•38 min•Ep. 77
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 ...
May 05, 2022•50 min•Ep. 75
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...
May 02, 2022•45 min•Ep. 74
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 ...
Apr 28, 2022•51 min•Ep. 73
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 ...
Apr 25, 2022•47 min•Ep. 72
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 cell...
Apr 18, 2022•35 min•Ep. 71
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’ ...
Apr 14, 2022•56 min•Ep. 70
