Oct. 1, 2021

157: Money Talks #42: Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator in Ireland | Chase Goes UK | AngelList Gets Stacked

Eoin Fitzgerald and Pete Townsend dive into the big news for Ireland’s startup ecosystem as Techstars come to Ireland with the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator, along with the news on Pete leading the program, then we get into how we think Chase’s digital bank might fare in the UK, and also AngelList’s announcement of AngelList Stack and their opportunity to monetize their massive user base through fintech.

Show Notes
Guest Profile

MAIN STORIES COVERED:

Techstars comes to Ireland with the Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator

Techstars to hold blockchain-focused accelerator in Dublin (Charlie Taylor, Irish Times, 27-Sep-21)

5 Questions with Pete Townsend, Managing Director of Launchpool Web3 Techstars Accelerator (Techstars Blog, 30-Sep-21)

Pete Townsend on Web3: “Web 1.0 gave us back-and-forth messaging on a bulletin board. Web 2.0 moved us into the Netscape universe, e-commerce, social media, and building fintech and SaaS platforms. Web 3.0 is the decentralized web where you’re building these massive online experiences and people living in the metaverse.”

“That may seem like a fantasy today, but go read the book, Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It was really helpful for me to paint the picture of where Web3 is taking us. That being said, is this accelerator all about gaming? No, it's not. It's recognizing that tools like crypto, DeFi, NFTs, and blockchain itself are all building blocks of the next frontier, where money meets the metaverse.”

“Blockchain, digital assets, crypto, DeFi. This is all the digitalization of finance, and these are the building blocks you need to make this online metaverse ecosystem possible so that people can engage with it. We see snippets of that already happening with Axie Infinity, where kids in the Philippines are earning three times more than what they could earn in a job in the real world with this play-to-earn game.”

“We’re at the beginning of all that, but everything we’ve seen over the last 10 years, with cryptocurrencies, with blockchain in the public realm, with blockchain in the private realm, all of those are just the building blocks of Web3.”

Chase Launches UK Digital Bank

JPMorgan Chase Launches New Digital Bank in the UK: What do the Industry Think? (Fintech Times, 21-Sep 21)

Pete on the possibilities: “I'm thinking of a few scenarios where it could work, and I hadn’t thought much about their acquisition of Nutmeg until just now. So, if they have the Nutmeg audience and they’ve got a digital bank proposition ready to go, do you just bring the two together? We’ve talked a lot about building a community first and then monetizing it in new ways.”

Eoin Fitzgerald’s view: “Nutmeg could be the key piece here because they're saying ‘we've already got a significant number of investment clients’. Now they’re just adding on to the other end of the value chain for those customers with a current account.”

AngelList launch AngelList Stack

AngelList returns to its founder-focused roots, with a twist (Techcrunch, 28-Sep-21)

Pete’s view on Stack “AngelList is launching AngelList Stack, a new suite of products that will compete with Carta in providing services to help founders start, operate and maintain ownership over their companies. It's just taking this value chain of what founders and investors need to do together - and that's what AngelList is really good at is bringing founders and investors together in a platform – and saying let's make this 10x better.”

Eoin’s view: “Obviously, there’s a large volume of users already on AngelList. They're making it a place for startups to land and easily set up companies to take investment, as opposed to more directly competing with Carta.”

“To me, it seems more like Stripe than Carta, moving down the value chain to when companies are being established and digitalizing that process. If I'm an investor already using AngelList, I'll be asking the next entrepreneur who has an idea, ‘why don't you set up your business through AngelList?’”

Pete’s view on where things could go: “When you are making shares of early-stage startups available for sale in secondary markets, you need that platform, you need the community. Once you have that community on your platform, they will get behind you like Revolut’s or Robinhood’s customers.”

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