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In this conversation, our Editor-in-chief Lex Sokolin walks through how 2023 is the year for executing on raw fundamentals, which means understanding how to design a Fintech or DeFi business model and understanding the shape of demand. Companies must focus on customer centricity and use a Lean Startup methodology to validate ideas and assumptions. This is done by testing products and services with prospects, using digital landing pages, and buying Google Ads to drive people to those landing pages.
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0’31”: Introduction - What the last 3 years brought to the Fintech space
2’45”: How to approach 2023 from a mental model perspective
7’03”: The approach to designing a Fintech or DeFi business model in 2023
16’27”: The Lean Start-up Methodology & how it optimises product market fit
22’48”: Methods to seeking economically sufficient demand: traditional banking vs neobanking models
27’45”: Automation of the CFO stack vs Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)
30’48”: Risk appetite: Betterment vs Coinbase vs MetaMask - their similarities and vastly dissimilar approaches to win consumers
36’11”: Economic models attached to opportunities
44’32”: Platform businesses providing an intermediating layer with repeatable demand
46’29”: The nature of economic flows: Money in motion vs money at rest
50’49”: Conclusion - closing remarks
Sneak Peek:
Lex Sokolin: …another approach is to look at demand through the lens of novelty, not through. These are repeatable patterns, and we know where they are and we know how many mortgages people need to do per year and so on. But instead to look at the platform shifts, the transitions, the weird things that are going on where demand is uncertain. What is the demand for iPhones going to be? What is the demand for ads technology and so on? So, you look at places where you have uncertainty and you have open frontiers. You would call these blue ocean opportunities instead of red ocean, which have lots of competition. Blue ocean is open, nobody's there yet. So, I gave the example of the iPhone. Another toy example would be cases for iPhones or iPhone protectors. The first iPhone comes out and you go, ah, I'm going to go after this opportunity to create print your own case protectors for iPhones.
Maybe that device will be popular, maybe it won't. You don't know. You don't know how much it will grow. So that bet is very uncertain in terms of its exposure, but it has asymmetric upside. So, if we look at things that are similar in fintech and in DeFi, I'll give you an example. So, one of the transitions has been the automation of the CFO technology stack. So, the chief financial officer at a company uses likely spreadsheets and all sorts of reconciliation systems. So fintech has built out a whole bunch of payment operations, payroll processing, and other integrated systems to help the CFO function of businesses. And in many ways, small businesses do these things in a much more integrated automated customer-centric ways. Now, the same thing is happening to decentralized autonomous organizations in Web3. DAOs. So DAOs are like small businesses except they are in this internet digital world, and they also have payroll.
DAOs have lots of people who are doing stuff and want to be paid in tokens, so they need automated payroll. DAOs also need to figure out…
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Finance is being pulled apart by the forces of frontier technology. From AI, to blockchain, crypto and DeFi, to mixed reality, chatbots, neobanks, and roboadvisors — the industry will never be the same. Here is the blueprint for navigating the shift.
Finance is being pulled apart by the forces of frontier technology. From AI, to blockchain, crypto and DeFi, to mixed reality, chatbots, neobanks, and roboadvisors — the industry will never be the same. Here is the blueprint for navigating the shift.
