Lex interviews Sam Williams - founder of Arweave. This episode delves into the innovative aspects of Arweave, a protocol designed for permanent data storage and computation within the Web3 ecosystem. The discussion covers a range of topics, from the economic models underpinning Arweave to its potential applications in decentralized finance (DeFi) and beyond. Notable discussion points: The Founding of Arweave and its Mission – Sam Williams’ interest in distributed computing and concerns about aut...
Mar 10, 2025•46 min•Ep 176•Transcript available on Metacast Lex interviews Andrew Jamison - CEO and Co-founder of Extend - a financial infrastructure platform that helps banks innovate financial product development with capabilities while working with their existing systems, starting with virtual cards. Andrew shares his journey into fintech, detailing his experiences at American Express and the evolution of virtual cards. He discusses the challenges and opportunities in the virtual card space, the founding of Extend, and its innovative approach to simpl...
Feb 24, 2025•42 min•Ep 175•Transcript available on Metacast Lex interviews Jayendra Jog - co-founder of Sei Labs, about his professional journey and the innovative Sei protocol—a high-performance parallel blockchain. Jay shares insights from his time at Robinhood, emphasizing the importance of distribution over technology and the challenges of scaling a fintech company. He discusses the limitations of Ethereum's transaction processing and how Sei Labs aims to address these through parallelization. The conversation also covers the future of blockchain in ...
Feb 14, 2025•42 min•Ep 174•Transcript available on Metacast Lex interviews Arun Kumar, the CTO of Socure, an identity management and risk assessment company. In this exciting episode, Arun touches on: (1) his experience building large-scale, high-throughput, and low-latency systems at companies like Amazon and Citadel, and how he applies that expertise to the identity verification and fraud detection challenges at Socure. (2) Socure's rapid growth, serving over 2,700 customers including 9 of the top 10 U.S. banks and over 30 state agencies, processing hu...
Jan 28, 2025•42 min•Ep 173•Transcript available on Metacast Lex interviews Shachar Bialick, the founder and CEO of Curve, a fintech mobile wallet. In this exciting episode, Shachar touches on: (1) his background as a serial entrepreneur and his experience in the Israeli military shaped his ability to solve problems and work in high-stress environments, which are key traits for a successful founder. (2) The initial idea behind Curve was to create a "wallet to rule them all" - a single interface that could consolidate and manage multiple payment cards and ...
Dec 23, 2024•53 min•Ep 172•Transcript available on Metacast Lex interviews Michael Heinrich, co-founder and CEO of 0G (Zero Gravity) Labs. In this exciting episode, Lex and Michael explore the concept of decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) and how it differs from centralized, closed-source AI models provided by big tech companies. Michael kicks off with his background in tech and finance, and how he became interested in decentralized AI as a solution to the issues with closed AI systems. Notable discussion points: (1) Decentralized AI provides tra...
Dec 06, 2024•46 min•Ep 171•Transcript available on Metacast Lex interviews Tom Duff Gordon, the Vice President of International Policy at Coinbase, where he drives the company’s engagement with policymakers in global markets across the UK, Europe, APAC, LatAm, and the MENA region. Together, Tomm and Lex discuss the importance of policy work in the financial services industry, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, and how policy teams collaborate with regulators to shape the regulatory environment; the reasons why the financial services industry is ...
Nov 21, 2024•46 min•Ep 170•Transcript available on Metacast Lex interviews Alessandro Chesser - CEO of Dynasty, a San Jose-based online platform for trust creation and management. In this episode, the key topics discussed include: The importance of aligning business and product teams, and the challenges Chesser faced when this alignment broke down during Carta's unsuccessful foray into the private markets business. Chesser's decision to leave Carta and co-found Dynasty, a startup that aims to simplify the process of creating trusts to avoid probate and p...
Oct 29, 2024•44 min•Ep 169•Transcript available on Metacast Lex is interviewing Sankaet Pathak, the former CEO and founder of Synapse, and CEO and current founder of Foundation, to explore what happened with Synapse, the banking as a service industry, and key lessons learned. The discussion covers Synapse's origins, the reliance on bank partners like Evolve, the discovery of reconciliation issues and missing payments, and the eventual sale of Synapse to TabaPay. Pathak shares details on the various categories of "breaks" they uncovered, including debits ...
Oct 07, 2024•49 min•Ep 168•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Zuben Mathews - CEO and Co-founder of Brigit. Brigit is a leading consumer financial app in the United States that offers a suite of holistic financial products including budgeting, financial insights, access to paychecks, and credit building. Zuben kicks off the conversation discussing his journey from investment banking at Deutsche Bank to founding one of the largest financial health apps in the U.S. Mathews reflects on his early experiences in banking, where he launched a small...
Sep 16, 2024•46 min•Ep 167•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Till Wendler, Founder of Peaq Network - a leading DePIN Layer 1 in the blockchain space. In this episode, Till discusses his journey into entrepreneurship and the blockchain space. He talks about his early involvement with Ethereum and building a business around e-commerce payments using cryptocurrencies. Till also explains the concept of decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePINs) and their role in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Economy of Things (EOT). He highl...
Aug 26, 2024•36 min•Ep 166•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Luke Voiles, the CEO of Pipe - a modern capital platform built to connect business owners to fast, frictionless, dilution-free funding. Luke kicks off discussing his experience in the FinTech industry. He talks about his transition from being an investor to working in FinTech. Luke shares his background in distressed credit investing and how it led him to focus on lending money to other lenders. He then discusses his role at Intuit, where he helped build QuickBooks Capital and gai...
Jul 29, 2024•47 min•Ep 165•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Danielle Sesko about insurance and innovation in the fintech sector. They discuss the purpose of insurance and why it exists, the structure of insurance companies, the challenges of insurance innovation, and the integration of insurance into digital lending platforms. Sesko explains that insurance is necessary because most people cannot sustain a total loss of their assets, such as their homes or businesses. She also discusses the regulatory structure of insurance in the US, which...
Jul 12, 2024•40 min•Ep 164•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Anthony Moro, CEO of Provenance Foundation. Provenance is a blockchain platform for real-world assets and has a focus on financial services. Moro discusses his background in the traditional financial industry, particularly in security servicing, and explains how Provenance is positioning itself as a good control location for ownership of securities. He highlights the inefficiencies and high costs associated with intermediated securities transactions and explains how Provenance aim...
Jul 01, 2024•47 min•Ep 163•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Lu Zhang, the founder and managing partner at Fusion Fund, a venture fund that invests in deep technology, including artificial intelligence (AI) and healthcare. They discuss Lu's experience as an entrepreneur and the challenges she faced in building her own company. Lu also shares her investment thesis on AI, highlighting the opportunities in AI application and infrastructure. She believes that while large tech companies dominate the consumer AI market, there are still opportunit...
Jun 14, 2024•49 min•Ep 162•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Vishal Garg, the CEO of Better Mortgage. Better is an all-in-one digital homeownership company. From finding a real estate agent and getting a mortgage, to shopping for homeowners insurance and title services, Better and its affiliates take customers through the entire homebuying process online. Garg shares the story of how he founded Better Mortgage after experiencing the difficulties of getting a mortgage online. He explains how he saw an opportunity to reimagine the mortgage in...
May 31, 2024•46 min•Ep 161•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Matt Watson, the founder and CEO of Origin, a comprehensive money management platform for the modern workforce. Watson discusses his background as an entrepreneur and his first fintech experience working on Wall Street. He also talks about his previous business in the commercial insurance space and the challenges of building out the go-to-market function for that company. Watson then explains the concept behind Origin and its focus on providing a mass-market private banking experi...
May 20, 2024•42 min•Ep 160•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Jason Morton, CEO of EZKL - EZKL is a technology that helps people build around artificial intelligence using zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) and the latest in technology. Jason explains that ZK proofs are a way to prove that a computation has been executed correctly without revealing any sensitive information. The proofs can be used to verify the execution of AI models, statistical models, and other computations on blockchain networks. EZKL provides a command line tool, a backe...
May 07, 2024•41 min•Ep 159•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Libor Michalek, the President of Affirm, a buy now, pay later (BNPL) company. Michalek discusses his early experiences with the internet and how it shaped his understanding of technology and its potential in the financial services industry. He explains how Affirm was founded with the goal of building honest financial products that improve people's lives, and how the convergence of e-commerce, mobile technology, machine learning, and access to consumer information enabled the compa...
Apr 26, 2024•44 min•Ep 158•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Sarah Levy, CEO of Betterment - the largest independent digital investment advisor. Levy kicks off the conversation by discussing her career journey from working in the media industry to leading a fintech company. Levy explains that she was attracted to Betterment's mission of making people's lives better and saw the potential for growth and scale in the company. She also highlights the importance of brand building and understanding the customer in creating a successful business. ...
Apr 19, 2024•48 min•Ep 157•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Anthony Cimino, the head of policy at Carta - an equity management company that builds the infrastructure for innovators, supporting approximately 35,000 companies, over 2.2 million stakeholders, and more than 5,000 funds. Cimino discusses his background in government and policy in the financial services industry and how he got involved in finance and policy. He explains the role of policy in the fintech industry and the importance of engagement with policymakers. Cimino also talk...
Apr 08, 2024•42 min•Ep 156•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Malcolm deMayo, Global Vice President for Financial Services at Nvidia. deMayo kicks off the discussion on how Nvidia has been working with financial services firms for over 15 years, providing accelerated compute platforms to help solve compute-intensive challenges in trading, banking, and insurance. DeMayo explains that Nvidia's hardware accelerators, such as GPUs, can execute thousands of instructions at a time, resulting in a significant speedup compared to traditional CPUs. H...
Mar 22, 2024•48 min•Ep 155•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Nelson Chu, founder and CEO of Percent - the modern credit marketplace. Nelson kicks off the discussion b by walking through his inspiration for building the private credit marketplace and the challenges of operating in the fintech industry. He explains that Percent aims to provide a better alternative investment platform for credit investors by offering shorter durations and lower minimum investments. Nelson also discusses the importance of infrastructure in the private credit ma...
Mar 15, 2024•45 min•Ep 154•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Richard Ma, CEO of Quantstamp -a leading blockchain security company. Richard kicks off by discussing the origins of the company and the importance of security in the blockchain space. He explains that the idea for Quantstamp came after he invested in Ethereum and witnessed the hack of the DAO, which prompted him to focus on the security side of Ethereum. Richard describes how Quantstamp conducts audits of blockchain projects, identifying vulnerabilities and providing recommendati...
Mar 08, 2024•37 min•Ep 153•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Christian Catalini, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Lightspark - a company aiming to break down global payment barriers, throwing its weight behind a new standard intended to make payments as easy as sending an email. Christian kicks off by discussing his career in blockchain and academia, as well as the challenges and opportunities in the fintech industry. He explains how he became interested in crypto through his research on crowdfunding and how he later focused on Bitc...
Mar 01, 2024•51 min•Ep 152•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Shelby Austin, co-founder and CEO of Arteria AI - Arteria AI is an AI-focused company that develops a contract lifecycle management platform for end-to-end digital contracting. Shelby kicks off by discussing her career journey and the development of her company, which focuses on solving documentation challenges in the financial services industry using artificial intelligence (AI). Shelby explains that Arteria AI uses a combination of people and technology to streamline document ma...
Feb 16, 2024•40 min•Ep 151•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Rachel Lin, the Co-Founder & CEO of SynFutures, a decentralized derivatives trading platform. Lin discusses her background in traditional finance and her transition into the fintech and cryptocurrency industry. She explains her experience working in structured derivative sales and trading at Deutsche Bank, where she interacted with clients such as hedge funds and corporates who used derivatives for speculative purposes, hedging, and arbitrage. Lin then moved to fintech company Ali...
Feb 09, 2024•36 min•Ep 150•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Stan Miroshnik, founder and managing partner of 10Squared Capital, discusses his early experiences in financial services and his journey into the world of digital assets and crypto. He talks about the challenges of navigating the ICO market and the importance of price discipline in investing. Miroshnik also shares his insights on the current state of the market and the opportunities he sees in sectors such as infrastructure, consumer applications, data analytics, and financial ser...
Feb 02, 2024•44 min•Ep 149•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with Jerome Le Luel, founder and CEO of TRIVER - a London-based startup that uses open banking data and AI to provide short-term working capital to SMEs. To kick off, Jerome discusses the application of AI in fintech lending for small businesses. He explains that traditional banks have struggled to automate lending decisions for SMEs due to regulatory constraints and manual underwriting processes. However, with the emergence of open banking and the ability to access transaction-level d...
Jan 26, 2024•47 min•Ep 148•Transcript available on Metacast Lex chats with David Minarsch, co-founder and CEO of Valory - a team focused on providing research, products, and services at the intersection of multi-agent systems (MAS) and distributed ledger technology (DLT), one of them being Autonolas - a platform that offers an open-source software stack and an on-chain protocol, facilitating secure operations and incentivizing autonomous application development. In this episode, David discusses the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto ...
Jan 19, 2024•56 min•Ep 147•Transcript available on Metacast 
