← Fintech Leaders
Fintech Leaders
Is Finance Technology? How Founders Can Avoid the Mistakes That Kill Fintech Companies
00:44:29
Loading summary
Transcript50 lines
- [00:00]
A
Really, when you get down to it, the entirety of finance, whether you're looking at banking or insurance or payments, all of it in essence was at one time cutting edge technology. You really can't have finance without technology. People who are, who commit fraud are quite intelligent. They spend all day thinking about it, whereas you as an operator, you spend a portion of your day thinking about it. Maybe you're doing this, maybe you're not, but they definitely are finding the best tools to really take a slice out of your bank account. I've spent a decent amount of time in two very different but related camps. I've spent a lot of time in the finance world, worked on Wall Street, I'm on the board of a bank and more deeply I've been involved in the technology side of things. Those two camps really don't understand each other very well.
- [00:47]
B
Welcome to Fintech Leaders. I'm Miguel Armaza and over the last six years I've recorded nearly 400 conversations
- [00:55]
C
with the top leaders in fintech.
- [00:57]
B
I also co founded Gilgamesh Ventures, a fintech VC where we've backed almost companies around the world. In this show we extract how the best builders and investors in fintech think, what they've learned and how you can apply some of these lessons to your own work. If you enjoyed this conversation, I invite you to leave a review on Apple, Spotify or YouTube. I sat down with Andrew Endicott, fintech entrepreneur and my co founder at Gilgamesh Ventures.
- [01:30]
C
Andrew is also the author of the
- [01:32]
B
recent book Is Finance Technology A Practical Guide for Founders, Operators and Investors in Financial Services. The book covers everything from the common mistakes that kill fintech companies to how to think about risk fraud and regulation across verticals. I highly recommend picking up a copy. Few people have operated across as many roles and verticals as Andrew has, having been a financial services lawyer and investment banker, founder, board member and now investor. And the book reflects that breadth of knowledge.
- [02:11]
A
You actually have that.
- [02:13]
C
All right, great to have you in the new studio.
- [02:16]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [02:17]
C
I want to start with a very interesting question which is the history of financial services and we're going to talk a lot about your book. Great Is Finance Technology. I really like how you start the book, which is the history of our industry and you kind of make the argument that fintech is not a decades old concept, but instead it's thousands of years old. That's right. Why is that?
- [02:47]
A
Yeah, I mean really, when you get down to it, the entirety of finance, whether you're looking at banking or insurance or payments, all of it in essence was at one time really cutting edge technology. You really can't have finance without technology. It's all a human creation that amplifies what people are doing in different verticals, whether it's through writing or accounting or the calculation of interest, which if you go back was extremely cutting edge and often still people don't really understand it. Not a historian, but based on the evidence that they have, the Mesopotamians really are the guys who came up with interest. Oddly enough, if you go back in history, there's an ancient Mesopotamian, Sumerian, it's kind of all the same group, at least from our perspective. There's a tablet that, if you took an investment banking analyst today and looked at this tablet, it truly is a financial model. However, it's a financial model that instead of using money, it's using cattle. So there's compounding interest rates, there's the time value of money with cattle instead of currency, which is just a currency. Currency hadn't really at this point been invented. The lending preceded arguably kind of coinage in these things. So you know, that was very long time ago, thousands of years ago. But in many ways what we're doing today with fintech and I think in cryptocurrency, this is kind of the most obvious. We're using the best means we have to make economies function in a better way. Currency did that thousands of years ago when the Lydians developed it. And today, you know, the folks with Ethereum and Bitcoin and other Solana, they're doing the same thing. They created something out of thin air, which was true for coinage a long time ago as well. And all in the pursuit of making commerce function more effectively and using technology to do it. So I think that it's, you know, in the world of fintech, it's easy to look back on, you know, what's kind of the norm, what the incumbents do today. As you know, just that's just the norm. That's the standard thing. But not very long ago that was actually quite cutting edge. What we're doing today will probably be seen in a similar light. And I think also looking at things through that lens, I think can also kind of keep you honest about what really is an innovation, what really is different, how things are really going to give someone an advantage when they're using a given technology.
- [05:38]
C
Staying on the history aspect, maybe give us some examples. But more importantly, what was it that forced people? What were the forcing functions for these innovations to be invented and created?
- [05:56]
A
Yeah, so really a lot of times it was just a problem, which sounds very familiar. Necessity is the mother of invention. That's true today, as it always has been. I also like saying the same thing in a different way, that creativity thrives within constraints because that reflects it. But I think a really good example of the forcing function is the emergence of international trade. You know, if you're in ancient Greece and you have a bunch of extra wheat on hand that you want to trade with someone in, let's make up a place, Troy, I guess it's a long ways away, at least by their standards and still by our standards, if you were to walk it, it's not exactly close, and I guess you can't walk it because it's by water. But it was in a world where there was not clear currency, FX markets didn't exist. There was a lot of risk being taken. And so if you go back to this period, you see kind of the beginnings of insurance began in the same period. And also secured finance, so kind of what we call asset based lending began with this. I think in some ways it also resembles venture capital, although I think that really happened later with different types of shipping and whaling and whatnot than kind of the ancient times. But really, people, economic participants, create new arrangements using new means. Back then it was writing, they use this new means to solve a problem, which is how do I manage the risk? How do I efficiently trade with somebody in a different place who may speak a different language, have a different economy, have different coinage than I do? So I think that that's a good example. But fundamentally it's when you have a problem. And I think today, similarly, we have a lot of problems. In the last decade, there were a lot of people that couldn't get bank accounts. And we had the creation of businesses to make it easier for a consumer to get a bank account. You have a lot of people who can't qualify for credit. Likewise, you have the emergence of models to help people qualify for credit, both businesses and consumers. The humans are really good at creating novel ways of solving, you know, just, just challenges that they have. And they, they typically pick up the best tools kind of on the. The cabinet to do it most of the time, maybe.
- [08:24]
C
Tell us why you wrote this book. I've seen you do it the last several years, you know, at least two and a half years or so. But you had this in your mind for a while.
- [08:38]
A
Yeah, the. So I have had this in my mind for a while. I think one of the things I learned. I'll get to your question in a second. When you write a book, which is an interesting process for yourself. When you write a book, you learn more about how you're a little bit different in how you see the world. That's certainly true for me. My background is kind of a mishmash of things. I was a lawyer, I was an investment banker, been an entrepreneur, now I'm an investor. I was born in the southern U.S. everybody's different. So that very much colors what the book ended up being. And I didn't really know that before I started it. But the reason I wanted to start the book is I've spent now in my career a decent amount of time in two very different but related camps. I've spent a lot of time in the finance world, worked on Wall Street, I worked in the M and A industry. I'm on the board of a bank, Encore Bank. And more deeply, I've been involved in the technology side of things. So I co founded Petal in the credit card space. Today, Miguel and I, we invest in fintech companies. And so I've spent time in those two camps. Those two camps really don't understand each other very well. And I find that the ways that they see the world are so dramatically different for very good reasons. And so I, you know, I have probably more of a calling to the technology side. That's what I do every day. That's really where I've leaned in the most in my career. And I think for an operator, for a founder, the starting a fintech company, it's absolutely essential to know really not just your history, but to understand the context you're operating in. Starting a finance or starting a fintech company, starting a technology company that serves finance companies, whatever it is, is very different than doing almost anything else. And I'm sure you can say the same thing for other industries too, but I feel like it's very pronounced. In fintech you have major themes that are completely absent from other parts of the economy. The biggest one being risk. But also regulation is a huge thing. And there are others as well in addition to that. And those, those features that you have in finance end up almost turning things upside down when it comes to running a fintech company. Often something you would see as a good thing in running any other business is actually a bad thing sometimes in finance. Like what? Like often fast growth. You know, as a venture capitalist, I love fast growth. But if you're starting a fintech company, you need to have the awareness to think critically about whether fast growth is actually good because it can be fueled by all kinds of things that are not good, that can be bad in the short run or the long run. And there's other things like this that I think, you know, really pervade the experience of starting a fintech company. And it really comes from, to get in front of these things, to avoid creating problems as an entrepreneur, as an executive, as an employee, as an investor, you have to know about the context that you're in. And I hadn't seen a huge amount of writing and thought on this point, probably because fintech still, in the grand scheme of things, is somewhat new. It really hasn't existed, you know, at least in the way that it does today, for more than a decade. And so I wanted to contribute that to the, to the discussion and the, you know, kind of the, the puzzle of human knowledge out there in the universe. It also reflects a lot of, kind of how I see things, having done all the stuff that I've done.
- [12:28]
C
So you started Petal north of a decade ago, right. The landscape has changed a lot. A lot of things remain true. And from your point of view, working with many young founders like we do every day, but also having been a founder decade ago, what has changed? We know that a lot of things remain, but what has changed? And you often hear founders say, or VCs who were founders say, like, hey, a lot of my knowledge is stale, right? Cause some things have changed. Do you agree with this?
- [12:59]
A
Yeah. So I think this is one of the most interesting questions because these kind of eternal truths that I mentioned about operating in finance, they're not really eternal truths. They do change over time. New capabilities emerge that sometimes can do away with them or at least alter how you have to think about it. I think today a good example is in the world of generative AI, the stumbling block of a lot of companies is collecting all the right information from your customers to do know your customer. Well. That's changed a lot because you can pre populate this, you can use agents to really not circumvent the step altogether, but it changes it. That friction's not there in the same way. It's not as painful as it was in the past. When your customers having to type in or otherwise deliver a bunch of information, there is change. And I think one of your best entrepreneurs, and I think a really good example of this is Renaud Laplanche, who wrote the foreword for the book. He's one of these people. They have the awareness of these big important aspects of creating company in this space, but they know enough to know when you can really, when New technologies and new things emerge that allow you to do things differently so you don't make silly mistakes, but you do innovate in a really interesting, really powerful kind of competition altering way. And that's what the best entrepreneurs do is they have the context and, and they know when things are changing. And we're in a moment like that right now, I think, where you're still going to have these big considerations, risk, fraud, compliance and kind of the business models which I go into a little bit in the book, they all have their quirks that kind of define how they work. Those things will remain the same, but we're going to see some significant changes in and kind of how you manage them with more powerful technologies. So I think I answered that.
- [15:06]
C
You mentioned Renault, obviously we were both huge fans of him. Who are some of the other founders, alive or deceased, who really embody what you think takes to succeed in our industry?
- [15:24]
A
Yeah, I think somebody who has just shown incredible innovative intuition and also just has an amazing ability to grow a business as Mike Cagney. He's now done it several times with SoFi and figure the whole premise of SoFi at the beginnings was really around understanding the impact of a government guarantee and a standardized market interest rate with that that's not being adjusted for risk and how that doesn't make any sense at all. And that was the foundation of that business was student loans, which enabled them to grow at just an incredibly rapid pace. And then they used that as momentum to spread into a ton of other different products and to become the wildly successful company they are today. And if you look at Figure, I think kind of talking about, like I said, you know, you create things to manage problems. That's what fintech really is about. You know, I think the things that Figure has done for taking a system that was created for good reasons, the securitization process, you know, the way that it functions, makes sense if you look at the historical precedents, but still is problematic. It's way too complicated, it's way too expensive and it's not something that even looks remotely like what you would design from the ground up if you wanted something to work well. And with Figure, I think they've, in Providence, I think they've done a fascinating job of taking creating a new business a new capability that solves for the same things that the old system needed to solve for, but just does it in a much more elegant way. So I think that's a really good example. So Mike Cagney, Renaud Laplanche, but there are others. I think the founders at Brex have really shown incredible just kind of insight into how to build a difficult to build business very quickly, grow it to a significant size and build it in a way that a large acquirer is going to be interested in capital one, which is one of the larger exits we've had in fintech, at least in the last several years. And so that's several. But there's a lot and you know, I'm sure that we're going to have several in the coming years that we don't even know about yet.
- [17:54]
C
Part of the reason why you wrote this book is because you like teaching. Right. And you felt that you have this wealth of knowledge accumulated from lived experience.
- [18:08]
A
That's right.
- [18:09]
C
And you want to pass it on to future founders, current founders. What are some of the common mistakes you've seen early stage fintech founders make? Or some of those common pitfalls that are not considered pitfalls in other parts of tech? Right. Maybe because this is an important part of why you wrote this.
- [18:37]
A
So I think the first one I mentioned was kind of the kind of the notion of it grows like a weed, it might be a weed aspect, that fast growth can be an illusion in terms of being a good thing. So that's one big one. I won't go into that more. And relatedly, just not giving enough credence to, you know, the risks coming from fraud and credit and adverse selection which impacts both insurance and credit and fraud pervades most things. Payments, deposits, credit, insurance. Not giving enough credence to those downside possibilities.
- [19:23]
C
And the problem with those is that once the downside manifests itself, it might be too late.
- [19:30]
A
Right? Right. You often realize it too late and it's not obvious when it begins. And sometimes you build your business in a way that it's almost the foundation is kind of going after that type of customer or that type of risk which is not the risk you ultimately want. You just don't know it yet. And so something that companies need to think about a lot is kind of who your customer is. Do you really want them? Are you really pricing them correctly given the risk that they present and so on. And this applies to payments to basically all fintech except for just the pure technologies. And so that's one, I think another big one is kind of just a bad foundation. And what I mean by that is this typically manifests in picking bad partners, people that not only can't scale with you, but that they prevent you from scaling. And this can happen for a variety of reasons. Sometimes contractual, sometimes operational. But you need to choose the people and the platforms or the businesses and the platforms that you're setting your business up upon and make sure that it's a, you know, a house of bricks, as opposed to a house of straw, to use the three little piggies metaphor, which I use in the book a little bit. And that, that's, that's, that's a, that's kind of a silent killer. You don't, you don't see that one in the news as much. We see it as investors because you have a company that they, they get out of the gate well, and something just, they just go sideways after a certain level of scale. Often that's because they reach a point of friction and conflict or just incapacity of the partners that they have.
- [21:23]
C
The wheels fall off.
- [21:25]
A
Yes, the wheels fall off. It's just not built to last.
- [21:27]
C
So going back to the second point you were talking about, which is handling fraud and managing risk, were there any particular instances that really taught you this lesson?
- [21:39]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I think anyone who has built a business, at least in the lending space, which that's, that's what I have exposure to, but really in most parts of Fintech, probably have a lot of stories that, that reflect this. But you know, particularly on, on fraud, you know, I definitely have memories of a lot of sleepless, sleepless nights pertaining to, not so much like not taking it seriously, but just, just missing risks, you know, in, you know, in my entrepreneurial, you know, kind of journey. Synthetic fraud was a pretty big deal in this kind of the late teens, kind of pre Covid. And there were definitely occasions where that was relatively cutting edge at the time. We didn't have great understanding of it and didn't have controls and really not even controls, didn't have the tools in place to detect it and as a result, you know, incurred real losses because of it. You know, with fraud in particular, I think I would just say that something that is always true, this has probably been true for a very long time as well. But it's particularly true today that people who are, who commit fraud are quite intelligent. They spend all day thinking about it, whereas you as an operator, you spend a portion of, of your day thinking about it. And they are, maybe you're doing this, maybe you're not, but they definitely are finding the best tools available, the best technology, the best techniques available to really take a slice out of your bank account. And so I think that's probably the biggest example. These are hard problems to solve, these contextual kind of Ongoing things that define what fintech is. You don't just need to be aware of them. They're difficult problems and they're also because of that, they're sources of opportunity. Many smart founders now and smart founders in the future will build businesses specifically that go at these defining things. Fraud being one of them, compliance being another risk generally in other parts of the kind of the pyramid of the industry.
- [23:55]
C
You spend a lot of time in the book talking about the four horsemen of fintech or financial services if you will. That's banking, payments, insurance and infrastructure. Maybe you rank them in order of difficulty to disrupt and then also maybe it's not a correlated order. Which ones are the most profitable.
- [24:21]
A
Yeah, so I think when I wrote this chapter, the four horsemen of Fintech, I think I'd watched a very dramatic movie the night before or something. I was feeling saucy. But yeah, when I look upon the landscape, those are really your four big categories. And banking notably includes both credit and deposits, which are really just two sides of the same coin to me. So you said kind of which, which what's the most profitable? And what was the first part of the question?
- [24:54]
C
Which ones are the hardest to the hardest to disrupt?
- [24:58]
A
Yeah, so the. I think if you just look at the last decade, which that may change. You know, the last decade may not be a prediction of the future. It really seems like payments has been a really fertile reason region to. To build a company in. Some of the biggest exits in fintech in particular have been on the payment side. Stripe hasn't exited yet, but as an example Adyen. So people have built very big businesses in payments. And I think one of the reasons it's a good place to build is that there's a ton of first mover advantage. There's a lot of network effects, there's kind of the notion that there's a lot of switching costs that people don't like to change their payment rails once they're set up. And these are some of the reasons why Visa and MasterCard for instance are such highly valued companies. They're just, you can't get rid of them on payments.
- [25:54]
C
You say it's the laziest way to get rich, but only if you're lucky.
- [26:00]
A
Right? And again, that subtitle is meant to be a little controversial and, and little smirky, but what I'm trying to convey is that first mover part. I think there's been a lot of successes in payments and the companies that were successful, I think were often not successful because they had a brilliant design. For what they wanted to do, it was really. They saw an opportunity in the market. They built a great mousetrap for it. They were the first ones to do it, and then they just did a good job running a business thereafter, and they become incredibly huge. I think if you look at Stripe as a business, they do a lot of things now. And the founders of Stripe are brilliant. The people that run that company are brilliant. But fundamentally, what they're doing, at the end of the day, at least for the first decade of running the business, they were enabling credit card payments on the Internet. That's it. And they made it easy for a merchant to do that. And that is a huge company today. And for much of their life, they really weren't facing that much competition. So I think that's a good example. And Visa has elements of that as well. They were enabling payments not on the Internet, but just generally with a credit card. And Adyen has features like that as well. So I think it's really. It's not lazy. It's hard. You got to know what you're doing to build a payments business, but if you can build it at the right time in the right place, you can build a tremendously large business. And so I think in some ways, payments is definitely one of the more interesting places to build. But I also want to touch on infrastructure, because I think it also competes for kind of just the best place to go. One of my favorite companies in the world is Bloomberg. I have no idea how long Bloomberg will dominate the position that it's in in the future. I know that every couple years somebody's trying to go at them, and that's happening today with LLMs and with generative AI. But they have had an amazing run, enormously profitable business, dominant position, basically powering Wall street, which itself is one of the biggest economic engines on the planet. That business is kind of the opposite. What I was saying about payments, to build this infrastructure, it's less right place, right time. I think it's more. You got to be the right team, you got to have the right network, you got to have the right credibility, particularly if it's enterprise at all. But it also has the feature that once these things start succeeding, they have a tremendous potential in Runway, and Bloomberg's a really good example of that. But there's lots of others, and they've done really well.
- [28:57]
C
And Bloomberg never raised capital.
- [28:59]
A
Yeah, never raised capital. They raised a tiny amount at the very beginning, but I think it was like the partners that put it in. And I don't Want to dismiss the other parts for the banking side of things and the insurance side of things. I think in terms of just the number of public companies, I haven't done the math on this, but you might have actually seen more in the banking lending deposit space than anywhere else. You've got chime, you've got affirm, you've got SoFi, you've got a lot. And so there have been clear successes there. I think a lot of square today is that although square is payments and banking with square cash versus the square terminal, but there's been a lot of successes there. But it's also a hard space. I think if you've got credit, that's hard. You've often got balance sheet kind of stresses in building those businesses and so on and so forth. Insurance is the curious one to me that the size of the insurance industry is just bafflingly big. The greatest fortunes on earth arguably come from insurance. Warren Buffett basically built his entire, you know, his entire wealth through insurance, although there was a lot of other stuff involved there. But the foundation was insurance and reinsurance. But we haven't seen a whole lot of successes. There's been some. There's been companies that have gone public, Lemonade, Root and others, and there's some successful private companies today. But it's a nut that kind of hasn't been cracked yet as far as I'm concerned. And I'm curious if that's going to change. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. It's not clear. But yeah, each of those verticals in a broad sense have different features that make them really different from the others. And that's the way I like to
- [30:49]
C
slice up the space when it comes to banking. This seems to be the best window we've had in decades to get a banking license. And I think every week we hear of yet another fintech that is pursuing some sort of banking charter. Should fintech get a banking license?
- [31:12]
A
Yeah. So this is funny. This question really hits an interesting point for me, particularly with respect to writing the book, because writing a book, we might talk about writing a book later, but writing a book takes a long time. It's not a blog post. It takes for everyone I've ever talked to who's written a book, it takes years, not months, to actually get it out. And so when I wrote the book, I included this. It's not a sub chapter, but it's like a subsection of the banking part talking about should you become a bank? And when I wrote that, I think my opinions were probably very much in the minority, I think where I thought it made sense for a lot of fintech companies to try to become banks for a very specific reason that I'll get to in a second. Well, that's changed. It's driven entirely by the government, by politics. You have an openness today to opening up the banking system to new entrants. Whereas if you go back the last several administrations, that really hasn't been the case, particularly starting with Obama. You know, there were, there were vanishingly few bank licenses granted. It was really hard to acquire a bank as well. The industrial bank model in Utah was kind of shut off to new entrants, which is a particularly important kind of part of the fintech world in particular. And there just wasn't much activity if you were. The banking system was off by itself. It did its own thing, it's had its own regulators. And then fintech was pretty separate. Now you're really having movement between the two. I think it makes tremendous sense. I think if you, particularly if you, if your business involves lending, I think your, the logic for you to get into becoming an actual bank itself is, is very straightforward. Fintech companies that are, that are, that are, you know, for the first many years of their existence, they're in a position where they're having to basically go to Wall street, go to private credit, go to securitization to fund their portfolio of loans. And that tends to be very expensive. And so what it ultimately results is you have a large book of loans, but you're making very little profit off it, which hurts your ability to grow. At the end of the day, once you become a bank, deposits tend to be a much cheaper form of funding. That's why banks exist really. They take consumer and business deposits and then they lend them out. And so if you can become a bank, you can, you can immediately overnight change your, your margins. And I think that's, that's why people are doing it today. Now there is a disadvantage that goes along with it. Once you're a bank, you're regulated in a very direct way. Before you're a bank, you're also regulated. This is the part that nobody talks about. If you're a lender, you're partnering with an issuer bank or with some other financial institution and they push down the regulation to you. So you have to follow a lot of rules that an E commerce business doesn't have to follow. But when you become a bank, you're regulated directly. So your operation changes, your team is different. You kind of suddenly have someone who in a way kind of signs off a little bit on, on what your plan is. And so you only want to really become a. If you're a fintech starting out, you don't want to become a bank overnight. Most of the time there are some new entrants today that are becoming a bank immediately but most of the time you probably are better off getting to a certain level of scale and then converting to becoming a bank. Once you really care about profitability more.
- [34:58]
C
There's also another thing. The markets will value you differently.
- [35:03]
A
Yes.
- [35:03]
C
Right. You'll be valued at a multiple, typically in the low single digits of book value. Does that the optimist in me, does that indicate that if a VC backed company decides to pursue and obtain a banking charter, are they indicating like hey, we are going to become huge to the point that even if we're valued at let's say 2 to 3x book value, it's still going to be a fantastic return for our VC investors.
- [35:40]
A
Right. So yeah, I think it's a really good question. It's something that immediately comes up and when you're thinking through the strategy of when to do this and whether to do it just for people watching it. So book value is a balance sheet item. It's kind of the net worth of the company. That's how banks are valued. Tech companies, including fintech companies are usually valued off revenue, which is much more of a top of the funnel measure. Doesn't worry about profitability in nearly the same way. Growth tends to be not profitable. If you're growing fast, you're probably going to be unprofitable. So you want to focus on. It's better for you to be valued off revenue than book value. Yes. I think that is the bet that people are making is that you're going to be so large that it doesn't matter. And by the time if you, and particularly if you're doing this later in your life cycle that you don't really have to make the argument too aggressively because you're probably already big. If you're starting at day zero and becoming a bank. I think there's a. To me there's an unanswered question that I think we're now going to see the answer to in a couple years as to whether that really is a traditional venture backable investment. Venture capital funds usually need to make many multiples of their money on. They need to have the potential to make many multiples on their money in a given investment. It's harder to do that with A bank because you have natural constraints on growth, but you have natural constraints on what a book value multiple is going to value the business at because it's more mathematical. It's not just about how many customers you have. It's about the accumulation of profits that the business has had in the past. I think it's going to be interesting to see. Also, I think part of the reason you're seeing venture capital dollars make these kind of bets is because venture capital itself is changing. It's becoming more of a private equity model. The required hurdle rate, investment, hurdle rate on an investment potentially is falling. It's more about, yeah, it's more about deploying large amounts of money rather than large amounts of money and getting a good return rather than deploying smaller amounts of money and getting a great return. We're also going to learn that in the next couple years. I don't know the answer, but yeah, it's unresolved, I think.
- [38:04]
C
What did you learn about the process of writing a book?
- [38:06]
A
Yeah, writing a book is, you know, I don't know how most people operate, but before I started writing a book, I did very little research into how to write a book. I kind of, I sat down not at a typewriter, but with a computer and really just commenced writing. That's how I approached it. So the whole process as I went was pretty revealing. You know, I didn't know much about publishing other than Simon and Schuster and Penguin were big, big publishing houses. I'm assuming we still have publishing houses as a concept. So I didn't know very much. It's an ordeal. It really requires a different level of commitment and kind of endurance and discipline than writing anything else. And so you, you're in the world of creating different types of content. That definitely requires a certain type of discipline of regularity doing it consistently writing a book. It has similarities, but it's different. It's more about. You have to set a. You have to commit yourself to write certain volumes of work consistently with a goal of getting all of it done. So it's more, it's more output related than frequency related, although frequency plays into the output. And you can read a lot about how different authors approach this different ways. Some Authors will write 10 pages a day or two pages a day. I was not so structured. I just probably because I have a pretty time consuming day job, it really required that when I had extra time, sometimes on the weekends, sometimes on a holiday, sometimes on a random Thursday when my meetings just didn't really crowd in that period of time, I had to write, and I often had to write an uncomfortably large amount for what I kind of had in my brain. And that was a weird part of writing a book. So that was part of it. It is almost a physical endurance kind of thing. And then the other part I'd add is the. The publishing industry works in strange ways. It, you know, you think when you look out from the ins, from look in from the outside, you kind of think that the author is kind of calling the shots. You know, it's their book. They, you know, and they. They send it in and a few things happen and then it's published. That's actually not what happened. I think the. So I started writing this book quite a while ago, and I think in the summer of 2023, and it basically finished at the end of last year, which that's a pretty long period of time. It's two and a half years. But I'd finished writing it basically a little more than a year. So there was an additional year and several months to the process before it was published. You get a lot of edits, you get a lot of input, you get feedback. You have to deal with that. You have to think about how you're going to. What the COVID of the book's going to look like. You have to think about how it's going to be distributed. You got to think about how it's going to be marketed. And also there's a bunch of stuff happening in the background that you don't even see. The publisher is coordinating with different parties in a way that you're not even aware of. I think one of the biggest things I've learned about publishing is the author is really just one part of one stakeholder and maybe not the most important one. I think the publisher is kind of playing quarterback and you're some other position, maybe the running back, moving the ball, but they're making the decisions.
- [41:44]
C
A lot of time before I let you go, what is it that you hope readers will take away after reading? How do you want them to feel?
- [41:55]
A
Yeah. So I hope they learned something reading the book. I think that's why most people read. They want to emerge with more knowledge than they had before. And that's my hope. I mentioned at the beginning of this that something you learn writing a book is that you as an author have your own way of seeing the world. I learned that I have a specific way of seeing the world that I haven't seen it specifically in other people approaching at least this topic. And I kind of hope that other people are able to see that this kind of seeing fintech in a broader landscape of finance and building a future industry that doesn't exist, but serving the same needs that have always existed, plus some nuances on them that maybe didn't. So I think that generally I'd like people to come away with that, that kind of just perspective that I have that hopefully is to some extent unique. And I think also on a more practical, from a more practical perspective, I think I'd like operators, founders and to some extent investors to be more successful. I believe that I talk about some things in the book that are they're real issues that people forget or that they don't take seriously enough, largely because no one tells them that they should. Or at least no one with authority or with experience that they respect tells them to worry about those things. And I would love it for people to read this book, particularly entrepreneurs, to read this book and to maybe keep the car on the road a little bit better and avoid going off in the ditch for ways that are preventable. So I think that's probably the main
- [43:56]
C
thing is finance technology. Get it before it flies off the ship. That's right. All right, thanks for doing this.
- [44:03]
A
Thank you. This is great.
- [44:05]
B
Thanks for tuning in and I hope you enjoyed this great episode with Andrew Andicott. If you want more interviews, please subscribe, follow and leave a review on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your shows. It helps and means a lot. And if you have any suggestions or thoughts about the show, just drop me a line on LinkedIn or email. See you next time.