Insights

The BaaS Value Chain is Broken

Listen to this article in podcast form: Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) has been the subject of much excitement in fintech over the past few years, together with the related but more general concept of embedded finance. The proliferation of APIs capable of connecting disparate...

Raising a $20m VC Fund as a Solo GP with Rex Salisbury

Rex Salisbury is the Founder of Cambrian and GP of Cambrian Ventures. Rex is a key figure in the Fintech ecosystem, having started Cambrian as a prod...

Competing to Win as an Emerging L1 Blockchain with NEAR

Recently, we wrote a deep dive analysis of NEAR Protocol, an emerging L1 blockchain, available to Premium subscribers. Today, we're releasing a conver...

Financializing NFTs & Why It Matters

I’m not a financialization maxi. Without a doubt, financial innovation and responsible and appropriately supervised financial engineering unlock ...

Fintech Valuations in a Macro Hurricane

Fintech valuations have gotten crushed over the past few months, with growth capital availability and public market comps plummeting due to macro cond...

Deep Dive: NEAR Protocol

Setting the Scene Before digging into NEAR specifically, let's start with the higher level question of how L1s should be evaluated. NEAR isn't a comp...

Seed Investing in a Bear Market with 186 Ventures

Giuseppe Stuto is Managing Partner of 186 Ventures, a $37m seed fund launched in late-2021. 186 has made 10 investments since inception, following on ...

Checking in after a year of building

We paused our regular programming a year ago while I worked on BELLA. It was right after Gamestop. Bitcoin was spiking to $60k, Dogecoin was minting m...

Purpose Driven Investing for Financial Return with Flourish Ventures

It’s great to be back after taking nearly a year off from regular content to build and launch BELLA. The break wasn’t really planned, but betwe...

Lessons Learned from the Founding, Sale and Closure of Simple

In 2009, Shamir Karkal and Josh Reich founded Simple, the original digital bank. The concept was straightforward and clearly articulated in an emai...