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 dis...
Nov 17, 2021•58 min•Ep. 37
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 s...
Nov 15, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 36
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 gues...
Nov 10, 2021•54 min•Ep. 35
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 c...
Nov 08, 2021•51 min•Ep. 34
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 l...
Nov 03, 2021•56 min•Ep. 33
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, w...
Nov 01, 2021•46 min•Ep. 32
Nathan Baschez joins the Deep End to discuss the passion economy, the realities of building a media business, and gets real with Marshall about the realities of embarking on the founder journey as a creator. The two also chat about Every, which Nathan describes as a writer collective for productivity, strategy, leadership, & culture. This conversation with Nathan blends a few different threads that we've covered on The Deep End. Nathan's background as a prolific writer & podcaster makes this a n...
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 31
Joining the Deep End is Doug Ludlow, CEO of Mainstreet. Today's conversation is about the unbundling and re-bundling of the smart bank and how the 35 million small businesses in the US can benefit from aggregating their business identity data in one place. We talk about helping small businesses navigate PPP loans during COVID, discuss how startups can earn tax credits easily for things like research & development and other ways that Mainstreet can help restore America's economy coming out of the...
Oct 25, 2021•50 min•Ep. 30
At On Deck, we believe that startups are the building blocks of a better future. Startups drive global economic growth by creating jobs, improving quality of life, and making meaningful progress to solving society's biggest problems. We also believe that the the biggest constraint on startup creation is the number of founders - for each person starting a company today, there are hundreds more sitting on the sidelines. This is an enormous waste of human potential. That's why we are excited to ann...
Oct 21, 2021•41 min•Ep. 29
Joining Marshall in the Deep End is Sara Du - cofounder & CEO of Alloy Automation, a no-code tool for automating e-commerce stores. The conversation begins by discussing how the line between commerce and e-commerce is blurring as e-commerce penetration continues to accelerate across the consumer economy. This trend was certainly accelerated by the pandemic, but Sara notes that Black Friday shopping patterns and other indicators suggest that such a shift was inevitable anyways. The discussion the...
Oct 20, 2021•50 min•Ep. 28
Karthik Puvvada (known by his friends and online as "KP") is the Program Director for On Deck No-Code and is also a leader of the "build in public" movement that is taking the internet by storm. Today's conversation takes place at the intersection of those two tech trends. When KP thinks about building in public, he encourages his audience to use content as a lighthouse to attract other people to your circle. These content pieces help to signal that you're serious about a certain niche and help ...
Oct 18, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 27
Josh Kaplan was an early employee at Morning Brew and was a product manager during their meteoric rise as a media company. Now, he’s taken what he has learned as an operator in a creative space and applied it to his role as co-founder and CEO of Smooth Ops to help content creators scale their businesses. Today’s conversation is about the deeply challenging logistics involved in the creator economy. Josh contends that most creators find themselves thinking relatively short-term. While it’s import...
Oct 13, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 26
Bored Elon Musk (one of Twitter's largest pseudonyms with 1.7 million followers) joins us to discuss the nature of pseudonyms and his investment activity. We also chat about the metaverse, the pseudonymous tech stack, the future of deep fakes, and much more. Pseudonyms are interesting because they are inherently meritocratic. Bias isn't possible because nobody knows who you really are. As the internet becomes more crypto-native and employment becomes more fluid, pseudonyms will only continue to ...
Oct 11, 2021•53 min•Ep. 25
This week's guest on The Deep End is Dr. Emily Anhalt. Dr. Anhalt is a psychologist, emotional fitness consultant, and the Co-Founder and Chief Clinical Officer of Coa, which describes itself as building a gym for your mental health. Today's conversation is about how to train for emotional fitness. Just like trainers at a traditional gym might rotate clients between a leg day, chest day, and shoulder day, Dr. Anhalt and her colleagues have developed classes to train different traits of emotional...
Oct 06, 2021•54 min•Ep. 24
Cooper Turley leads a handful of online communities known as DAOs. "DAO" is an acronym that stands for a decentralized autonomous organization. In more colloquial terms, a DAO is an internet community with a shared cap table and bank account. They represent humanity's newest structure for cooperative decision making. Cooper joined us for a live episode last week to help explain why DAOs are exploding in popularity. In our discussion, he explained their governance structures, described the differ...
Oct 04, 2021•57 min•Ep. 23
It's a new season of the Deep End and we're moving to two episodes per week (Mondays + Wednesdays)! We lay the groundwork for all of our upcoming episodes by discussing the nature of the open-source web. Our guest, Cal.com Co-CEO Peer Richelsen, views the internet as a democratic, transparent, and open technology that is undergoing a renaissance. Open-source software development was the spiritual precursor to 2021's web 3 boom. Tinkerers like Peer are ecstatic that technologists are returning to...
Sep 29, 2021•58 min•Ep. 22
Dean Hollis Robbins wears many hats: Administrator, teacher, scholar of black sonnets... but she's also an expert on expertise itself. Today's conversation is about frameworks for organizing knowledge. Dr. Robbins argues that our modern society suffers from mismanaged "self-secretarying" - most of us receive no formal training in how to process & sort the huge amounts of information that we have to process every day. She also straddles the line between higher education and tech. Her involvement ...
Sep 22, 2021•58 min•Ep. 21
Patrick Rivera (Product Engineer at Mirror and alum of ODF + ODW) has a front seat on the edge of the crypto revolution. He details the evolution of the internet from Web 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0, discusses the crypto-native creator economy, paints a picture of the current crypto landscape (and challenges), and provides some predictions for the future. For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com...
Sep 15, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 20
Flo Crivello (CEO of Teamflow) believes that a new way of working calls for an entirely new set of tools. In this conversation, we explore how employers can curate a new kind of space that looks virtual, but feels intimate and collaborative in the same way a traditional office does. Our wide-ranging conversation covers text-based productivity vs. video-based work, the entrance of Facebook into the remote work space, the implications of visa immigrations in a borderless world, and much more. For ...
Sep 08, 2021•50 min•Ep. 19
We sit down with Marc Lore, a serial entrepreneur and self-described "moonshot seeker." He has successfully founded and sold three companies, including Jet.com, which sold to Walmart in 2016 for $3.3 billion. Now, he's building a mission-driven city called, "Telosa," which comes from an Aristotle-coined word "Telos," meaning "a higher purpose.” For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com...
Sep 01, 2021•49 min•Ep. 18
We sit down with Gaby Goldberg, investor at Bessemer and explorer of the metaverse. Also joining us is Shriya Nevatia, program director of On Deck Catalyst. For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com
Aug 25, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 17
We sit down with Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda Space Industries. He explains why Varda’s mission statement is to “expand the economic bounds of humanity” and how its success will do for space what the gold rush did for California. For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com Next Monday we're hosting a live podcast recording and Q&A about the metaverse and web3 with Gaby Goldberg, investor at Bessemer Venture Partners ( RSVP for fre...
Aug 18, 2021•59 min•Ep. 16
We sit down with Sam and Andrew who, since meeting during On Deck, have gone on to co-found a startup called Levels together. Their goal is nothing short of changing the way the world interacts with food through the creation of a whole new product category centered around metabolic health. For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com Next Monday we're hosting a live podcast recording and Q&A with Delian Asparouhov of Founders Fund and Varda ...
Aug 11, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 15
For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com Coming up this month we're doing live recordings (free to attend) with... Delian Asparouhov of Founders Fund and Varda Space industries on manufacturing in outer space ( RSVP ) Jack Carlson of Rowing Blazers on building iconic fashion brands from scratch ( RSVP )...
Aug 04, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 14
For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com
Jul 28, 2021•54 min•Ep. 13
For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com
Jul 21, 2021•53 min•Ep. 12
For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com
Jul 14, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 11
For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com Rebecca Kaden on Twitter: @rebeccakaden
Jul 09, 2021•26 min•Ep. 10
For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com Web Smith on Twitter: @web
Jul 07, 2021•36 min•Ep. 9
For full show notes, links, RSVPs to live podcast recordings and more visit thedeepend.substack.com Jarrod Dicker on Twitter: @jarroddicker
Jun 30, 2021•58 min•Ep. 8
