Sometimes your portfolio becomes thematic by accident. You make a few early bets in a sector, some of them go well, and that pulls you toward the next opportunity, and the next. That’s what happened to us with financial services as one of our investment themes.
My original reason for investing in the category was simple - the products were terrible. Finance was clearly the largest category that hadn’t been consumerized yet & was a massive market where people were stuck using products they hated. Huge TAM, miserable NPS.
As an angel, I was one of the first investors and an early advisor at
@atlascardhq.
@patrickmro took product design as seriously as anyone I’d ever worked with, and he was applying that taste to building a new kind of consumer card product.
I was also lucky to get into the early rounds of
@mercury, where
@immad was just as thoughtful & bringing that same design rigor to startup banking.
We were seed investors in
@FlexSuperApp, one of the most underrated financial services companies out there and only getting better. They focus on small and medium-sized business owners, and
@zaidrmn has built an incredible product that Silicon Valley hasn’t fully appreciated yet.
More recently, we invested in
@ether_fi, which brought consumer-grade financial products to crypto and became the fastest-growing crypto neobank in the world. When all is said and done, I think
@MikeSilagadze will go down as one of the best crypto founders of his generation.
And we’ve been lucky to partner with
@ereborbank, who are building financial products for the innovation economy & serving deep tech across defense, manufacturing, robotics, and other industries they understand at a deep level.
I don’t think of myself as a fintech investor, and I never planned to go this deep on the category.
But one thing leads to another, and suddenly you’ve gone down a rabbit hole that turns into a career-long passion.
I still feel that way about financial services today, and I hope to keep backing founders building innovative products in the space for years to come.