Found & Lost: Losing Your Identity as a Founder
Editor’s note – Today’s essay was written by my friend Kristen Anderson. Kristen founded Catch, a fintech company focused on providing benefits to independent workers. Catch shut down earlier this year, and Kristen generously volunteered to write an essay about her experience shutting down the company and navigating the immediate aftermath of that decision. It’s a deeply…
Read MoreA Bucket of Cold First Principles
Editor’s note – this interview with Frank Rotman, Chief Investment Officer at QED Investors, has been edited down from a longer interview, which can be found here. The edits were made to improve clarity and conciseness and to make Alex Johnson sound like less of an idiot. Alex Johnson: Instead of asking you to predict…
Read MoreRich People and Relationship Banking Don’t Mix
#1: Rich People and Relationship Banking Don’t Mix What happened? First Republic Bank was taken over by the FDIC and sold to JPMorgan Chase this weekend: Regulators took possession of First Republic on Monday, resulting in the third failure of an American bank since March, after a last-ditch effort to persuade rival lenders to keep…
Read MoreThriving in the Next Era of BaaS
An analogy that I hear a lot in fintech is the Wild West. Every new thing is the Wild West. Open banking is the Wild West. Embedded finance is the Wild West. Crypto, especially, is the Wild West. I get the temptation. Technology is a fast-paced, risk-on type of industry. Stuff is moving fast and…
Read MoreWorst Headline Ever
#1: Debt Management, for Whom? What happened? A fintech company focused on debt management raised a Series A: Clerkie, a startup providing debt repayment and optimization tech to lenders, has raised $33 million in Series A funding from Left Lane Capital, the company tells Axios exclusively. As more people fall behind on bills due to…
Read MoreWhat would you say … you do here?
Today, I’m going to catch up on some fintech news items that I’ve been wanting to share my takes on. And just because I can, how about I pair those takes up with quotes from one of my all-time favorite movies – Office Space? Let’s do that. Let’s do EXACTLY that! “Well, I wouldn’t say…
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