Founder experience comes first - Mark Fiorentino, Index Ventures

Crypto Roundtable - How Crypto startups can be the next driver of Fintech, a discussion with 3 crypto startup founders

In this episode of Fintech@Haas, Andrea Chang and Yuhsin Cheng had a discussion with 3 crypto startup founders. The first speaker after the host is Bette Chen, co-founder of Acala. Next, we have Bernado Magnani, co-founder of Lastbit, which is a startup in Ycombinator Winter 2021 batch. Last but not least, we have Ashley Brooke Tayler, co-founder ReSource Network.We touch on their projects and their startup journey. We also take about how crypto can complement the fintech/finance industry. Finally, we also touch on stablecoin and its applications.

Founder experience comes first - Mark Fiorentino, Index Ventures

In the last episode of Fintech@Haas in 2020, I chat with Mark Fiorentino, Principal at Index Ventures. Index is a multi-stage VC firm based in London and San Francisco and their list of fintech investments is huge and includes; Robinhood, Transerwise, Plaid, Revolut, Metromile, Privacy, Revenue Cat, Nova Credit, Prodigy and Fast. We touch on Index's structure and how it's designed to put the founder's experience first (something he mentions multiple times), Mark's personal and professional journey into fintech and his recent investment in Revenue Cat. Mark talks about areas of fintech he is interested in which include cross border B2B payments, AR/AP tools and solutions for Finance teams. It includes a shout out to one of his favourite newsletters Fintech Today by Ian Kar and Julie VerHage and to Harry Stebbing's podcast. Check out my fintech newsletter here [fintechacrossthepond.com]!

We don't hire assholes! - Dov Marmor, Railsbank

In the latest episode of Fintech@Haas, I chat with Dov Marmor, COO of North America for Railsbank where they have just launched their Credit-Card-as-a-Service. Railsbank enables any business to prototype, build and scale their own financial services products. They are riding the wave of embedded finance and enabling innovative brnads to solve unique problems for their customers. We touch on the history of Railsbank and the challenges in launching a global banking platform and his approach to culture. Since we spoke Railsbank successfully raised $37m in funding to grow their business.

The importance of saying no quickly and kindly - Nicolas El Base, Partech Partners

In this episode of Fintech@Haas, I chat with Nicolas El Baze, General Partner at Partech Partners. Partech is a global, multi-stage VC firm led by former entrepreneurs. Nicolas shares challenges of investing globally under Covid restrictions, what he looks for in an investment and why he is excited about LendTable, his most recent investment that he couldn't name at the time. His mantra of saying no quickly and kindly stands in contrast to some entrepreneurs experience with the VC industry and should be more widely adopted. He also talks about the differences in fintech opportunities globally and likens it to Maslow's hierarchy of needs which was super interesting.

Treasury Prime's plan to modernize the banking system - Jim Brusstar, co-founder Treasury Prime

In this episode of Fintech@Haas, I chat with Jim Brusstar, co-founder of Treasury Prime about his what he has learnt from his journey from Standard Treasury, to YC to Treasury Prime. We touch on the vision for a modern banking system, the difficulties of Covid, good APIs vs bad APIs and the challenges of fintech which is especially relevant with the recent issues at Beam Financial.