BUILD CREDIT

“With LLMs, the barrier to entry into an area of programming that you've never done before is nil. This time around, I'm like, well, I can just ask my favorite agent to go research this stuff and set it up for me, and then I can just focus on exactly the functionality that I want and the implementation quirks that I'm interested in. Reconciling this opportunity where coding is fun again and easy again with the need to run a big company is a lot of fun.”

“Majority of American banks derive a disproportionate percentage of their income from late fees. A late fee was obviously conceived as a means of slapping your wrist and saying, like, if you're going to be late, I'm going to remind you. At some point, someone said, wait a second, that's 100% gross margin product. It's better if you're late a lot, because then I'll make more money, and it cost me nothing to create that revenue line. Affirm was founded in many ways to fight all of that and destroy the ridiculous and the exploitive.”

“The explosion of stablecoin demand is enabling entirely new borrowing types.”

“I think we always wanted to get here to have something like quality assets that people can simply hold on chain, self-custody, or, you know, borrow land loop, which is like kind of like a simple way of tranching it, you know, getting the senior trash or the junior trash by lending or by looping it.”

“You want to do it well, you want to inform people about the token, what does it do, what are the risks, what is the yield coming from, be as transparent as possible, try to curate as much as possible. Because that's how you build a user base that appreciates those things, that invites other people, trusts you, etc.”

“Think we kind of all looked at the past few years, and we thought low risk DeFi is a thing. And, everyone's happy to earning a two and a half percent or 3% forever, and I just simply don't believe it. Or maybe Solana is more higher risk appetite in general and is more keen to get, you know, 12% yield. We found that people are extremely interested in getting this this extra yield as long as they understand the asset.”

“I was talking to everyone at BrainPoint that this is going to be really good and big in Solana. Because we always wanted this and we finally have it. And I think although we live in this permissionless 24-7 world, it's still fine and some people still lose money and things break.”

“Camino was born about three years ago, kind of out of a of a need to serve some of the stable coins, in Solana. It's you initially, it was, an LP, protocol to to tokenize LPs, and then it once we realized that, actually, the bottle end was not well served or did fit all the needs, we decided to build our own bottle end as well. The reason why it was all created was to serve DeFi and Solana because we thought the blockchain will, create a lot of economic activity, which is what is happening now.”

“We focus on structuring deals to align with traditional private capital.”

“Building a modern credit institution requires utilizing the latest technology.”

“You know, I've come across this rule of thumb over the years in my work, and it's adjusted over the years too even this rule of thumb. I think as we're living longer, but it started as a rule of thumb where you take the number 100 and you subtract your age, and that number that you're left with, the percentage of that is the percentage of your portfolio that should be allocated to stocks. Well, now we're living longer. So many people, and I myself included, use 110 and subtract your age, and then that is the number you allocate to stocks. So for Lucia who's 35, 110 minus 35 is 75. So 75% stocks, that's called the age based rule. Then the remaining percentage, 25% for Lucia, would be allocated to bonds.”

“I think we always wanted to get here to have something like quality assets that people can simply hold on chain, self custody, or, you know, borrow land loop, which is, like, kind of, like, a a similar way of tranching it, you know, getting the senior trash or the junior trash by lending or by looping it. We always wanted to have this, but the the assets were never there. So we always had native, crypto, so ETH and Bitcoin, and stable coins.”

“I think the net IQ of the world is about to go up like 50 points. Like we're surrounded by people—not in Silicon Valley, of course—where the average IQ is still 100. I think the average IQ with AI in your ear at all times is about to go up to 150, which is like north of the genius definition. Very, very soon, the willingness to put up with random, obnoxious things like low quality or crappy terms or products that pretend to be something they're not is just going to get flushed out very quickly.”

“But there's this weird dynamic on chain, which is I can just issue a utility token to fund my project. And so like what role does debt actually play? And I guess my view would be it largely has been supply and demand for leverage. And so credit cycles on chain, they don't necessarily follow sort of credit cycles in the TradFi world.”

“And, also, being in our forties, I was having this conversation with my husband last night at dinner. I was like, I'm really proud of us because we are taking a moment right now in our mid to late forties to say, okay. What do we need to do to be able to retire or to be able to arrive at retirement and not have anxiety over money? I'm gonna probably write about this because I don't think enough people talk about this. Maybe people are doing this, but I don't see the financial planning community saying, for example, hey, midlifers, here are the things that we want you to start checklisting because we now have the hindsight. We now know that for people who are turning 65, 70, 75, here are the big financial headwinds. Health care costs. Cost of living still is very high in your retirement age. Do we know what you're gonna be getting from Social Security? What are the gaps that we need to start filling and start filling incrementally today so that when you arrive in retirement, you're not shocked, surprised, feeling super behind.”

“Socialism sucks. It is terrible. The only people who do well in redistribution of wealth are the ones doing redistribution. It's fundamentally corrupt and there's not enough bad things I can say about socialism. So I think capitalism works exceedingly well, especially when the competition is encouraged and allowed to flourish. We've had thousands of years to evolve a fairly good economic model, and the US is most certainly 1A in the right way to do it.”

“I think companies that have built software poorly and just sell that software are very vulnerable. The bar for quality of software is going up rapidly. If you really hate some piece of software that you're using and it's just software, it doesn't have some deep sort of proprietary data, proprietary source of value, it will get replaced. Like, there's no reason why not. It's long overdue to get rid of bad software.”

“What happened was she got a customer alert that her email and phone number had been removed from her account. Okay. This is a major financial institution. I have the link to the New York Times article in the show notes. When she logged in, this woman discovered that her accounts showed a $0 balance and no records. Even her historical documents, like her statements, her tax forms, everything was missing. And so from her perspective, it looked like her money had been wiped out. Like, someone had hacked into her account and stolen all her money. Right? Like, what would you think? So she gets in full panic mode. She calls the company on her way to her job, and they told her that, well, she doesn't seem to have any accounts with them. They actually suggested that maybe she called the wrong bank.”

“The most important lesson is always the team. It is sort of the Alpha and Omega success or failure of a company is the team. And there's an art form to building a company with it. The corollary to the team is the fact that just having a bunch of brilliant people is not actually enough. You need to organize them, you need to give them a mission, you need to give them a way to pursue that mission that feels true to them, but also aligns them all together, which is kind of what leadership is all about.”

“If my kids were going to college right now and they were looking at a school school that was a $100,000 a year, it's kind of a nonstarter, I would say, in our household. But I would say, look. In lieu of going to that school, what if you chose a school that was 40% less? And I would give you the remaining 40% that we're not giving to this academic institution. I will invest this money for you. By the time you turn 30, you could probably buy a house. You could do whatever you want. You could start a business. You would have such a leg up in life. Again, really hard to have these conversations with teenagers, but you gotta have the conversation. It's hard. I I see parents, like, the kids are not happy with them. But it's a small price for you to pay for your kid's gain in the future. Let them be unhappy with you for now.”

“There was never really, like, exogenous quality sustainable yield. And I think the first the first glimpse of that was Athena, last year or two years ago when we had, like, exogenous yield that was not due to, you know, like, leverage against Bitcoin. It was, to some extent, leverage because it was, still driven by the funding fees, but it was somewhat upon exogenous yield. And what we observe with Prime is when you have something that is sustainable, and can sustain sustainable and at scale, it takes a bit of time, but people start trusting it.”

“We are witnessing the evolution of private credit onto open onchain rails.”

“So the basic question we all need to ask ourselves is, does the financial outcome justify the financial input? This is a very hard place for 19 year olds to live and think and breathe. It's hard for mature adults to, you know, think more about the money than the emotional ties to a decision. But does your financial make or break sugarcoat this? Deciding on where you go to school and how much you're gonna pay and how you're gonna pay for it can be a make or break financial decision, not just for the next four years, but for the rest of your life. The rest of your life. I can count on my hands the number of 40 year olds I know who are still paying back their undergrad and graduate student loans. They do not own a home. They hardly have any investments for their retirement. This has been a crippling decision for them.”

“What we observed with Prime is when you have something that is sustainable and that scale, it takes a bit of time, but people start trusting it and then they realize they can do useful things. People with that want to earn yield, they can rely on it. So this was always the promise of defy composable money, but there were no pieces to compose with.”

“Figur's been at, sort of the RWA, intersection of of TradFi and credit origination since 2018. You know, we set out to really rebuild capital markets, but doing so, on chain. And so, you know, we're vertically integrated across the whole stack from credit origination, mostly known for tokenizing HELOCs, on chain. Done about 22,000,000,000, of those to date. We structure the cash flows, and then we also distribute, across TradFi and DeFi.”

“Pioneering a new category of Open Credit expands the TAM for private credit.”