Excited to finally share what
@MahdiRazaMR
and I have been building for the past few years!
We’re thrilled to debut
@exponentcap
and announce that we’ve closed $75M for fund 2.
TLDR - we write lead / co-lead checks from pre-seed to early A, NYC based, thematic generalists
The vast majority of convos I have with “pedigreed” business peeps that ask me how they can break into an early stage startup as a non- technical hire usually distills down to
My A: do sales. Aka go be an sdr, and then an AE, carry quota.
Response: oh something more strategic
Can someone ask how much secondary Domm took off the table vs how much his employees made off their equity in the end?
If you’re going to give him a platform to try and justify how he burned through that much capital, might as well ask how much he got too.
20VC Exclusive Tomorrow with
@domm
What happened
@fast
Was burn really $10M per month?
What is it like having Stripe invested? Mob or no mob? 😉
Could/should the board have done more?
This and so much more…
Stay tuned… 🚀
When I flew out to sf over 5 years ago for my final interview at Plaid, almost all the “experts” I talked to told me not to join.
“The market is too small, the founders don’t have the right experience, the team is all randos, the company is way too small, etc etc”
We’re incredibly excited to share that Plaid is joining
@Visa
!
Together, we’re looking forward to expanding our products for developers and connecting consumers with the fintech services that are making money easier for everyone. More details here.
Can we all agree to not combine equity fundraise $'s and debt $'s as total fundraising headlines?
Ex raising $5M in equity and $100M of debt does not make it a $105M round...
NYC Chinatown supermarkets have everything you need (including cleaning wipes+water), masks everywhere, and they’re practically empty right now 🙁so defacto social distancing. Meanwhile Whole Foods has crazy lines filled with random people soooo...racism is dumb.
In other professional news - Friday the 17th was my last day at Plaid! Here are some of my thoughts...
(1/95)
Just kidding - more to come soon but once again hiring for early sales/business people, engineers, and more for an early stage fintech company in NYC!
I did some googling but couldn’t find a good solution - whenever I try to “open in app” on IPhone, feels like 80% of the time I’m directed to the App Store, not the app itself. How do I fix this???
In other news, made the move out from NYC to...Hoboken, NJ! Can confirm it's pretty much just as cold as it is in NYC right now.
Also, today is my first day at
@usealloy
where I'm going to be focused on all things fintech :).
As always - we're hiring!!
In other news…I joined
@tryramp
leading up all things growth and I couldn’t be more excited to publicly share what we’ve been up to! is the first corporate card that helps companies reduce their burn by actively identifying areas of overspending (1/8)
Hi fintech twitter- who are your fav compliance + risk people?
Collecting thoughts around kyc, fraud, and risk problems across financial services and want to aggregate + open source this!
This story is wild - Citi accidentally wired out $900M vs the $7.8M they intended to send out and the courts are ruling that the lenders get to keep it - all because the checkboxes in the software they use to send out wires make no sense.
Consumer fintech acquisition methods + examples:
SEO - The Points Guy
Referral- Venmo
Waitlist fomo - Robinhood
B2B2C - Upstart, Carta
Content - Nerdwallet
Direct Mail - Lending Club
Physical (Billboards/Subways/Bus) - Brex
TV - Chime
Sponsor - SoFi
Bank branches?
what else?
More than half of US smartphone users download 0 new apps per month, which means customer acquisition is tougher than ever. Here are 5 overlooked ways new companies—esp. fintech co's—can acquire new users. (Hint: It's not Google ads.): from
@illscience
Feels weird that getting a unicorn valuation feels "expected" these days for a high growth company.
When I first got into startup things, joining a company that got to a billion dollar valuation was the dream as it typically was a reflection of revenue growth + margins...
Have talked to multiple companies now that are building their payment processing stack with a crypto on-ramp + stablecoin vs going w/ a more traditional payment processor. APIs on top of a blockchain seen as much scaleable and lower maintenance than APIs on top of FTP ACH/cobl…
My girlfriend and I live in the UES and the neighborhood has been clapping and cheering for coronavirus essential workers every night at 7pm - NYC is still the best.
If I were to come up with “intro to fintech” curriculum for someone interested in fintech, what would be some required course titles you’d want to see in there?
Introducing...
The📍Ground Floor Job Board📍
Early eng + biz roles are often the hardest to find as there's often a high noise to signal ratio (e.g. "everyone is crushing it").
I'm curating a mix of roles at early stage startups I'd want to work at :)
The ultimate employe recruiting perk - a rational 409a & thus strike price for options w/ obvious upside.
(great article on how
@retool
approached their $20M series C with a smaller fundraise + valuation vs what the 'market' would pay).
👋 Twitter - I’m hiring for the early sales team
@tryramp
and while I’ve gotten a ton of dms, it’s pretty much all male. Who are some of the best female sales people y’all know that are in nyc or want to be in nyc? You also get to join
@SashaPilch8
who cofounded
@NYCFintechWomen
!
Is everyone on tech Twitter but myself an angel investor in something? Where does everyone find the time and money, particularly startup peeps that haven’t gone through a liquidity event?
I keep coming across people that say these opps naturally appear...but also I got bills?
1/ For my first official post on
@fintechtoday_
, I thought it would be fun to look back on 2020 in fintech. So much happened that I ended up breaking it out into two parts, so here are some highlights for Jan -> Jun
A🧵...
Is anyone building a fintech venture studio where several ideas are incubated internally and matched with founders? Know of some funds starting to do this but curious if there are some obvious examples
Feels like we're seeing the beginning of the next wave of infrastructure to create the new fintech stack. The 2010 fintech stack featured companies like Plaid, Quovo, Synapse, Dwolla, Marqeta, Galileo, I2C, Apex, etc
Putting together a 2020 fintech recap of notable news, exits, early stage investing themes and crowdsourcing things that I shouldn't miss - fintech twitter what's at the top of your lists?
Say whatever you want, but
@rabois
sets the bar for a lead investor.
You only get this kind of founder response from S-tier founders if you’re in the details with them and the counsel given is actually impactful to the company’s trajectory.
Respect 🫡
@rabois
@vkhosla
I also pinged a bunch of
@rabois
' portfolio founders on short notice to see what they had to say.
A bunch responded, including OpenAI CEO
@sama
, who hopped on the phone: "He's one of the few that early-stage founders actively seek out."
Today, American Express announced that we have entered into an agreement to acquire
@KabbageInc
, a leading fintech provider of innovative cash flow management solutions. Learn more about our plans and what it means for U.S. small businesses:
#AmexBusiness
Thoma Bravo $8b for Coupa is an 8.7x multiple on management projections of next twelve month revenue, with new ACV booking decelerating (negative bookings in Q3) and revenue growth + rule of 40 also declining dramatically.
2023: expect a lot more LBO's of tech companies...
“Let’s go to Cape Town and meet some great South African founders.”
-proceeds to hang out with each other even they’re we’re all in the US-
@pitdesi
@seema_amble
@ryansandler_
Doing a quick round up of US based fintech companies w/ their own corp VC investments - so far have:
Stripe
Brex
Affirm
SoFi
Square
who else should I highlight?
It's a bit funny seeing bank execs complain about vc-backed companies and how much of an "advantage" they have due to that funding.
JPMChase made $36B in profit in 2019 but most of their digital products still look like they were made 10 years ago...
Dear fintech twitter - what are you go to primers on financial services infrastructure? i.e. things like program managers vs issuers, BaaS, etc
I've been starting off with Payments Systems in the US and then the Anatomy of the Swipe as primer reads...what else should I add?
Stripe x Shopify deepening their partnership led me down a deep rabbit hole on APIs, strategy in an API-first world, API-first business models, Factorio, and Twilio.
It's APIs all the way down.
One of my favorite things we did at
@Plaid
was Plaiderdays, a bi-annual week long hack week where everyone at the company worked on anything as long as it benefited the company, all for the Golden Plaidypus.
What are other companies that do this and what were the awards called?
Also I'm amused at Venmo trying to do cash app fridays but for millennials on Instagram. Gotta respect the amount of hurdles that team had to go through at Paypal to get that live...
To all the Plaids affected by today's news - hit me up!
We have a Plalumni slack group and everyone in the community wants to help with roles + new opportunities.
The Plaid ecosystem is an amazing talent ecosystem and we'll do everything we can to support each other 💪💪.
Uber is deprioritizing the Uber Money effort to focus on core business.
More opportunities for B2B players in the "embedded finance" space to help larger cos enable these fintech capabilities and monetize on large distribution and proprietary data
I'm hiring for my first team member at
@usealloy
!
I'm looking for a broad generalist to work on high priority initiatives across GTM, product, operations, etc as it relates how Alloy works with fintech companies.
This past Monday was my 4 year anniversary at
@Plaid
! For some reason I get a lot of questions in interviews, coffee chats, etc as to what keeps me at Plaid since apparently staying for 4 years at one company is a big deal in the tech world because startups are weird like that..
I often get asked what's the secret sauce to Ramp and I've now (over)simplified it to:
Everyone individual at Ramp, and this started on day 0, has a customer + product obsession which allows the company to hit PMF on their products as fast as humanly possible. And they 🚢, FAST.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce our $300M Series D at $5.8B post. The round was led by
@ThriveCapital
& Sands Capital, along with
@GeneralCatalyst
@FoundersFund
and more.
@tryramp
has never been in a stronger position to help our customers succeed. 🧵
But the more time I spent with
@zachperret
and
@williamhockey
in person, the more I thought - I think they’re just going to will this into existence and I will regret not joining them. Have never looked back since and I’ve met so many amazing people as a result.
The past 5 years at Plaid have honestly been the most stimulating, stressful, interesting, challenging, (insert way more adjectives here...) work experience of my career so far...And there’s still so much more to be done in building the future of financial services. Go team! 🙃
At PayPal this morning for
#CodeCommerce
. Some fun stats:
- 74% of online retail carts abandoned during checkout
- Equates to $200bn left on table due to friction
- Coming soon this year, PayPal to support paying with banking reward points
First time I've seen Stripe's customer facing Link bank payment checkout experience on an ecommerce site!
some quick thoughts...
1. took me a while to figure out that it was Stripe
2. when I inspected some of the API calls it was actually calling out to finicity!!