PinnedA Simple Tale: The First PitchHow we pitched Simple to the best VC firm in the world — My own response to Josh Reich’s email has been lost to time, but I remember it as something like — “Regulation can be figured out, but let’s understand the idea better”. I was actually on vacation in India when Josh sent me that original email. But Josh and I had…Neobanks6 min readNeobanks6 min read
PinnedA Simple tale: In the beginningFrom: Joshua Reich <josh@i2pi.com> To: Shamir Karkal <shamir_k@yahoo.com>; Jerry Neumann <ganeumann@gmail.com> Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009, 3:43:08 PM GMT+2 Subject: lets start a retail bank What would it take to start a really boring, simple bank? As I see it, a bank provides basic functionality: 1. A place to hold…Fintech4 min readFintech4 min read
Oct 21, 2022A Simple Tale: To found or not to foundHow I got the best advice of my life — I had another thing to go to, so Josh and I took different routes coming back from the meeting with Albert. We agreed to meet back at his home in Brooklyn (we’d been working from his basement office as we put our pitch deck together). …4 min read4 min read
Apr 29, 2021Vaccination in the USWhy you should get vaccinated asap — Sila Team, I spoke to my sister in India over the weekend. As you’ve probably seen, there is a huge Covid wave in India at the moment. The numbers and the human stories behind them are truly horrific. My 80-yr-old mother lives with my sister and my brother-in-law. They all…Covid 192 min readCovid 192 min read
Apr 16, 2021Nobody owns the customerSlavery is dead. Long live the customer. — “But won’t we lose ownership of the customer if we do this?” I have lost track of the number of times I’ve heard that comment. Usually from a bank executive who has something like customer or retail in their job title. If I am feeling particularly snarky I’ll respond “Ownership…Banking4 min readBanking4 min read
Jan 18, 2021The CloseThe best thing that I ever did — One of the things I am proudest of was how Josh Reich and I handled the Simple sale to BBVA. Out of the $117M sticker price for the deal that closed in March 2014, $14.6M in cash was paid out to 100 employees excluding founders. How did that $14.6M happen…3 min read3 min read
Nov 16, 2020From Pittsburgh to PortlandHow the Simple tale has come full circle — I opened my first PNC account in 2004, when I started my MBA/MS dual-degree program at Carnegie-Mellon. I already had a checking account at Citibank, but Citi didn’t have branches in Pittsburgh back then, and PNC was everywhere. They also had a desk on campus that made it easy to…Bbva4 min readBbva4 min read
Aug 31, 2020Banking Regulation and WagesOriginally published March 26, 2010 on Blogger It looks like the furore over outsize pay in banking is dying down. Kenneth Feinberg’s final report on the pay practices identified $1.6 billion of “ill-advised” pay among banks that took TARP funds. …2 min read2 min read
Jul 24, 2020A Day in the Life of BradA Short Story about an American’s Relation to the $ in 2035 — Brad woke up with a feeling of foreboding on Saturday morning. The moment he checked his phone, it turned out to be justified. He had been laid-off. He’d been expecting it for a while, truth be told. His speciality was more old-school full-stack coding, and his employer had been getting…7 min read7 min read
Mar 13, 2020Life in the time of covid-19I run a private Slack group for Fintech nerds, and Covid-19 has been a hot topic there. I posted a rant there, and thought I’d post it publicly as well. So here are my thoughts on all this. Current Situation This is a global pandemic, and we are all in a bad…3 min read3 min read
