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Sheel Mohnot Profile picture
Sheel Mohnot
@pitdesi
Posting stuff I find interesting. Work: @btv_vc, leading pre/seed rounds of fintech cos. Always up for adventure.
Apr 20 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Extremely common crypto refrain…

But wtf is my cousin in rural India going to do with USDC? With Wise he can buy groceries a few seconds after I hit send.

Stables are ~useless without on and off-ramps, and those are the reasons this map looks like it does. I send USDC to a self-custody wallet. He transfers to a crypto exchange and sells USDC for INR then withdraws to his bank. He gets KYC’d along the way, eat spreads and fees, and banks often flag these transactions. With Wise I send $ to his UPI account. Nothing reqd on his end.
Oct 5, 2024 • 15 tweets • 6 min read
Bhutan is a fascinating place that most of you have never been, so I’ll post observations here:

Flying in is wild.

Super short runway, 18k ft 🏔️ on both sides, cloud cover & no radar, so the 25 pilots that can fly here do so by 👀, only during a few hrs/day when winds allow Pilots have to navigate a winding valley to get there with <2 miles of visibility to the landing strip, and they have to navigate electric poles and roofs as they get closer.

Evan Spiegel flew in on a G650 this week but a Bhutanese pilot was required to fly it.
Jun 16, 2024 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Wowwwww
Everyone in fintech has been saying that the Bilt credit card ($3.1B valuation) is too good to be true; How can you get cash back on rent payments?

Turns out they have an unsustainable deal with Wells that is losing the bank hundreds of $millions. Wells made a number of incorrect assumptions in their underwriting.

They assumed that it would be a top of wallet card for renters who carry balances. Instead, a lot of savvy consumers (myself included) use the bank for the minimum required to collect the rental points.

Wells assumed that 65% of card-purchase volume would be non-rent, generating interchange-fee revenue.
The reality is inverted... most of the volume is rent payments on which they don't earn much.

Wells also assumed that 50-75% of the balances would be revolving, earning them interest. The reality is they mostly have cardholders like me who don't carry a balance - only 15-25% are revolving.

Wells is paying 0.8% to Bilt on rent payments, even though the bank doesn't get interchange on them. Wells has a massive mortgage business and thought that they'd be able to cross-sell mortgages when the renters become homeowners but that hasn't panned out.

Kudos to Bilt for negotiating a killer contract that doesn't expire until 2029... but I wonder what the future looks like after that. Wells says they won't renew it as-is.

In the meantime - it's a great card... pay your rent via the card and make 5 other transactions a month to get 1% back on your rent.Image wsj.com/finance/bankin…
Apr 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Adyen & Stripe '22 annual reports are out.

Adyen processed $837B, +49% YoY (+70% in '21).
Stripe processed $817B, +26% YoY (+60% in '21)

Adyen market cap: ~$47B
Stripe valuation: $50B

GPV/employee
Adyen: $251M (w/ 3.3k employees)
Stripe: $116M (w/ 7k employees) Source:
Stripe annual report: assets.ctfassets.net/fzn2n1nzq965/5…

Adyen annual report: adyen.getbynder.com/m/62ef2a84c324…
Apr 3, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
Had an epic weekend at a super fun participatory conference in Tahoe called "Learning Man"

We each made presentations to share knowledge & skills outside of work.

There were 30 presentations; people took them VERY seriously... Image Topics included:
Breaking down the chess scandal
Anatomy of a DJ transition
How LLM's work
Keeping up with the Justices (Supreme court)
Finding the perfect partner
Knife skills
Acroyoga
Fertility 101
Practical survival skills
The Art of Negotiation
Date night planning
Beatboxing ImageImageImageImage
Mar 10, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
SVB closed today by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation 😞

All insured deposits moved to the Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara

They say accounts will have access to their insured deposits Monday morning.

fdic.gov/news/press-rel… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… I got really emotional and my heart sank reading this.
Feb 20, 2023 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
✅ a bucket list item this weekend - sailed thru the Panama Canal!

One of the world’s great engineering wonders, it gets more awe-inspiring the more you learn (& see)

more on our voyage & the canal below. We sailed Pacific to Atlantic, which means we sailed East to West (see map)!

Kind of makes your brain hurt thinking about that.
Oct 28, 2022 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
There are guys in SF who just went to the Twitter office with boxes pretending to be "let go" from Twitter to get in the news

This guy said his name was "Rahul Ligma," pretty good stuff
"Michelle Obama wouldn’t have happened if Musk owned Twitter. Obama in 08 wouldn’t have happened without Elon owning Twitter."

"I even own a Tesla, man. I’m a big fan of clean energy, climate change, even free speech too."

Got em!!!
Oct 6, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
In Michigan, all public school students take the SAT in 11th grade so you get a full cross-section to look at demographics.

25% of Asians scored above a 1400 (96th percentile) on the SAT; no other demographic comes close Women scored higher in English (ERW is Evidence-Based Reading and Writing), men scored higher in Math
Sep 16, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Walked by this heaping pile of twisted concrete for the 1st time in a while (SF Embarcadero)...

brutalist buildings are bad enough to my eyes but this fountain is the worst example I can think of

And it's spewing green water right now (which apparently is a temporary cleaner) Fun fact: U2 performed an impromptu set at the fountain in 1987. They decided to do it with <24 hours notice and ended up being their first cover of "All Along The Watchtower" which they just decided and learned the chords to on the way to the show.
Sep 15, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
456X for seed investors in Figma

They raised $332M in equity and are selling for ~$20B.
Possible they only spent ~$200M of equity capital to get to the $20B outcome.

By contrast Lyft gobbled $7.3B of capital and is worth $5.1B.

Software wins. if this is accurate, OATV sold all of their shares at the series C, meaning they got a 12x return (making some assumptions) instead of the 456x they could have had if they had held on.

No right way to do this btw, plenty of counter examples.
May 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
True story:

2 co-founders met while flipping burgers at Burger King

They decided to start a fintech company and entered their schools business plan competition and placed near the bottom.

Now the company is worth ~$30B.

@Klarna Sources: forbes.com/sites/parmyols…
May 25, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Investment advisors have to file w/ the SEC every Qtr.

Q1 for @viseinc ($1B val, Ribbit & Sequoia)
AUM: $362M🔻35% QoQ
Accounts: 2,478🔻0.6% QoQ
Mgmt fee: .25-0.5%; $900k-$1.8M annualized revenue
Employees: 91

They do charge a platform fee, so the revenue # may be incomplete @viseinc fwiw I don't mean to knock them, they are building a business and I think its possible that I'm missing something, just interesting to read public filings

radientanalytics.com/firmdetails/50…
May 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Biggest iOS publishers by all-time downloads:
1) Facebook: 16B
2) Google: 15B
3) Voodoo: 6B
4) Tencent: 5.7B
5) Tiktok/Bytedance: 5.2B
6) Microsoft: 4.8B

You might not know 2 & 3… Voodoo is a 350 ppl French company that makes a ton of free-to-play games (Helix Jump, Baseball Boy, Snake vs Block, Hole io, Aquapark, Purple Diver, Paper io). They build on Unity and pump em out, often cloning indie games
May 19, 2022 • 5 tweets • 4 min read
People always talk about how India has 1.4B people...
but to be in the top 1% of Indians by income, you only need to earn $57K.

Top 1% in US earn $823k+ Another great thread on this topic from @Nithin0dha
but a little jargon-y for the US folks.
definitions: 1 Crore = 10M. He's saying a max of 150M people are addressable as revenue generating in India

May 4, 2022 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
Stripe launched a Plaid competitor today.

Plaid CEO @zachperret says the guy who runs it took multiple interviews with Plaid and asked probing questions in interviews. @zachperret
Oct 2, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
People say this looks like America, but it's always this picture. It's a very specific interchange that those driving east to DC know well.

It's Breezewood, PA (AKA "Gas Vegas"), where I-70 meets the 76... and it looks like this bc of a federal law In Breezewood, PA, I-70 meets I-76.
When they built I-70, you were not allowed to use federal funds to move from a free road to a toll road. So they have this shitty workaround. You get off I-70, travel on this road for .25 miles, and then get on 76.
Jul 7, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Blast from the past! I found my 2010 YC application video.

It is so bad that I'm surprised they even interviewed us. I was still working at BCG at the time and didn't really know anything about startups. Here’s what we said we were going to make
Jul 7, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Top VC LP Greenspring Associates getting acquired by Stepstone $STEP for ~$800M.

Greenspring manages $17B, carry on $9B, net 21% IRR returns

$STEP gets 0 carry on past funds; 25% of carry until 2024, 50% of the carry after that. It'll be a good way for many to get VC exposure Greenspring is one of the largest & best allocators in venture.

They are LP's in Accel, Aleph, Benchmark, Bessemer, @btv_vc, CRV, Craft, DCM, Emergence, Felicis, Founders Fund, Insight, Lightspeed, NEA, Obvious, Redpoint, Revolution, Thrive, TLV, True, Valar etc.
Jun 22, 2021 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
This looks like a post-apocalyptic scene from a Cinderella nightmare, but these faux chateaux are real!

It was to be a luxury housing development for wealthy Gulf tourists w/ 732 French-style chateaux, along with a shopping center, Turkish baths, cinemas, and sporting facilities Image Turkish entrepreneurs raised $ to build this village, "Burj al Babas," to attract MENA buyers.

Each villa was supposed to have a Jacuzzi w/ natural hot springs on every level!

Their brochure made it seem like the homes would be set apart by themselves, not crammed in together Image
Dec 19, 2020 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Doing an EOY audit and trying to learn from the data. Some takeaways from LIMITED DATA in my 1st yr as a VC (2016)

at 500Fintech, we did 14 $125k 1st check investments @$2.5M valuations ($1.75M) in 2016

This cohort was amazing:
Current FMV: $27.8M
Co1 returned $9.8M already Looks great now but NO ONE wanted to invest at that time.

"Any good founder would reject your deal; you'll end up with losers who didn't get into YC"

"Fintech won't work"

So I "bootstrapped" - warehoused 36 investments into the fund (huge % of my net worth, stupidly)