indelibly Every now and then I receive an email from a recruiter who has seen a particular keyword in my Linkedin profile and is offering me the “opportunity” to talk with a company that is looking for that skill. Not really reading my profile, not understanding my career progression, just the simplest rule of all: if […]
Focus on Moven
A word I constantly hear these days is “focus”. It comes in many forms, from advisors insisting the company should focus on this or that aspect of the business, from experts that have focused their career on a narrow field, to behavioral experts explaining that multitasking is “killing our brains” and we should focus on […]
Back to the (Fintech) Future
Another Career Switch I have spent three years of my life as a venture capital investor, talking with over a thousand fintech startup teams, looking for outstanding teams, excellent ideas, and good enough execution – in this order. My previous experience as entrepreneur, software executive, and internal innovation promoter has helped – many times too […]
Competing with Incumbent Banks with a Stacked Deck
In a very interesting piece about a financial services conference, I found out about Victoria Raffe, a former bank regulator in the UK, now an independent consultant, talking about the process of getting approval for new banks in the UK. As someone following closely fintech startups like Moven (and Simple before that) and others that deliver […]
Hiring for Insurance, or Potential?
The “job description” has achieved gospel status in the modern corporation, from startups to large multinationals. It lists tasks, responsibilities, competencies, skills, and anything else the hiring organization, through the hiring manager and HR specialist eyes, thinks is important to help filter and select candidates for a job. I refer to this hiring strategy, jokingly, […]
The Startup CEO
There is no shortage of advice for startup CEOs, from books to blog posts, and an endless stream of online advice. The bigger the mainstream media buzz about startups, the better the chance of seeing almost every day something like “The 3 Most Important Characteristics of a Successful Startup CEO”. But I digress… I have […]
The Power of Positive Feedback
In one of my early jobs, I was a young engineer working for a company assembling electricity meters. Several thousand employees were working day and night putting those together, and the main activity was using small screwdrivers to screw together the many parts of the device. A key productivity tool was the electrical screwdriver – […]
The New Age of Algorithms
I come from an engineering background, for me computers were, for a long time, calculators, a tool to perform either complex calculations, or on large data sets. Otherwise a handheld calculator – standard in my university years – would have been more than enough. Computers were expensive, data entry was a pain, and output was […]
Q&A with SBT Venture Capital
1.What is your definition of fintech? My view is that fintech is a misnomer, but good as a shortcut name. What we really mean is the disruption of financial services through technologies like mobile, cloud, social, big data analytics, crypto, etc — and whatever will be invented in the years to come. While financial services companies […]
Getting To Know You, or Why We Invested in IdentityMind
We have recently announced our investment in IdentityMind Global, a software-as-a-service company that provides technology solutions for mitigation against financial crimes like identity fraud and money laundering. The problem of fraud and financial crime has always been with us, before computers and the internet. And as the financial system evolved, so has financial crime. In the age of e-commerce, with an […]