MTB

An argument that risk in fintech behaves like energy in physics: it can't be created or destroyed, only transferred between counterparties. The piece walks through how risk-transfer pricing determines who bears what, why most fintech businesses are fundam

An argument that the AI-era "context graph" (the relationships between customer, transaction, and operational data that make an AI agent actually useful) is something vertical software has been compounding for a decade. Frames vertical SaaS as the incumbe

Software people assume fintech moats work like software moats: code, distribution, network effects. They don't. The post explains why fintech moats live in different places (risk pricing, regulatory permission, balance-sheet trust) and what that means for

A meditation on the shifting definition of "computer" as AI agents move us from programmable instructions to programmable cognition. The post traces how each generation of computing has expanded what "computer" means and argues we are at the start of anot

A short explainer on card issuing: the five-player chain of promises (cardholder, issuer, network, acquirer, merchant) that turns a tap into authorization in milliseconds, why debit/credit/charge/prepaid are different businesses, how Marqeta-era unbundlin