Most of modern finance has been built for now : instant payments, real-time trading, same-day settlement, on-demand credit. We have made moving money effortless. Tap, swipe, trade, transfer—done. But while the world raced to make money move faster, it neglected the half of finance that moves slower, the half that actually makes civilization work. That other half is what I call Meanwhile Finance :…
Agentic AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of acting independently in the world. These agents no longer retrieve information; they take action. They deploy code, initiate transactions, rent compute, and source data. As their autonomy increases, they begin to resemble economic actors more closely. The challenge is integrating them into real-world markets. The default assumption is that…
Intelligence itself will be commoditized. Any generation of large models will have multiple competing versions from different labs. What’s going to matter is vertically tailored applications of artificial intelligence. When founders approach me to discuss their ideas, I urge them to determine what matters for their particular vertical: data or process. Will the dominant competitive advantage be…
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” I worked as an Associate Partner at McKinsey for three years before starting Meanwhile . Folks often find that surprising. I wasn’t…
We conceived of Meanwhile three years ago, between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2021. In January 2022, we raised our first seed round from Sam Altman and Lachy Groom. We knew very little about long-term insurance; now, we know a lot and have a licensed and regulated life insurer. That's part of the entrepreneurial journey. I use the phrase long-term insurance because “life insurance” encompasses…
Short-term thinking dominates our world. The quarterly performance of a company, the daily performance of a stock, the hourly performance of a meme coin. Folks approach their careers in two-year chunks and the projects they work on in two-week sprints. Yet the companies and individuals we most admire are those with long time horizons. Maybe that's what the best of what founder mode means: building…
No one small can hope to win the infra layer in AI (NVIDIA) or the model layer (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta). The opportunity is to compete at the application layer. There will be three levels of business opportunities in app-level AI based on the amount of work a company can take on: The most modest opportunity lies in developing agents that can replace or augment existing worker profiles — software…
As an entrepreneur, I think higher valuations are usually better. Or perhaps I should say lower dilution is better. But I have learned my lesson on this a little bit. In my first startup, Standard Treasury, we were a relatively hot company coming out of YC in the summer of 2013. That was a mistake, likely, but there was buzz.[1] We chose a party round at a higher valuation ($15M) rather than an…
In 2013, the Bank of England revealed a decision to encourage new banks to start in their banking market. The goal was to introduce competition into the industry and respond to consumer demands for greater transparency and better services. In contrast to the United States, there were very few banks in the United Kingdom during the financial crisis. Their regulatory thinking was that the crisis was…
(This article originally appeared as an op-ed in the Financial Times published Monday, April 15th). The future of finance is digital. Entrepreneurs are building new online banks, lenders, and payments companies that seek to improve customer experience and compete directly with incumbent brands. In China, WeChat Pay and Alipay have shown how thoroughly tech companies can revolutionise consumer…
My recent thoughts on housing policy ( Broken Promises: The Housing Market in San Francisco (And Ten Ideas to Fix It) ) have gotten a big response — positive and negative — on Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter, and my email box. This post comes from the frequent question: "what can be done, if anything?" The political situation can be changed. Below I outlined how I believe there is a political…
Almost everyone who visits San Francisco falls in love with it. People love the character of the city. To me, that spirit isn’t contained in the way the buildings look or even the beauty of the Bay. The city’s greatness comes from its diversity and its attitude. It’s the combination of the collection of people here and the space provided to be weird, to be different, and to be experimental. When I…
(Also see my follow-up post on getting organized , and sign up to my tiny letter to get contacted about fixing housing affordability in SF ). San Francisco’s housing system is broken. The only way to fix it is through a radical change in our housing policy: a change that encourages (a lot of) building. Failed public policy and political leadership has resulted in a massive imbalance between how…
While it has been technically illegal to pay women less than men for doing the same job since the Federal Equal Pay Act (EPA) of 1963, women still earn substantially less than men in the United States. According to the American Association of University Women (AAUW), in 2014, women in full-time positions earned 79 cents for every dollar paid to men—and the numbers only get worse for women of color…
(This op-ed originally appeared in the Sunday Insight section of San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, February 14, 2016). U.S. banks recently surpassed $200billion in fines, penalties and settlements for their misbehavior and fraud related to the 2008 financial crisis. The vast majority of these cases has involved the country’s biggest banks, but thousands of U.S. banks played no role in the…
My background While I was growing up my Dad was a postal clerk. Being a mailman is a decent blue collar job, all-in-all, and we were fine financially. But when I was twelve or thirteen, my Dad took a huge risk. An avid reader, a curious soul, he felt stifled by his work. My Dad filled our house with books and our weekends always included a trip to the local library. He got an Associates degree by…
We're proud to say that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has acquired the assets and team of Standard Treasury. More information can be found in the press release . Dan and I started Standard Treasury a little more than two years ago because we saw that APIs would become the dominant way that commercial clients connect with their financial institutions. Since then we have had the honor to collaborate…
Square has reportedly confidentially filed for an IPO under the JOBS act ( Bloomberg , WSJ , etc). In response to the announcement and long before there has been a lot of skepticism about Square's core credit card processing business model. Even with thirty billion dollars a year in processing, running a large engineering, product and design organization on top of such a low-margin business has…
We have some news upcoming about Standard Treasury. But before that... Almost every week, I get thank you notes for publishing our YC application . It is one of my most viewed blog posts ever. Those notes remind me over the large, supportive community of entrepreneurs. It's been one of the more heartwarming lessons about running an early stage company: there is a supportive conspiracy between all…
At Y Combinator Alumni Demo Day, I had a chance to talk to the co-founders of Rescue Forensics (who have a fascinating backstory ). I learned a lot about their analytics tools for law enforcement while we talked at length about our shared backgrounds in fighting human trafficking . They are doing a lot more work on the topic now, obviously, and much better work than I ever did. It got me thinking…
I have posted on my blog exactly twenty times since September 2013 when Dan and I and Standard Treasury got out of Y Combinator and raised our seed round. Some of the posts have been quite business related while others have been deeply personal. All in all, I've had a couple hundred thousand uniques on the blog (my most popular post is about weight loss). Recently I got concerned about Svbtle, the…
At Standard Treasury we are building an API banking platform, becoming our own bank, and doing so in the United Kingdom. I want to address these three aspects of our work and also talk about the long-term social potential for our bank.[1] Banking as a platform Over the last six years, we have seen a proliferation of startups at the application layer of banking. Some examples include LendingClub ,…
At Standard Treasury we are building an API banking platform, becoming our own bank, and doing so in the United Kingdom. I want to address these three aspects of our work and also talk about the long-term social potential for our bank.[1] Banking as a platform Over the last six years, we have seen a proliferation of startups at the application layer of banking. Some examples include LendingClub ,…
Over the summer, I wrote two articles on mental health and startup founders. One was on how the mental health problems of the founders I know often extend beyond depression and another was about how many founders I know have trauma and mental health issues . These posts seem to have hit a nerve with a lot of folks, as every week I get a few emails from folks discussing their own struggles with…
This morning was my final data collection for a randomized diet experiment I have been participating in for the last year. Here is a graph of my near-daily weigh-ins on Withings: It can be hard to read: on the first day of the study, October 2, 2013, I weighed 236.3 lbs and this morning I weighed 178.0 The study I have been a participant in the One Diet Does Not Fit All: Weight Loss Study . The…
( This started as an email to the Standard Treasury team to summarize the many conversations that my cofounder Dan and I had with them over lunch, dinner, coding, and a ton of product discussions. The team thought it made sense to share it publicly. ) I often get asked to tell the story of Standard Treasury: Why are we building it? What is our vision? How did we come to this thing over all others?…
A conversation seems to be slowly starting about mental health and Silicon Valley, or at least mental health and starting one's own company. And in a more serious fashion than "you'd be crazy to do it". Sam Altman on Founder depression started the conversations. TechCrunch continued by noting that We Need to Talk about Depression (which also has a good list of links to other similar articles) and…
Last week Sam Altman wrote about Founder Depression . Catherine Shu followed on, among others, with a candid telling on TechCrunch of her struggles with depression. I applaud them both. Many startup founders I know aren't depressed though. They are anxious.They are on the spectrum of anxiety disorders. Real existential concern about whether they'll make it. Whether they're doing the right thing.…
Banks have a nearly one-size-fits-all product model which leaves value on the table. For instance, when a bank releases a new online or mobile banking system, it will often be an identical system, with the exact same interface, for all clients of a particular segment. But oil companies like Chevron have different banking needs than do retail companies like Home Depot, even though they may be the…
“The skill of making and maintaining Commonwealths consisteth in certain rules, as doth arithmetic and geometry; not, as tennis play, on practice only: which rules neither poor men have the leisure, nor men that have had the leisure have hitherto had the curiosity or the method, to find out.” ― Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan Jack Gavigan wrote a blog post yesterday titled " What would a disruptive bank…