It’s the eve of election night, and I’m having a drink at Fiction Bar listening to live jazz and pretending like I have something crucial to say about the mayoral election in New York City, one of the greatest cities in the Western World. Tomorrow we’ll know for sure if Zohran Mamdani is the mayor-elect of New York. How did we get here? What does this mean for politics around the city, as well as politics for the rest of the country?

I’m going to make the case for what happens if everything goes according to plan - if we’re actually on the cusp of a new political movement in America, and if it’s time for the Democrats to start making sense again and stop embarrassingly losing elections.

The Modern Failure of the Left

Many of Zohran’s policies aren’t necessarily new. In San Francisco, bus fares are effectively unenforced, rent control is quite common, and alternative sources of policing funded. The results have been abysmal and horrifying. Many people feel unsafe taking public transit. An old coworker of mine was cornered and attacked while taking the bus to work, leading to her feeling unsafe relying on it to get to work. Rent control exists, yet the housing crisis in San Francisco is at an all time high. Alternatives to policing exist but are ineffective at rehabilitating homeless, which leads to more suffering for both the unhoused and the service workers that interact with them on a daily basis.

People are skeptical of Zohran’s policies because they’ve been them fail in cities like SF. My theory is simple: Zohran’s policies can work in New York because NYC is different.

The Massive Bull Case

Why can’t buses be free, safe, and fast? New York is already a city that has an extremely well functioning public transit system, why can’t we dream of making it even better? Rent control is not the cause of the housing crisis: lack of development of new housing is. It’s possible to do both, something Zohran has said is a part of his agenda. Alternatives for policing, especially to handle domestic disputes or first responders, sound like great ideas but haven’t been successfully put into practice, yet.

New York has the potential to get these right primary because New York is not SF. It’s much more politically diverse, and it’s historically had a much stronger track record of city compentence. New York could be the first city that successfully executes this policy, creating a more prosperous city for everyone. Public transit being free, fast, and safe? Why can’t NYC be the first to do it well in America? I think it’s worth a shot.

NYC is already a very expensive place to live - I like to think that New Yorkers get way they pay for. An expensive city with the best of all types of things: beautiful people, great arts, world-class restaurants, everything else that makes NYC special. There’s a chance we get more of all of it. If NYC builds more housing sustainably it means more great restaurants, free buses means more people take the buses to go places, which means more money spent eating good food, which means more amazing restaurants.

People decide to put up with San Francisco politics because San Francisco is a beautiful city that happens to be the best place to build a career in technology. People stay in NYC for industry as well, but people decide to spend their dollars to live in NYC because it’s a great place to live. It’s also the only real city in America.

Some say that rich people will leave the city if Zohran Mamdani is elected. My question is: where else will they go? For people that have the ability to choose, NYC is the only option. There aren’t many compelling alternatives for people with choice. It’s safe to say that rich aren’t leaving NYC either.

A New Dawn for America Politics

I think that the 2024 Presidential Election marked two moments very clearly: the transformation of the Republican Party to the party of Trump and the death of the modern Democratic party. Zohran Mamdani represents something new. We’re in desperate need a new ideas that inspire people about a world that could be different and better. Specifically, one that voters care about: making housing affordable, making public transportation better, and making the city safer. I think there’s a chance it might actually work this time.

It’s 2025. It’s been 24 years since the twin towers fell. We live so far in post-9/11 America that many voters have no conception of 9/11 in their lifetime. As such, voters have never seen a terrorist attack on U.S. soil and have no reason to be Islamaphobic. The genocide is Gaza is a lot closer to reality than a terror attack that happened before they were born. It turns out there’s nothing wrong with an American mayor that happens to be Muslim.

I’m looking forward to seeing the results of the election roll in tomorrow. In general, it’s been exciting living in a city where things are happening and where people are ambitious enough to try doing radically exciting public policy right. Regardless of the outcome, both of the election and the results of it, I’m optimistic about the future of NYC and by extension of the future of America.

The software infrastructure that powers the world economy is being written and rewritten at a faster pace than ever before. LLMs will enable software developers to rewrite critical infrastructure underpinning our economy. Most of our critical infrastructure are programs that move money.

What will it take to build the next generation of social services like Social Security? Stablecoins have been rapidly growing to enable remittance in corridors without stable currencies, but some of the most critical work to be done will be enabling developers and their coding agents to rebuild classic payment businesses in the world’s largest economies.

The truth is that while stablecoins will play an important role in the world economy over the next few decades, innovations in traditional fiat money movement, specifically open standards like ISO20022 and instant bank transfer rails like Real Time Payments will play an even more important role at rebuilding the world’s most important services.

The Growth of Stablecoins

Across the world, hundreds of millions of human beings live and work in countries without stable currencies. The money they earn can’t be saved, they do not have access to financial services, and they cannot financially plan for a future by building wealth. The corridors between the western world and these countries are underdeveloped and expensive. SWIFT is more concerned, rightfully so, about the $1B wire between Hong Kong and London than the $100 payment between the U.S. and Argentina.

This is where stablecoins will play an important role. Dollar-denominated stablecoins like USDC are already playing a critical role for remittances between countries like the U.S. to countries in LatAm and Africa.

Crypto has and always will be important hedge against the tyranny of governments, which hold tight and sometimes poor control of their currencies. Inflation in Argentina was 211.4% in 20231. Perhaps it would be better if they transacted in USD, which inflated 4.1% during the same period2.

Coming Back to Earth

Why hasn’t there been any major ($100B+) businesses in countries with developed payment systems like the U.S, China, and the U.K. that solely rely on stablecoins? The truth is obvious: nothing beats money that is sent directly to your bank account.

Talentir, an Austrian startup that builds better ways to payout Youtube creators, quickly realized during their rapid growth that they needed to build bank payouts to serve their biggest users. Talentir sends bank payments using SEPA, the ACH of Europe. Today, SEPA transfers are instant, effectively free, and universally accessible within Europe. Tomorrow, the same work is happening in countries like the U.K, Australia, and the U.S, which payment rails like FedNow.

In the real world, payments volume is measured in the trillions.

Across the world, bank transfers are getting faster, cheaper and simpler: the entire world is standardizing upon a standard interface called ISO20022. If the blockchain is the settlement layer in crypto, the settlement layer for fiat money are the settlement networks: the Federal Reserve, the European Payments Council, and others. One by one, they’re starting to support instant settlement using a uniform rail, allowing businesses across the world to send bank transfers as easily as sending crypto.

The Challenge of the Future

What will it take to build the next Social Security or the next Medicare? I believe that stablecoins aren’t the only answer - better fiat rails are. I believe that most payment volume in developed countries will not be moving to stablecoins - instead they will moving money through better bank rails that offer the same functionality.

In the U.S, payment rails like RTP are emerging as alternatives to decentralized settlement networks like Solana. One major challenge remains: interacting with the banking system is opaque and difficult. Open standards emerging, like ISO20022, are going to change that. ISO20022 is a standard adopted by virtually every bank in the world that allows standard format messages to be sent to them. Every modern payment rail in the world uses ISO20022, like RTP, Fedwire, and FedNow in the U.S, SEPA in the European Union, and CNAPS in China.

In order to unlock the next $10T of economic growth, we need to arm developers with the tools to build the next generation of services that move money. iso20022js.com is an open source library built to make sending bank payments as easy as sending money with crypto. It’s currently one of the most popular open source bank transfer libraries on the internet and the first library to allow you to create RTP payments in Typescript.

Here’s an example of how to send money using U.S. Real Time Payments with iso20022js.com:

// Create an RTP ISO20022 Message using iso20022.js
const payment = checking.createRTPCreditPaymentInitiation([
    {
        type: 'rtp',
        direction: 'credit',
        amount: 100000, // $1000.00
        currency: 'USD',
        creditor: {
            name: 'All-American Dogs Co.',
            account: {
                accountNumber: '123456789012',
            },
            agent: {
                abaRoutingNumber: '37714568112',
            }
        },
        remittanceInformation: '1000 Hot Dogs Feb26',
    }
]);

// Send using fiatwebservices.com
client.payment_transfers.send(payment)

Crypto will play an important role as the check and balance against the tyranny of governments. No one should live in a society where the money they earn will be worth half as much in a years time. In this sense, crypto is aligned with the American value of preserving human rights and liberties.

By making fiat payments easier for developers to use, we have the potential to reinvent the most important parts of society. One day in the near future, engineers will architect a better, faster version of Social Security for the U.S. Government. It will certainly use ISO20022 to orchestrate money movement, and there’s a good chance they’ll be using iso20022js.com to do it.

If you’re interested in working on the future of money or are rebuilding critical parts of the world economy, I’d love to hear from you. Shoot me an email at svapnil@woodside.sh if this is you.

If you’re looking for information on how to build applications that interact with banks, check out iso20022.js and feel free to give it a star on Github.

Last week, I released iso20022.js, which received over a hundred thousands views, making it to the front page of HackerNews. Clearly programmatically communicating with banks is a huge unsolved problem for developers, and I hope what I’ve learned can be helpful for others that are interested in this space.

REST APIs Aren’t How Banks Communicate, Files Are

A vast majority of the instructions sent to banks do not move through the modern day REST APIs that we are used to, they move through file.

Taking a step back - let’s consider how most developers are used to interacting with services on the internet. Most people are used to HTTP APIs, and public facing URLs that return predictable JSON responses. This wasn’t the first way computers interacted with each other. An alternative to REST APIs and gRPC is a much older and simpler solution: SFTP. Most instructions in the banking world are simply done directly via file. For example, to send a SWIFT payment means creating a SWIFT payment instruction and dropping it off via SFTP to a directory you were allocated by a bank.

In 1974, the NACHA file standard was developed to move ACH across the US. Since then, MT103 was designed to move wires, checks, and everything else. The world continues to rely on files and SFTP to power the world’s most critical infrastructure.

This is why the REST APIs offered by banks are so often not good enough. Most banking customers simply aren’t integrating against them. Even if you are, you might be using a solution that gets inevitably converted to files under the hood.

Looking deeper - the Central Banks that move the underlying funds, effectively the centralized database that powers the money movement, only interact using files or file-like structures. Consider that the Federal Reserve’s FedNow and Brazil’s PIX both move through ISO20022 messaging standards that banks provide SFTP hookups for.

Bank APIs are Not Designed to Be Easy to Use

If you’ve built consumer apps, you might be familiar with Stripe’s API. Stripe was built by software developers for software developers, and there’s a clear emphasis on usability and ergonomics. One simple interface works for every credit card and merchant.

On the other hand, Banking APIs are fragmented, and there isn’t a clear incentive to be developer-friendly.

Every bank has their own interface per each type of payment rail they offer, and are always one feature behind the file-based offerings that most of their customers use. We don’t need a thousand different adapters to interact with the banking system.

Open File-Based Messaging Standards Will Prevail

Reinventing the wheel by building new REST APIs may not be what enables developers and entrepreneurs build new businesses on top of the world’s banking institutions. Instead, the files that are currently used to power the world’s economy will continue to get used more.

The banking world started with simple “flat-file” interfaces to send payment instructions. The future doesn’t look like an API, it looks like better and better files.

ISO20022 is the next open file standard that banks use to communicate, and if you pay attention, the world is already moving to this new standard. SWIFT is mandating all instructions will be ISO20022. Currently, all SEPA payments, the ACH of the EU, move via ISO20022 file, and FedNow and Pix are following.

I built iso20022.js to help developers interact with this file standard directly. My goal is not to offer a new standard to abide by, but to make the leading one even easier to integrate with. You can check it out if you wanna see how to build a SWIFT instruction in three lines of code using standards that already exist.

If this is something that resonates with you, I’d love to learn more about your business and help you figure this stuff out. Consider subscribing if you’d like to learn more or reaching out to svapnil@woodside.sh - I’d love to hear what you think.

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Work life balance is a topic heavily discussed in Silicon Valley. Every few weeks it becomes the topic of conversation on Tech Twitter / X. Rightfully so, people building startups care lot about doing impactful work and want to learn how to do so, and discussions like this are a byproduct of how much people care about their job.

So what does it really take to build a successful company - is it worth sacrificing nights and weekends? What does it take to build a successful life? Is it worth sacrificing your twenties for enlightenment in your thirties?

I’m relatively early in my career, so by no means have I figured any of this stuff out, but I want to share some of my thoughts so the next person reading this has a better idea than I do. Chances are you care a lot about doing great work, and I hope this helps you do it.

Optimizing Your Chances of Success

I’ve heard the phrase “optimizing your chances of success” countless times in SF. What does success look like? For a startup, this might mean how much money you’ve raised, how many employees you have, or have much revenue you’re generating. It’s important when you run a company one day you get these things right.

I think optimizing for success is the right framework, but we don’t take it nearly far enough.

In some ways, the most important enterprise we will ever run is the progression of our own life, and it’s incredibly important we take the decisions we make here seriously. The jobs we do, the friends we keep, and the time we spend are all decisions that we intentionally have to make on the long journey it takes to build a successful life, and it’s worth trying to optimize our chances for success here as well.

Depending on what your goals are, this might mean taking a weeknight off to go and learn how to dance, go on a date, or spend time talking with your family. It’s definitely possible to fail at building a large successful company, but succeed in building a great life. The counterfactual for this is as ominous as it is real: it’s possible to build large, successful company and live a failed life.

Working Hard

Nothing good comes easy, and there’s no substitute for hard work. I think that’s true both in business and in building a good life. It’s worth striving for success, regardless if it’s a great relationship with your parents or 1M ARR.

Being early in our career, it’s easy to see work as a short distance sprint, especially if you’ve only been in the workforce for a few years. Can you really grind non-stop in your twenties to relax in your thirties? Note that some of the best companies, like Amazon, Google, and Facebook, were built over decades. If your goal is to do your life’s work, it might be worth finding a way to do it sustainably, since you’ll be doing it for decades.

Looking Ahead

Work-life balance is sort of a misnomer. If work plays an integral part of your identity, then it’s just life. If you take that part of your life seriously, then consider every other part of your life, your friends, family, and personal satisfaction, as an extension of your work.

If you’re reading this, you are probably someone looking to do their best work, and do it over the long haul. It’s working taking seriously not just how our life’s work will be done, but to recognize that the most important thing we’re building along the way is our life itself. Just as serious it is to build a venture-backed company, we should take trying to live the best life we can incredibly seriously.

If the ideas in this article resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts about it. Feel free to shoot me a message or email (svapnil @ woodside.sh) about it.

Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky to have been given the opportunity to work with great engineers at companies like Meta, Modern Treasury, and others. The best engineers I’ve worked with were great in obvious ways - they finished their work quickly, set and made deadlines, and produced great work. What interested me were the non-obvious traits that made them and the companies they’ve worked at successful. What I’ve concluded is that some of the best engineers demonstrate a shared set of values in their work, which I believe every engineer can co-opt and emulate.

As I’m currently working on building something on my own, I look back at the values of the best engineers I’ve worked with for inspiration on how to do great work. I’ve tried to distill what I’ve seen into a few values below.

Not Afraid of the Details

There is a generally accepted paradox in engineering management that the more senior an engineer is, the less necessary is her ability to write code. While this may make sense at first: the core competency of an engineering leader is to architect and manage teams, not code, I believe that the best engineering leaders actually practice the opposite: they’re able to dive into the details and set an example for the rest of their team.

One concrete example of this was working with an engineering director that was growing her team. At first, while her team was small, she was directly involved with the scope of work her team is responsible for, like setting up our company’s Datadog infrastructure or scaling our Postgres DB’s connection pools. As the team grew, she was able to seamlessly transition ownership off to people she hired.

An engineering leader that is able to demonstrate proficiency in all levels of their team, from managing the team to completing the IC work, is able to lead their team by example, raising the bar for the entire organization. It’s not a surprise that engineers under a strong engineering leader’s leadership are able to move forward in their careers quickly, as the archetype of their next role is right in front of them.

Value Craftsmanship

Steve Jobs wasn’t the last to strive to build things “insanely great.” From my perspective, great engineers must deeply care about quality of their work beyond the level of care commanded of them. The result of demonstrating craftsmanship in their work are undoubtably great products that speak for themselves.

One clear cut example of craftsmanship in software is the Stripe API. Put simply, every detail in Stripe’s data models has been clearly thought through, which is why developers prefer to use Stripe over other payment solutions. The result of their API craftsmanship is an enduring business that makes billions of dollars every year. So many engineering marvels in our modern world - the iPhone, the Toyota Camry, and the Stripe API, are examples of enduring engineering craftsmanship.

I think of Modern Treasury’s Payment Order API as another example of an API reference built with care. Having built payment integrations against a variety of payment API vendors, it’s obvious where an engineer built something because they were forced to or if they built it because they actually wanted it to be useful and pleasant to use. The best engineers should always strive for craftsmanship in their work and care about building something beautiful.

Sovereignty

Are great engineers successful because they work for successful companies, or are companies successful because they have great engineers? I believe both are equally true. Great engineers aren’t dictated by their team, their manager, their organization, or their company - they find the right place to be themselves, and they continue to earn their spot there by doing great work.

Engineers must find great work to do to avoid stagnation. Meta famously makes it very easy to switch teams and find impactful work, which is their way of retaining talent.

Caring About Users

When I first interned at Facebook, I was surprised at how passionately people felt about the users that used their products. On the outside, the news media painted a picture of software engineers apathetic to the results of their work, but on the inside were engineers that deeply cared about the people that used their software. In fact, during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, many engineers switched teams or quit to prove their point.

Whether working on a billion user consumer app or a B2B SaaS, the best engineers demonstrate a deep empathy and responsibility for building something that brings joy to their people.

Enterprise software is riddled with applications that don’t meet the mark - which is sometimes celebrated in Silicon Valley today. “If Concur can make billions of dollars making enterprise software people hate to use, so can I!” This mindset fails for two reasons: bad products are hard to sell to users, even if they need it. Just as importantly, great engineers want to work on something that brings joy, and it will be hard to hire one to build something that they know doesn’t.

Mentoring Others

The one seems the most obvious - the best people I’ve worked with work hard to raise the bar for everyone around them. Proactive mentorship is one of the best things an engineer can do for their organization and their colleagues.

Looking back at my most formative experiences working in tech over the last few years, I look fondly back to memories of my coworkers pushing me to be better. Whether it’s to improve an API-CR I’ve written, craftsmanship, or coaching me to take the next step in my career, sovereignty, and many other examples, carrying the torch and making the people you work with into becoming better engineers is a core competency for talented engineers.

Originally built as a joke to show my friends, I’ve seen firsthand how products evolve once real users start pulling your product off the shelves. Since a year ago, I’ve had to deal with overloaded servers, ran customer support, and learned everything there is to know about Stripe billing. What I ended up with is a product built on nights and weekends with tens of thousands of users making hundreds of dollars a month, profitable and owned and operated 100% by myself.

In this post I’ll be explaining a little bit about what I’ve built, how to build online products that work, and how to make money while doing it. I believe engineers who can ship things themselves are well-equip to start and grow lasting businesses on the internet. If you are an engineer or are interested in a technical deep dive on what I’ve setup, consider subscribing for when I explain it in a later article.

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The Product

Last year I created Presidential AI, a bot which plays custom AI-generated voices using text-to-speech in Discord voice calls. I was inspired when I saw skits on Tiktok of the U.S. presidents playing video games with each other and thought - what would the product version of something like this look like? If Midjourney was the Discord app for images, what would the app for audio be?

Back then, 11Labs was just taking off, and they just released a v0 of their API. I felt like that was all I needed to build something funny to show my friends. I built a small demo which let users pretend Joe Biden was in their group chat and posted it online.

A week or two later, I showed a friend in-person a demo of what I’d built, and it didn’t work. What happened? A few groups of friends had found the bot I made and started using it every day to make fun of each other, and quickly exhausted the compute credits I’d initially bought. That’s when I realized I had built something interesting that people might want, and I had to keep the party going.

Scaling

Going from a demo to a product on the internet that can sustain itself and capture value isn’t trivial. Many VC-backed startups fail without building a single product that people actually find valuable. In this case, I had built something that people had at least found entertaining enough to bring offline, which is what motivated me to finish building it out.

Talking to users is easy on Discord because you directly have the usernames of your users that use your product. Building a self-serve website that uses Oauth works the same. If you aren’t proactively asking your users for feedback by emailing or messaging them out of the blue, you’re wasting time and missing out.

The second step was the hardest- I had to slow down my power users from using all the compute and taking down my app. I quickly built metered usage which ended with a paywall and eventually a Stripe checkout link. To my surprise, people actually started paying for what I built.

Experimenting with pricing was the next step. I went back and forth on this: could I build a high cash-flow product with this, or should I only charge as much as I can to keep the lights on? I ended up deciding to not worry about my take-rate earlier on, which ended up being the right decision. For software products that scale at zero marginal cost, the goal should always be to grow as fast as possible, and start extracting value once already built. For me, this came down to choosing between $5 dollars of profit a month from a handful of users, or $2-3 a month for hundreds of users. If you can afford to wait, it usually pays off.

Iterating

All software on the internet lives and dies by two variables: how much you listen to users and how fast you ship. It was important to understand why users were using what I built, why users were churning, and to quickly build features that bridged the gap.

One example of this was the paywall users were running into - unfortunately AI-generated audio is expensive, and users were quickly hitting a monthly-limit and getting frustrated enough to churn. I could only afford to generate new audio at scale for paid users, so there was no way for free users to continuously use my app. They primarily used it to make fun of their friends, so I ended up building a free-forever “roast” feature to use pre-generated insults free of charge. I shipped it and noticed a huge-drop off of churn. The longer free users could use what I’ve built, the longer they have to decide if they want to pay.

Learnings and Conclusion

I firmly believe that any skilled engineer can build something on the internet, scale it to millions of users, and monetize it. It all starts with the YC adage - building something people want. From there, it matters how much you talk to your users and build what you believe they’re asking for.

This is something I’ve built on nights and weekends over the past few months. I recently left my job as a software engineer to build things myself full time, where I’ll have the bandwidth to build larger, more sophisticated projects. If you’re interested in staying in the loop or have questions about how to build things, please reach out at {first_name}a@gmail.com.

Introduction

Over the last four years I’ve spent my career in building out software infrastructure for fintech products. My two years out of college I worked on backend infrastructure at WhatsApp Payments - building support to send money instantly in India using UPI, India’s real-time payment system. The last two years I’ve spent building out US payment infrastructure at Modern Treasury, covering ACH, check, wire, and real-time payment support across a number of US banks.

Fiat money movement powers the world economy, but besides a small few in the weeds, no one really knows how it all works. I hope by sharing a bit about what I learned I can make financial technology industry a little less opaque, and hopefully inspire people to be involved in it. Here are four things I’ve learned during my four years working in fintech:

It’s All Files

Most of the US financial ecosystem is powered by files, sent between SFTP servers, and powered by software written in the 70s and 80s. Sending money involves sending a payment initiation file, like a NACHA file or a PAIN ISO20022 file, to a bank’s SFTP web server. Receiving transactions involves picking up and parsing transactions out of a transaction file, like a BAI2 file or a CAMT ISO20022 file. In contrast, most modern day tech startups are web applications that communicate to downstream services using REST / HTTP. It may seem archaic, but the legacy file-based money movement system moves trillions of dollars through the economy every year, arguably more important than every web application built in Silicon Valley combined.

The upshot here is that our modern day financial ecosystem is extremely mature. Many people, who are reaching the end of their career now, have spent a lifetime making sure money gets to where it needs to without service interruptions. Unlike Facebook’s “move fast and break things” - these types of treasury services do not move fast - but nothing breaks either. Every month, hundreds of millions of people make payroll, pay their rent, feed their families, invest in stocks, and we’re better off for it.

The bad news is that it’s difficult to build modern day software companies that rely on these old file infrastructure systems. The knowledge on how to assemble these files is hard to hire for, and maintaining infrastructure for it is non-trivial. These file-based systems have downstream constraints that hold back the industry - since they were written in the 70s and 80s in COBOL, no can even update the code that it relies on anymore. At Modern Treasury, we built infrastructure to let companies move money without building their own treasury infrastructure in-house.

Banks be Banks

Banks, the ones that power the financial ecosystem, do not sell software. They sell banking services. J.P. Morgan Chase themselves have over 300,000 employees. This means a lot of mouths to feed, and there’s plenty of ways the bank makes money besides selling technology. For example, banks make most of their money selling financial products, investing cash, and providing investment services, like underwriting companies to IPO.

Banks do not make money with technology. One way of looking at it is that technology is a cost center - meant to subsidize other profitable ventures within the company. In order to stay competitive in corporate banking, banks will modernize their treasury services to stay up to date with competitors. The more efficiently this can be done, the better for the business’s bottom line.

The burden of innovation in financial technology falls to tech companies, like Facebook, Plaid, and Modern Treasury, and to non-profit governing bodies, like NACHA, SWIFT, and the Federal Reserve, who control payment standards. Banks play an essential role in enabling money movement, but it’s a partnership with an external entity that provides real value.

Standards Rules Everything Around Me

Standards permeate the financial ecosystem. ISO20022 is an XML file standard that is the industry standard for money movement, SWIFT is the standard file format for international wires, and UPI is the standard to send real-time payments in India, along with many others.

As a payments nerd, it’s not just important to know what these standards are, but to know why they exist. For example, ISO20022 file standards are the current state of the art file formats to move money with banks. Why is the state of the art a seemingly archaic file-based message? Understanding that most of the economy already has file-based money movement infrastructure is important context to understanding why the most modern money movement standard is still a file. We make it easy to send ISO20022 files to a bank through Modern Treasury.

UPI, the real-time payment interface of India, is a tightly controlled standard by the India’s NPCI, National Payments Corporation of India. To make an app that can make and receive UPI payments, you must use one of NPCI’s software-development kits. To get approved to move money, one must get the application approved by the Indian government. We faced these challenges getting UPI payments up and running in India when I worked for payments on WhatsApp.

Why is UPI so tightly held by the Indian government? It all makes sense when you consider that the purpose of UPI is to boost India’s economy. NPCI cares a lot about the UX being safe for Indian consumers, and wants to advantage home-grown companies in this competition. I think to truly understand fintech it’s not enough to understand what the rules for these technologies are, but to understand their motivations for existing.

Global Payments is Hard

Sending payments globally fast and cheaply is a giant unsolved problem in the world. SWIFT is the leading global standard to send wire payments globally, but it comes at high cost and high settlement time. Making credit card payments internally works, but the volumes here are trivial compared to other ways that money moves through the economy. Deel, for example, enables global payroll, and itself is a $12 billion dollar company.

Understanding the rules of other payment methods is also non-trivial. Last year, I wrote an article clearing some misconceptions on how to send an ACH internationally (spoiler alert: you can't). Banks maintain their own global payment products that enable them, but the rules at play are often hard to understand, on top of the messaging formats being non-standard. At Modern Treasury, I built a global payments product that enables money to be send internationally at the tenth of a cost of a SWIFT wire. To do so, we had to build a standard interface to send money regardless of the underlying bank or rules required.

At WhatsApp, it took us a long time to get the approval to send payments in India. Getting the approval to do so was an international challenge that took some of the best lawyers and partnerships people in the world to get done.

This year I’m moving to New York with three of my friends from SF. Only eighteen month ago, I wrote a few poems about San Francisco. So what changed?

I’ve lived in San Francisco every since I graduated college. It’s a beautiful place. I’ve always had my mind set on going to Silicon Valley. In college, I lived in Redwood City and rode the corporate shuttles to Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park. Before that, I dreamed about working in California, only applying to job openings in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I think there’s a different, more accurate way of looking at it: the time I’ve spent living in the Bay Area has given me the courage to explore something new. Embedded in the culture of SF are values: the importance of doing something good and meaningful for the world, building something important, and taking risk. One way I think about moving is me applying these values to my life in practice.

Developing My Worldview

SF tells one do change the world, but is the world actually like?

People say living in SF is like living in a bubble, but it’s hard to understand the extent of it until you live there. I spent one month last summer living with high school friends in Lower East Side and one thing stuck out to me: the people here are actually normal1.

I am so used to everyone working in tech, earning six figure salaries, and working in startups I almost forgot that it wasn’t reflective of most of America. Regardless of what Market St. might be showing, software hasn’t eaten the world yet. Meeting people in NYC reminded me that while SF might be ahead of the curve in some ways, but doesn’t totally reflect reality.

A friend who recently moved from SF to NYC is the founder of a SaaS sales startup and was describing to me the narrow-minded mentality of early-stage B2B founders in SF. When one is surrounded by other frontier B2B startups- it’s easy to see the market opportunity as zero sum. Competition is fierce, and a deal to one founder might mean a deal lost to another. The truth is that the world is much bigger - most sales forces in NYC do not care about the seed-stage ventures fighting to the death in SoMa. In the same vein, I think there is a real risk that only living in SF could lead to a lack of perspective that would otherwise be important in building a meaningful career.

Living Somewhere Dynamic

The most important work takes time, so might as well have fun while you’re at it.

Perhaps there are trade-offs. NYC is a city that has too much fun, while SF is a city that builds. One look at the built environment in NYC tells a different story. NYC is a dense, urban jungle filled with offices in skyscrapers, restaurants, and art galleries. Surely many many people have had and will have successful careers there.

The built environment of San Francisco, on the other hand, has looked exactly the same for the three years that I’ve lived there. In fact, it’s arguably gotten worse. Anchor Steam Brewing has closed, the original Philz has closed, and at least eight Walgreens have closed in the last three years.

What do we win by living in a city going through so much? Moving to a dynamic city with new, interesting people to meet and pursuing interesting things to work on is one way to have your cake and eat it too.

Taking Risks

Having the courage to do something different with the willingness to be wrong.

San Francisco is a city that encourages taking risk - it’s prestigious to leave a big, corporate job to build something new and work on your own thing. Ironically, I think the biggest risk that people in San Francisco are too scared to make is to try living somewhere else. New York City might not be a great place to be in tech, but it is even worse to never have known. I do not want to look back at my life and regret choosing work over having a better understanding of the world.

At the end of the day, San Francisco is still an amazing place. It’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and the engineering talent there is top notch. I have no doubt that great things will be built there. The AI-boom is mostly concentrated in San Francisco. OpenAI is here. There surely will always be opportunity in SF, and I’m looking forward to the day where I fall back in love with all the Bay Area has to offer2.

I would recommend everyone in tech to spend some time living in SF. At the same time, I would recommend everyone to have the courage to lift their head out of the water and see what else is out there.

Cast out into the turbulent sea, defiantly standing against the Pacific
They say one day the city will get what it deserves, an earthquake away from annihilation
Till then it still stands, daring God if only by existing itself

If San Francisco was a woman, she’d be exactly my type,
Outrageously beautiful, gorgeous in the most ordinary times and places
Who appreciates the beauty of nature in the day and fine dining and cocktails at night
Smart, driven. Capable of changing the world
Although I know the city has flaws,
Hopelessly addicted to both drugs and good intentions, held back against achieving its full potential
Cold and expensive at times I can hardly understand why
The only thing I fear is that I wouldn’t know how to break up with her.

Interning in Silicon Valley, staring through big glass windows into the Bay 
Stood massive companies with immense power among the Redwood trees
Shouldering the websites, apps, and phones billions of humans used every single day
For a brief moment it felt like you were standing in the center of the internet 
And by extension the world.

"If you’re going to die on the street, San Francisco is not a bad place to do it." - Nellie Bowles

Beanstalk Protocol

The price of a Bean, a new form of currency invented by the Beanstalk Protocol, is equivalent to one US dollar. In the real world we can be sure that a dollar is worth a dollar because the US government says so, but in the crypto world no one has that privilege of authority. Beanstalk sought to be a programmatic stablecoin, one worth a US dollar, not because a trusted authority said so, but because the currency itself would programmatically stabilized to such price based off its supply and demand.

The most crucial feature necessary for the success of Beanstalk was the promise to make its financial backers incredibly rich. At its core, Beanstalk uses ponzi dynamics to convince backers to stake real dollars to ensure Beanstalk’s economic success. As an investor in Beanstalk, one buys Beans, usually worth a little above $1 US dollar, and “plants” the bean within Beanstalk’s virtual land, effectively programmatically loaning money to the protocol. Every hour, or “Season” in bean world, these Beans grow into Stalks, which by existing itself creates more Beans, which brings the market value of a Bean back down to $1. Then the cycle repeats.

If you deposited money early within the protocol’s tenure, this meant that your deposit in the Beanstock Protocol may have increased something like 20-fold. For example, a computer science student may have deposited some of their summer internship savings, five thousand dollars, into the protocol. Over the course of a few months the money, or beans, compound. As of yesterday they would be sitting on one hundred thousand dollars worth of Bean tokens, more wealth than many people see in their entire life. After which they could have converted back into U.S. dollars through a crypto exchange. Today, the Beanstalk Protocol is compromised, the value of $BEAN is nothing, and their stake is worthless.

The Exploit

How did this happen? The short answer is that a Beanstalk Protocol is programmatically governed by holders of beans, and on April 17th a anonymous bad actor took a loan of around five hundred million of dollars of beans and made a malicious majority vote to drain the Beanstalk’s treasury. From there they laundered the money through a separate token protocol, effectively bringing home $75 million untraceable dollars through this hack.

Cryptocurrency engineers are still figuring out exactly how this exploit happened, but the technical details are insane and display the full capability of the complex new financial instruments of DeFi in action.

One may ask: how does someone just anonymously borrow $500 million dollars? The answer boils down to a new concept created in DeFi called flash loans. Transaction history gets finalized on a blockchain in “blocks”, which usually last every several hours. A flash loan is a loan that gets safely created and paid off in a single block. Because transaction history is only finalized at the end of block creation, if someone borrows money they don’t pay off, then the originator of the loan doesn’t have to acknowledge the loan as valid, and all the subsequent transactions the borrower has made are invalidated. In this case, the flash loan from the bad actor was used to hack the Beanstalk’s treasury and the funds stolen were used to pay off the loan. At the end of all of the financial math, the bad actor profited off with $75 million dollars.

Looking Forward

Today, $181 million beans were stolen in internet land. Cryptocurrency is still the wild wild west, and as a cryptocurrency investor everyone who invested in Beanstalk assumes the risk for these types of investments. At the end of the day, the Beanstalk Protocol was an innovation in finance, and the ones that built it deserve recognition for creating something special. Who knows, maybe there will be a way to retrieve the stolen funds or make investors whole. It still be very exciting to see where cryptocurrency goes, and how decentralized organizations like this will be run in the future.

Internet Businesses are Different Today

Spending some time in the startup ecosystem you’ll hear mantras like “If you build it they will come” and “Make Something People Want.” Is this all it takes to build successful businesses? From my perspective, not anymore. The 2000s and 2010s were marked by successful internet consumer businesses: websites and apps that were used by normal people rather than businesses. In this era, success meant getting people to stumble upon your app and it being so useful that people tell their friends. No sales people involved.

For the most part, the growth of these types of businesses have ran their course: fifteen years ago most people didn’t have an app for everything: today we all have apps like Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, and Hinge somewhere on our phone. The next generation of internet businesses will be B2B and will grow in different ways. Unlike regular people, businesses don’t go looking to spend money on things they see on TikTok. When building something meant for other businesses, you will need to be able to convince the right people to buy what you’re building, and that will involve selling to them directly.

Everything Is Selling

Selling seems like a bad word to engineers, but it shouldn’t be. A more critical look will show us that sales proliferates through every aspect of our lives, and should generally accepted as a necessity of life. Sales is everywhere. One subtle way this manifests is in how software engineers dress. The typical outfit in San Francisco of an engineer is a company t-shirt and a Patagonia jacket. As comfortable as the outfit is, there’s also a signaling factor here: I’m dressed like this because I’m a software engineer in San Francisco and want to be taken seriously. In a world where software must be shown to people before being sold, the only way to be taken seriously is to have some sales muscle.

Selling Is Informing

Sales at its worst is the trope of a used car salesman: someone who would gladly overpromise and underdeliver a bad used car. In the best cases, sales basically boils down to informing. As a software engineer, you’ve likely build something that you deeply believe is good for the world and want to share it. In this case, being the salesman means informing a customer about how what you’ve built solves a problem that the customer has had.

Approaching selling as informing completely changed my perspective of how a sales motion should be done. When you’ve built something useful that people need, informing them about the solution you’ve built makes it become something that people want. Doing this is more important than ever today, since the surface area of software businesses are expanding into B2B businesses that require some level of informing before something is sold. Engineering and sales are the yin and yang of a successful software business today, and I believe its so important for engineers to understand the other side to fully comprehend our work.

On January 2022, The Founders Fund, a premier venture capital fund in Tech, hosted a conference on Miami Beach called Hereticon, so called to celebrate controversial beliefs. I was lucky to have the opportunity to attend the event through the OpenStore sponsored Engineering Forum and try to understand what people were building over there, and why it might matter to someone who cares about the future.

I currently live in San Francisco, and have lived here for almost a year. It’s a beautiful city, and there’s a lot of reasons to fall in love with it, but the primary reason most people like me move here is because the Bay Area has been the center of tech. For someone building their career in information technology and computers, San Francisco and Silicon Valley have for decades been where the center of the action is- the focal point where the next Facebook or Uber might be.

The Founders Fund, let by investors like Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, are betting hard on Miami becoming a tech hub, and eventually a Great American city with the likes of New York and Los Angeles. They’re betting with not only their money, but with something arguably more valuable for them, their time and reputation. This reason alone got me thinking: what really is happening in Miami that we should be paying attention to. From my short time there, I believe we should take Miami as the next success story city seriously for these reasons:

• The big US cities are incumbents, and Miami has a chance to disrupt them.

• Miami can become the capital of capital.

• The future of work is remote, so why not Miami?

If Miami Was a Startup

Everyone loves a good story about David and Goliath. In tech, one roots for underdog startups defeating big evil companies that have gotten too big for their own good. Why can’t Miami be that underdog?

If Miami was an underdog city, hungry to grow and prove itself, the SF Bay Area and NYC would be incumbents. Over the last few decades, places like the Bay Area have gotten immensely wealthy and successful, partly due to the success of local industries and being able to attract the best talent across the world. Do they deserve their success today? Some would disagree.

In the process of becoming successful, rents in places like the Bay Area and New York have skyrocketed, making it prohibitively expensive to move in and fight for a better life. City and state income taxes are at an all time high, although when seeing the crime and suffering on the streets one would wonder if it was being collected at all. It doesn’t seem like these things will change anytime soon, and it only looks like the problem is getting worse. Have these cities taken their own success for granted? If Miami can offer a better product - a safer, cleaner city, cheaper rent, lower taxes, does it have a chance to disrupt major metropolitan cities?

Miami as the Capital of Capital

Eyes on the money.

The United States is a capitalist country, and capital is the lifeblood of America. Understanding where the money flows is important to understand where power is concentrated in this country. New York is the home of finance - where private equity meet the big banks who underwrite IPOs and hedge funds hire math nerds to keep the public markets on their toes. In the Bay Area, venture capital keeps the money moving - entrepreneurs and investors shuffle on Sand Hill Road discussing secrets and plans to build valuable companies.

Miami offered an eye-catching product to capitalists during COVID: why not do your job in a place with 0% state tax, a great lifestyle, and warm weather? On top of this, Miami acts as the gateway to getting money into Latin America, a region on the cusp of an economic prosperity explosion. If Singapore is the capital of capital in Southeast Asia, Miami could be the capital of capital in the Americas.

Miami has the opportunity to be the capital of capital, a place where venture capitalists, private equity, investment banks, hedge fund traders all come together and celebrate capital itself.

Why Not Miami?

Overwhelmingly, the future of tech is looking remote. There may always be an office to some extent, but people want to have flexibility and it just makes sense to allow people to work from anywhere. Most founders and venture capitalists can agree on this, so over the last two years this has become pretty consensus.

To this extent- why shouldn’t the HQ a tech worker or creative works from be Miami? If one had the choice to choose where they would like to live, I believe there are good reasons that Miami may deserve to win. The weather is pleasant, the lifestyle (for a high-earning knowledge worker) is top-notch, and for a large, coastal U.S. city it’s relatively cheap. Could the future of work be remote and Miami at the same time? Maybe there’s room for both.

Closing Thoughts

I currently live in SF and I’m lucky to work with and be friends with great, smart people that are fun to be around. That said, I love rooting for the underdog, and for that reason I’m rooting for Miami and the ambitious project to build it into an even better city. I hope that the success of Miami drives all American cities to think bigger about becoming better, and I think everyone will win in that process.

I’m grateful for Keith Rabois and his company in Miami for taking a chance on young people and making this trip possible. If you’re interested in working in Miami at a fast-growing startup with smart people, OpenStore is hiring.

This is the first in what I hope to be many posts reflecting my opinions about technology and the world around me. I’m hoping you’ll enjoy the content that I write about on here as I set out to accomplish two things:

1. Learn how to write complete, coherent prose by doing

2. Etch my ideas onto stone before they change or I forget about them

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