aketchum

Sure - but that is buying a bank not forming a new bank. I do agree that in practice this is how well funded companies become banks.

but Goldman wont take your call if you are sub $100MM in revenue (probably need way more than that). So you set up your partnership early in your company life then if the relationship is working fine why would you pay hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and rebuild your integrations just to have a larger bank partner that none of your users will ever know you are using

Column does not offer many of the options that other bank providers do, is fairly expensive, and may not have been in existence when Mercury chose their vendor. Evolve is not a "random obscure bank" - it is a bank that pivoted to have a main business model of providing b2b platform banking instead of consumer banking.

The major banks don't get into this game because the regulations on banks get much stricter the larger you get. So the fintechs are incentives to partner with "small" (this means sub $50 Billion in AUM) banks to deal with the minimum amount of necessary compliance (still a LOT of compliance working with small banks)

There are plenty of reasons to partner with a bank as a fintech other than to drive debit card revenue.

1. There are lots of regulations that say only banks can do certain actions, like lend in all 50 states under the rules of a single state. Or open a FDIC insured checking account. Or have a unique account+routing number for each user to send ACH funds to (various reasons this could be preferred to everyone ACH to one single global account). These are valuable services without any debit card issued by the fintech.

2. It is basically impossible to become a bank. The government only approves a handful a year. Square (block) actually got approval recently but it is very difficult to do.

As a result of (1) + (2) is that if your company needs any banking products at all you need to partner with a bank because there is just no reasonable way to legally build that functionality yourself.

VIVA Finance | Atlanta, GA | Junior/Senior Back-End and React Developers, Project Manager

VIVA is a Fintech Startup based in Atlanta, GA with the mission to build a more inclusive financial system. VIVA offers unsecured personal loans to subprime customers who have traditionally been excluded and taken advantage of by the legacy financial institutions. The VIVA difference is to underwrite heavily on employment history and set up repayments through voluntary direct deposit payments from the borrower paycheck.

We are a VC backed company and have been in business for 5 years. We hit cash-flow positive in May and are now default alive with our ongoing growth series B likely to be our final round. We are growing the team to further support our personal lending product, in addition to getting the staff to support building new products to diversify our revenue streams.

Our tech stack for the back-end is fully on AWS, using Lambda and ECS for compute and Typescript as the language, but experience with this specific stack is not necessary for talented candidates. Preference is given to candidates who can come 4 days a week to our new office on the Atlanta Beltline (next to Krog Street Market) but remote positions are available for strong candidates able to work hours in eastern timezone.

Send me an introduction (alex at viva-finance.com) with a resume and we will be in touch!

> And ideally give me a choice of providers.

This sounds good I guess but would be pretty annoying in practice for basically no upside for the business. I could see having 2 providers that are both randomly used so that we can continue business when one has an outage. But even then I would not be showing the option to my customers. The vast majority of users would be more confused by the options than happy about having options, and likely hurt conversion.

i joined as founding engineer as my second job, 2 years after college. The founders were the same age which I think let them consider a young founding engineer. It worked out for me and I think if you have the opportunity then it is a great time to take the plunge. Knowing what I know now I would likely not take the same role at 30 due to lifestyle requirements (have wife and house now, back then I was paying very little for rent with roomates and had no issue with 12 hour days. I think the risk can make sense early in your career but most founders probably dont want to risk it on an untested dev with sub 3 YoE.

the 3% rule accounts for inflation. Average nominal return 7-10%, inflation of 3.5% average, leaves you 3% withdrawal with no decrease (or even an increase) in principle in real dollars

You can hire one for sure, but in my experience they are of dubious value for very early companies. I would focus on understanding your customers. Do you have product market fit proof? Have you strongly defined who your customer segments are? If you have not then I believe you will waste money with an agency. To get the most out of them, you need to have clearly defined audiences and what the value add to the customer is. These are needed to make an effective ad campaign. But also once you have these details you can also start running the ads yourself.

I don't know what your runway looks like but I think for early stage you should try doing it yourself. Otherwise you are going to run into issues of high minimums for larger agencies.

atlanta is trying to fix this by building a park over the interstate in the city center. Only tangentially related but it blows me away how ambitious the project is. The stated goal is for reconnecting communities on either side

I opened a Sofi account when interest rates started rising after having only a Truist account paying 10 bps. Sofi paid $300 bonus and that was what actually got me to actually make the switch (their average cac must be over $400!). Its so interesting how the switching costs are very low but still feel high enough that it is tough to actually open new accounts even when you can easily earn $500 extra per year per $10k in balance. I wonder if fedNow adoption will make it more common to bank hop without the delays of the ach network

there would have to be illegal images in the training set right? which I would imagine would make the whole model illegal and therefore it outputs?

This is likely a way for Coinbase to outsource KYC. Plaid gives you regulatory backing to prove you sent the funds to the person you think you did. There are other ways of course but this is an "easy" way for Coinbase to not have to worry about that.

Hey Steve! Super exciting project and congrats on the launch! I tried to use my open AI key and am getting an error around "you exceeded your current quota, check billing". Does the standard $20 a month OpenAi Pro subscription work for this or are there additional permissions needed?

Edit: found the answer on the github readme

"*To use your own API key, you need to have access to usage tier 1. Check out your current tier, and how to increase it in the OpenAI settings."

I grew up in Fairhope, Alabama which was established as a single tax colony inspired by the theories of Henry George. One of the most interesting things to me is that on the bay, you can have two houses next to each other, both for sale and both equivalent in terms of house quality. One house happens to be on colony land and the other is not, so when you buy one house you own the land, but the other you get the 99 year lease. What I find interesting is that there is little to no difference in price between the two. The market prices the 99 year lease the same as owning the land. Just an interesting tidbit about this in practice that I have always found counter-intuitive.

I agree with the sentiment, but cars did put stalls and horse and buggy drivers out of business. Google translate may not have put translators completely out of business but when I travel I dont stress about needing one because I can fall back to translate for emergencies. The new voicebox model from Meta does seem like it really could put translators out of business. Some technologies really do kill entire industries (but I dont think the current iteration of LLMs will do so for programmer)

I didn’t read the comment as an attack on musk at all. It was a direct comparison to a very similar experiment by another company. The poster also said nothing about politics. I think you are projecting a lot here

so if it is one of your modules, does that mean that I can say "hey Pier, get me a lending license in NC" and they you handle everything and come back after however long and say "here is your NC lending license"? how do you handle states that require in state offices?

If you handle getting the licenses for the company that is super valuable

Very interesting - I run the software team for a lending company so this is an area I am very familiar with. How extensive is the coverage of your compliance? Do you handle any dollar size loan in every state? Or do you limit to the easy loan types (only allow loans of $3001 or more in GA to avoid GILA, no loans in NC because no physical presence etc)? As a customer of Pier, how does this allow me to get around the licensing laws? The originator of the loan has to be licensed to give the loan so is Pier the licenser? Does Pier have APR caps separate from those in the states themselves or will you allow full utilization of fees to hit those 300-400% APR in states like AL and UT? Do you support all the interest calculations (rule of 78, 365/365, 365/360, Pre computed interest, refundable maintenance fees)

I know first hand that this industry is a GRIND and most existing tech solutions are bloated and inefficient legacy systems so I think there is definitely space to disrupt the industry. Best of luck!

yeah but you run into other issues when you put all of your lambdas on the same VPC

just migrated off of PG to ddb as the main db for my application (still copying data to SQL for data analytics). Working with distributed functions and code hosted on lambdas, the connection management to SQL became a nightmare with dropped requests all over the place.

Since everyone is sharing their similar stories - I had a dell laptop at boarding school and by my senior year it was on its last legs. My friends played a lot of League of Legends and my laptop would overheat, cut off, and my friends would lament that I went afk for the 5 min it took to reboot and relaunch the game. So naturally I started wrapping an ice pack in a washcloth and placing that under my laptop whenever I played a game. Was always nervous about water damage but I luckily was able to avoid that.

I have no dog in this fight as I rarely deal with cash and do not run a retail business. However from a conceptual point of view I really have a viscerally negative reaction to not accepting cash. It is a societal acceptance of the rent seeking behavior of the credit processing networks. I already have to pay a sales tax to ${TAX_ENTITIES.length} different government entities, I don't love that I also have a 3% tax going to VISA/Mastercard/Amex/...

Article is great, (with it being written by pat mckenzie that is almost tautological)

> The value of portfolios is a huge discount to the face value of the debts; at the point where a lender has only worked it themselves and the debt is a few months delinquent, portfolios generally fetch about 5 cents on the dollar. That value will continue to decay over time.

I agree with his point directionally (the value of the sold debt is far below the face value of the balance) but he is off on the absolute value. You can expect more like 7-15% after working the account for 4-5 months.

> Debts are conveyed to the debt buyers as large CSV files with minimal supporting documentation.

This is funny - it is true that just big ole csv files (only ever opened in excel of course) are the way the debt is sold but how else would you suggest it be done? And in my experience you provide the debt collections agency all supporting contracts and account documents for each loan.

there was a revolution to "overthrow" the monarchy - just a local overthrow instead of a empire wide revolution

re #2

As I understand it, normal marijuana contains 1-2% TCH and the rest being THCA. So the new "high TCHA flower" is not higher TCHA than normal, simply lower pure THC than normal.

Craziest part is you can buy the high TCHA flower and the D9 Edibles online, shipped through USPS, and you just pay standard sales tax (not a sin tax like you would in a legal state).

I assume you are being snippy, but to actually answer the question: Kinda - if you are paid on Fridays then payroll is submitted on Tuesday or Wednesday.

I think there is a delay on stock disclosures, like they only have to disclose purchase/sale once a quarter or something which makes it hard to profitably copy their trading.

I think that the "star trek" use case of a live translation is super exciting. I think that this also will force people to have pass phrases that they use to authenticate phone calls with. I normally downplay when people bring up everyone signing everything with a public/private key (impractical for normal users) but clearly there will be a need for authentication protocols as AI proliferates

all of my lambda functions are returning "We currently do not have sufficient capacity in the region you requested." and the console is definitely down.