🎧The Fintech OG Series: Amit Kumar and Sheel Mohnot

You know you’ve found true fintech OGs when your guests were almost roommates before “fintech” was even a buzzword. That’s exactly the case with today’s guests, Sheel Mohnot and Amit Kumar—two longtime friends and collaborators who’ve not only seen the fintech industry evolve over the last decade-plus, but have helped shape it.

In this episode, we dig into their early startup days—FeeFighters, CardSpring, and Twitter M&A tales—plus what it was like building before infrastructure existed, the bets they wish they’d made sooner, and why they believe fintech is still one of the most promising sectors to build in today.

We also get into:

• What Apple Pay did accomplish—and what it still hasn’t replaced
• Why a modern global Venmo still doesn’t exist
• What Sheel looks for in the next 10 years of fintech innovation
• And why Amit advises CS students to do their “master’s degree at Stripe”

Whether you’re a founder, investor, or just love hearing two friends go deep on the evolution of a category they’ve helped pioneer, this episode is packed with insights and reflections. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Hey guys, welcome back for episode number two of season three. I'm so excited for this one. You know you found true fintech OGs when your guests were almost roommates before fintech was even a buzzword. And that's exactly the case with today's guests. I have Shu Mano and Amit Kumar, two longtime friends and collaborators who've not only seen the fintech industry evolve over the last decade plus, but they've helped shape it and often helped shape it together. In this episode, we dug into their early startup days, Fee Fighters, Card Spring, and Twitter MA tales, plus what it looks like building before infrastructure existed and the bets they wish they'd made sooner. We got into everything about talking about Apple Pay and what that has accomplished, why modern Global Venmo still does not exist, uh, what SHEL looks for in the next 10 years of fintech innovation, and why a myth advises computer science majors to do their master's degree at Stripe. Uh, whether you're a founder, investor, or just love hearing two friends go deep on the evolution of a category that they've helped pioneer. This episode is packed with insights and reflections, and I'm so excited for you guys to tune in. Uh, go back and listen to the first episode that we did too with David Marcus and Dan Kimmerling. Lots of great info there on payments, stable coins, Bitcoin, what it's like being an entrepreneur, the highs and lows, et cetera. They both have so many great experiences. And then if you want to go even deeper on stable coins, I help out Commerce Ventures with their podcast, Commerce Conversations. And we just wrapped up a three-part series on stable coins, talking to folks from Bridge, Goodwin and Proctor, Moon Pay, and Conduit across the spectrum of things going on in that space. So definitely dive in if you want to take a deeper dive. Otherwise, let's dive into today's episode. And it was just telling me that you guys were almost roommates like 10 to 15 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Yeah, that is true.

SPEAKER_02 2:11

I think that's the first fintech OG pairing I've had where that was the case.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

It was the fintech world was a very small world, and so was San Francisco. And so if you worked in fintech or tech, you got connected and you were friends. And Sheila and I met through mutual friends back in Chicago when he was moving out to SF. It literally happened. Like we're almost at the moving in. And then of course things went a little bit different. But we've known each other forever.

SPEAKER_02 2:35

Where were you both working at that time?

SPEAKER_00 2:37

I was at Groupon. Yeah, he well, he was at Fee Fighters, and then Fee Fighters were in the world. Fee Fighters, Fee Fighters got acquired by Groupon. And then I was still at CardSpring. Card Spring was also like a small fintech business, and we sold it to Twitter in 2014 back when it was called Twitter. And I used to live in Hayes Valley and the Groupon office, I think, was a block from where I lived. And so I would just bump in on the street. The fintech world is super small. And so actually, when Cardspring was going out and talking to potential acquirers, Groupon was one of the groups that we actually spent a bunch of time with.

SPEAKER_02 3:06

Awesome. Okay. Well, thank you to Amit and Sheel for joining me today. I'm super excited to take off the second episode of our third season of the fintech OG series. Why don't you both give me just like a quick 60-second intro on what you're currently up to and we'll go from there?

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Great. I'm a partner at Excel. I lead seed series A investments at Excel. And one of the categories I look after is FinTech. And I'm very fortunate to have invested in some really interesting fintech businesses. Most of the good ones actually with Shield. So it's really good. And your point, it's a very small world.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

No wonder you guys have remained friends then. If it was leading you astray, that's when it'd be happening.

SPEAKER_00 3:42

My my friendship with Shield dates back a long time. We met in the year, I think, 2012, which is still super early days. I was a fintech entrepreneur. I started a company called Card Spring, which did card linked offers, and we sold the business to Twitter in 2014. And then at Twitter, I helped lead engineering for Twitter Commerce and built out buy now offers, donations, like a bunch of products of fintech products that Twitter was experimenting with. And now in the investing world with Shield, but very fortunate to have known him before either of us were investors.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

Yeah. Also, just in the world of fintech, it's forever ago. Like 2012, to the point of this podcast thing about OG, is at that time you kind of knew everyone in the world of fintech. There wasn't really anyone we didn't know or companies, like every company you'd heard about them or you met them somewhere. Even though I was living in Chicago, I like knew every FinTech entrevoir at that time. Now, even as an investor, it's just hard. I don't know them. Anyway, back to my background. I run a fund called Better Tomorrow Ventures, my partner Jake. Uh, we're a fintech focused fund investing at seed and leading rounds. As Emmet said, we're fortunate to work together on a few companies. Prior to starting BTV, I started another BC fund. Prior to that, I was uh investing a little bit of my own capital and was the founder of a couple companies.

SPEAKER_02 5:04

And you decided you're on the city.

SPEAKER_00 5:06

Just to give you context on 2012, Hard Spring started in 2010, which is the same year that Stripe founded. And the running joke was we started a slightly less successful API business. It could have been it could have been so much better and bigger. But to to the point of 2012, it was it's really an era ago from where we are today and the proliferation of founders and investors and really world-changing companies across so many different categories.

SPEAKER_02 5:31

That leads me to the next question, really. Well, was that your first foray into fintech, or had you done other things in fintech before starting Cardspring?

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Yeah, I would tell you the definition of fintech is so broad, and so it could be applied to anything. And under the right lens, the narrative of my previous startup could be a fintech business because payments is involved in almost any company. And some companies that are in the GovTech space are actually secretly payments businesses, and companies do a really good job of pretending they're in a different category when at the end, the core business models around payments and transactions. But Cardspring was like a true blue payments company, like a fintech company. It's the when you get that uh the fintech Bible as part of your welcome package joining the company, that's when you know that this is a real fintech company. And almost everybody at the company still is in fintech in some way or shape or form. Engineer at Chime, they're at a firm, they're at Stripe, and that tends to be a really good indicator of whether it was actually a fintech company.

SPEAKER_01 6:22

I'm not sure Fee Fighters actually. So Fee Fighters, Josh, our CTO, became CTO of Boom, the supersonic jet company. Sean is CEO of KIN, Helmut's insurance company that I'm fortunate to be an investor in. That's a fintech company. But Stella founded a company in the AI space, not fintech. But anyway, I think of my pre-T Fighters fintech background. My I say my fintech background starts on the nonprofit side. I was at Kiva making microloans in India. Kiva is a website where individuals can make loans to people in the developing world for the sake of alleviating poverty. And that's that was my first foray into fintech. And then I ended up working at BCG. And when I was there, I primarily worked on financial services, not a whole lot of tech, but a lot of sin. And then left to feed fighters.

SPEAKER_02 7:17

And what do you think the reasons are that you guys had stuck around in fintech? Like you obviously are both very smart, accomplished people. Why not try any other industry? What kept you around?

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Well, I mean, it's at some level I work at a generalist firm and I do invest in other categories. To the point I made earlier, fintech is just thread that's woven in every single startup. And so I think having expertise in payments and transactions and fintech, it just comes in handy no matter the category that you're investing in. It's, I know we call fintech like, hey, there's this world here and there's the non-fintech world, but the truth is that fintech is just this underlying platform that everything else sits on top of it. And hey, there's always going to be innovation there. And exciting entrepreneurs want to build companies in this category. And given the background and expertise both from Cardspring and Twitter, it just was a natural place to spend time once I got to Excel. And then to the point, like having that expertise, it's just such a helpful foundation as you look at any other kind of business.

SPEAKER_01 8:10

Sheo, what about you? I would say it started from like the background I had, which is really, I think Tamit's point, you can ignite everything and say anything is fintech for the most part. Which I did. And then, but I knew folks in the FinTech 1.0 era, including Amit. And then as I was thinking about if I wanted to focus on a particular area when I started investing full-time in 2016, I just thought about where the biggest opportunities were. And I thought about how difficult finances are for the average person. And I wanted to make that easier. And also, financial services are 20% of global GDP. It's a massive opportunity that is inherently digital. And I want to see that be more digital. And it's called Better Tomorrow because I think it builds a better tomorrow, like makes life better for people.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

And I will say, like for Shield and Better Tomorrow, man, expertise is so critical when you're supporting these businesses and verticalizing and specializing in fintech is it's critical to be successful in the field, or it's such a big asset and weapon for Shield. And his reputation with founders would explain that. I think it's also why you see certain partners at some of the generals' firms specialize in FinTech, because it's it is hard to just kind of dip in and out. Like you really do have to go deep and the nuances and how the markets are shifting. It's a bit of the battle I fight at Excel, but I think the strategy of verticalizing on something, which is to be honest, like there's only a few categories I would say are evergreen. Maybe like security is evergreen and payments in fintech is evergreen. It's always evolving and changing. And it's also very conducive as people are investing in Latam, they're investing in other markets. FinTech and payments is usually one of the very first things to like work in those categories, in those companies and in those countries. Yeah, this isn't a hypothetical. I mentor a lot of kids coming out of school. I run this mentorship program with the top 30 C CS students at Berkeley every year. I've been doing it for eight years. I have 250 kids. And I tell people to do your master's degree at Stripe, go do your master's degree at Robinhood. Like these are exceptional companies and the world-changing impact that they're having is like undeniable. They're just magnets for talent. And look, if you want to make a difference in climate change, if you want to make a difference in any of these categories, the tools and the training that Stripe, Robinhood, Affirm give you is as good as anything. And certainly if you go to Berkeley or any college campus, everybody wants to work on climate change, but they also went to college because they felt like they needed to go get prepared before they made that impact. And working at Stripe, my first job out of school was at Microsoft. And Microsoft is the do everything generic company at this point. And it was an amazing training ground for me. And I really learned how to be an engineer. I think, like, is the world shifting much more towards AI today? Is that the most important technology trend? I think absolutely it is. But the fintech companies have grown to such prominence because the impact is so significant. And you look at the volumes that a company like Stripe, you look at the number of consumers that a company like Robinhood is touching, like it's so impressive. And so it's, I think it's still a great place to go and learn.

SPEAKER_01 11:25

Yeah, for sure. I I think look, you should go where your heart takes you. But in terms of if you're looking for an area that still has a lot of opportunity for growth, I think certainly fintech is one of them. To my earlier point, like it still isn't as digital as it should be. And our lives will be more and more digital. There will continue to be opportunities for fintech. It's funny because like if you think about other categories that people invest in in their sector specific funds, they're actually a lot smaller than the opportunity for fintech. If you just think about it from a GDP perspective, macro lens financial services is 20% full of GDP. Like every like education is a much smaller slice.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

There aren't as many opportunities to build a big business there, but fintech is huge. Yeah, and very specifically about fintech, because you can make the same argument about healthcare. It's such a big part of GDP, but the technology adoption has been super slow. Whereas I think consumers are pushing the state of the art doorway. They're demanding better and better financial products. And so you see a firm and Afterpay and Apple Pay and all these different products like really take hold. The legacy folks are having to react to the robin hoods of the world. And that just hasn't happened in healthcare yet. Maybe this AI thing is really going to help, and there's a lot of talented people going after it. But like in fintech, it's really being led by the front of all these like emerging startups.

SPEAKER_02 12:44

Yeah, no, that's a really good point. It on that the same front, is there a certain area or certain, I should say plural, certain areas of fintech that you think would be the best for folks to dive into right now, whether it be more B2C focused, B2B, B2B to C, and then maybe even more specific than that.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

Look, I think all we invest in all those categories. I would say over the last few years, there's been there hasn't been much investment in consumer fintech companies. I think there are a bunch of reasons for that. There hasn't been a lot of investment in consumer period and fintech as one example of that. But I still think there are opportunities there. Part of it is it felt like a lot of low-hanging fruit was captured in the time period we were talking about, like in the early 2010s, you had the Chimes Robin Hoods and others of the world to get started. And they took a lot of low-hanging fruit, and those companies are doing super well. And it you have to find something truly unique now to go after it. And marketing to customers is a lot harder than it was back then. When people were just figuring out what to do on their mobile phone, there was a good opportunity to market to them. Now it's a lot harder because they already have a solution for most of the things they need. But we do invest in consumer. I think B2B to C are great. I think probably a lot of money has gone into enterprise over the last sort of five years or so. And those are both companies serving other large companies serving other fintech companies, infrastructure. And then there's also other than I invested in a company that sells to SMBs, and that also is a great category. So I'd say all the above.

SPEAKER_00 14:17

Yeah, I think there's still tremendous opportunity. I would tell you, look, like we're Sheel is amongst the most sophisticated consumers I know on the planet, and he has 19 credit cards and he uses every digital product. And so he's like on one side of the spectrum.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

But I would also need to just do an episode with Sheel, like, okay, personal financial advice. Yeah, yeah. Give people their tips, go.

SPEAKER_00 14:38

100%. But I think like largely a lot of modern financial products still haven't crossed the chasm. Most people are not trading through Robinhood. Of course, young people are on Chime as a Well, one fat one fascinating thing on this though.

SPEAKER_02 14:51

So I went to Michigan State University and I spoke to the seniors in the fintech class that they have there a few weeks ago. And I asked them, I was like, okay, just out of curiosity, how many of you use like a neo bank, like a soap by chime, et cetera? And how many use a traditional bank like a Chase or a City? No one used a Neo Bank. They all just use the old banks that they're putting on the bank.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

100%. Yeah. And I I think that's because we can opine and have like silly little opinions. But what I would say is that there is a value of having a brick and mortar presence for these banks. And I think the purely digital, you know, certainly it works for certain people. I do think there's room for a Travis-like entrepreneur who can kind of wrangle the atoms and the bits together into like a next level opportunity, next level, next gen experience. There definitely is so much more innovation that has to happen. I would also tell you, we're so early on the curve for some of the exciting companies that are already out there to keep growing into the opportunity. When you think about wealth management, when you think about personal loans, when you think about stock trading, when you think about personal banking, the truth is like none of us use a digital bank as our primary bank. And that is inevitably what's going to happen, I think, over time. And aware the company Shield's referring to called Coast, and I call it a red state company because they're selling to these SMBs who are managing fleets and limo companies and construction companies. And that's exciting because those sectors and segments haven't seen this level of just even being touched by modern financial products. So to me, like we have 90% to go. Like we're 10% there. It definitely feels intimidating if you're a new entrepreneur because there are sophisticated entrepreneurs who've picked lanes and are going after them and there's still lots of adoption. But I think as a country, like the next 20 years, I think are going to be really exciting for all of these companies.

unknown 16:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:36

And I think the other thing I realized is that like college students don't have anything in their checking and savings accounts anyway. So having in a higher customers. Yeah. So it's more so like they get to be like 25 plus.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

It used to be like when we were in college, I'm a denier, I'm the same age, old age, like they the credit card companies were able to market on campus and they would try to do anything to get you as a customer and think the lifetime value is high on the credit side. On the debit side, time's whole thing is like get your paycheck early. And college students don't have a paycheck. And also like they make money on interchange, and they're often not spending that much. And oftentimes colleges will have a deal with a more traditional bank.

SPEAKER_02 17:20

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense for sure. Put in gears a little bit. I want to dive into some of your guys' personal career highs and lows. Because a lot of times we just see like, oh my God, like Shield founded this amazing venture company. What would be some of the low points that you've gone through and then some of the highs that you've had, whether it be as a founder or as an investor, or maybe, you know, one of both?

SPEAKER_00 17:49

I mean, to be honest, we could spend the whole podcast on this. I mean to be in this industry, there are very few people who, for everything they do, is up into the right. But I think if you're in it, nobody. Yeah, nobody, basically, right? You read the stories on Twitter, it's just not true. I started three companies, and no one starts three companies if the first two were successful, right? And even the third one, it was like an okay exit to Twitter. And you look at all the missed opportunities or the different paths you could have taken that could have led to like a bigger outcome or bigger success. But those are just steps along the journey and threads into your personal quilt of learning. And you accumulate experience and you accumulate judgment and you accumulate a network and credibility over time. And the Twitter acquisition was a really pivotal moment for me in my career, and it opened a lot of doors for me. And I think about this concept of being in the jet stream and having driven my personal car way off-road, being at Twitter at that time, 2014 to 16, I was like being back on the highway and it bootstrapped me with an incredible network and credibility out of market. And there's no way I'd be at Excel without that Twitter acquisition. And even though it was a road bump or a blip in the history of the company, it was like very meaningful for me personally. And I'm super grateful to the company and the network that it gave me. People from Twitter are all over the valley, and it's been invaluable for me in my venture career.

SPEAKER_01 19:03

Yeah, similarly, actually, Fee Fighters had acquired by Gripon. It was something that, like, you know, Sean and Josh really wanted to do. I was not that excited about it. I wanted to keep going, but it got me where I am, and that was awesome. And I like I'm so thankful to have that initial initial bump. And also the more important thing is actually move me from Chicago to San Francisco. I think we were based in Chicago. I thought at that time that you could do everything there. There's no reason you should move to San Francisco. I'd spent a lot of time there, but I thought I don't need to move there. And Fee Fighters, or when we got acquired, I was forced to move to San Francisco. And I think it really just greatly expanded everything. Like my mind, what I thought was possible, the types of businesses that I thought were possible, my network, all that stuff happened in 2012 for me.

SPEAKER_00 19:55

And then as an investor, and I'm sure Sheila has similar stories, and I know because we've talked about it at Nausea. The investing game really tries your psychology. And of course, being a founder is harder and all your eggs are in one basket. But you know, it's really hard to be a great investor. It's really hard to find excellent companies at two people. The mission of an investor is to find the most important company in the world when it's one or two people. That's crazy, right? At some level. And I remember being in investing and they have this ridiculous expression which only finance people could come up with, which is like the lemons ripen before the fruit. I don't know if you've heard of this. I'd been in the job for three years and I'd made a bunch of investments, and some of them hadn't worked, and I didn't really have any markups. And then of course, COVID hits, this freaking pandemic hits, and I'm like, all right, well, that's cool. I had a good run, like that was great. But COVID obviously was a big accelerant. And I made a couple good investments that year. It turns out two of the investments I had made previously turned out to be pretty good. And suddenly I entered the year when I thought was like zero companies that were working and exited with like four companies that were working. And so that was like a wow, the first three years were really tough. And then suddenly it felt like things were working. And then on the other side of COVID, as things slowed down and there's a pullback, you have companies that are over-rotated because they've been valued at high prices. And that's a totally different kind of pain. There's a pain when you work on something and it's not working, and then there's a pain on something where it looked like it was working and there were a lot of signs, and now there's a pullback, and now you're really trying to like regroup and keep your momentum and your morale. And it's just, it's a really long game. And that's I think the pro and a con is a double-edged sword for sure. That's why you want to be in it with people who have a very long-term perspective. And the valley, to your point, is really good at pushing out people who are very short-term oriented. Like there might be small wins here or there. Rashil and I have known each other forever. And that trust and that relationship is one of the reasons why we work on companies together is because you just you know how each other's thinking, the other person's reliable, and you kind of know how the other person's wired.

SPEAKER_02 21:46

Yeah. Well, on that front, both founders and investors need to be pretty good at thinking about what the world's gonna look like in the next five to 10 years, right? So when you guys were just starting out, what's something that you thought would have been a accomplished by today in fintech, but hasn't. And then something that we have already accomplished that you thought would have taken longer.

SPEAKER_01 22:08

I can go with what I thought would have been accomplished. Yeah. So I started in the world of payments, and I thought that we'd be able to have some we'd be able to at least decrease the importance of the card networks. And like there would be some merchant consumer business that was able to take over from Visa and MasterCard, whether it was Square or some like mobile coalition or some I didn't think the mobile coalition or the grocery retail coalition was going to work, but I thought something where we would be paying with our phones and the card networks wouldn't be there. Could be real-time payments, something like that. But really hasn't really made a dent to recent MasterCard have continued to crush it.

SPEAKER_02 22:53

Yeah. No, that's a good point. It's I often get a lot of payments related ones when I ask that question, but I hadn't gotten that angle yet.

unknown 22:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

And I'll tell you the flip side, I think it's a miracle you can pay with Apple Pay. Like the number, like the amount of work that must have gone into that, it's the magical dream people go without using the credit card now. They just swipe it totally. It's such a seamless experience. It works almost everywhere. It's shocking. It works in other countries. It's so easy. And I just remember this era where if you left like what was the MasterCard thing? Like don't leave home without it. Like you actually can't leave your home without it. Like it's fine. Totally. And it's I think we take it for granted but it's for anyone who's worked in fintech in the early 2010s like it's a freaking miracle because totally been talked about ad nauseum and the amount of coordination it would require and of course it took a company like Apple to drive it but it is magical.

SPEAKER_02 23:44

And something like COVID to drive adoption of it.

SPEAKER_00 23:47

Absolutely it's a once in a lifetime pandemic no big deal.

SPEAKER_02 23:51

Literally all right now you each need to reverse it.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

I think I've been surprised at how popular and how much trust people are willing to put into absolute Robinhead. And now and I remember talking to the CEO of a very large bank in 2016 who basically like laughed it off. And now Robin's probably bigger than F10 kids. And I've moved the vast majority of my money to Robinhead actually.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

Wow. I guess I'll give you a crappy answer. I'm just thinking about what we were working on at CardSprint two things popped into mind. Like one, I'm still shocked at how backwards the infra is that our payment rails are built on. So much of it is like FTPing files around like how settlement isn't instantaneous. It takes a couple days for it all to pass through. It's crazy to me. And I think you could bucket with that the Swift system. There are a lot of people now going after Swift but just instantaneous money transmission around the world shocking to me that we don't have that as much. There's like Venmo, there's like little dribbles and drabs of it. But if you're really trying to send a decent amount of money to someone you still have to go through this like two or three day process of sending a wire like it's crazy to me. And I'm shocked. I mean it's like one of the fundamental building blocks that you might think of when building a fintech or payment system. And it's still Swift and there's stable coins and all these different approaches but nothing has really reached mainstream. You still have to like I still have to call my person at the bank and have them like trigger the wire and it's super manual and totally like the biggest advancement in the technology of wires that I get to send an email now rather than have to walk into the Wells Fargo bank. Like I actually remember that one of the reasons I transferred my money out of Wells Fargo is because the only way I could send wires is that I actually had to go to a bank branch and I was like well I can't do this anymore. And SDB was really nice and they said well you can just send us an email and that is the state of the art in wires and that's crazy to me.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

Bro you got to get in Mercury if you upload and it automatically does it for you.

SPEAKER_02 26:10

Yeah. I know I know but it's I have used that feature on Mercury. I don't send wires very often but like the two to three times I have was great.

SPEAKER_01 26:17

Oh I use it all the time capital calls I just upload them and it sends them for me automatically plugged for Mercury. It's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 26:25

I'm just not cool enough to have to send capital calls out so that's why I don't get very cool when you're doing it. Let me tell you question actually then on the payment side of things if we were to do the you know over the next five years do you think we'll have accomplished that much more in payments or do you think it's going to take longer than that to really move things since again like there's all this old architecture around I would give you the truism that we vastly overestimate what we can get done in one year, but we vastly underestimate what gets done in 10 years.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

And you picked five which is somewhat in the middle but I would just tell you that if when we look back at 2012, which is 13 years ago, man, a lot's changed in that time. So if you look forward and think about 2035, I I just think it's going to be a completely different world. And we'll it's hard to know exactly how or what. I suspect you'll have a different answer from those Michigan kids next time you go.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

I agree completely. I think I think Elony Must had some hope that there'd be more likely real-time payments but it hasn't happened. There's until it's mandated it's not going to happen. But and it and a lot of banking would need to be rethought and how they make money would need to be rethought there. But that would be awesome and this sort of like global Venmo is something I really wish existed. It's as somebody who travels a lot and has friends all over the world it'd be awesome. Spling money is kind of an interesting idea. It doesn't work for India and several other markets that I need but it's cool that we're moving that direction.

SPEAKER_02 27:51

Okay. One other thing I'd love to to dive into a little bit is looking back I asked what areas you thought would still be good places for kids to join coming out of school. Are those the same areas that you'd want to be investing in or does that change at all based on rephrasing the question a little bit?

SPEAKER_00 28:11

I think it's one of the best times to invest in technology ever. This anytime there's a big change or dislocation, there's going to be new emerging winners and there's an opportunity for a technology overhaul or a readoption across all sectors. And I think it's one of the exciting things about the AI stuff is it opens up new sectors that maybe previously weren't possible or maybe the technology was just too complicated and now the interface is voice or it's there that there's so many ways that you can insert and package this technology. I think it's a great time to invest and that's true in fintech and it's true outside of fintech but I think it's a particularly exciting time.

SPEAKER_01 28:47

Yeah couldn't agree more and I would say like we've done a lot of investments in the AI intersecting with fintech area and even our companies that are not in that intersection like they aren't AI for AI companies per seing so much value from AI that Thomas point you're just seeing a lot of change and that's a great time to be coming into into business or joining a company.

SPEAKER_02 29:12

Yeah how is AI shaped which areas you want to invest in fintech obviously there's some that are more hot right now so like accounting obviously really big one that's hot in AI. Are there any other sectors like that?

SPEAKER_01 29:25

Or like maybe you're open back up to more consumer side because of AI changing the dynamic a little bit yeah I had this thesis that AI was going to make consumer was going to change things for consumer a little bit. So yeah I thought and targeting would get better for one it hasn't played out that much of like I've been thinking about this for the last couple years we still haven't invested much in consumer but our consumer companies have not seen as great benefits as what I thought but still interested in it. Aside from accounting there are all sorts of other businesses anything that requires people we have one in the credit underwriting space meets AI. We have one in the account receivable space. So anything it's really just like services as software. And I think there are a lot of opportunities for that across every category mortgage and other yeah I totally agree.

SPEAKER_00 30:18

What's interesting though about the AI stuff is it it really makes it easy to interoperate between data and a lot of fintech is based on really well understood specs and transactions that are automatically processed at massive scale. And some of the AI automation that we're seeing in other categories I think is being less effective at fintech because transactions are automated. They're all digital they're all processed that's already been happening I think we're Shield's referring to is seeing a lot of human processes in and around fintech start to be disrupted whether it's debt collection, whether it's accounts receivable, all you know accounting certainly all of those categories. I think we're I'm still trying to make sense of it. I think we probably all are it's still ridiculously early in the AI wave and how it's going to impact things. At some level it's like the iPhone moment not every great idea on the iPhone was invented within the first couple of years. It took time for people to really internalize the primitives what it could do. And in this case the primitives are changing the core models their capabilities are changing. What's possible is changing on our feet so rapidly so it's it's a really good time to be a founder if you can keep up with the pace of innovation and you have a really clear idea of what you want to build like it's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 31:32

Question then to to wrap this all up if you give yourself one piece of advice when you were starting out in fintech 10 plus years ago, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 31:42

Well I think it's the same as being an engineer which is like really understand how things work. You know, that's the good engineers can solve problems, write algorithms, the great engineers they go deep, they understand how the system works down to the studs. And I think the people who've had the most success in fintech aren't just the people who hey look there's this problem in front of me I'm solving it but like really understand the stack. They understand how all the constituent pieces and parts fit together and if you understand that you are prepared for all the changes and evolutions and innovations that are happening. And the folks who've like really who really love fintech and have gone deep like those are the people who have the staying power in the category and that's certainly true for Sheel and the rest of us are trying to keep up with him but that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

Yeah. I do have to say that I was talking to another investor a couple days ago at this conference here in New York I had mentioned like having multiple portfolio companies with Amit and he said oh that's a flex like just having portfolio companies in common with Amit is a flex. Look at this guy.

SPEAKER_00 32:46

Well to be fair Amit like the Steve of India so he could have been interpreted to be that's talking about you oh geez.

SPEAKER_01 32:52

But but when I'll say on the question is probably something similar which is like a lot of the infrastructure hadn't really been built yet. And I think V1 of fintech was just bringing stuff that was offline online in some clue scenario kluge way and then the infrastructure got built over time and people and it was really hard to build in the early days. And so the folks that were able to make it like were able to build this kluge solution and make it work. But building was tough to raise a certain amount of money and then it got a lot easier to build because of because the infrastructure came but I think I probably wish I had invested in infrastructure earlier.

SPEAKER_02 33:35

There you go. Well Amit Kiel, thank you so much for joining me I'm super excited for this episode to air and I loved the band true back and forth. Like I was telling Amis before we get started it always works out so much better when the two guests that I have on in the episode know each other and again almost roommates at one point I think that takes the cake so far.

SPEAKER_00 33:55

Awesome. Thank you Julie appreciate it amazing thank you guys