Kind of wild that one of the companies with the most revenue from generative AI is a consultancy: Accenture
Over $600M booked this quarter, on track for up to $2.4B annualized 🤯
Seeing so many bad/misinformed hot takes about Apple Card, I might as well lend my payments perspective.
Trigger warning ahead for Apple True Believers. 😂
a thread... 🍎 💳
Is it possible to both believe NFTs are quite likely the start of something new & different, while also not understanding why anyone would buy one?
Because I think that’s where I find myself.
My childless friends in quarantine: "I've been working out every day, catching up on my reading list, binge watching shows... it's great."
My parent friends in quarantine: "We're just 1 week in and I'm on the brink of insanity. All teachers should be paid $1 million a year."
I regret to inform you that this is the way it’s been for most of startup history. We just had a wild run of free money and a lot of people forgot that entrepreneurship is mostly chewing glass and staring into the abyss.
Vibe check is that the typical founder I know is no longer having fun, all they can think about is their runway, lack of product market fit, that the broad market is going south, etc
Rarely does sheer laziness explain procrastination. Procrastination usually masks either 1) anxiety over fear of failure, or 2) overwhelm/confusion over how to break down a complex task into its component parts.
Congratulations, SF. You just screwed yourself even harder.
Putting a public defender in the DA seat over 3 moderates who together got 65% of the "first choice" vote is INSANITY.
Brace yourself for more lawlessness with no real repercussions.
We need a word to summarize “you’re so important to me, and I wanted to draft a thoughtful response to your note, which is why I haven’t replied yet, but now I’ve put if off so long that it’s awkward, but really it’s only because I care so much.”
PSA: founders, if a VC wants to invest but tries to attach a side letter requesting to have a say in key hiring decisions, hands-on operating involvement, and/or onerous information rights, just say no 🚩🚩🚩
A walk down memory lane on the creation of the “payfac” (ie “payment facilitator”).
I was at Visa when the “payfac” category was created. Before payfacs there was only such a thing as “Internet payment service provider,” or IPSP. The first to be an iPSP? PayPal. 1/
One of my favorite weekly FinTech newsletters made the claim that Stripe invented the PayFac category. The newsletter is a fantastic regular read, but this claim isn't true. Here's some background on the history of PayFac from someone who lived it.
1/
💳The Capital One / Discover acquisition is a big deal, and I've been discussing it this week with other fintech nerds, so I thought I'd post my thoughts here publicly... 🧵
🧠 In a nutshell, I think it’s a stroke of genius on Capital One’s part, but there’s a lot more intrigue
Unless you spend more on Apple products than gas, groceries and restaurants combined, there are many better rewards cards for you.
See
@NerdWallet
and thank me later.
Apple pushing people to keep cash inside the Apple ecosystem is not to be underestimated!
They are playing a long game here. If successful, this is very bad for the card networks.
Most reporting I’ve seen on
@stripe
’s new issuing product has totally missed the biggest potential of the service. Stripe has the early building blocks of its own global closed-loop network; think an early, more modern version of American Express or Synchrony Financial. /1
Holy shit. I just got this insane Hex ad in the physical mail. The website is even more alarming.
Always a good sign when your header has a big “Scam” link between “How it Works” and the “FAQ”. Totally not problematic. Everything is fine.
This should be a layup for the SEC.
The pace at which LLMs have been adapted to run on edge devices has been insane to watch the last 2 weeks.
GPT4all - based off Llama & trained via ChatGPT 3.5 turbo API - now running on a TI-84 calculator. 🤯
We’re delighted to announce that
@Visa
has made a strategic investment in
@getVGS
!
We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Visa as VGS advances its mission to help companies securely use sensitive data!
Read more here:
🚨SVB-affected startups: I've compiled a list of resources that might help w bank & liquidity issues:
💰 Short-term loan options
🏦 Expedited bank account opening
⚖️ Legal docs for bridge loans
If you have more resources to add, please DM or email.
Request for startup: ChatGPT + Zendesk
train an LLM on a company's documentation, knowledge base & past support tickets; then turn it loose as a support chatbot.
questions it can't answer get triaged by humans and/or forwarded to PMs responsible for given feature/product
RIP my DMs 😂
Thank you for all the outreach! I’ll try to get back to everyone; I just ask for a little patience as I work through my avalanche of DMs (a very good problem to have!)
And please keep sending interesting companies & entrepreneurs my way. 🙏 ❤️
Speaking of fees, they claim low interest rates, but fine print shows “13.24% to 24.24% based on creditworthiness”, which is a big range & also standard for credit cards. Plus, you do pay more for missed payments (again, typical industry terms).
Pushing cash rewards to Apple Cash card w/in Apple wallet is a clever move to spur peer-to-peer payments (think Venmo-killer) & keep $$$ inside Apple ecosystem.
Apple’s cost of funds is near zero if Apple Cash gets recycled to iTunes or P2P (vs card fees today).
I had a blast chatting with
@APompliano
about AI, venture investing, crypto and what we look for in startups at
@M12vc
Pomp asks thoughtful questions, and I hope you enjoy the conversation! As always, my DMs are open for founders in fintech, B2B SaaS and AI 🚀
Microsoft’s VC arm is one of the best corporate venture capital firms on the planet.
I sat down with
@peter
to talk about artificial intelligence, OpenAI, bitcoin, software, and where he is investing capital now.
Listen:
Big announcement from Facebook on the launch of a new cryptocurrency & blockchain, Libra, with some giant brand-name partners.
The payments nerd in me is intrigued, but some big unanswered questions remain. (a thread) 🤔♎️
1/
A note on usability: Apple touts no card number on the physical card! No CVV! Security! Privacy! Yay!
Ok... but what happens when I want to pay somewhere w/o Apple Pay or Safari? Do I have to open Apple Wallet and key enter everything? Sounds like a PITA.
One thing to add: the death of $V and $MA is typically grossly exaggerated, but Apple Card could become a big threat if Apple Cash gains traction & keeps funds w/in ecosystem and/or acts as a bridge to banking directly w/ Goldman, cutting networks out of txns when possible.
Big winners in the traditional payments world here are Goldman Sachs (new entrant in consumer cards!) and MasterCard.
I have no special insight into how MC beat out Visa, but I have a hunch they were willing to do stuff V wouldn’t (new rules or backing up the 💰 truck :-).
.
@mint
and other PFM (personal financial mgmt) apps are having a bad day today with the promise of auto-classification of Apple Card transactions.
Showing merchant locations on a map in transaction history is a nice touch, but
@Square
did it first.
📣 🗣 Some personal news…
1/ This is overdue, as the last several months have been quite busy & I’m not much of a self-promoter to begin with, but I was recently called out (ahem,
@mengxilu
!) for my stealth profile update, so I figured it’s time to share with a wider audience…
Rewards - 2% cash back is good (not great), and only comes when you use Apple Pay. Clearly designed to drive usage/customer demand for NFC.
3% back on Apple purchases is nice, but it’s far from best in class.
Everything else gets you 1% cash back, which is meh.
Turns out the popular sound bite that 40% of Americans can't afford a surprise $400 emergency expense is wrong.
It's closer to 15%, not 40%. Still not great, but nowhere near as dire as we've been led to believe.
Google domains is a fantastic product, so of course Alphabet is killing it off, like they do for nearly every elegant product they own. 🤦♂️
So much broken user trust over the years 😞
People may forget that SF had a public defender as DA not long ago: Terence Hallinan. He was an unmitigated disaster & eventually had his law license suspended.
Thoughts & prayers to all the future victims of crime in SF, because that's about all the help you'll get going fwd.
All in all, Apple Card is a cool development in the payments world, and the impact on Apple Cash will be especially interesting to watch (P2P payments & Apple Pay activation).
Great read on why SF has fared better than any other big city in the US on COVID-19 deaths.
In short, trust in science, lots of mask wearing, good city & health leadership, and world-class hospitals have kept us safe(r).
Still amazes me that Square bought Tidal to merge creator economy & fintech, yet Square and Twitter share a CEO & co-founder, but apparently no one has thought to merge the two, or at least embed fintech deeper into Twitter?
So much value left on the table (by Twitter).
Rare miss by Harry on the Fast / Domm interview. I was hoping for some introspection; instead we got a bunch of softballs & deflection from Domm.
Goal
#1
is don't run out of money. Domm danced around the Q & implicated the board. No follow-up from Harry. Everyone loses 👎
@matthew_d_green
Doing 60K transactions a second, having processing connections to nearly every bank in the world, & offering the same brand experience & consumer protections in Manhattan as in a remote 3rd world village is certainly a non-trivial accomplishment.
I’m headed to
#Money2020
next week for the first time in a couple years! Looking forward to catching up with folks old & new.
If you’re building in fintech, let’s chat! DMs are open.
PSA: when pitching investors, it's in your own best interest to explain, up front, in simple language, what your company does.
Flowery marketing copy or gauzy vision statements don't make you sound sophisticated; they mostly frustrate & confuse the uninitiated.
First off, to appease the fanboys, this is a pretty good offering from Apple. Some genuinely novel features, wrapped in the typical Apple sexiness/walled garden.
But... it’s far from revolutionary.