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.

Find out why Itai Damti (the founder and CEO of Unit) hates the word BAAS. We take a deep dive into his mindset and what got him to where he is today.

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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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.

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/

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.

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 Savings
• Credit Cards and expense management
• Treasury
• Venture Debt

In 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 covid
• 2021 ecommerce boom & tech bubble
• 2022 tech crash
• 2023 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.

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

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

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.