I think a lot about technology company-building: startups, and how they act as “vehicles” to sustainably deliver a solution to complex problems at scale using tech.

I’ve been deeply curious about founding stories throughout my time in university, and enjoy tinkering with ideas for companies that the world still needs, to the point where I see myself either founding a company or joining an early-stage team in the future.

This train of thought has been so habitual that it represents a subconscious part of my daily thinking appetite and is the focus of lots of intellectual sparring sessions with friends.

Sometimes I’ll notice a non-customer-friendly pattern at a restaurant, and my mind runs on what I’d change as the owner. Other times I come across unfair terms and conditions of a product I use, hate seeing how it could trick people, and that ‘falling in hate’ inspires spending the next week thinking of a better way.

Shapes

Though I’ve had few actual building experiences, I think I’ve done a pretty good job in retaining the earned knowledge through the ones I have had: building a strong intuition in the process (as much as one can have for only having done internships).

Now as I actively think of where I want to spend my time after graduating—whether it be joining something early-stage, the companies I’d want to invest in if I went into VC, or debate starting a company—I have structured thoughts on the characteristics of the thing I pick to commit time to.

Instead of focusing on a sector, domain or demographic to service, I’m thinking more about shapes and themes of problems for an organization or team to work on.

The point of this terminology is to emphasize that often characteristics of interesting opportunities transcend specific lines of business, industries and business model practices—and sometimes touch on elements of all three.

Pulling forward second-time founder lessons

This lack of intentionality usually motivates a lot of people to just start, sometimes into pivots and companies that become successful. Though it feels like I have a clearer head on this, I’ve also spoiled myself through my sustained interest in startups, which ends up raising my bar in mission assessment.

This track of intentionality is something more people should share; I haven’t mastered these ideas or built ultra-strong convictions, but I think having zero progress in understanding a fundamental “why” and preference on a focus area is the exact factor creating the 500th niche B2B SaaS company that drives no meaning to the world.

Why do founders have to wait until their second company to realize they should hold their time in high regard, and only qualify ideas that are truly significant in a positive way to work on? Imagine the founder-hours we waste on mediocrely interesting and marginally-impactful startups, and the loss when great potential founders don’t build a second company when said ventures fail.

Apoorva Mehta from Instacart talks about having this high bar on working on meaningful things he would also enjoy, and it’s a pretty simple thought that surprisingly is missed by many first-time founders I observe jumping into starting a company.

I’d bet more people would arrive at the conclusion to have the utmost highest bar in the quality of things they spend their time on if they were intentional about understanding their “why” for starting a company.

A running collection of my own

This post is more of a self-reflection via writing; I’ve distilled below some specific shapes and themes of problems I’d want to work on to better hunt for a mission I want to commit my time to for the foreseeable future (or at least one where I can pick someone to convince to bring me on board):

• Problems with a high criticality to life and human prosperity, and also ideas that can have high scope without proportional friction to scale.

  • Imagine Doctors as a job at one end of the criticality spectrum, and large-cap enterprise SaaS salespeople (sorry 😅) at the other. One is objectively helping human life prosper through their work.

  • That Doctor can only deal with one patient at a time though, so while their work is highly critical, it’s not scalable enough.

Taking a first principles approach, we now want to look for proxy signals that represent opportunities that are both high in scope and high in criticality (because these obvious aren’t labelled as “worth it” or not in the wild for us):

High Scopes

• Businesses with non-first order effects. I’ve found that the extent of a business’s indirectness to the consumer—in that there are multiple orders of players before the final product beneficiary receives the experiences—correlates with its impact scope. The further ‘up chain’ a business is, the wider the breadth of people who use the product.

  • Usually, this manifests as API businesses: Stripe builds a product designed to partially provide a superior buyer experience when people try to pay for something online. In the most extreme case, the product is first delivered to a platform business, which is enabled to provide a service to another business/individual operator, who serves the end user (think Uber, Instacart, Doordash, Amazon, Shopify, etc).

  • Infrastructure/platform technologies businesses are other examples of “non-first-order-ness”: OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a product that enables certain functions, that as a result enable another company to do something easier/faster/cheaper for an end consumer. The shift to mobile computing is another example: it enabled a cohort of ideas that couldn’t previously solve certain problems.

  • Flexport’s ability to reduce poverty rates via global shipping technology is another great example of this: Better tech → more freight forwarding efficiency → lower tariff rate + higher trade volume → lower poverty rates

  • It’s important to note that each “order” in the chain needs to provide some value or do something of use with the product they're being handed from the provider, to not just be a middleman and sink value. Ex: Shopify builds e-commerce software using the payments APIs Stripe hands them, which allows merchants to sell things online to people like us.

• Problem spaces that need straightening of unaligned economic incentives. The very fact of a market or customer demographic injustice existing indicates that 1) the people it serves need the thing, enough to look past unfair product tactics, and 2) that strong demand mitigates any market risk for a new idea that ‘rights’ the wrong of the existing thing. There usually is some third-degree risk in the market (not relating to the direct consumers or execution potential) that discourages competitors: this could be regulation, the economics of scale of incumbents, or purely a tediousness in barrier to entry.

  • Early D2C companies exploited this angle: Warby Parker taking on Luxottica, Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club taking on P&G, jet.com taking on the fulfillment inefficiencies of Walmart, etc.

  • Consumer fintechs building condensed products that remove unnecessary fees and friction

  • It’s important to note that sometimes these unaligned incentive structures aren’t intentional, and could just be the product of a changing market or new technologies, and an incumbent who hasn’t caught up yet.

• Geographically bound disadvantages in problem areas that should be agnostic. This is usually the consequence of a highly-physical industry not realizing the benefits of digitization quickly enough. When present for long enough, it starts to uncover pressing inefficiencies in the way things are done.

  • The gravity equation shouldn’t exist in digital “trade” (of value, goods, knowledge, otherwise): where trade strength is inversely proportional to the distance between two parties.

  • Blockchain technology, most notably Bitcoin and Ethereum, enables this for the transfer of durable value; Internet networking protocols enable this for content and information movement. More mildly, Stripe acts as an on-ramp/off-ramp intermediary for global value transfer, abstracting away the geographically-sensitive complexity

  • “The human body does not change how it behaves when it crosses state lines.”

High Criticality

• Complexity is often present in problem spaces that drive drastic suffering to a user’s experience. And this is often correlated with highly “physical” areas.

  • Usually, this revolves around non-market and -execution risks: government and regulatory, oligopolistic pressures, availability of a specific technology, etc.

  • The more physical a problem area is, and therefore likely more complex, the more critical and positive a solution in the area will be to the lives of those who experience said problem.

  • It’s when we combine these highly physical problems with solutions that benefit from the scale characteristics of software can address them really effectively.

  • Ambrook helping improve farms, Flexport reducing supply chain inefficiencies, Uber connecting drivers with cars to people who need a ride

• Industries that have non-technical barriers to build are a proxy of physicalness/complexity (like the above point).

  • Beyond market/execution risk: policy, market comfortability + adoption slowness, oligopolistic or current best-practices market pressure

  • This is often the reason climate, government tech, space and similar ‘on the edge’ domains are unsexy for founders to work in.

  • Success in these areas usually requires a much larger timeline than a quick social media app virality cycle and is often tedious to work in. They feature problems that can’t entirely be solved by a skillset in technology and business.

• Ideas that cut the Gordian knot (the idea of reducing complexity in a challenge by circumnavigating the main source of the challenge): sort of a triple agent when it comes to innovation thinking.

  • Founding theses that try to take a step back from advanced tech-based solutions and do something simple/conventional, but with a highly unique delivery/approach; like synthetic hydrocarbons instead of battery electric vehicles.

  • It may not work, and the crowd may be right this time, but the risk of going against the crowd to see if there’s a better way is always admirable even when said crowd is already going against an even more conventional crowd

• Founders with “larger than self” theses for life, and how company building is their method to work towards their thesis

  • Evidence of exacting craftsmanship: caring about the nitty gritty, and how it’s obvious in the product or experience

  • 10x > 10%: Orders of improvement, instead of marginal

  • These are also often missions with the natural ability to attract crazy talent (top 1% in ambitiousness)

    • Most people, when asked if they’d work for such a company and mission (regardless of role), would answer “hell yes”

  • These are often also noble ideas: where deep care is attributed to the prosperity of one or many demographics of humans

A ripple in the market

Chris Paik talks about the idea of the most explosive enterprise value creation happening only by companies founded at the onset of a major market dislocation that enables a key part of the company that previously wasn’t possible.

The most valuable 2010s tech companies rode the wave of mobile and 3G computing: the ability for certain things to be done on a connected phone allowed the possibility for the gig-economy companies; Snapchat and TikTok relied on network bandwidth that allowed for feasible video data transfer; OpenAI needed the advent of scaled machine learning models and low hardware compute cost to enable consumerized use of AI.

Most of these are captured technology-driven market dislocations, that present some market risk because there is a “new” thing that definitionally couldn’t exist before. On one hand, this can justify why rapid growth can happen, but on the other hand, it suggests anything that isn’t driven by a direct technology-driven market dislocation may not be a great venture-backable and value-creating business.

I’d like to suggest an amendment to the definition of a market dislocation:

So far, we’ve seen tech-driven reasons for a market dislocation to exist. But there are also significant examples of startups that created extreme value while riding on a technology that wasn’t anything new.

The dislocation existed as a competitor, regulatory and pure market element.

• Tackling a customer segment by using a more sensical GTM approach than the one incumbents employ (which they probably do because it asymmetrically benefits them anyway). Anduril countered the existing cost-plus contracting practice for government defence contracts. Hardware and robotics were nothing new at the time.

• Shrinking the size of a market—because the status quo players don’t charge responsibly causing the the current market size to be unnecessarily large—via company building with better practices to capture a higher share of the smaller landscape, like Ro in US healthcare. At Ro’s beginning, the product was purely software, though regulations of physician credentialing probably were both the barrier to growth and as Ro made progress, their moat against competitors.

• Affirm’s success entirely rests on a business model innovation: the combination of revolving lines of credit like loans, but issuable at point of sale like credit cards. Beyond making more sense for certain purchases from a product experience standpoint, it also eroded levers that banks would use to commit product injustices, taking advantage of users by charging exorbitantly.

• Airbnb (and Uber, as early gig-economy companies) ushered in a shift in consumer behaviour that enabled their businesses to grow. These companies identified a dislocation in the market that wasn’t even really a mismatch until they came along. I think it’s completely normal to rent a stranger’s apartment halfway across the world now, but that was insane 10 years ago. And beyond the distribution of the internet, there wasn’t any crazy new technology used to enable explosive value creation.

Some caveats though:

There could be serious impediments to scaling a company by taking advantage of a non-technology-based market dislocation, like the need for significant capital to start, or size and economies of scale. It may also be the case that potential competitors don’t succeed because it requires convincing a large group of consumers of a fundamental shift in consumer behaviour that is considered weird.

As access to building with advanced technology gets democratized, it’ll be more than just a technology-based market dislocation as the only plausible market “ripple” to exploit and build a great company out of.

While there’ll definitely be exceptions to all of these rules—companies that fit the shape but aren’t high in scope or criticality—I think trying to check off as many as possible is the right way of refining and filtering for truly meaningful places to spend your time helping build or directly start.

High-level personal themes

Gearing these shapes in the context of a specific theme can also help narrow the initial exploration process, as well as give a clearer understanding of the domain areas where you want to try and manifest these shapes.

I want to be able to answer this question 30 years from now really effectively:

“Is there a high-level theme or principle you’re following in making your career decisions, that together achieve a macro goal you find really meaningful to your life?”

 In the context of technology companies, this is usually around the thematic mission you want to align all your work with. Doesn’t have to be one, but I’d be surprised if all the seemingly different professional adventures don’t share a higher-level principle.

My answer for this right now: I can see myself dedicating all the work in my life to helping build software that materially improves economic prosperity at scale. That conclusion isn’t the product of crazy self-reflection; but rather an assessment of the fundamental reasons why I was interested in the things I was interested in.

With this, I can justify current and past intellectual explorations like fintech, emerging markets and international development, global trade systems, verticalized primary care, industrial biotechnology, etc.

The point

Primarily, this is a method to further solidify (or potentially disprove) my own thoughts; all in the hopes of hearing feedback or disagreements on anything I’ve discussed from strangers!

I’m going through a phase of being uncertain of the areas I want to spend time working on next, now that I’ve graduated from university. I want to be adjacent to startups, but don’t have enough conviction in my own ideas to commit, and have also only recognized a few places that I could find meaningful to spend my time at.

I want to approach that ongoing debate with a set of principled thoughts and ideas that hold my decisions to a high bar. While I *want* to be a founder, my goal is to prevent that for as long as possible by finding missions that align with the themes most interesting to me and meet the minimum shapes of what its respective opportunity looks like. And if/when I fail at preventing being a founder—because I’ve found an area that *needs* me to do something on my own—I’ve won anyway.

It’d be cool for the world to have more principled builders.

Thx for reading. Say hi if you’d like!

The first taste of deep care

I was a pretty great student through most of grade school - I cared deeply about my classes and gave the maximum effort in extracurriculars and sports while remaining numb to the setbacks (like never making the volleyball team in high school).

In my senior year of high school, I reallocated a lot of my time from conventional school-related activities towards learning about startups and tech, building small projects and meeting people in the space. Through the help of a student program, I was building a foundational passion for wanting to work on tech companies. The peak of those experiences — and also the trough of the mental commitment I was giving to school — was a high school internship at a big bank working on machine learning projects in the summer after my senior year of high school. I felt mentally zen and enjoyed putting in as much effort as I could. Unlike school, it felt real and the right thing to chase.

That time represented a local maxima in my life for having deep care and dedication to something—to the level that I would be thinking about it in the shower, on commutes, and before going to bed.

Because in the four years succeeding that time, in university when I studied software engineering, I progressed to the other end of the spectrum and became a mediocre student, losing the level of care and attention for the ‘main thing’.

An unintentional shift to little purpose

While in university I always felt uncomfortable with the way I carried myself, from a professional and academic perspective. At first, I thought I had recklessly lost my work ethic, and refused to believe I had a foundational disinterest in the things I had chosen to study. Switching wasn’t an option, because I thought it would represent “losing” the mental battle with myself — that my procrastination and laziness were forcing me to take an easier path, and I wasn’t okay to let myself stoop that low.

I became an observer of life passing by because I started operating with less-than-great principles and didn’t feel the motivation to try. I felt like I had an empty purpose and also didn’t realize it was in my power to change that. It was a fun time: hanging out and living with my friends, going out and partying; but it was just that.

Over time, I found other outlets where I naturally was spending a lot of my time, giving deep care to my efforts and thinking about it a lot; closely resembling the operating principles from high school.

I started exploring VC, interned at a high-growth fintech startup, and started passion reading about economics and law. Things of true interest. Though it didn’t feel like I had found the right outlet, because engineering courses were still my “day job”.

In hindsight, I realize I drifted away from striving to practice extreme excellence in how I carried myself through life and on interactions with the things I had to spend my time on — purely out of disinterest, and a lack of internal motivation.

Life until that point granted a default outlet and purpose (school) and I loved trying to be great at the ‘main thing’; the pursuit of excellence felt intrinsically good. I didn’t see all the time I had to put in as ‘effort’.

But I also received the premature blessing of noticing the ‘real’ things sooner and had yet to realize it was up to me to land on a new outlet to practice the chase for being great at something.

Rediscovering outlets in cycling

When COVID first hit and everything shut down in early 2020, I started road cycling a lot. I had impulsively purchased once at Walmart before heading to university (and luckily avoided the crazy backlog of bike orders), and in an effort to fight boredom, I took up the hobby. It quickly engulfed my time completely — as a way to stay fit, explore rural landscapes in my city, give me time to listen to podcasts, and later become my new outlet.

Over the 2020 season, my average speed and power increased from ~17 km/hr and ~60 W over 5 km, to ~34 km/hr and ~180 W over 50 km. I became obsessed with tracking every minor change in my cycling performance, nerding out over the numbers, and hyper-analyzing how I could improve in single-digit percentage points: how my arm could be better positioned on the bar, the resting spot of my foot on the pedals—the most tedious of details.

It was the first time in a few years, since the end of high school, that I found an outlet where I felt motivated to pursue extreme operating excellence. Through cycling and other extracurriculars, I realized it was the zen state that facilitated a mindset of chasing being the best in a craft, that I loved. And as a downstream effect, it drew on to how I subconsciously carried my life.

For better or for worse, the state of wanting to be excellent grows only in areas of personal intellectual curiosity—it happened that software engineering classes don’t manifest that for me, and I never want to make the mistake of dedicating myself to work that doesn’t make me want to relentlessly chase a state of irregularly high performance.

For what it was worth, I was lucky to intern with a great team after my junior year of university, and while pursuing excellence there, I learned more than what school had tried to teach for four years.

A quote

A by-product of an interest in cycling was starting to follow the Tour de France — someone who appreciates excellence in a field loves watching it, and so I naturally became interested in the sport.

Greg Lemond’s career caught my eye: he is a 3-time Tour winner (the first and only American to do so, so far), he returned from a hunting accident that lost 65% of his blood volume and brought him 20 minutes away from death to another Tour win. Most notably, I admire his saying:

It never gets easier, you just get faster.

That principle touches more aspects of high performance in life than what it initially lets on.

The “physics” of it

In the first season of cycling, when I became more intuitively comfortable and intrinsically enjoyed it, I also started running and swimming more (I had a phase when I thought qualifying for the Olympics as a triathlete was ~easy~). Running didn’t come as naturally as biking for me: my muscles hurt and I’d hear the voice in my brain telling me to slow down or take a break.

My second cycling season was when I first started hearing that same voice. On windy or rainy days, and on routes with steep inclines, the mental resistance to keep going is high and it’s pretty relieving to stop—but if you do, you’ve lost. You have to lock in and fight the mental urge, to a point of extreme where you become numb to the voice in your head, and the results after that blow past the competition.

Newton’s first law has a good way of helping to frame this, in analogizing with static/kinetic friction:

Our force of effort rises, and proportionally so does how hard it is to keep adding an incremental unit of effort. Let’s assume our effort is efficient (ie. well thought out, intentional), and so we also happen to get proportionally “faster”.

This keeps increasing until it reaches a point of mental friction (mF) of normalness. Most people usually quit here - it’s their perceived limit for pushing themselves.

But those who are truly in the pursuit of greatness switch into mental overdrive and keep pushing; they become numb to the mental resistance and achieve a state of pure performance dedication.

The mental friction of excellence against every incremental unit of effort past this point may still exist, but it’s nowhere close to the mental friction of normalness; just like static and kinetic friction dynamics.

All this is to say, to kick ourselves into mental overdrive in pursuit of excellence in whatever our craft is, we have to first be able to recognize when we quit just because it’s getting tough—because chances are, it’s the perceived limits of our ability that we confuse with our actual limits.

When we lock in and push ourselves further, we end up going “faster” than most other people (because they quit, as we would if we listened to the voice in our head).

Then at a certain point, past the switch into overdrive, we are in a position to truly reach the highest level of performance in the things we do, and have a chance at becoming great.

It’s why Steph Curry is the three-pointer lead of all time: no matter the day, the workout routine does not gets skipped. It doesn’t matter if last night was a late night, if we performed extra well the game before, or anything else.

It’s why Elon Musk slept on the Tesla factory floor when the Model 3 was experiencing severe production difficulties, delays and costs.

At that level of operating, the pain is hidden from us in the focus on achieving perfection. But it only happens on a thing we truly care about, and requires us to mentally buckle down and let our conscience learn what we’re actually capable of.

Have I ever experienced this professionally? Not yet — so that’s the only disclaimer here. These are simply the inferences from spending two years cycling in a period where I was—without realizing at the moment—desperately looking for an outlet I’d be interested in pursuing excellence.

The point

I was having a conversation with a close friend who recently joked that I didn’t have a great work ethic (I don’t blame them for saying that—they’ve only seen me in the outlet of school). It’s something I couldn’t stop thinking about, and what led me to write this. I realized that behaviour is a function of the environment that I let influence my mindset — it’s what happens if I don’t actively seek something that lets me manifest deep care and inspires a pursuit for excellence.

One of the purposes of life (without sounding too grandiose) should be to explore crafts to exercise the highest level of performance until we come across an outlet we truly resonate with. To chase obsession.

When you constantly brush and cross the border of mental overdrive between normalness and excellence, and don’t quit, you’ll feel the zen state that the highest performance people seem to feel in their crafts; and it’s only fuel to help you push through.

That feeling of mental overdrive will never not feel hard, but you’ll always keep getting closer to true excellence—even if that’s a goalpost you never actually reach.

In the relentless pursuit of extreme operating excellence in one’s craft and life, it’s mostly an internal battle of recognizing when the gap between you, and the level you strive to be at, starts growing.

If the measure for the pursuit of greatness is that it never feels like it gets easier, you’ll know you’re not going as hard as you should because you’ll find yourself not getting faster.

Thanks for reading. Say hi if you’d like!

This doesn’t come by surprise: people visit Google +14b times a month and make 1.2t searches every year—and this is only with half of the world having internet access.

With all this money, Google funds some pretty cool side projects through its lab, X.

Loon—one of these projects, announced in 2013—has a mission to fly a network of hot air balloons to provide internet access to the 3.3b people who live without it. Though it’s recently shut down, there are quite a few lessons

The concept and approach sound outlandish (the word ‘Loon’ is even synonymous with a foolish person), especially for some search engine company. But there’s more to it than what meets the eye:

Through a third-order effect, Loon was imperative for drastically growing Google’s core businesses in the next 50 years and beyond.

Loon would expand Google’s total available market (TAM) by reaching people who currently can’t be users and providing them with the infrastructure they need to become users.

To generalize this:

1. Let’s call the group of people that aren’t currently included in a company’s TAM, but could be if ‘enabled’, marginal clients.

2. Let’s call the process of implementing a product/service that provides support to ‘enable’ marginal clients to be included in a company’s TAM, the Loon Effect.

Consumer fintech companies will need to create a Loon Effect and create novel financial product experiences to differentiate and continue growing.

These novel financial products will likely do this by creating new segments in existing financial services product verticals.

Product Verticals in Financial Services

In Canada, all Schedule 1 FIs are entities consolidated of the five core product verticals that consumers need when it comes to financial services. You can conduct all your life’s finances from one institution (for the most part).

These ‘verticals’ within the bank are often siloed departments that internally operate their business functions independently from one another.

The problem arises when siloed business functions have to work alongside shared corporate functions:

The shortcomings of FIs in providing great product experiences come from corporate functions shared across verticals being spread too thin (data science, customer service, experimental product development and P&L responsibilities).

The opportunity for consumer fintech companies is in improving these mediocre experiences across a bank.

They take on solving a problem very effectively in one vertical, and when they can, expand to the other verticals.

• Robinhood and Wealthfront moving into cash management

• Marcus (formerly Clarity Money) moving to lending—after being acquired by GS

The goal for consumer fintechs is to take on incumbent FIs — and that means they have to expand into all five verticals and do them very well.

The first fintech to 5, has a huge advantage over the rest.

The verticals are saturated already, but the products offered are nothing new in the core product structure than the banks.

The fintechs that play in each of a bank’s verticals simply recreate the products offered by banks, and that’s not enough.

Once you’ve replicated a consumer banking product, there’s only so much incremental improvement that can be expected to attract new customers; there have to be wholly new product offerings.

Affirm, for example, combined the flexiblity of a line of credit and accessbility of a credit card to give consumers who made big purchases but couldn’t immediately pay them off a novel product experience—an idea still in its infancy for many FIs.

Now, Affirm didn’t apply the Loon Effect in their POS Financing product because there’s no non-primary-order business that gets a boost from a product like Affirm’s.

But, if a bank were to take from this idea and integrate flexibility into a credit card product or accessibility into a line-of-credit product, then we’re onto something:

CIBC, one of Canada’s big 5 FIs, quietly rolled out an installment plan option into their credit cards (essentialling a POS Financing offering), letting consumers buy like normal, but have a more flexible (and cheaper) payback experience.

CIBC applied the Loon Effect. The TAM of their conventional lending business increases by the number of consumers who needed the flexibility and accessibility of a POS Financing offering to ease their financial situation, which before restricted them from safely taking on those conventional lending products.

CIBC enabled marginal clients to be able to use their conventional lending products by pushing out a wholly new financial experience.

Often FIs don’t significantly innovate on their core products because they're scared of that new product’s threat to their bottom line in the status quo.

But over a multi-decade period—at the risk of sounding cliche—disrupting oneself is the best way to protect being disrupted by another.

And we do that, by applying the Loon Effect, in this case by creating new segments in existing financial services product verticals.

Closing Thoughts

Until recently, companies had to inherently provide financial services to consumers and enterprises (therefore dubbed fintech); making for a ‘1st order’ avenue for helping customers with their money.

Lately, we’re seeing a deeper integration of fintech services among larger non-fintech companies.

Shopify provides money management for merchants. Ride-sharing companies doing the same for their drivers. Even Starbucks essentially works off pseudo-payments rails for much of their orders.

For these companies, ‘embedding fintech’ in their products is the implementation of the Loon Effect.

Except we see the expansion of touchpoints with a customer, rather than expanding the same set of touchpoints to more customers.

This is very new, and it’s bound to provide a higher-fidelity experience between brands and their customers and users.

Astro Teller, Head of Moonshots at X (Google’s experimental lab) talks about attacking the ‘talking monkey’ first: go after the hardest part of the idea and prove it can work (by trying to find why it can’t), and then move to the easy parts.

The one modification to this? Create more hard problems to go after outside of the current concept.

Things are getting exciting, and I hope you’re now closer to the front seat of speculating the shift in fintech after 🤓

If you enjoyed this read, I’d love to hear from you! Don’t hesitate to shoot a ‘hello’ over email or we can connect on Twitter 🙌🏼

Cheers 🥂