Insights

Financializing NFTs & Why It Matters

I’m not a financialization maxi. Without a doubt, financial innovation and responsible and appropriately supervised financial engineering unlock tremendous value for society that wouldn’t otherwise be available, like buying important, expensive things, investing for the fu...

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...

The Origins of Digital Banking with Shamir Karkal

Today, we’re joined by Shamir Karkal, co-founder of Simple, the first digital bank in the US, and now co-founder of Sila. Founded in 2009, Simple...

Dissecting the Free Stock Trading Industry with Freetrade

Today, we’re joined by Viktor Nebehaj, Co-Founder of Freetrade, a free stock trading platform in the UK. Founded in 2016 and launched to the publ...

Robinhood, Chime and the Emergence of a New American Finance

Welcome to our much anticipated first episode of 2021, and what a start to the year it has been. Last week was a train wreck as Gamestop, which was...