I love fintech and so can you
Meetup
About a month ago I met up with a few fintech geeks at Hogwash during a quick trip to San Francisco and could not help grinning to myself as I nursed a couple Dale's Pale Ales and listened in on conversation.
To my left was Vincent Turner, CEO of Planwise and co-founder of SF Fintech waxing poetic about startups to Rachid Grimes and Kevin King of Pylon Loans. To my right was Ben Brown, innovation scout for First Annapolis and Twitter fintech maverick chatting with zeroDB founder and Wall Street expat MacLane Wilkison.
Earlier I had spent some time with the team at FT Partners, an investment banking firm focused exclusively on the financial technology sector who counts both multinationals and new ventures in its burgeoning client Rolodex and a bitching transaction database.
The day before was coffee with Brad Leimer, Head of Innovation at Santander Bank and a chat with Cashflower founder and Innotribe senior adviser Mike Sigal at SC Studios Innovation Center.
Me? I had Tweeted a few dozen times about fintech--brashly inserting myself into conversations with veteran VCs and entrepreneurs where I had no business being--and written a half-decent Quora post about New York startups that for some reason people found useful.
You see the point here? One of these things is not like the other.
A few months earlier, in December of 2014 I had scrapped my old Twitter, launched a new handle (tactically including my middle initial to differentiate myself from the insolent LA-based graphic artist who has systematically monopolized all 'Bruno Werneck' tags on social media) and started berating people online about the recent Lending Club IPO.
I latched onto the buzz EquityZen created with its Path to IPO post and for the following several days forwarded the piece on Twitter to bigwigs in the marketplace lending world: Renaud Laplanche (Lending Club), Aaron Vermut (Prosper), Dan Ciporin (Canaan Partners), Peter Renton (Lend Academy), and the like.
I had been following the peer-to-peer lending space for a couple of years after stumbling upon LendingMemo but had remained a passive observer up to that moment. My Tweets received a tepid response at best but I was hooked. I began toying with Twitter, optimizing the content, structure, and frequency of my Tweets and familiarizing myself with the more visible users on the platform.
The process took a few weeks but with the help of several Twitter lists, an automated Buffer queue, and Hootsuite for real-time engagement I was off to the races. Two Retweets became twenty (still tepid, I realize) and the obsession expanded.
I enjoyed the immediacy of Twitter dialogue but what it provided in responsiveness it lacked in content permanence. I needed a platform that offered the virality of Twitter but allowed for more stable presentation of material.
Quora
Quora solved both issues in one fell swoop and my obsession flared up again, even stronger this time.
I subscribed to every relevant question regarding financial technology on the site and began methodically crafting answers, beginning with the most followed queries to the least. I strategically published posts on Tuesday mornings and Sunday afternoons when I knew netizens would be most likely to pause and read the material. I Tweeted at users I could see were following the question and followed up with Direct Messages and e-mails afterwards asking for thoughts and introductions.
The hit rate on responses was surprisingly high and grew as my network did. People were interested in discussing, promoting, and collaborating, especially as I was increasingly able to reference previous work and interactions. Two months on Quora led to 50 thousand views across 28 posts with three top answers to boot. Lukewarm, but heating up.
Medium
Cross-pollination between Twitter and Quora Twitter accelerated momentum and I began moving from content aggregation to creation. I started slowly: First, a list of fintech investors with Marc Bernegger. Next, a piece with Bernard Lunn on the New York ecosystem.
As my Evernote folders and call notes piled up I became intent on producing longer pieces, ones based on personal opinion and analysis not just regurgitation of others'.
A call with Yann Ranchere of Anthemis--whose site is a fintech repository of knowledge--stoked inspiration. He had two central pieces of advice: a) Write for yourself, and b) seek criticism.
TekFin, Yann's online blog persona, had been finely crafted after years of hustling yet his domain expertise came not necessarily from deep technical training (though he certainly earned his chops at Kurt Salmon) but from continued curiosity and proactivity.
And so I followed Yann's suggestion and the age-old adage: There's no substitute for practice.
I wrote 'Finentropy and the next big thing' on Medium about the need for more robust financial data and infrastructure, including the expanding use cases of XBRL taxonomy. The post counts a strong four 'recommends' as of today (hoping for five by year end) and rattled around the Twittersphere for a couple of days (including a thumbs up from Yann).
But more important than the immediate response was the sense that--though far from an expert--I had the potential to meaningfully contribute to the fintech community in some small fashion.
Fintech Fanatic
I became a full-blown fintech fanatic and took to labeling myself as such. The sobriquet never stuck but the recognition began to.
I attended every Meetup in New York I thought might be marginally applicable and reached out to the 21 People in the New York FinTech Scene You Need to Know About through a mix of introductions and cold e-mails (currently batting .333).
In the course of six weeks and through planned serendipity I was asked by the founder of Empire Startups to help run the FinTech Startups Conference and now proudly support the Innotribe Startup Challenge as a judge and Techstars' Barclays Accelerator as an informal mentor.
Though I have not yet earned my FinTech Mafia t-shirt and will not be found on the Absolute Ultimate Guide of Who's Who in FinTech for the forseeable future, I hope to surreptitiously sneak into the fintech literati in the years to come.
Let me be clear: I was and remain an utter neophyte in my understanding of financial technology, the greater financial services landscape, and emerging trends in the space. Tweets and Quora posts cannot supplant experience, hard time, and a well-built network.
But the beauty of the fintech community in mid-2015, besides the visceral excitement of its members, is the number of avenues by which outsiders can access the ecosystem and develop relevancy and cachet in relatively quick fashion.
And, hey, Fidessa wasn't built in a day.