This is a good time to talk about the dangers of joining fintech startups with super high valuations relative to their progress (or ARR). Let's assume that you have two fintech companies, Startup A (low-profile) and Startup B (buzzy), competing head-on to build exactly the same product.

(It's more like 5 per YC cohort these days, but...)

What's the danger of joining the buzzy, highly-valued startup?

A couple ago, I left my BD & Strategy job at @GooglePay. The next morning, I was on a flight from New York to Kampala for a @twifintech meetup. Attitudes on fintech across Africa – on fintech outside of the US for that matter – have shifted dramatically over the past couple years. It’s amazing to see examples like @ycombinator lending its brand to startups from Sudan.

techcrunch.com/2022/03/08/sud…

We all know that Q1 was a crazy quarter for fintech fundraising - but just how crazy was it?

Fintech companies raised *$17.7 BILLION* in Q1, more than 55% over the highest quarter we've ever tracked. The number of #fintech deals has been sharply ticking upwards:

- 130 funding rounds in Q1 '20
- Up to 211 rounds in Q4 '20
- Up to *301* rounds in the last quarter

This has been my theory for a couple years and it's exciting to see it come to fruition.

@Apple never wanted to be a credit card company. It wants to create lock-in benefits to its core money-maker: the iOS ecosystem, and it wants to (privately) own more types of user data.

https://twitter.com/noyesclt/status/1289227091217715200

Mobile and QR payments took off in other countries (eg. Alipay/WeChat Pay in China), but they lagged significantly in the US for years.

Why? No superapps. Many people have credit cards, but not everyone has *one* app that they can use to pay for anything, anywhere.