👪 Husband & father 🥋 Former MMA · lived in Japan 💻 Senior #fintech exec · 3x founder 🛠️ Building https://nitter.cf/t.co/oIyrToCj0S
Knoxville, TN
Joined November 2009
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Valley Bank's plan for Bluevine: Bluevine's founder runs ALL of Valley's small business. "One segment with one very clear leader."
That's Total Relevant Market done right. Organize around the customer, not the channel.
Branch SMB plan + digital SMB plan = two half-strategies.
Distribution in order:
1. Earned: content and search
2. Borrowed: someone else's foot traffic
3. Paid: only once CAC and LTV are proven
And the first sale is fool's gold.
Episode 4 of Sunday, Unedited: open.spotify.com/episode/2NO…
One of my agents is called Daily Threat Brief.
I built it to keep me up-to-date on international, national, regional, and local threats.
Here's one line from this mornings brief that has me really concerned...
1) 33% of all fertilizer is produced in the ME. The 70% drop is in exports, not production.
2) China is the "main release valve." Russia supplies about 20%.
At this rate, we should all expect an increase in certain food prices in 2027. On top of a 2.5%+ increase from 2026....
The largest crypto theft on record reportedly started with a laptop.
Not a movie-style breach. One engineer's machine.
On October 29, Binance, the world's biggest crypto exchange, had roughly $6.3 billion in assets hit across about ten blockchains in a few hours.
Around $3 billion has been frozen so far.
Binance says it will cover user losses, and blockchain analytics firms are pointing to North Korea-linked hackers.
But the detail that stuck with me was the first one Binance shared: a compromised DevOps laptop, and a path from there into the systems that move money out.
Investigators have since found more points of breach. It still started small.
This is a company with an emergency fund, a massive security team, and every reason in the world to get this right.
So I don't think the lesson is "crypto is broken."
The lesson is that every company has a single point of failure holding up more weight than anyone realizes.
For most founders I talk to, it isn't a laptop. It's one customer that's most of the revenue.
One platform that sends all the leads. One contractor who's the only person who can ship. Or the founder, who is every process.
None of those feel dangerous.
They feel efficient. Right up until they aren't.
Try this: write down the five things that would stop your business cold if they disappeared tomorrow. Next to each, answer one question. What do I do if this breaks at 8pm on a Thursday?
The one you can't answer is your laptop. Fix that one first.
If I had to pick one winner for the banking sector it would be Revolut.
That’s what I told a room of 230+ community financial institutions last week.
Revolut says they are running down JP Morgan Chase. They aren’t. They are running down the entire sector.
They have a refined playbook and they are bringing it to the US.
But they can be beat. Thats what my session covered last week at our annual conference.
Did you miss it? I’m happy to share the presentation. My DMs are open.
I just broke 10,000 words on my upcoming book - The Final Moat.
Writing is equally parts maddening and a joy.
If you've ever thought about writing a book, just start typing. You won't regret it.
Market Investment Mapping in one test:
Share of GTM spend next to share of closed-won revenue, by channel, last 4 quarters. Count hours, not just invoices.
The gap is what you're paying to subsidize indifference. Move one line item this quarter.
Seven giant banks built a wallet with 150M+ cards ready to load. V1 still flopped: too many screens, low approvals.
The fix was GTM, not tech. But the hardest pillar is still open: who is it for?
Paze through the Six Pillars: thefintechgtm.substack.com/p…
Cross River is buying Accrue because "every brand wants its own wallet."
Accounts, cards, payments, lending, now loyalty. That's Product Alignment and Bundling: own the outcome, not the line item.
Sell one layer? Your next competitor might be a bank selling all of them.
"Banks and credit unions" is not a market. It's thousands of institutions with different cores, regulators and buying committees.
How I'd cut it down to a Total Relevant Market you can actually win:
Building is easy now. Getting the market to care is not.
Yet companies still go idea -> build with zero GTM thought.
AI made building cheap. It made attention expensive.
Before you build, know: who it’s for, why they’d switch, how they’ll find you, and what they’ll pay.
Some of the biggest banks in America spent Money20/20 week explaining why AI agents can't touch customer accounts.
The same week, Huntington gave its new AI tool away to small businesses that don't even bank there.
One closed a door. One opened a new one. Both were answering the same question: where does a customer start a money task now?
It used to be the branch, then the app. This week it split four ways. An AI agent. The software a business runs on. A brand's wallet. And yes, still the branch.
In this Sunday's Fintech GTM Report, I walk through six moves (Citi and PNC on agents, Huntington, Cross River buying Accrue, Ramp's charter filing, the OCC's stablecoin rule, and a Michigan credit union buying a Florida bank) and what each one means for banks, credit unions, and fintechs.
The short version: nobody can own all four front doors. The institutions that struggle will be the ones trying to show up at all of them with a budget for one.
Full breakdown here: thefintechgtm.substack.com/p…
Todd and I are builders at heart.
So, we picked a business and built it live, in an hour.
In this week’s episode of the Sunday, Unedited podcast you get an inside view into how we’d spin up a Micro Art Vending Machine business.
Listen in at podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
