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.

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

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!

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

▂▂▂

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/

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/