AI transcript
0:00:10 tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed
0:00:15 at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see
0:00:21 A16Z.com/disclosures. Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I’m Lauren Murrow, and today
0:00:26 we’re talking about when fintech meets social. It’s a trend that’s evident on both ends
0:00:30 of the spectrum, whether that’s people divulging their crushing levels of debt on Instagram
0:00:35 and Twitter or bragging about their credit scores and stock trades. In this hallway-style
0:00:39 conversation with fintech general partner Anish Acharya and Darcy Kulikin, a partner on the
0:00:46 consumer tech team, we discuss why this holy grail of social plus fintech is both so challenging
0:00:50 and potentially so rewarding. We’ll cover which products and companies are taking advantage
0:00:55 of it, how it’s being driven by various subcultures online, and why this shift is happening now,
0:00:59 which is where this conversation begins. The first voice you’ll hear is Anish, followed
0:01:02 by Darcy. So the fact that people are actually talking
0:01:07 publicly about their debt is a new behavior. In the past, spending was public, but debt
0:01:12 was private. And for the first time, debt is starting to become a public conversation.
0:01:17 What’s new is that this generation is living in a completely different socioeconomic context.
0:01:21 That’s not flighty millennials and zoomers or whatever. That’s a completely different
0:01:25 financial world that they’re growing up in, and that’s driving a different set of conversations.
0:01:29 You see certain categories that people are now talking about that they didn’t talk about
0:01:33 before. Salary is something that a certain generation is much more comfortable talking
0:01:38 about. Student debt is a category that people are much more comfortable talking about. Trading
0:01:42 is a category that people are much more comfortable talking about. Across the spectrum, you see
0:01:48 sharing on social of financial stuff going up. You see it on Twitter, you see it on Facebook,
0:01:51 you see it in blogs. There’s a bunch of pockets.
0:01:57 Why do you think this shift is happening? I think it’s driven by a few factors. One
0:02:02 is generational. Every generation’s relationship with sharing and every generation’s relationship
0:02:06 with money is different. So what boomers did versus what Gen X did versus what millennials
0:02:11 do versus what Gen Z does is different. And I think you see this macro trend around increasing
0:02:15 sharing. And that’s driven by historical changes. That’s driven by the financial crisis.
0:02:20 Exactly. They have to take nontraditional paths to achieve financial progress and dreams.
0:02:25 For a long, long time, buying a home was not only the American dream, but something you
0:02:29 achieved through the traditional financial system. So everyone had a mortgage. Today
0:02:33 mortgages are less accessible than they’ve ever been. Will you talk to your peer set
0:02:37 about how am I ever going to buy a home? And that’s really the catalyst behind many of
0:02:39 these things. And I think you see that also with the massive
0:02:44 increase in student debt over the last 10, 15 years. It’s reaching unsustainable levels
0:02:48 and that’s forcing a conversation. And then that breaks down the stigma about talking
0:02:51 about student debt. And then once you break the stigma, then it’s like, hold on and everything
0:02:55 comes flooding to the forefront. We’ve talked about how money is inherently
0:03:01 private. Do you not think that that is becoming less so? There’s a generational piece of it.
0:03:05 Then yes, we’re sharing more of our lives in general. And then there’s a political angle
0:03:09 to it, this idea of radical transparency to affect change. So that’s why we’re posting
0:03:13 more about student debt, about medical debt, about our salaries.
0:03:19 Usually there is a long-term trend line towards sharing more rather than sharing less. But
0:03:24 you see it happening at the category level and to a certain extent at the subculture
0:03:28 level. So take student debt as one category. When people start talking about it, then everybody
0:03:34 feels empowered to talk about it. And I think you need catalysts for walls to come down around
0:03:38 certain categories like the student debt crisis, a financial crisis. There’s a lot of external
0:03:42 events that have led to some of these things come down, but it’s happening inch by inch
0:03:46 and category by category. And the question is, what pieces are going mainstream?
0:03:52 I think the hacker mindset has pushed outside of software and into finance. There is always
0:03:57 a small number of people who are excited about hacking their money, but now that’s becoming
0:04:02 a more mainstream concept. So the idea of being someone who arbitrages rewards across
0:04:07 credit cards used to be a pretty niche edge thing. And now more and more people are doing
0:04:10 it to the point where a lot of card companies are having to pull rewards back because there’s
0:04:14 a points guy and a million other sites that tells you how to actually hack the system.
0:04:19 And credit scores are very similar. It’s not a destiny. It’s a game, or it’s at least closer
0:04:23 to a game than a destiny. And more people are talking about the ways that you play it.
0:04:28 When I say it’s a game, I say that in a hopeful way, but not in a dismissive way in terms of
0:04:29 the importance of it.
0:04:32 It also goes to what are the things people like to do on social? And three of the core
0:04:37 functions are bragging, complaining, and rubbernecking. And I just think you’ve seen where social and
0:04:42 finance intersect, kind of coalescing around those three use cases as well.
0:04:45 At the end of the day, social and finance, a lot of it is just content, and it’s content
0:04:49 that’s anchored around some financial transaction, but it’s still just content. And so the usual
0:04:53 rules of social apply. Another way to think about it is, when you’re building something
0:04:58 in social plus finance, you have an interaction layer, and you have a transaction layer. And
0:05:02 the interaction layer is built around the emotional and cognitive pieces. And that is
0:05:06 content creation, that is messaging, that is all these social things that we see pop
0:05:11 up that appeal to these cognitive and emotional levers. And then you have a transactional
0:05:15 layer, which is whatever your actual financial transaction is. And that’s generally much
0:05:21 more of a functional use case. The magic in social plus finance happens when the transactional
0:05:25 piece and the interactive piece are mutually reinforcing, and that’s where the flywheel
0:05:29 on social plus finance really starts to spin aggressively.
0:05:33 Can you give me some examples of particular products in which you’ve seen this magic happen?
0:05:38 The easiest example is probably Venmo back in the day, where you had messaging apps,
0:05:42 money transfer apps like PayPal existed, and Chat existed, but the idea that you could
0:05:46 attach your transaction to an emoji just made the transaction easier, it made the emoji
0:05:51 more fun, it made the whole thing more self-reinforcing. It’s a really challenging problem to be able
0:05:53 to do that, but when you do do it, it’s magic.
0:05:58 I actually think that those products are fascinating. I still like to scroll through the global
0:06:03 feed on Venmo, which now is capped at the last 50 transactions, but it’s just so fascinating
0:06:07 to see all of these people all over the country sending each other money. There’s something
0:06:13 that is just vicariously thrilling about it, and because money does touch all of us, and
0:06:17 it’s so private, and the products that can start to invert that, I think they just touch
0:06:21 a nerve in an interesting way. And by the way, it doesn’t have to only be online. So there’s
0:06:27 a couple of interesting offline examples, SoFi, which is really in the business of refinancing
0:06:34 mispriced student debt, built this whole community of Henry’s, high earning, not rich yet, did
0:06:40 a ton of parties and events, and made it feel special to be a SoFi member, and really they
0:06:45 were a lender. So I think they’ve actually, at least in the early days, had a lot of success
0:06:51 combining the two. I imagine it’s less successful as Capital One is now opening coffee shops
0:06:56 where you can hang out and get coffee and do your banking, I guess, and it’s easy to
0:07:00 dismiss that as clumsy, but I do think that they’re trying to touch the same nerve.
0:07:06 There’s also this long legacy of companies starting out at the nexus of social and fintech,
0:07:10 and then eventually moving one way or the other generally towards the fintech transactional
0:07:14 layer. So a lot of people who can build either features or community in the early days and
0:07:19 really use it as a way to bootstrap their product, but then over time it migrates more
0:07:23 towards a transactional fintech product rather than a truly social product as well.
0:07:24 What are some of those examples?
0:07:28 SoFi is a great example. It’s functionally a lender, which is not a multiplayer social
0:07:31 game, but they were able to build this early community, which is able to get them a lot
0:07:35 of traction. You look at Wealthfront. Before it transitioned into Wealthfront, I think it
0:07:40 started as Ka-ching, which was a social fintech product. If you look Robinhood originally,
0:07:45 it was a much more social product, then became a much more transactional product. Prosper
0:07:48 started as a much more social product, and then became more of a peer-to-peer lending
0:07:53 platform. A lot of these things start social and are able to bootstrap in their early days
0:07:57 off of some of those networks. Then you end up at a decision point where you try to thread
0:08:01 this needle and continue down the social plus finance angle, or do you move into a more
0:08:05 single-player fintech product? I think a lot of the more successful fintech companies have
0:08:07 started social, but then eventually transitioned.
0:08:09 Why are they making that transition?
0:08:10 It’s hard.
0:08:14 Well, let’s talk about it. What is so hard about social fintech?
0:08:19 The most direct manifestation of social plus fintech is we have messaging, plus we have
0:08:24 payments or some other shared accounts, shared ledgers, some other joint accounts, et cetera.
0:08:29 I think that is very difficult for a number of reasons because money is so private. People
0:08:35 are less likely to send invites to each other and bootstrap a social product in the way
0:08:39 that you would bootstrap other social products.
0:08:43 I think there’s a lot of other examples, though, where the experience may not directly represent
0:08:48 social plus money, but it very much plays to that. I think the example Darcy brought up
0:08:52 is great, which is Robinhood. There’s been a ton of talk about how Robinhood is doomed
0:08:57 because others have cut fees and adopted their business model, but in truth, Robinhood is
0:09:02 a game, and it’s a game that people like to talk about. It works because it feels like
0:09:06 adulting when you actually have a stock portfolio, not because active trading is something that’s
0:09:12 smart for almost anyone to do. I really see it as addressing a different consumer need
0:09:17 than Schwab is addressing, and it’s really not threatened as much by players like Schwab.
0:09:23 That’s an example where the fintech product is addressing a social consumer need, but
0:09:27 at first blush, it may not appear to be the combination of social plus money.
0:09:32 Some of these products are really tapping into the trend for its gamification. Do you
0:09:36 think more products will go that route and design around that impulse that we have?
0:09:41 I think the thing you will likely see is that these social plus fintech products will actually
0:09:45 come much more from the consumer side of things. I think there’s some things like Robinhood
0:09:50 where you are able to build both fintech and community, and it comes from the fintech side
0:09:53 of things. Another encouraging angle to it is the things that are coming from the social
0:09:57 side. Whether it’s a bunch of the chat apps that now have wallets and payments installed
0:10:00 in them, or even something as weird as Fortnite, which is technically a game, but they have
0:10:05 V-Bucks, and they have these economies built into them. It’ll be fascinating to see what
0:10:09 happens with those types of products, because that could be the actual place where we see
0:10:10 social plus money take off.
0:10:14 I do think, by the way, there’s been a bunch of past attempts, which maybe seem naive at
0:10:19 the time, but now just seemed like bad timing. Blippi is a famous example of this where it
0:10:23 tweeted everything that you bought, linked your credit card, and every time you swiped
0:10:29 it, it tweeted. Okay, there’s obvious reasons why that might not be a good idea, and yet
0:10:30 I think the fact that…
0:10:31 It’s too soon.
0:10:34 Hey, look, the fact that Dave Ramsey exists, and people are talking about debt and spending,
0:10:39 and there’s the nugget of truth in all these things. As Mark says, it’s rarely that the
0:10:42 idea is wrong. It’s usually that the timing is.
0:10:46 One of the interesting things about this category of company is that if you just take a step
0:10:50 back and you’re looking for a broader consumer trends, you can often look at little emergent
0:10:53 behaviors that are happening somewhere on the internet and try to figure out, is that
0:10:56 going to actually go into the mainstream at some point?
0:11:00 One of the interesting and challenging things about social plus fintech is that so much
0:11:04 of it is driven by norms, so much of it is driven around what’s taboo and what’s stigmatized,
0:11:09 and that actually exists at the subculture level. You can grow up in the same town at
0:11:13 the same age, and if you grow up on one side of town, your norms around money and sharing
0:11:16 are very different from the person on the other side of town.
0:11:20 That leads to a lot of very distinct subcultures within different pockets on the internet.
0:11:24 One of the more entertaining one is All Street Bets on Reddit, where people are posting some
0:11:29 mix of fake and real trades and explosions and everything like that, and so then you
0:11:32 can look at these things and say, “Oh, here’s this crazy emergent behavior that’s happening.
0:11:36 I think this is going to go mainstream.” In some cases, it will, or in some cases, it
0:11:40 is just part of that subculture because the norms and taboos will never translate into
0:11:46 the mainstream, but when those stigmas fall, then everything happens and everybody runs
0:11:48 for the entrance at that point.
0:11:52 Yeah, it is interesting. If you think about crypto, so this crypto as a computing platform,
0:11:57 which is how we talk about it a lot internally, but then there’s also the sort of socio-political,
0:12:02 perhaps anarchist thread of crypto. I think the historical example of that was mostly
0:12:03 gold, though at the end is taboo.
0:12:07 Nobody was screencapping their Boolean collection and sharing it on Twitter.
0:12:13 Well, depending on what Facebook group you’re in. I think, again, there is a past precedent,
0:12:17 but you’re right. There’s a functional aspect of hedging against things that may go badly
0:12:22 wrong in the future, and then there’s a cognitive, emotional, socio-political to your point, Lauren.
0:12:25 Crypto is fascinating because it’s a subculture that has a totally different relationship with
0:12:30 transparency and anonymity and all of these different dimensions and just changing the
0:12:36 form factor of value from a dollar to some sort of token has freed an entire segment
0:12:39 of people to talk about it and have a different relationship with it. It’s one of the most
0:12:45 entertaining parts of social is what’s happening in crypto. Again, the concept of crypto versus
0:12:49 concept of money created a psychological shift in some people that then made the norms around
0:12:50 it much different.
0:12:54 So, you’re saying there are these subgroups, little niche categories, but it’s difficult
0:12:57 to build a business around them until they reach that tipping point?
0:13:01 I actually think you can build great businesses around some of these subcultures. There’s
0:13:04 a lot of these quote-unquote niche, but they can be massive niches, right? Like Wall Street
0:13:06 Bets has like 800,000 members.
0:13:10 People always want to talk about how they’re making money. It’s having debt that’s always
0:13:15 been private. So, the hardest problem in terms of social and money is having people talk
0:13:20 about their debt, which is why people don’t want to have a relationship with their lender
0:13:23 or talk in too much detail about certainly their credit card debt because they feel bad
0:13:28 about it. They feel like it reflects poorly on them. Now, it’s just checking Insta right
0:13:35 now and there’s 675,000 posts for #debtfreejourney. This has become a public conversation and a
0:13:39 lot of it is happening on Instagram and I think that’s the hardest problem, the hardest
0:13:43 segment to actually unlock. So, I actually think we’re pretty far ahead right now.
0:13:47 Well, and to your point, Wall Street Bets is not just about, “I made a bunch of money.
0:13:50 It’s also people posting, “Shit, I just lost a bunch of money.”
0:13:54 Though, the subtext is, “Look at all the swagger I’ve got. I can lose all this money and it’s
0:13:55 all good.”
0:13:56 Yeah.
0:13:57 Not always.
0:14:03 Fair. Where this gets a lot more interesting is looking beyond social media and social
0:14:08 networks and starting to talk about how this stuff drives an emergence that are products
0:14:12 and how products are designed. Lauren and I both talked about this, which is the concept
0:14:17 that as a product, you can create value in a functional way, which is, “Hey, my credit
0:14:23 score was X and now it’s X plus Y.” You can create value in a cognitive way, which is,
0:14:27 “Hey, I now better understand my credit score,” or you can create value in an emotional way,
0:14:32 which is, “I feel better about my credit score and my financial situation.” Historically,
0:14:36 most products have been designed with a complete focus on the functional and now we’re seeing
0:14:40 the next generation of not just fintech but consumer products think more about cognitive
0:14:41 and emotional.
0:14:46 There’s also more offline examples than we’re all typically aware of. So, one I learned
0:14:52 about over the last few years is called RASCAS, which is Rotating Savings and Credit Associations,
0:14:56 which are these offline communities that are managed in mostly immigrant communities managed
0:15:01 by an individual where everyone contributes, let’s say, $1,000 a month. And then each month,
0:15:06 if there are 10 members, one member receives $10,000. And typically, these are folks in
0:15:11 your community. You might meet them at church and it’s really hard to save $10,000. It’s
0:15:15 a lot easier to contribute $1,000 a month. And then when you receive the lump sum, there’s
0:15:20 always some big thing you want to do with the $10,000. There’s tons of examples of these
0:15:25 micro communities has not yet successfully been brought online. So, not everything is
0:15:29 sort of starting from zero when it comes to digital products.
0:15:33 And those ones are interesting because there’s a different iteration of those in every single
0:15:37 culture and every single country. And it is this robust offline behavior. And the question
0:15:42 is how do you bring it online and how do you bring it online in a way that is culturally
0:15:47 specific enough that it reflects the norms of that culture but also in a way that’s scalable?
0:15:52 So there’s the example of Rosca’s in a lot of communities all over the world. And then
0:15:57 I think if you look at the flip of that, what’s the extreme San Francisco version, it’s a
0:16:01 lot of people here do things like invest in restaurants. Why would you ever invest in
0:16:05 a restaurant? You’re probably not going to get your money back. There’s no liquidity.
0:16:09 At best, it’s sort of like cool to tell your friends maybe that you’re an investor there.
0:16:12 Maybe you skip a sort of reservation. It goes to emotional versus transactional.
0:16:13 Totally.
0:16:15 It’s not a transactional piece. It’s the emotion of the finance.
0:16:21 Exactly. But the proof point of actually investing in something versus just frequenting something
0:16:26 is very different. People want to participate. They want to express these preferences and
0:16:27 money is the strongest way to do so.
0:16:31 Well, and another example of something that’s inherently social. You’re investing in something
0:16:34 that then has a built-in social network in the investment.
0:16:38 There’s also this amazing trend around fractional ownership. So there’s a category of companies
0:16:44 that includes Rally Road and Otis and Mythic. They will take some asset, be it a classic
0:16:51 car, be it some culturally significant item, be it a magic card, be it a case of wine.
0:16:53 There’s a different version of all of this. And they will take that asset and they’ll
0:16:59 functionally securitize it. And then you, as a user, can purchase shares of that asset.
0:17:03 And then in some cases, depending on the kind of investment that you make, you get certain
0:17:07 levels of access or swag or other things that are associated with ownership.
0:17:13 So on the one hand, you actually have a piece of equity, a share in something that is theoretically
0:17:17 valuable because it’s actually a hard asset that has value. On the other side, you have
0:17:23 the status of owner within this piece that is of value in a more emotional sense, which
0:17:28 you’re investing in cultural pieces, which may or may not be a good financial investment
0:17:32 but from emotional cognitive side can be really, really rewarding. So I think that’s another
0:17:35 version where this idea of social plus fintech is taking off.
0:17:38 I love this example. You know, we’ve talked about this internally as perhaps a future
0:17:43 of museums and I think that vision is really interesting and it’s a much more emotional
0:17:44 than rational.
0:17:48 What’s the potential there? Are there areas where you see opportunity in some of these
0:17:50 niche groups?
0:17:54 I think social and finance is like the Holy Grail, right? The social version of most products
0:17:59 is the best version of most products. Engagement is higher, retention is higher, customer acquisition
0:18:03 costs go down. All these things that most consumer fintech companies struggle with are
0:18:07 solved by building the social product. It’s the extent that you can get something that
0:18:12 threads that needle between social and fintech. It’s amazing. It’s magical. It’s this incredible
0:18:16 thing that happens when it actually happens. It’s really hard to do, but when it does happen,
0:18:17 it’s phenomenal.
0:18:21 I think the biggest opportunity comes from finding the emergent behavior within niche
0:18:27 groups at the social level, at the community level, and then figuring out how fintech or
0:18:32 transactional layers into or on top of that. The saying is every company is eventually going
0:18:36 to become a fintech company, and I think that is probably the direction in which it goes
0:18:41 and which you have weird social behavior that has some ability to layer transaction inside
0:18:44 of it, and then that’s how social plus money takes off.
0:18:49 In my mind, the most direct way to start seeing this play out is just having more fintech products
0:18:54 address emotional needs as well as functional and cognitive needs. There’s some fintech products
0:19:00 like Joy, an app where you rate every transaction on how it made you feel. The goal of the game,
0:19:03 of course, is to only spend money on things that make you feel good, which is interesting.
0:19:07 I think that’s a product that’s completely designed around a set of emotional needs with
0:19:12 perhaps a set of functional outcomes as a happy side effect. I think there’s probably
0:19:15 a middle ground where a lot of products that are focused on helping you buy your first
0:19:21 home or reduce your debt or invest in stocks can actually start to design for these emotional
0:19:25 needs when it comes to money. That’s how we actually start to see this achieve scale.
0:19:29 Are there companies right now that you see making strides in that direction?
0:19:33 I think an example of a company that’s really gotten this right is Credit Karma, and granted
0:19:38 I was at Credit Karma. But if you look at the tone of the emails, if you look at the
0:19:44 ads that are on TV, if you look at the way the product is positioned, it plays as much
0:19:50 to curiosity and taking some of the heaviness out of credit. I think that’s been a really
0:19:55 successful strategy for them. I think this is a company that’s gotten it right when it
0:19:59 comes to how you talk to your customer about these otherwise really heavy things.
0:20:03 As people share more, it becomes less intimidating.
0:20:07 Or if you can see yourself relative to other people, that’s the other way that Credit Karma
0:20:11 works. It’s like, I know where I stand relative to other people, and maybe it makes me stressed
0:20:14 or maybe it makes me feel more comfortable, but at least there’s some level of transparency.
0:20:19 Right. There’s some freedom in that transparency that perhaps is driving customer acquisition.
0:20:24 That’s right. In terms of the products that have not worked, I think the product category
0:20:29 that hasn’t really seen success is personal financial management tools. There’s two reasons.
0:20:34 The first is that there’s a very small number of people who are super excited about budgeting
0:20:38 and trying every budgeting app, which is why when a lot of these products launch, they
0:20:42 get great growth in their first 18 to 24 months. You can get a couple of million users who
0:20:47 are really engaged. That’s not actually representative of the wider market where most people hate
0:20:51 budgeting. It’s not just because it’s a pain to keep a budget. It’s because it’s mostly
0:20:57 bad news. I look at a lot of these PFM and budgeting apps like calorie counting apps.
0:21:01 Just mostly makes you feel bad, and it’s easier to uninstall the app than it is to actually
0:21:05 stick with the budget or the diet. I think that’s a great example of a product category
0:21:10 that despite the fact that there’s real functional value there, it hasn’t taken off because it
0:21:14 didn’t address the emotional challenge that the consumer is facing.
0:21:19 I think another category that has not worked super well is ones that are designed to be
0:21:24 social but only transactional. I think there’s been this long history of people trying to
0:21:29 get people to be more public about what their portfolio is, and then other people can invest
0:21:35 based off of that portfolio, and it benefits the portfolio manager who’s sharing it. That’s
0:21:41 one where it is almost purely transactional relationship with purely financial incentives.
0:21:44 I think there’s been a lot of attempts at that. As far as I’m aware, none of them have
0:21:48 really taken off, but I think that’s another category where when you just stick within one
0:21:53 kind of bucket just within the transactional side, it’s really hard to layer social into
0:21:54 that.
0:21:58 So if we agree that social meets Vintec is really hard to do, but I’ve also heard you
0:22:03 both say it is the holy grail. Why is that? What makes it so powerful if we can get there?
0:22:07 I think first of all, if you just look at it, the most narrow lens is just from a core
0:22:13 business perspective. Stickiness, cross-out, acquisition, all of these things that are
0:22:18 super hard problems for most Vintec companies become dramatically easier if there’s a strong
0:22:24 social layer. So that’s the most narrow lens. And then I think the broadest lens is just
0:22:30 ending this dynamic where we’re alone together. Everyone’s in a dark room feeling bad about
0:22:34 their money with everyone else in that same dark room, and I think if you can turn the
0:22:40 light on, then all of a sudden, it is an opportunity to uplift everyone a little bit and normalize
0:22:44 the situation that folks are in. I think that with, especially we talked about both the
0:22:50 good side of Insta, but Insta is also a very public place to talk about your spending,
0:22:55 and I think that that drives a perverse set of expectations around what’s normal, and
0:22:56 we should try to change that.
0:23:00 Yes. There’s multiple levels to why social plus money is this holy grail. Another lens
0:23:07 is it broadens the solution space within which, as a founder, you can operate because now you’re
0:23:12 not just on the transactional level or you’re not just on the emotional and cognitive level,
0:23:17 you’re now across all three. If you actually have financial or social plus Vintec or whatever
0:23:23 it is, so you can now design things that have some combination of those three levers, which,
0:23:26 if you’re competing against a purely transactional thing or you’re competing against a purely
0:23:31 emotional thing, you now just have more factors that you can operate across. The flip side
0:23:37 to that is it’s combinatorially more complicated to do, but if you do do it, you’re in a class
0:23:38 of your own.
0:23:40 Thank you for joining us on the A16Z podcast.
0:23:41 Thanks, Lauren.
0:23:42 Thanks, Darcy.
0:23:43 Thanks, Anish.
0:23:43 Cheers.
0:23:53 [BLANK_AUDIO]
The last financial crisis prompted many consumers to reassess their banking expectations—none more so than millennials and Gen-Z-ers. While revealing one’s financial information was once considered taboo, now consumers are more apt than ever to openly discuss money and debt on online platforms. It’s a trend that’s evident on both ends of the spectrum, whether that’s people divulging their crushing levels of debt on Twitter and Instagram (#debtfreejourney), bragging about their credit scores, or bemoaning their latest stock trades. And the repercussions extend far beyond social media.
In this conversation with fintech general partner Anish Acharya (a former product manager at Credit Karma), consumer tech partner D’Arcy Coolican (a social+ fintech founder himself), and host Lauren Murrow, we discuss why the “holy grail” of social plus fintech is both so challenging and, potentially, so rewarding. We cover which products and companies are taking advantage of it (some in rather novel ways), how it’s being driven by various subcultures online, and why this shift is happening now.