In this episode of Fintech@Haas, Andrea Chang and Yuhsin Cheng had a discussion with 3 crypto startup founders. The first speaker after the host is Bette Chen, co-founder of Acala. Next, we have Bernado Magnani, co-founder of Lastbit, which is a startup in Ycombinator Winter 2021 batch. Last but not least, we have Ashley Brooke Tayler, co-founder ReSource Network.We touch on their projects and their startup journey.

We also take about how crypto can complement the fintech/finance industry. Finally, we also touch on stablecoin and its applications.

In the last episode of Fintech@Haas in 2020, I chat with Mark Fiorentino, Principal at Index Ventures.

Index is a multi-stage VC firm based in London and San Francisco and their list of fintech investments is huge and includes; Robinhood, Transerwise, Plaid, Revolut, Metromile, Privacy, Revenue Cat, Nova Credit, Prodigy and Fast.

We touch on Index's structure and how it's designed to put the founder's experience first (something he mentions multiple times), Mark's personal and professional journey into fintech and his recent investment in Revenue Cat.

Mark talks about areas of fintech he is interested in which include cross border B2B payments, AR/AP tools and solutions for Finance teams.

It includes a shout out to one of his favourite newsletters Fintech Today by Ian Kar and Julie VerHage and to Harry Stebbing's podcast.

Check out my fintech newsletter here!

In the latest episode of Fintech@Haas, I chat with Dov Marmor, COO of North America for Railsbank where they have just launched their Credit-Card-as-a-Service.

Railsbank enables any business to prototype, build and scale their own financial services products. They are riding the wave of embedded finance and enabling innovative brnads to solve unique problems for their customers.

We touch on the history of Railsbank and the challenges in launching a global banking platform and his approach to culture.

Since we spoke Railsbank successfully raised $37m in funding to grow their business.

In this episode of Fintech@Haas, I chat with Nicolas El Baze, General Partner at Partech Partners. Partech is a global, multi-stage VC firm led by former entrepreneurs.

Nicolas shares challenges of investing globally under Covid restrictions, what he looks for in an investment and why he is excited about LendTable, his most recent investment that he couldn't name at the time.

His mantra of saying no quickly and kindly stands in contrast to some entrepreneurs experience with the VC industry and should be more widely adopted.

He also talks about the differences in fintech opportunities globally and likens it to Maslow's hierarchy of needs which was super interesting.

In this episode of Fintech@Haas, I chat with Jim Brusstar, co-founder of Treasury Prime about his what he has learnt from his journey from Standard Treasury, to YC to Treasury Prime.

We touch on the vision for a modern banking system, the difficulties of Covid, good APIs vs bad APIs and the challenges of fintech which is especially relevant with the recent issues at Beam Financial.

In this next episode, I sit down with Lourdes Amayo who works in Growth Strategy at Aura Financial.

Aura provides affordable, credit-building loans to working families in America. From $300 to $4,000 their loans are simple and transparent with affordable payments tied to borrowers paycheck cycles.

Aura's customers are some of the worst hit by Covid and Lourdes explains what Aura is doing to help and how it plans to continue to support its borrowers in the future!

Fintech@Haas sits down with Betsy McCormick,Head of Customer Success at Nova Credit. Nova Credit is building a global credit bureau to provide underserved individuals with a credit profile in the US.

We touch on Covid and immigration challenges currently, challenges of leading a B2B2C Customer success team and why is there not already a global credit score provider?

An awesome conversation with another Berkeley Haas MBA Class 2015!

Fintech@Haas sits down with Moses Lo, co-founder of Xendit a Indonesian digital fintech infrastructure company (think Stripe+Plaid)

We touch on recent challenges of Covid, his YC and fundraising journey and his take on culture. AND his intriguing recruitment strategy!

An phenomenal guy and entrepreneur who ended his MBA with offers from Google, Amazon, Square and YC.

A couple of my favourite quotes;

• No one was as good as what we wanted, so we built it ourselves
• Whenever we don't like something about our company culture, the first we do is look in the mirror and say, what are WE doing wrong?
• How do I spend the next investor dollar?
• Build something people want
• What do you know that everyone else thinks is false, but is actually true?

For this episode of Fintech@Haas I chatted to Viram Shah, a Berkeley Haas alum from MBA Class 2019 and co-founder of Vested.

Vested's mission is to bring US equities to India.

We discuss his entrepreneurial family upbringing, his fondest Haas memories and the problem Vested is trying to solve.

For the second episode of Fintech@Haas, I chat with Matt Austin of Finix, a payments infrastructure company.

They recently extended their Series B, adding Lightspeed Venture Partners and American Express as investors.

We take a deep dive into the payments ecosystem (AKA the Payments Layer Cake) and learn more about Matt’s background and role as Chief of Staff.

Lots of awesome insights for people in the fintech space!

For the inaugural episode of Fintech@Haas, we are joined by Stephen Deng, Haas Class 2015. Stephen is a co-founder of DFS Labs, which invests and supports early-stage founders in Africa. Stephen talks about his time at Haas, how he became involved in fintech during his time at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the state of fintech in Africa.

Music credits to Joseph Mcdade