Cambrian Fintech with Rex Salisbury

Jimmy Chen founded Propel in 2014 with the ambitious vision of improving America’s safety net.  $65 Billion of government benefits go unclaimed because of cumbersome and opaque processes.  Even when those benefits are claimed, the user experience is frustrating.  Propel started by making one of America's most important social benefit programs, SNAPs, formerly known as food stamps mo...

Today, I’m talking to fintech pioneer, Shamir Karkal, the Founder and CEO of Simple.   Founded in 2009, Simple was one of the very first neobanks, meaning they offered banking services, but were not themselves a bank.  Simple built the user experience and tech, but partnered with a bank to provide the charter. In 2009, it was not at all obvious this was even possible. Simple helped...

Incredibly excited for this conversation with Immad Akhund , the Founder of Mercury, a business bank for startups.   Mercury was founded in 2017 when almost no on had tried to build to a neobank for business.  Today, Mercury has over 100,000 business customers and provides a suite of banking products Checking and Savings Credit Cards and expense management Treasury Venture Debt In t...

On this episode, originally recorded in Mar 2022, we dive into the backstory of Chipper Cash, at the time, the most valuable startup in Africa recently valued at just over $2 billion. Chipper provides free and instant cross border money transfers, and has grown to serve over 4 million customers, doing 80,000 transactions. █ Guests Ham Serunjogi , Founder & CEO at Chipper Dan Kimerling , Founde...

Today’s guest is Laura Speakman , Co-Founder of Alloy. We cover her journey from interning in microfinance to narrowly avoiding becoming a career lawyer to then becoming a fintech founder building crucial infrastructure. Alloy is a global identity decisioning platform that helps banks and fintechs with onboarding, transaction monitoring and credit decisioning. They have 300+ customers and 300+ emp...

In this episode, I talk to Shuo Wang, the founder of Deel. Deel is an all-in-one HR platform for global teams. They help companies of all sizes, anywhere from a two person startup to publicly traded companies, manage contractors and full-time employees in 150 plus companies or countries around the world. I first met the founders of Shuo and Alex in 2019, shortly after they had graduated YC's winte...

In this episode, we are going to talk about how you to stop banks crises forever. That’s right, permanently stop bank crises. I know that seems crazy. How? Narrow Banking. It’s an idea that’s been around since the 1930s. It essentially means that Banks cannot lend out deposits, which is why it’s also known as fully reserved banking. If you know anything about Banking you probably think this is abs...

Building Credit Karma was not easy. Ken raised the company’s first major round in 2009 during the Great Recession and in 2020 navigated the sale of the business during the early days of the covid pandemic, during which Credit Karma saw dramatic declines in revenue and faced the prospect of layoffs. But the company has come through those events and more stronger than ever. Despite the pandemic, Int...

In 2019, William announced he was stepping down for Plaid. For 3 years he and a small team worked in stealth on a new company, Column. Today we’re going to talk about that company. William describes Column as “a nationally chartered bank that has built every facet of the technology from scratch”. We are going to cover what inspired William to start this new venture and why he believes the technolo...

Ramp is one of the fastest businesses ever to go from $0 to $100M in revenue and they did it in less than 3 years and their last raise in 2022 valued them at $8 billion. It’s a great company in large part because it’s a great product.  Cambrian runs on Ramp and I never thought I would say this about corporate expense software, but…it’s magical!