finally, someone who can articulate my G2M strategy!

Alex Jones was ahead of his time.

New Feature - 'Intelligence Search' for banking, available in app and via APIs this month. #fintech #aibanking #banking

No doubt, this will begin to push the banking market forward. cnbc.com/2025/01/28/elon-mus…

🚨 Episode 1 of the Hyperflo Podcast is LIVE! 🚨 Dive deep into the AI revolution with me! 💥 We're exploring how AI is reshaping everything in business, from workflows to how we even organize teams. 🧠 In my first episode, the legendary @sytaylor & I dissect the wild world of fintech. 💸 AI is transforming finance – are you ready? 🤖 Listen now & let's talk AI! 👇 youtube.com/watch?v=kG9FjQf9… #AI #Fintech #Podcast #Innovation #FutureOfWork

Peter Thiel on pivoting and PayPal’s early failure “When we started PayPal, the initial product was an infrared-beaming device on Palm Pilots for sending money. It was voted one of the 10 worst business ideas in 1999. And 1999 was a year when there were many bad ideas in technology… But the team was good… It’s not like you only get one chance. You get many chances so long as you keep trying. If you get hung up on failure, and if you think you don’t have another chance, that’s when you really don’t.” One lesser-known fact about the PayPal pivot is that the idea didn’t come from the cofounders, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. It came from David Sacks who was fresh out of Stanford Law School and a one year stint at McKinsey. Sacks was the one who finally persuaded a reluctant Levchin that beaming money between Palm Pilots was a bad idea. Instead, he argued, they should focus on sending money via email. A talented team and getting multiple shots on goal turned out to be the difference between startup failure and a $1.5 billion exit to eBay. Video source: @CBSNews (2012)

AI: Stripe launches AI agent payment processing open.substack.com/pub/lex/p/… @stripe really getting some agentic workflows going @finblueprint

My new favourite and scariest #UAP / #UFO theory is that the #Aliens have told Governments that they 👽cannot disclose their existence for fear of reprisal.

The heliosphere is the outermost layer of the Solar System and protects the planets from powerful cosmic events like supernovae. This artist’s visualization shows its possible shape [📹 Star Walk]

Why do I only see you in Vegas. @sytaylor

Space based solar farm by 2040? How’s the roadmap looking? Starship should get us under the $200 per kg mass to orbit?

Bring it on

Starting the conference season off with an #AI panel @CES year. My first one after almost a decade in the game. Any #fintech people been before? @sytaylor @sammaule

As we head into 2024, here are some of our favorite podcasts we did to end the year on the Fintech Blueprint: Advancing Bitcoin with Lightning, Inscriptions, and L2s, with @Blockstream's Chief Product Officer Jeff Boortz How @animocabrands built an empire at the intersection of Gaming and Finance, with Animoca Brands Chairman @ysiu Can open banking power AI-based finance?, with Bud CEO @hyper_ed Bringing @MetaMask to the next billion users, with Agoric CEO Dean Tribble and MetaMask Co-Founder @danfinlay Listen on your favorite podcast player or subscribe here: lex.substack.com/podcast I hope you a have a wonderful end to the year and am excited for 2024!

Great Canadian trip

I am hearing rumors that the CFPB open banking rules (Dodd-Frank 1033) are dropping tomorrow. We are going to have a Twitter Spaces session with a group of experts to discuss once this drops. Stay tuned.

With many 🧩 dropping recently, a more complete picture is emerging of LLMs not as a chatbot, but the kernel process of a new Operating System. E.g. today it orchestrates: - Input & Output across modalities (text, audio, vision) - Code interpreter, ability to write & run programs - Browser / internet access - Embeddings database for files and internal memory storage & retrieval A lot of computing concepts carry over. Currently we have single-threaded execution running at ~10Hz (tok/s) and enjoy looking at the assembly-level execution traces stream by. Concepts from computer security carry over, with attacks, defenses and emerging vulnerabilities. I also like the nearest neighbor analogy of "Operating System" because the industry is starting to shape up similar: Windows, OS X, and Linux <-> GPT, PaLM, Claude, and Llama/Mistral(?:)). An OS comes with default apps but has an app store. Most apps can be adapted to multiple platforms. TLDR looking at LLMs as chatbots is the same as looking at early computers as calculators. We're seeing an emergence of a whole new computing paradigm, and it is very early.

Bud.ai is here. This is the realization of the type of financial intelligence we imagined in 2015. Hyped!

See Y'all there

Yesterday was fun. Maybe I’ll do stage dives more often.