"Age of Miracles"

Rohit Mittal founded Stilt to give loans to immigrants and underserved people for whom traditional underwriting models didn't work. He came to the US as an immigrant and experienced the pain of establishing credit without any, and after years of working within the system and learning, he built the product to fix it. That meant rebuilding everything -- new underwriting models, license, tech stack -- and stitching it all together.  With the rise of embedded finance and banking-as-a-service, it turns out that the stack Rohit and team built from scratch was really valuable to a lot of companies who wanted to start extending credit to their customers. At first, Rohit helped some YC companies figure out how to do it, but enough of them were asking -- and just wanted an easy API they could plug in -- that the company built a product: Onbo. Onbo lets companies build credit products without a bank sponsor, in weeks instead of months or years, for a fraction of the cost. Despite just coming out of stealth, the new business line is growing like wild.  On today's episode, Rohit and I dive into the nuts and bolts of spinning out company infrastructure as its own product, why GTM motions are so different in API-first and consumer, and much more. If you like this episode, consider leaving us a rating in your podcast player of choice and telling your friends!  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Flow, the blockchain for open worlds created by Dapper Labs, is a normie blockchain.  In a world in which L1s are battling for 300 million crypto users, going for the other 4.7 billion internet users is crazy differentiated enough that it just might work.  You can read the full essay at Not Boring. Thanks to our presenting sponsor, Masterworks.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Abrar Ul Haq is the co-founder of Tazah, a B2B agricultural marketplace that provides access to market and access to capital to millions of farmers in Pakistan and in the middle east region. Prior to Tazah, Abrar and his co-founder worked at Careem, a regional super app that competed with Uber, beat it in its home region, and then got acquired by Uber. In this episode, Abrar shares the lessons he learned at Careem and how he's applying them to building a fast-growing marketplace.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Today, Quaestor is announcing a rebrand to Standard Metrics and a fresh $23.7 million Series A to build the data and relationship graph for the private markets.  In this episode, we'll discuss why the private markets, and especially venture capital, needs an Entropy Wrangler, and the two key strategic decisions that Standard Metrics is making to ensure that it becomes the platform on top of which private markets investing apps are built.  You can read the full post at not boring.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Neuro-ID and Alloy are teaming up to tackle the $721B in estimated losses from identity theft, stop fraud ring attacks, and create smoother experiences for good customers. We dig into the direct fraud problem and the even bigger problem caused by stopping good actors who want to purchase. Plus, Jack and Tommy share how a partnership like this comes together in the first place.  Disclosure: Neuro-ID is a Not Boring Capital portfolio company.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

I recently read two books on quantum physics by Carlo Rovelli: The Order of Time and Helgoland. While this isn't a quantum physics podcast, I think they're actually useful to think about in our context in three ways. Understanding the current state of the science. It’s at least interesting, if not practically useful to most of our day jobs, to understand where the cutting edge of physics is today. Web of Relations as a useful model. Quantum theory’s main insight – that everything exists as a web of relations – is a helpful framework for many of the ideas that we discuss here. Getting comfortable with the weird. I don’t remember a lot of the specifics from the essays I write; I can’t expect you to. Instead, I want you to walk away with an informed open-mindedness and comfort with new technologies and ideas. I’m successful here if you see something new and crazy and think, “Woah, fascinating” instead of “Yeah right 🙄.” You can read the full piece at not boring. Thanks to our presenting audio sponsor, Masterworks. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

In five years, Snappr has gone from graduation photography to the leading on-demand marketplace for professional photography and now, to end-to-end visual content workflow software used by many of the world's largest companies and marketplaces. Matt Schiller is running the the API-first playbook in reverse, and the business is growing like a weed. You can read the full post at Not Boring. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

The American Dream is on life support, but it's not dead. We need to stop focusing so much time worrying about protecting peoples’ downsides and start spending more time working on getting more people more upside. We can revive the American Dream by making ownership an explicit economic strategy. You can read the full post at Not Boring.  Thanks to our Presenting Sponsor, Masterworks.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Braintrust is a user-owned talent network that has done $37 million of volume in under two years since launching. It's also the best example of a "real-world" use case I've found in web3.  Read the full post at Not Boring.  This episode is brought to you by Masterworks, our presenting sponsor for Q1 2022.  Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post and Not Boring Capital is an investor in Braintrust.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message

Last week, Not Boring crossed 100,000 subscribers. In this episode, we take a quick look back, brush off the trolls, and re-commit to taking risks, getting things wrong, and being unabashedly optimistic. You can read the full post at Not Boring. Thanks to the Presenting Sponsor of Not Boring's Audio Editions: Masterworks. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ageofmiracles/message