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venantius

1,450 karma · joined May 31, 2012

Founder / CEO @ Griffin (https://griffin.com). We're a Banking-as-a-Service platform that's got our own bank license. We help fintechs like Stripe, PayPal and Coinbase hold customer money and integrate banking services with their applications.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/venantius; my proof: https://keybase.io/venantius/sigs/-q1GLlB9txQNpo2NHvriIXfiM5Qc8vjC6a9AAIUMLP8 ]

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venantius··on Having your insulin pump die while you're on vacation
Hey, this happened to me about two years ago! Forgot I was wearing my pump and walked into the ocean. Oops. I was on a Greek island during Easter weekend - the worst possible time and way to need emergency medical care.

One thing I now do is always travel with one of my old insulin pumps. They may be 5, 10, even 15 years old, but they take the same infusion sets and all they need is a fresh AA/AAA battery and they’re as good as new. Thank you to the medical devices industry for making some resilient AF kit.

venantius··on Jules, our asynchronous coding agent
I feel like this is closest to trying to compete with Charm’s Crush rather than anything else.
venantius··on Migrating to Postgres
I am not an expert, but I have worked somewhere MariaDB/MySQL was being used at scale.

My preference today for Postgres comes down to the fact that its query planner is much easier to understand and interface with, whereas MySQL/Maria would be fine 29/30 times but would then absolutely fuck you with an awful query plan that you needed a lot of experience with to anticipate.

venantius··on Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
Among other things the big tech companies are literally planning to build nuclear power plants off this so I think the infrastructure investments will likely be pretty good.
venantius··on Generative AI is not replacing jobs or hurting wages at all, say economists
It is possible for all of the following to be true: 1. This study is accurate 2. We are early in a major technological shift 3. Companies have allocated massive amounts of capital to this shift that may not represent a good investment 4. Assuming that the above three will remain true going forward is a bad idea

The .com boom and bust is an apt reference point. The technological shift WAS real, and the value to be delivered ultimately WAS delivered…but not in 1999/2000.

It may be we see a massive crash in valuations but AI still ends up the dominant driver of software value over the next 5-10 years.

venantius··on Apple will now be treated like a bank
As someone who runs an actual bank, the headlines around this story are super misleading. In no meaningful way will be Apple be treated like a bank in the way that we generally expect banks to be treated.
venantius··on Hundred Rabbits is a small collective exploring the failability of modern tech
Two people and a pet isn’t really a “collective”
venantius··on Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?
I made a headless bank.
venantius··on When am I "allowed" to quit and not be labeled a quitter?
We wouldn’t fit either of your criteria.

And yet - we now have a bank license (!) and should clear 15-20M in revenue this year.

Sometimes hard things don’t make for overnight successes.

venantius··on Oldest footprints in North America push back human arrival
Wooooosh.
venantius··on Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
Our customers are other Fintech companies rather than normal humans :)
venantius··on Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
Because it’s not a great fit for an event driven architecture.
venantius··on Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
Actually, no - the regulatory sandbox cannot be used by prospective banks.
venantius··on Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
It’s hard in the UK too! Just not “infeasible” hard. (Plus, it’s easier to finance as you don’t have those pesky Bank Holding Company Act regs dinging your investors)
venantius··on Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
I wouldn’t say “given up” as much as “actively delegated”.

The UK has essentially made a (political) choice that rather than cover the cost of policing finance through taxes, they’ll just make the banks sort it out for them.

This is not great for some people for obvious reasons. But for everyone else it’s lower taxes. Where one falls on the political spectrum largely determines how one feels about this.

venantius··on Griffin – A fully-regulated, API-driven bank, with Clojure
There still isn’t a ton of choice in market - ClearBank is one of three other banks that actually have decent offerings. And having a good API is not enough; you need a holistic operating model that is aligned with your customer base, which is much harder to build for.
venantius··on The culture map: How to navigate foreign cultures in business
The article is literally a summary of this book.
venantius··on Ask HN: Who got hired from HN?
I have had the fortune to find a job through HN and, later, to hire people who found my company through HN. So the system definitely works :)
venantius··on Many companies aren’t prepared to replace underperforming CEOs
It’s actually quite common at certain types of organizations (typically foreign-owned) to appoint a local as CEO on a specific term and then to revisit when that’s up.
venantius··on Column – a chartered bank for developers
We’re rolling out something similar for the UK with https://griffin.sh - aiming to get our bank license this year. Then expanding to the rest of Europe :)
venantius··on Column – a chartered bank for developers
Hi! Griffin co-founder and CEO here. Yes, we're building exactly what Column is building but for the UK. Fun fact - Column's CEO is even an investor in us!
venantius··on CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
I don't normally go in for insults, but the author of this article is a fool who clearly has no idea what the job of the CEO actually is. We are a very long way from being able to automate the job.
venantius··on Why did I leave Google or, why did I stay so long?
This sounds like a nuanced view, but I think you have missed the point - we're using terminology that allows for us to talk past each other and that's part of the problem.

At least in my experience, the Just A Job crowd are generally _very_ vocal about their view that this is Just A Job. Their worldview is not compatible with the worldview of people who Really Care. There is a very healthy middle ground of people who (in NON CAPITAL LETTERS) both really care and for whom this is just a job, but they don't _identify_ with those as their primary worldview.

venantius··on Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent
I guess the real question is: what will actually happen if the SEC wins this case (which we should assume they will). Ripple is vast and presumably has the resources to deal with any judgement against them. The ruling would have to make the administrative burden of managing global XRP holdings unviable in order to really change the overall equation here. Is Ripple just getting slapped with a small fine in the realm of possibility?
venantius··on Cryptocurrency company Ripple says SEC lawsuit is imminent
What are the implications here for the Stellar project and Stellar Lumens? They seem like an awfully similar use case.
venantius··on Blob Opera
To quote my father, who is a huge opera fan: "I've heard worse!"
venantius··on The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business
What are your thoughts on listing foreign companies? Asking from the UK.
venantius··on Squad Wealth
Seconded. I notice a lot of comments scoffing at this and talking about group disintegration - have now been part of the same “group chat” / squad for 6-7 years and it was inchoate but there even before then. We do everything described in the essay. Reading it was eerie.
venantius··on Gallup: 81% of Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence
This headline buries the more material difference outlined in the article, which is the major difference between black/Asian Americans and other groups in how likely they feel they are to be treated with respect by the police in any individual encounter.
venantius··on Low carb diet leads to “clinical remission” in 3 cases of type 1 diabetes
@dang can we have the title changed or something? Most of the diabetics in this thread (yourself included) agree that the title is misleading at best and simply false at worst.
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