Fintech, SaaS and Work

Fintech, a guide to enlightenment

A quick guide to how we can think of fintech as a business prospect:

1. Doing things banks (or other financial institutions) have done but better? The author mentioned risk scoring in insurance and whilst I do feel personally attacked, it is true. From my experience, the data moat is very very real, especially data moat that comes from private source (IoT, existing customer etc.)
2. Transaction (or other exotic) data is valuable? I think a lot of founders/managers/directors type get very enchanted by this type of exotic data process. My counter would be, you better have a good statistician on the team, if not, you are going to spend a lot of time wheel-spinning on either bad results or worse, releasing into the wide world something that is misleading. (see $Z)
3. People will trust you instead. As the author pointed out, being a good middlemen or platform is mostly about building trust and relationships (B2B) and that’s more FIN than TECH.
4. Someone else’s network is nice, and I am a bit more hardworking than the incumbent. This often includes paying marginal costs to be a third competitor, or run on incumbent’s networks. But see 7 for how it actually ends up being.
5. Ignoring regulators until you can’t anymore. And indeed it is true, start-ups can go under the radar and hope bad things only befall them when it’s too late!
6. Cheap but useless directly to customers. I see this as the flashy “app-based” movement. Apps are actually cheap, compared to real customer support and physical presence. As we get more comfortable in that regard of being completely virtual, we can do cheap but bare minimum useful better. Personally I am not very bullish on customer interaction systems, as it seems it barely works with larger internet platforms.
7. Getting your act together with respect to an industry standard where the industry has conspicuously failed to do so. Again though, as the author states, this is all good until incumbents decide to move their butts, and that’s when the founder will inevitably sell.
8. Fucking around with new assets. Whatever the new hype cycle is, build a platform to sell that! Do it fast and maybe you can become Coinbase/OpenSea/{Next DeFi Platform}!

Anyway, a fun, perhaps too cynical way to think of what’s viable and possible in modern fintech.

Working alone

Some thoughts on working alone:

• God bless productivity nerds,. Not agreeing it totally, but I think remote puts an emphasis on documentation and writing as a form of communications. Meetings are cool for collaborative problem solving, but very often meeting results in wheel-spinning and nothing concrete gets noted etc.
• Open offices are like, 25% the reason I personally don’t ever want to go back to a true office 100% of the time. Give me my space.
• I wouldn’t argue productivity being a main factor for WFH, the author is correct in that regard.
• New starters do have it rough in this kind of full remote situations.
• If you gonna build product, especially alone or small team, B2B is the way to go.
• Business > Code.
• Share things with people, don’t fear people “stealing” ideas.
• Tool and playbook building is good! it’s never time wasted, because it’s always learning and reusable!
• JFS. Just let it go, there’s no perfect, just let it happen.