🎧The Fintech OG Series: David Marcus and Daniel Kimerling

🎙️ Welcome back to Season 3 of the Fintech OG series on This Week in Fintech!

To kick things off, we’re joined by two of the most influential voices shaping the future of financial infrastructure: David Marcus, CEO of Lightspark and former head of Libra at Facebook, and Dan Kimerling, founding partner at Deciens Capital and early pioneer in banking-as-a-service.

We cover everything from the rise—and regulatory fall—of stablecoins, to why Bitcoin might just be the TCP/IP of global money movement, to what it really takes to endure the emotional highs and lows of building in fintech.

And before we dive in, a big thank you to our sponsor Persona, the adaptable identity platform helping businesses fight fraud, meet compliance requirements, and build trust from the very first interaction.

Let’s get into it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey guys, welcome back to season three of the FinTech OG series on This Week in FinTech. To kick things off, we are joined by two of the most influential voices shaping the future of financial infrastructure. We have David Marcus, who is currently the CEO of LightSpark, but he was the former head of Libra at Facebook and president of PayPal, and Dan Kimmerling, founding partner at Deccan's Capital, an early pioneer in banking as a service. We cover everything from the rise and fall of stable coins to why Bitcoin might be the key to global money movement and what it takes to endure emotional highs and lows of building in FinTech. I think you guys are really going to enjoy this episode as well as the other ones we have coming this season. So don't forget to like and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Let's dive in. This episode is brought to you by Persona, the adaptable identity platform that helps businesses fight fraud, meet compliance requirements, and build trust. Listeners, how do you know you're really listening to me? These days, it's easier than ever for fraudsters to steal voices, faces, and identities. That's where Persona comes in. Persona helps leading companies like Branch, LinkedIn, OpenAI, and Coursera securely verify individuals and businesses' accounts across the world. What sets Persona apart is its configurability. Every company has different needs depending on its industry, use cases, risk tolerance, and user demographics. That's why Persona offers flexible building blocks that allow you to build tailored collection and verification flows that maximize conversion while minimizing risk. Plus, Persona's orchestration tools automate your identity processes so you can fight rapidly shifting fraud and meet new waves of regulation. Learn more at withpersona.com/slash this week in fintech. David, it's so nice to see you. And you guys, we are kicking off season three of this This Week in FinTech OG series with you two. I could not think of a better pair to kick off this season with, especially with some of the things that are going on in the Bitcoin, stablecoin, et cetera, market right now. I it's hard to think of anyone better able to address some of the history of this area than David and Dan. You have quite the eclectic background. So before we get started, I would love you guys to just do like a 30 to 60 second intro on how you got into fintech and how your careers have evolved. And then we'll dive into different pieces of it, highs and lows, where you think we're going over the next few years, things like that. Does that sound good?

SPEAKER_02 2:47

Yeah, sounds great.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Fabulous. Well, Dan, you were you joined me first. So I will let you go first.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

Of course. It's good to see you, Julie. Good to see you again, David. It's been a minute. It's been a minute for sure. I uh I studied finance in college and graduate school, but was graduated into the global financial crisis where there were no finance jobs. So I ended up moving out to the Bay Area to be the first employee at TechCrunch. David, I think that's where we remember you were running EchoVox, if my memory serves, quite a number of years ago at this point. And then after we sold AOL, after we sold TechCrunch to AOL, I ended up starting a fintech company called Standard Treasury, which was very early in banking as a service. And we successfully sold that to Silicon Valley Bay, where I worked for a couple years. And then about eight years ago, I started Desians, we're a very early stage financial services venture capital fund.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Amazing. I love the small world too. Oh, David, give us a quick intro on your background as well. You've always gravitated towards the payment side of the fintech space, if my memory served me right.

SPEAKER_02 3:57

Yeah, that's right. I've been in payments for as long as I can remember. So a bunch of startups. Uh the previous one is where I met Daniel. The it was EchoVox that led to Zong, that was a mobile payments company that was sold to PayPal, then ended up running PayPal for a few years. Otherwise, I would have been back at startups earlier. Then when I was starting to think about other startups, Mark Zuckerberg pulled me into Facebook to have uh the first four years or the only four years I didn't work in payments was a nice vacation away from regulated madness, building messaging products at Facebook. And then I got the itch again because I felt the way that money didn't move was a massive anomaly in the world and it needed to be fixed, and no one fixed it during my little vacation from payments. So I went back at it with Libra, the infamous stablecoin blockchain project that was killed by Janet Yellen on the morning of June 2021, and then packed my bags in December of 2021 with a massive axe to grind and a sense of unfinished business and started LightSpark. This time trying to build an open money grid for the world that built on top of Bitcoin because Bitcoin is unassailable and the most neutral form of money.

SPEAKER_00 5:11

Amazing. Well, you mentioned a few things that I we have to start off by diving into, because I believe the last time I saw you, you were getting shredded on Capitol Hill by congressmen and women that weren't such a fan of stable coins at the time, nor were they fans of Facebook and big tech at the time. And obviously, I think if you were sitting on Capitol Hill today, that conversation might have gone a little bit differently. So I'd love for you to unpack when and why you think things have changed since you guys were doing Libra over at Facebook and how you're incorporating that into what you're doing at LightSpark today.

SPEAKER_02 5:47

Yeah, look, I think I think we had a number of years, certainly the Biden administration and that time was the most aggressively trying to kill crypto and digital assets in America because they saw it as a challenge of on their control over the financial system, which to call a cat a cat, that's basically what happened. And so we just landed the worst possible time trying to launch a massive stable coin project that would have been distributed and used by billions of people around the world and substituting itself to the unit of account that's controlled by central banks around the world, which was and doing it, by the way, with the sponsor that was at the time one of the most hated companies. So it's we checked all of the boxes of uh having the most irritants possible for regulators and politicians around the world and in the US included. And I think now the new administration has figured out that if we don't win at the digital assets and crypto at a time where it's going to completely reinvent our entire financial infrastructure, we're going to be left behind and we have to catch up. So it's a massive whiplash of things for all of us in this industry.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Dan, I'd love your perspective from the investor side. So we're hearing David's side from the entrepreneur, founder, and executive within companies trying to do this. I'd love your standpoint because I'm sure you get loads of pitches from stablecoin-related startups, especially in the last six months or so. What are you seeing as some of the areas that you think will be truly transformative in this space?

SPEAKER_01 7:18

I think what the issue at hand is that we have a crisis in the legitimacy of institutions. I am I'm a big institutionalist. I believe institutions are important and powerful. And I will fight for the legitimacy of institutions. I don't think decentralization is a virtuous. A lot of people think there is a virtue in decentralization. I I'm not one of those people. That being said, the question is around the legitimacy of institutions and whether or not the stakeholders of those institutions believe them to be legitimate in their authority. And in my own lived experience, I think where stable coins are most interesting is in parts of the world where the quality of their institutions is the weakest. I'm very involved in financial services in Africa. I'm very involved with a company called Chipper Cash, which is one of the largest financial services companies in Africa. And we have seen the work that they are doing around stable coins in partnership with various jurisdictions in Africa be very powerful. And I think there's a strong argument for that. And other you've seen news about them in certain Latin American markets. So I think I I'm just so I think that's quite interesting. And I'm excited about that. But at the same time, I also want to argue for strengthening the legitimacy of our institutions rather than trying to burn them to the ground.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

Fair. At least in the US, their institutions tend to be at least slightly more trustworthy than in some other geographies for all. And our currency tends to be more trustworthy than other geographies as well. David, moving back to you, I would love to talk a little bit about LightSpark, what you're working on right now, and how that is similar and different to things like what Circle announced a couple of weeks ago and what they're doing with the, I think it's called the CPN, Circle Payments Network. And if you guys are tackling the same issues or not.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

Yeah, look, I think first of all, if you look at global money movement today, like the job to be done is really interoperating domestic real-time payment systems. Domestic payment systems have become real-time. So you have FedNow and RTP in the US, you have Spay in Mexico, you have PIX in Brazil, you have UPI in India, you have SEPI instant in Europe. So domestic money movement from regulated institutions has for the most part been solved. What remains to be solved is interoperating those domestic payment systems with one another. And today the best thing that exists is Swift and correspondent banking that takes two to five days to clear a transaction, doesn't work Friday after 5 p.m., doesn't work on weekends, doesn't work on bank holidays. That's why they call them that. And it's massively expensive too. Only banks have access to it. Like most banks, unless you're one of the top banks, like really hate it. And it still moves$5 trillion a day. And then closed payment systems that use their clients' liquidity to fake real-time money movement globally, like the JP Morgan Global Money Movement Platform or City, move another$10 or more trillion a day. So the opportunity is here, and we might be hyped up about stable coins and everything else, but even at the current numbers, they barely make a dent in that. And so I think the key lesson for us is from Libra is really that if you're trying to build a global money movement platform that's actually built and dependent on a single stable coin, then when it gets to that level, trillions of dollars a day, or you you project that risk that it's going to happen, then that thing will die. Because if you're the government of Brazil, or if you're the government of India, or if you're the central bank of Europe, a US dollar denominated stable coin that's fully centralized and run by people that are easily identifiable as part of a company that fully controls the reserve because stable coins are fully centralized, is not going to be an acceptable. Even if you're just using it for interoperation, if you're controlling the ins and outflows of, say, 30, 40% of all of the ins and outflows into India or Brazil, your thing is dead. So our strong belief is that if you want to actually build the right solution here, it has to be on a neutral form of digital money that can serve as TCPIP packets for money between those real-time payment systems. And the only asset and the only network that is fully neutral or neutral enough is Bitcoin. And that's why we're building on top of Bitcoin. And we have a strong belief that if you're interoperating between or you're sending dollars to someone in Mexico who's receiving Mexican peso, having Bitcoin in the middle completely abstracted from the user experience is really the way to go. And that's what we're building. We think stable coins can serve a purpose in that network, but if you're building a network that's solely dependent on a stable coin, then it's a very fragile setup.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

Dan, I saw you listening intently there. What are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_01 12:34

It is, well, I agree with David in the sense that Bitcoin is the only solution that I've seen that could, in theory, get the various stakeholders aligned. It it actually harkens back to a pre-World War I understanding of currency reserve. If any of your listeners are interested, there's an incredible book called The Lords of Finance that involves David Asheking said, he's clearly read it. It's an all-surprise-winning book, which it talks about like the movement of gold as a incredibly important way in which like pre-modern central banking existed. And if you think of Bitcoin as something akin to digital gold, which is not, I think, an unfair metaphor, then we're like everything that is old new is everything that is old is new again. But it's like we're just like repeating a certain set of lessons here. I I think that there's a question around there are certain jurisdictions where let's say backdoor dollarization via either moving assets into a USD, a USD denominated stable coin, or actually moving assets out of local currencies and into US securities, which is another kind of dollarization methodology. It's just a profound reality. Especially in markets where they have weak currencies or tight currency control. In other places, like some that David was mentioning, the Europe, Japan, India, where they have stronger currencies, stronger currency control regimes, stronger central banks. I think there's a more of a there's more national, there's no more nationalism around the currency. And I so I think in many ways it it's not a either or, it's an and. There will be certain times where backdoor dollarization is actually a feature, and in other situations where it's a liability.

SPEAKER_02 14:30

Yeah, I think just to react briefly on that, I think the key is really to make the distinction. A stable coin is just a content type for money, it's digital dollars. It's not a payment network. And so the question is if you're building a payment network that's on top of Bitcoin that can move fiat currency to fiat currency and also support stables, which this is one of the reasons we launched Spark, which is this brand new Bitcoin L2, to support stable coins and a few other use cases not well supported by Lightning and the core L1 of Bitcoin, then you can have like really a neutral network, neutral rails that can move fiat currencies, that can move stable coins, that can move any asset that people want to move. But the core network doesn't have a point of that single point of failure that's so fragile and vulnerable. And if the internet is any guide, the different types of content types that are moving on the internet have standardized over one protocol like SMTP for email, et cetera. And we think Bitcoin is that for all of the money in the world. It just needed the right technology and capabilities to be built around it so that we can actually support that global money movement. And that's what we believe in, and that's what we've been working on at Lightsport.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

I think there's a question around in my mental model is that the cost of a payment should asymptotically approach the cost of the risk associated with said payment. Uh, I think there's an economic convergence of those two. And then the question is as the speed of payments goes up and payments become irreversible, immutable, does that lower the risk or increase the risk? And therefore lower the cost or increase the cost. And I would argue that as there's there's the honeypot of breaking a transaction goes up in those very in that scenario, and therefore one should pay more for it. But I think different people don't agree with that. Different people have different views on that perspective.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

Switching gears a little bit, you both have obviously been very successful, hence part of the reason you were on this podcast, but not a single career is without its highs and lows. So I would love to dive into a little bit of those because I feel like so often we only see where people get to and we lose sight of the missteps that might have happened along the way. So, Dan, let's start with you. What are some of the, if I ask you, like name a career high and a career low, what are some of the first things that come to mind? And in particular for the low, what were some things that helped you overcome?

SPEAKER_01 17:11

Well, I think in many ways they would be the same thing, which was selling the standard treasury to Silicon Valley Bank. It was one of the highest highs and lowest lows. On one hand, I've come to see that as an entrepreneur, I want to run a company that is my life's mission, and therefore I don't ever sell it. That would be like an idealized mental model of the situation. I think I started Standard Treasury when I was 26, and I might have had a more a more mercenary view of it, and we successfully sold it, and that was obviously lucrative at validating in certain ways. But at the same time, I've come to see though that you don't really want mercenary founders, you want missionary founders. And sometimes when you sell a company, it's emotionally unsatisfying because you didn't necessarily complete the mission. Right? Our mission at Standard Treasury was to have banks have open APIs. And we were somewhat successful in that, but we always scratched the surface. And what helped me get through that was a fat stack of cash that always helps. I continued working on that with the same people at Silicon Valley Bank, and that's what enabled the Stripe Atlas product, if you all remember Stripe Atlas. And then many of those people are now working on Treasury Prime, and I'm still very involved with Treasury Prime, and on the board there continuing with that mission. So we've continued to be strong advocates for this idea of open banking and banking as a service. And so both one of the highest highs and lowest forms.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

Well, I think, you know, that morning of June 21 at the bi-weekly meeting of Powell and Janet Yellen basically telling Jake Powell that she wouldn't support him letting the project move forward, which was his intention, and that it was political suicide for him and she wouldn't have his back. And that was basically the end of it. The next morning, the general counsel of the Fed picked up the phone and called like all the participating banks and told them that they were uncomfortable with them moving forward, which was basically no legal basis, shakedown style, and that was it. Like that was basically the moment that Libra died. I still call it Libra because it's a better name than DM. But but yeah, and so so yet that was a pretty low after having spent three and a half years really trying to fight the fight and convince everyone of the merits of a global 24-7 real-time low-cost settlement network for money that would have lifted so many people up, that would have enabled so many people to have access to liquidity and capital in ways that they didn't have access to. But there there was also no regrets whatsoever in this journey because the setup was wrong. Back to the point I made earlier. Even though we tried to devolve power and try to not make Facebook the key decision maker of the network and how it was run, the reality is it was still too centralized. Like the 28 members of the Libra Association all cared more deeply about their core business than they cared about the success of the project. And with that came a lot of pressure surface. And that's how the project died. Hence, you know, me now never building on anything else than Bitcoin, because you can't press pressure Satoshi Nakamoto or miners or whomever these people are to change the course of travel. So And I also think the other learning is back to the point we were just discussing with Daniel earlier, which is if you're if you're threatening to replace, substitute, intermediate sovereign currencies with a fully centralized digital dollar, then that that's just not going to work well in many large countries and helpful in others as a form of unit of account of settlement, but in most cases not helpful and threatening to governments in ways that that are just not sustainable.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

So, second half of that question, though, what would be one of your career highs then? Was it selling Zong to PayPal? Was it something else?

SPEAKER_02 21:35

I don't know. I feel like for me, like the messenger years and messaging at Facebook were great because it was a lot of fun. We had such an amazing engineering team. We were really building features faster than we could think of new ones. We got this thing from 115 million monthly actives to 1.5 billion users built like messaging business for the first time in a West at very large scale. This is like a double-digit billion dollar revenue line for Meta now. So that was a lot of fun. Also not subject to many regulations and headaches. So like really, really felt a lot of freedom there. So that was fun. And I think what I'm currently doing with LightSpark is very hard, but also probably the hands down, the very best team I've ever worked with. So I get a lot of pleasure and satisfaction in working with all of all of my team here day in and day out. So it's it's a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_00 22:34

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 22:34

I think entrepreneurial journeys. David and I have both been on quite a number of entrepreneurial journeys. And I think empirically, most of them are unsuccessful. The data is very clear that most of them are unsuccessful. And so you have to, I think, get a lot of pleasure out of the process. Like the people you work with, the kind of like day in and day out. Because if you hold all of the pleasure in the outcome, you're likely to be displeased.

SPEAKER_00 23:08

That's very true. And I think it's the other thing I would add to that, you have to believe in it so deeply that you just you have to go solve it. And if a hundred people tell you your idea is stupid, you'd have to believe that those hundred people are all wrong and you're gonna prove them wrong.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

Izzy Sharp, who started the four seasons, you know, the hotel group that is now owned by Bill Geese and his family, Izzy Sharp said that excellence is the capacity to endure pain. Sounds familiar.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

And having a really good therapist while you're an entrepreneur probably doesn't hurt either.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

A really good sign a really committed significant other is also a huge part of it. I think the significant others of entrepreneurs are often the unsung heroes of the entrepreneurial journey because they are not in the boardroom, they're not on the cap table, they're not. But if David is anything like me, you know, when shit gets real and it does a lot, they're the people that have to pick up the pieces. Very true.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

I think the I think it was the first episode of season two. We had Jason from Marquetta and then Ken from Credicor Ma'am. And Jason's significant other is also a therapist. So I was like, you're just killing two birds with one stone there. You got an amazing therapist and a an amazing spouse. So you're set. No wonder you believed in your product so so much. And Marquetta obviously had a lot of ups and downs. So she she deserves a lot of credit for what role she played as well, even though she's not on the board, not on the cap table, et cetera. Since you guys have both been in this space for 10, 20 years, I would love you to think back to when you were first starting out in fintech and think of something that you thought would have happened by now that hasn't. So surprise to the downside. And then something we already have that has surprised you you didn't think we would have it at this point.

SPEAKER_02 24:59

Happy to take a first tab, but look, I feel like fintech has just been like there was a lot of hope for fintech, and certainly there was a lot of value created, but like the reality is most of fintech has been lipstick on a pig, right? That's like and the pig is like the legacy, not real-time, archaic, older than I am, infrastructure that all of our financial infrastructure is running on, right? So and basically it's just like you you go to those fintech conferences, and that if you fix the underlying rails, like 80% of those companies are gone, right? Because they're just trying to create uh an interface to a very ugly thing that is just more usable. And I feel like a lot of the energy over the years has been really on that, because it's easier than revamping the rails, but not like really reinventing the infrastructure for real-time internet age payments and money movement and the rest of the financial stack. And yeah, this is what kind of forces me into doing it because no one else is, or no one else has succeeded in doing it. So if I feel like it's I have to get it done or die trying, or someone else has to do it, so I don't have to die trying, whichever happens first. But but it feels like this is a massive anomaly in the world that needs to be addressed.

SPEAKER_00 26:17

Okay, so surprise to the downside. Dan, can you think of something that has surprised to the downside?

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Well, I think in some ways I've thought a lot about the question of are there new problems or new solutions? And I've come to the conclusion that most human wants, needs, and desires are not novel. They're quite ancient. And so we're not trying to we're not they're not new problems, they're just new and novel solutions to old problems. Right? The problem of how do we move money or we have money today and we want in the future. We have money in the future, we need it now. We need to save for some rainy day or calamity, right? Like the central issues at the core of financial services are quite old. And so for me, it's about the question of are there new and novel solutions to these old problems? And in some ways, like what I've been surprised to the downside, it's because people think there are new problems and they want to reinvent the wheel and in doing and oftentimes they are able to manipulate others into there's a lot of hype-driven behavior in our industry in venture capital, in tech. David's been around this every year. There's a new hype cycle, and I'm just like, guys, just to chill out. Like the problem you're trying to say solve today has been around for a thousand years.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

What's something you didn't think we would have by 2025, but we do.

SPEAKER_02 27:56

The state of AI is like mind-boggling. That's so probably the answer everyone will give, but it's the clock speed and the compounding change there is just mind-boggling. I think no one five years ago would have expected to have the types of tools and capabilities we have in AI today. I think that's probably a fair statement.

SPEAKER_00 28:21

Dan, what about you?

SPEAKER_01 28:22

So when I finished graduate school, the path for a certain kind of human capital was doctor, lawyer, banker, consultant. And now there's like an alternative set of pathways for human capital that involve creating the future, bending the world to the will of individuals and helping create a more just, more lucrative, more interesting, more diverse future for all of humanity. And like when I'm surprised to the upside, it's because we have people who are willing to uh move against one of those very well-trodden career trajectories and invest their human capital in creating a better future for others. And so that's what I'm when I think about the upside. It used to be like I right out of grad school, I like moved to Mountain View, and me and three other dudes lived in a crappy apartment right above Safeway. Uh, and like we were the weirdos. We were the totally the weirdos. Now normal, well-adjusted people who went to Ivy Lee colleges do things like that. And like that is like in some ways very exciting.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Well, speaking of people fresh out of college, what would be some advice for folks that are just out of college, whether it be undergraduate or graduate school, getting into fintech? Are there certain areas that you think are most promising to them? And what pretend your like nephew is one of those people. What advice would you give him?

SPEAKER_01 29:49

The best advice I think I've ever heard anybody give on this topic is Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger said, follow your natural drift, follow what it is that you're insanely passionate about. Because to be successful, you have to be the best. And you can only be the best at something you're willing to commit hundred hundred-hour weeks, week after week. And you will never be able to do that if you're not insanely passionate about it. Somebody who is insanely passionate will just be able to outwork you.

SPEAKER_02 30:23

Yeah, I would second that. I think that's definitely very good advice. I also think that if you look at the most successful people, they're the ones that typically don't follow the conventional thinking and the consensus and just have an ability to kind of feel what the right direction is or what the right answer is, rather than just going by what they've been taught or what everyone else around them tell them is the truth. And I think for a lot of people who come out of college, they have to break the mold of a lot of what they've been taught over years of college, especially in this world where you know a lot of the curriculum right now is completely irrelevant. It's like you've been taught like a bunch of different things that like with the rise of AI and the accelerating pace of things, it's just not going to matter. And so just that just having the ability to think critically, to allow yourself to be massively curious and leverage all of the tools that you have available to feed that curiosity and enable you to be the best at what you feel passionate about is just just a paradigm shift that that I think, especially people who are graduating right now in the middle of all of this, will have to adapt to.

SPEAKER_01 31:43

Yeah, I'm being autodidactic, what David is saying about being able to learn independently and learn new things, incredibly important. I also think about this idea that going back to to the greats, whether that is I read a lot of I'm quite influenced by the Greeks, Plato-Socrates, it could be of various religious traditions, right? There's a lot of wisdom, right? What David is talking about is not knowledge, he's talking about wisdom, becoming wise. And one of the best ways to accelerate wisdom is by reading things which have been sources of wisdom for people for generations.

SPEAKER_00 32:23

Amen to that. Uh well, we only have about eight minutes left, and we've talked a lot about the past and present. So let's bring it to the future. David, you mentioned AI is something that has outperformed. If we were to come back and do this in four or five years, what are some of the ways that you can imagine AI having the largest impact from a fintech perspective?

SPEAKER_02 32:44

Well, I think that forget fintech, but I think just generally speaking, like the rewiring of all of our financial infrastructure, AI will be involved and embedded in all of these aspects. I think when you look at like the amount of cost that goes into managing financial flows, like decisioning, underwriting, dispute management, and the amount of people it takes to actually build those systems in the first place, a lot of that can be and will be automated and driven by AI. I also feel like commerce is going to change in a radical way. I think we're going to go from a visual interface with a payment button and a PAN to your credit card number to buy for something or a big PayPal button to conversational interfaces where you're just going to have agents buy the things that you need when you need them. And there's going to be an exchange of values for services between AI agents. So agentic commerce is going to become a reality, and then it's okay, how do you actually net settle in real time the value exchange in that world versus the world that touches humans? I have a point of view that if AI invented a digital value system, it would be Bitcoin, obviously, because like it's controlled by code and not by humans. But then when humans and real businesses need to interact, like the output is actually fiat currencies or stable coins, but the neutral settlement asset and network has to be like the most neutral digital first asset. So I think lots of interesting things will happen there, and we'll see more change in the next five years than we've seen in the last 20.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

Yeah, one of the episodes that we did for the we just wrapped up a fintech and AI series. And you remind me one of the younger people that we had on, Erica Dorkman from BRACS, who runs a bunch of their different products, is it's just so exciting to be a young person working right now. It feels like the burdening of the internet. There's so much going on to be on the front lines of things like this is it feels like very much a privilege for sure. Dan, what about you? Which areas of FitDeck do you think will be most impacted by AI over the next four to five years?

SPEAKER_01 34:58

Well, I think what I'm most excited about is so I'm quite fascinated by the history of the Industrial Revolution because you see that we went from like the world of the products and services that were available to individuals and institutions radically changed in the course of 70-ish years. But the process by which those were created changed dramatically. Perhaps what I'm most excited about is this idea, and we've seen this situation occur multiple times, not the least of which was the internet and to some degree mobile. But I'm most excited about this idea that the entire, let's say, manufacturing and industrial logic and distribution system of the capitalist enterprise is going to change. And that to me is the most exciting. Like the meta conversation is way more interesting to me. As an example, if it takes far less capital to build far bigger companies, what does that mean to the venture capital industry? Does that mean all the venture capitalists should be raising smaller funds rather than bigger funds? Does it mean that like how LPs think about allocating capital to venture capital or investing more generally is going to have to change? How does that how do we think about education? Well, David was alluding to like our educational system. How does that change? Like, and so the entire there's an entire meta-narrative that is going to have to be reconstructed around the way in which we organize like the fundamental operating system of our society. And that's way bigger than anything else to me.

SPEAKER_00 36:40

All right, with two minutes left, something personal that you're looking forward to in the rest of the year.

SPEAKER_02 36:45

So personal?

SPEAKER_00 36:47

Not job related. It can't be light spark related.

SPEAKER_02 36:50

I don't know. I can't think of anything else right now.

SPEAKER_00 36:55

Any fun vacations coming up or mind?

SPEAKER_01 36:57

I have an answer. Um I want to answer.

SPEAKER_00 36:59

Dan can go first.

SPEAKER_01 37:01

I'm quite passionate about art, and David Hockney is doing a career retrospective at the Louvre Foundation in Paris. I'm quite excited to go see the Hockney retrospective in a couple weeks. He's a very important 20th-century artist. And I think the artists are often at the vanguard of our society.

SPEAKER_00 37:23

There you go. I can very much tell you're a history buff, Dan. David.

SPEAKER_01 37:27

I like to I like to know how things happen.

SPEAKER_00 37:30

History repeats itself.

SPEAKER_02 37:32

So yeah, I don't know. I like I feel like I'm like in uh founder war mode right now, so I can't really think of vacationing and stuff like that. There's just so much on our plate right now, and like we're seeing everything that we worked on for the last three years like literally take hold right now. So I just really can't think of anything else.

SPEAKER_00 37:50

I probably just picked a bad week to ask because I feel like the last two to three weeks in particular have just been nuts for the stablecoin space. Hope between now and when this podcast airs on June 11th, hopefully you have some time to catch your breath and maybe plan like a long weekend getaway or something like that, too. Thumbs up. Well, thank you so much, you guys. This was amazing. I can't think of a better episode to kick off season three of our fintech OG series. Like I said, this will air in just a couple weeks. And with the stablecoin space being as it is, there might be some exciting announcements between now and then as well. But I really appreciate you guys both taking your time. As I was telling Dan before David got here, anyone I have on this show is always someone that has a crazy schedule. So I always really appreciate you guys taking 45 to 60 minutes to sit down and chat with me.

SPEAKER_02 38:40

Thanks, Julian. Great to see you, Dan. Good to see you, David. Cheers.