March 05, 2024

“You Have to Invest Into Change.” Startup Lessons from Fintech OG and VC Daniel Kimerling, Founder of Deciens Capital and Standard Treasury

29 minutes

“You have to invest into change. You cannot invest into stasis.

Daniel Kimerling has a keen eye for the trends, technologies, and cultural shifts that are going to be big. A decade ago, he took an insight – that developers needed powerful tool so they could embed banking services into their apps – and launched Standard Treasury, the very first banking-as-a-service (BaaS) startup. Today BaaS and "embedded finance" are huge.

Now, as a VC and the founder of Deciens Capital, Dan is again looking for change:

“From an ego perspective, I love being right. From a financial perspective, I love being right at the right time."

The right team:

"You have to be willing to embrace a level of physical, emotional, financial, psychological, spiritual pain and keep going. Just keep fucking going."

And business models that actually make sense:

"It's not that, like, Generative AI is not cool. As a Dweeb, it's fucking cool as hell. I got it. But then the question is: 'How the fuck are you gonna make a dime?'"

This is a fun episode! Listen in for a masterclass in disruption. Also f-bombs. Lots of f-bombs. More on Crafted than ever before. Yet also mixed with grace and humility. Dan is a mensch. :)

Key Moments:

[0:00] Introduction

[2:07] How Dan got started in tech, as the very first employee at TechCrunch

[4:58] Founding Standard Treasury, the very first banking-as-a-service (BaaS) company after meeting the founders of Twilio and Stripe and seeing the API’s and “embedding” were going to be huge

[7:25] “What you kind of come to see is that to some degree everything is a financial plumbing problem.”

[9:12] “You have to invest into change. You cannot invest into stasis.”

[11:37] Founding Deciens Capital

[12:23] The “industrial logic” of most VC firms and how Deciens aims to stay small and serve early stage founders

[15:07] What Dan looks for when making an investment, including grit, variant perspective, and a MacGyver-like adaptability

[18:36] Generative AI: Why VC’s are rushing in, but he’s skeptical about business models. Will all the spoils just go to the open source community + NVIDIA?

[22:36] What Dan is excited about: the future of VC and building financial service products that people actually love

[24:24] Personalization: “[Big banks] really serve a very median audience. And we have a number of companies [...] that are far outside of that middle lane. And thankfully, because of the power of the internet, the search and distribution costs for those opportunities is way lower than it would have been in a analog era.”

[25:11] How Dan goes out of his way to help people – and how you can learn from his system

[28:50] Outro

[29:27] An F-bomb laced Easter Egg parting gift

Books mentioned:

"A Brief History of Financial Euphoria" by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Power Law" by Sebastian Wallaby

About Crafted

Crafted is a show about great products and the people who make them. Hosted by Dan Blumberg, an entrepreneur, product leader, and public radio host with deep experience not only delivering major software releases, but also as the producer of the best known, and most listened-to, public radio shows. Dan has founded startups and led product releases and growth initiatives at LinkedIn, The New York Times, and as a consultant to fintechs and big banks. Before getting into tech, Dan led the team behind Morning Edition on WNYC, the most listened-to show on the nation’s largest NPR station. Dan produced, edited, reported for, and hosted this and other marquee news shows at WNYC and WBEZ and also frequently reported on national news events for NPR. Crafted is produced by Modern Product Minds.

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