Standard Treasury's Series A Pitch Deck | Hacker News Reader

Standard Treasury's Series A Pitch Deck

blog.zactownsend.com

64 pointszt14 comments

I've seen far worse, but if anything, this demonstrates just how far the Series A has fallen in today's market. A couple of examples:

"Series A Financials" (slide 14) shows a lot of money going out, but doesn't detail how the founders think about money coming in.

"Risk & Mitigations" (slide 16) is really lacking for a $10 million Series A raise, particularly one that involves setting up a new bank. "It takes longer to ship our software"/"speed up engineering hiring" is particularly amusing if you've been in software development for any length of time. "If we can't find the right people"/"work with headhunters and use contractors, as needed" will be equally amusing to anyone who has had to hire in today's market.

I agree. It seemed more like an angel round deck. A startup asking for $10M series A should already product validation, meaningful traction, and starting their growth phase. This had none of that. The only thing they had going for them was YC and a strong brand of previous investors.

To be fair to Standard Treasury, the pitch ("we're building a new kind of bank") is an unusual one for traditional technology investors, so product validation, traction, etc. are probably going to be less important to the investors who are interested in evaluating this further.

But even so, the detail is quite lacking and there's not a lot that instills confidence that this company has what it takes break into a highly-regulated market dominated by institutions with billions of dollars in capital and more and better technology resources than the founders would like to believe. Building a viable new bank is not a $10 million proposition, so as an investor my first question would be: how much are you going to need to raise in the next several years for this to even have a shot?

When I try to find the Standard Treasury homepage to get a better idea of what it's trying to accomplish (by following the link from OP's blog), all I see is an empty blog site. Is this because they are trying to keep a low web profile? It seems a little odd to me.

I get a certificate error. That's pretty egregious for banking software.

I also get a certificate error and a blank blog site...

It's also quite ironic given all of the insults lobbed at banks and their "bad technology" in Standard Treasury's pitch deck.

My understanding is that Standard Treasury's Series A raise was unsuccessful and the team was acqui-hired by SVB.

not surprised. the pitch deck didn't seem very convincing tbh

Shouldn't that be disclosed in this post?

If that's true, this deck is more an example of what not to do than what to do.

That fits with the OP's opening sentence. Also, the WHOIS record for standardtreasury.com was updated 29 hours ago, which would make sense if it was being transferred as an acquisition asset and accounts for it being down.

I found this fascinating, particularly the discussion about why the US market is so unfriendly that they decided to start in the UK. The way the team shared their full thought process going through all the alternatives I found very compelling.

Thanks for sharing, Zach

I'd like to thank zt for posting this and wish him and his team the best of luck in whatever is happening. Hopefully this helps offset the negativity regarding the deck itself and the uncertainly about the upcoming announcement being reflected elsewhere in this thread.

This type of release, especially if it accompanies either a retrospective or a post-mortem (as appropriate), can be very helpful for the rest of us in the community and should be encouraged.

It's a shame there aren't any forward-enough-thinking US banks that would make a reasonable partner for this type of effort. In the long run, owning the bank is a better asset but I wonder if a more prudent strategy would be proving out the value first. Maybe like a Tesla or PayPal strategy.

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