Hear why William left Plaid in 2019 to start Column, “a nationally chartered bank that has built every facet of the technology from scratch” — 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…

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…

The story behind one of Africa’s most valuable startups — Recording: https://youtu.be/BVGCf7XzsRU In this fireside chat, I dive into the backstory of Chipper Cash, one of the most valuable startups in Africa valued at just over $2 billion. Chipper provides free and instant cross border money transfers, and now has grown to serve over 4 million customers doing 80,000 transactions…

Make giving a habit with the “Donor-Advised Fund for You™” — Recording: https://youtu.be/EYtwwKZI8Mk Charitable giving is a big industry — $471 billion was donated 2020. But there is no reason it couldn’t be much much larger. The gap between philanthropic intent and action is tremendous (ie how much someone would like to give vs how much they actually give). This gap…

Fabrica uses NFTs to sell low-value plots of land 100% online. — This story first appeared on Forbes. If you look past the tremendous hype surrounding NFTs, you can see the beginnings of how this new technology is being used to tackle real, fundamental problems that have long plagued financial markets. One of the core problems in finance is high cost, high…

We discussed how the discovery of a new type of fraud led Naftali, the first data scientist at Affirm, to start a new company that now serves over 100 customers from fintechs to the nation’s largest banks. — Naftali is a great example of one of the most exciting trends in fintech that we often talk about at Cambrian — the explosion of talented entrepreneurs.¹ Often times, those entrepreneurs have developed novel insights into problems within financial services by joining one of the small, scrappy startups that have…

Cars are great as a way to get places, but they make terrible investments. Who hasn’t heard the tired phrase, “your new vehicle loses 20% as soon as you drive it off the lot”? What if it didn’t? What if you could buy a car AND it could increase in…

Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard, has died at age 89. Few, if any, have done as much to transform the investment industry to the vast benefit of the investor. If you are working at a fintech company today, you could learn a lot from Jack. There are many lessons, but…