Episodes
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In this episode, I sit down with James Dyett, head of platform at OpenAI. James discusses how AI is revolutionizing finance, with insights from clients like Morgan Stanley and Klarna.
Learn how Morgan Stanley uses AI to improve wealth management and how Klarna has automated two-thirds of its customer service tasks.
We also touch on Oscar Health and Nubank, exploring how AI enhances their operations. James shares his strategies for implementing AI solutions and the future of AI in the industry.
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In this episode, I sit down with Renaud Laplanche, founder and CEO of Upgrade. Renaud talks about his move from Lending Club to starting Upgrade, focusing on innovation in consumer fintech. He shares insights on the unique features of the Upgrade Card, the strategic partnerships with credit unions, and the future of consumer finance. We dive into his strategies for building successful fintech companies and what sets Upgrade apart in the industry.
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Missing episodes?
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Keith Rabois is back at Khosla after leaving Founders Fund. In this episode, Keith discusses his return, why he focuses on seed investing, his most courageous bet, his biggest mistakes (deciding which meetings to take) and more. He also shares insights on evaluating founders, the intricacies of startup success, and his approach to investing.
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Join us for a captivating chat with Zach, Plaid's visionary founder and CEO. Plaid stands at the forefront of fintech innovation, linking financial institutions with apps to revolutionize banking and finance. From its early days in San Francisco to becoming a key player in fintech, Plaid's journey reflects the sector's rapid evolution.
Zach guides us through Plaid's milestones—from filling a vital niche, scaling its impact, to navigating the fintech landscape's ups and downs, including the COVID-19 pandemic and banking crises. These moments highlight Plaid's crucial role in stabilizing the fintech ecosystem.
Diving into the heart of fintech innovation, Zach discusses the challenges and achievements of building Plaid, a platform essential to fintech's fabric, and shares insights on the future of finance.
This conversation sheds light on the innovation and determination driving fintech forward. It's a must-watch for anyone interested in technology's role in reshaping financial services.
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Connect with Rex on social media:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rexsalisbury/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rexsalisbury
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@rex.salisbury
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Pete Flint is a prominent figure in the technology and real estate industries, best known for his co-founding role at Trulia and his involvement with NFX, a venture capital firm. As one of the co-founders of Trulia, a real estate platform that gained widespread popularity, Flint played a pivotal role in revolutionizing the way people search for homes online. His entrepreneurial spirit and innovative approach have made him a respected leader in the prop-tech space. Beyond Trulia, Flint has continued to contribute to the startup ecosystem through his association with NFX, a venture capital firm that focuses on investing in seed-stage companies.
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Jimmy Chen founded Propel in 2014 with the ambitious vision of improving America’s safety net. $65 Billion of government benefits go unclaimed because of cumbersome and opaque processes. Even when those benefits are claimed, the user experience is frustrating.
Propel started by making one of America's most important social benefit programs, SNAPs, formerly known as food stamps more user friendly. Propel makes it possible for any of the 42 million Americans on SNAPs to check their balance from their phone instead of having to call a 1-800 number and wade through a cumbersome phone tree.
Today, Propel serves over 5 million people in all 50 states
To share how Propel vision expanded beyond SNAPs to become an all-in-one money app to include mobile banking, benefits info with the goal of patching America’s broken safety net, I’m excited to have Jimmy Chen here to share his story.
https://www.joinpropel.com/
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Today, I’m talking to fintech pioneer, Shamir Karkal, the Founder and CEO of Simple.
Founded in 2009, Simple was one of the very first neobanks, meaning they offered banking services, but were not themselves a bank. Simple built the user experience and tech, but partnered with a bank to provide the charter.
In 2009, it was not at all obvious this was even possible. Simple helped prove it was and grew a cult-like customer base in the 100s of thousands.
It’s hard to overstate how important the neobank model has become for fintech in the decade plus. Today, there are 100+ Neobanks and 20+ banking as a service platforms. But the bank-as-a-service model, is not just a story of neobanks.
It’s been crucial to the growth of fintech, especially embedded fintech, more broadly.
So, today, we’re going to talk w/ Shamir about what it took build Simple and pioneer a category.
But, like any good pioneer, Shamir’s not finished. Today, he’s founded Sila, a banking-as-a-service platform, informed from his time building Simple. We’ll talk cover that as well as what Shamir see’s in the future of financial infrastructure.
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Incredibly excited for this conversation with Immad Akhund, the Founder of Mercury, a business bank for startups.
Mercury was founded in 2017 when almost no on had tried to build to a neobank for business. Today, Mercury has over 100,000 business customers and provides a suite of banking products
Checking and SavingsCredit Cards and expense managementTreasuryVenture DebtIn this conversation, we talk about just how hard, but rewarding the journey has been. Each year has been radically different from previous:
2017 how?2018 build!2019 launch!2020 covid2021 ecommerce boom & tech bubble2022 tech crash2023 SVB fails...Most recently, the failure of SVB, their primary incumbent competitor, was a huge accelerant of the business with $2 Billion in deposits flow in a matter of weeks.
This is a great story of what it takes to build in fintech.
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On this episode, originally recorded in Mar 2022, we dive into the backstory of Chipper Cash, at the time, the most valuable startup in Africa recently valued at just over $2 billion. Chipper provides free and instant cross border money transfers, and has grown to serve over 4 million customers, doing 80,000 transactions.
█ Guests
Ham Serunjogi, Founder & CEO at Chipper
Dan Kimerling, Founder & Managing Partner at Deciens (lead investor in Chipper's Seed & Series A)
█ Timeline
[Intros] - Ham & Dan
[Raising] - How Dan & Ham Met
[Crisis] - Responding when shut down in their largest market
[Team Building] - How Chipper Built a world class legal and ops teams
[Roadmap] - How Chipper prioritizes their product roadmap
[Org Structure] - How Chipper built a matrixed org
[The Future] - Chipper’s Long Term Vision
[Advice] - Advice for prospective founders
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Today’s guest is Laura Speakman, Co-Founder of Alloy. We cover her journey from interning in microfinance to narrowly avoiding becoming a career lawyer to then becoming a fintech founder building crucial infrastructure.
Alloy is a global identity decisioning platform that helps banks and fintechs with onboarding, transaction monitoring and credit decisioning. They have 300+ customers and 300+ employees. Their last round value to them at over a billion dollars.
But, getting there was by no means easy–building infrastructure in FinTech almost never is. We cover both the successes, but also the bumps in the road. Enjoy!
We discuss:
1. Her early career from Brooklyn DA’s office => Microfinance in Nairobi => Payments in the US
2. Why she started Alloy in 2015 and how she met her Co-Founder, Tommy Nichols
3. How they closed their early customers (small fintechs) and eventually their first large customer (Ally Bank!)
4. How their GTM & Product has changed over time
5. Alloy’s global expansion, starting w/ a London office
6. Advice for new fintech founders
If you prefer video, find our interviews on YouTube:
youtube.com/@cambrianhq
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In this episode, I talk to Shuo Wang, the founder of Deel. Deel is an all-in-one HR platform for global teams. They help companies of all sizes, anywhere from a two person startup to publicly traded companies, manage contractors and full-time employees in 150 plus companies or countries around the world.
I first met the founders of Shuo and Alex in 2019, shortly after they had graduated YC's winter batch, when they were a small scrappy team, but clearly onto something big.
In the 4 years since they have gone on to pay out over $5 billion to 250,000 individuals around the world. So really great team operating a critical piece of infrastructure at scale.
In this interview, I cover how Shuo and Alex went from being friends at MIT to scrappy startup founders in YC to eventually building one of the most important companies powering the future of remote work.
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In this episode, we are going to talk about how you to stop banks crises forever. That’s right, permanently stop bank crises. I know that seems crazy.
How? Narrow Banking. It’s an idea that’s been around since the 1930s. It essentially means that Banks cannot lend out deposits, which is why it’s also known as fully reserved banking.
If you know anything about Banking you probably think this is absolutely crazy. If Banks can lend out deposits, who will provide credit?
There are a lot of objections to Narrow Banking, some very reasonable, some not.
My Goal with this conversation is not to convince you that “Narrow Banking is “THE ANSWER.” But invite you to consider that some of the core principles of how our banking system operates are not some sort of divine, natural law, but instead are specific policy choices that we made in a particular historical context and that we could change if we wanted to.
So hopefully, you’ll find this engaging and thought provoking.
And, in case you’re thinking, "I don’t want to listen to some radical pitch a crazy idea," you should know that John’s proposal for how we transition into Narrow Banking is probably the most modest proposal you can think of. It is basically...do nothing! Some people are starting to move their money into accounts that function much like Narrow Banks, money markets backed entirely by treasuries being a prime example. So if it happens, great! That’s it, that’s his proposal.
So hope you enjoy this episode I think you’ll learn a lot even if you don’t agree with everything.
Links Mentioned in Episode
John's Blog Grumpy Economist: https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/
Toward a Run- free Financial System: https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/across-the-great-divide-ch10.pdf
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Ramp is one of the fastest businesses ever to go from $0 to $100M in revenue and they did it in less than 3 years and their last raise in 2022 valued them at $8 billion. It’s a great company in large part because it’s a great product. Cambrian runs on Ramp and I never thought I would say this about corporate expense software, but…it’s magical!
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In 2019, William announced he was stepping down for Plaid. For 3 years he and a small team worked in stealth on a new company, Column. Today we’re going to talk about that company. William describes Column as “a nationally chartered bank that has built every facet of the technology from scratch”.
We are going to cover what inspired William to start this new venture and why he believes the technology they built will be critical for the fintech ecosystem as it scales.
█ Guest
William Hockey, Founder & CEO
https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-h...
█ Moderator
Rex Salisbury, Founder @ Cambrian
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rexsalisb...
https://twitter.com/rexsalisbury
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Cambrian is a community for fintech founders and builders. Check out our website to subscribe to our newsletter, join our meetups and check out our other initiatives!
https://www.cambrianhq.com/
https://www.meetup.com/cambrian/
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Building Credit Karma was not easy. Ken raised the company’s first major round in 2009 during the Great Recession and in 2020 navigated the sale of the business during the early days of the covid pandemic, during which Credit Karma saw dramatic declines in revenue and faced the prospect of layoffs. But the company has come through those events and more stronger than ever. Despite the pandemic, Intuit closed the acquisition for a record setting $8 billion in late 2020. Since then, Credit Karma has continued to grow and is projected to deliver over $1.5 billion in revenue in FY 2022. Even more importantly, Credit Karma continues to create huge benefits for their 110+ million members by bringing transparency to credit scores, which in turn affords tailored access to the best financial products–across card, mortgage, auto and more–for their unique situation.
█ Guest
Ken Lin, Founder & CEO
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennethjlin
█ Moderator
Rex Salisbury, Founder @ Cambrian
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rexsalisb...
https://twitter.com/rexsalisbury
▂▂▂
Cambrian is a community for fintech founders and builders. Check out our website to subscribe to our newsletter, join our meetups and check out our other initiatives!
https://www.cambrianhq.com/
https://www.meetup.com/cambrian/
