Hey friends -
Lots to announce! A new podcast, a new brand, and a new website all in one week!
Funders & Founders is Live!
The first three launch episodes for Funders & Founders are live!
Funders & Founders is a podcast conversation series with leading startups and investors on what it takes to build and scale from the earliest days. Roland Mansilla (Safely Finance), Joe Hasselmann (Invicta Growth), and Michael Dowling (Jewel, Mode Eleven) joined for the first three episodes to discuss building a fintech startup, a venture capital firm, and two banks.
I personally learned a lot in the conversations and I'm sure you will too. Key themes include:
The central role that trust plays in customer relationships with Roland
Experimenting like a startup while staying focused on core competencies with Joe
Just listen to Michael talk about Mode Eleven. It's a totally new vision for banking.
At the end of the day, how have banks have evolved? A lot of the evolution is not by regulations, not by money management, not even the technology used to record money. None of that has really been a change at banks. What has been changing are the channels of interaction.
So leading all the way up until the eighties and nineties, it was the branch. The branch was your interface to the bank. Then ATM's kind of came into play. Then debit card. And online banking and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Our interface for Mode Eleven is APIs. That's it, plain and simple. We provide our fintechs easy APIs to create financial services. We take care of the operational pieces and the compliance pieces. Let the innovators do what they're really good at.
There's so much more in each episode, I highly encourage you to listen.
Hear more from Michael, Joe, and Roland on:
And please - share, follow, and review. It really does make a big difference.
More conversations on Funders & Founders every week!
Fat Tailed Thoughts Becomes Fintech & Finance
A new brand and even more new content.
The weekly letter (this one) will be called Fintech & Finance. Same great content with a shiny new brand and logo.
When I launched this almost a year ago (!), I covered a much wider breadth of topics. The first letters were about bundling & unbundling business models, how the internet actually works, and how to prevent windows from continuing to kill 600 million birds per year. I've since narrowed the focus to fintech and finance. The new brand is a better reflection of the direction it’s taken. The letter content remains the same.
Fat Tailed Thoughts is returning to its roots with a broader range of topics. Steven Dickens and I are expanding our weekly podcast to uncover innovation before it goes mainstream - niche markets, outlaw finance, frontiers of capital, and more.
We're launching a short, more focused letter alongside it. Just the key takeaways so you know enough to be dangerous and to whet your appetite for the podcast. I'm excited about the upcoming content Steven and I have in store for Fat Tailed Thoughts.
All The Content, One Home: FintechandFinance.co
Everything now has one home: FintechandFinance.co.
There you'll find every letter, every podcast, and every conversation from Fintech & Finance, Funders & Founders, and Fat Tailed Thoughts. Past, present, and future.
Funders & Founders now comes with research guides so you can quickly get up to speed on new startups and transcripts so you can easily find that awesome quote. Look out for more content enhancement in the weeks to come.
All of this will continue to come to you weekly, the letters and the podcasts. If you already receiving this letter in your inbox - you're set. For everyone else, (welcome!) click below to subscribe.
Thank You 🙏
To you, my readers and listeners - thank you! The new content, the new brand - it all comes from conversations with you. I'm so grateful to have a such wonderful community of subscribers.
There's only one way to wrap up a big week of announcements - a cocktail.
Your Weekly Cocktail
An easy-to-make, make-ahead summertime favorite.
Strawberry Daiquiri
1.5oz Aged White Rum
1.0oz Lime Juice
8 Frozen Strawberries
1 cup Ice
Throw it all in a blender. Blend at high speed until smooth consistency. Pour into a hurricane or margarita glass and enjoy.
Full disclosure: I keep a jar of strawberry daiquiris in my freezer year-round. They'll keep just about forever. It's as wonderful a treat in the depths of winter as it is when it finally gets warm. The proportions here aren't precise and you can swap fresh strawberries for frozen or reduce the lime juice to taste. If the texture isn't quite where you want it, play around with the amount of ice. The worst that can happen is you end up with a strawberry-rum slushy. It's a great problem to have. Especially for large groups of guests, this is a great make-ahead batch cocktail. Freeze it until people arrive and toss it back in the blender before serving to get the consistency back to smooth.
This is my first daiquiri of the summer. It most certainly won't be my last.
Cheers,
Jared
Big news Jared, congrats!