Interviews with Leaders in Fintech & Web3
Interviews with Leaders in Fintech & Web3
Fintech & Web3 Career Advice from Simon Vans-Colina who was on the Founding team of Monzo, CTO and co-founder of Fronted, Founder of TreeDAO and now working at BigPay
Simon Vans-Colina has been at the forefront of fintech for over 20 years.
He started coding at 11, he found working at a bank boring , he was on the founding team of Monzo (the UK neobank unicorn), he is CTO and co-founder of Fronted, Founder of TreeDAO and is now moving to Singapore to join BigPay. He loves defi and web3.
Hear Simons thoughts on:
- Startups and why you need to be a generalist
- How the lines of fintech are blurring
- The massive opportunity in fintech, web3 and the metaverse
- DAOs and NFTs
- How to pick your 'elevator'
- What skills you should acquire to stand out
Join our exclusive waitlist: https://workinfintech.com/wait-list
Check out our website: https://workinfintech.com/
Follow our socials:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/work-in-fintech-global/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WorkinFintech
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdS4bYoCXaHVgfVm6syUrDw/playlists
Check out our website and subscribe to our mailing list to hear more about opportunities in fintech and web3.
Follow our socials Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube
https://workinfintech.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/work-in-fintech-global
https://www.twitter.com/workinfintech
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdS4bYoCXaHVgfVm6syUrDw
Hi, this is Matt, from work in fintech, and today we're delighted to be joined by Simon Vance, Kalima, who is seen CTO and co-founder, fronted a UK fintech and also one of the founding members of Monzo, the UK unicorn neo bank.
Talk about Hi Simon. Hi. So thanks for joining us today, can you tell us a little bit about your background and where and how you got started in the world of technology and fintech? And then we'll kind of move on to, I think, quite a few other questions that I'm eager to ask you.
Right. So I guess like like a lot of people who work in computers like my my journey started when I was about eleven years old and my mom was a schoolteacher. And over the summer, one year, she brought home an apple to eat and she didn't know much about computers.
So she brought home the big boxes, the screen she bought on the computer. But she didn't bring home the disk drive or any software. So the actual only thing I could do on the Apple TV over summer was hit like stop a break and type basic programs.
And so every day I would start afresh. I would have to beat the computer up and taught the same programing not typed yesterday, and I would improve it. And and it was accidental spaced repetition. But I became obsessed with writing computer programs on my Apple TV and I never really stopped programing.
I got into failing with a bad crowd of hackers and and we got in all sorts of trouble with the the police and the Telstra and Australia, and we did all sorts of like phone breaking and all sorts of things we shouldn't have done.
But it it meant that I was very early on in the in the internet, you know, like before. But this is before like, you know, those who people who are old would might have had a wind socks and an X modem and things like that.
And we were we were very early on in the internet before it really came to Australia. We used to we used to find ways of getting free phone calls to America so we could connect to. We could connect to dial up in America and get access to the internet.
And then that turned out quite useful. It got me, got me my first job and my first job pay me more than my my mum was making as a schoolteacher. So that was sort of my my intro. And then obviously, at around 1998, the the dot com boom started to happen and I thought a lot of my
friends were moving to London to sort of like work for tech companies over here. So I came over here and. And more or less I've been here ever since. So it's I've been in London for like 22 years or something crazy like that.
The whole time. I've traveled a little bit as well, but I've always worked in technology. I've always done project work. I've never had like a I've never been one of those people who's happy just having a desk job and a job that's like going to carry on.
I've always like joined a project for the sake of a project with a definitive finish line in front of me. And I wanted to work for banks because I thought that's where all the money was going to be.
So I spent years trying to build up my skills to go work in a bank and then realized it was unbelievably boring. And so I quit working for banks and I went away and I did a few other things.
And it was about seven years ago. I guess now that I got an email from from Tom Blomfield and it said, I'm starting a bank with an API and I got really excited about that because the like, as a person who had grown up with computers like every single part of my life, you know, when I first
got my Apple TV, my mom brought home over summer, it couldn't do anything. I couldn't talk to the outside world. I couldn't even talk to the printer. All you could do was put characters on the screen. It wasn't connected to the real world in any way, but it was still fascinating.
But over time, computers became like able to connect to more things. And so this like secret superpower that I learned when I was eleven years old became more and more powerful. I was able to use my programing skills to download my email or update my blog or build websites or build companies or move money.
But like, the one thing I could never do is I could never, I could never access my my finances, like my money, like my bank account. There was never an API for my bank, and I was just very, very lucky that I happened to be like in in the right frame of mind and in the right place
with the right skill set to to get an email from Tom saying he was starting a bank with an API and and I jumped at the chance and I quit my my job and and we went and and like, there was eleven of us and it was a bit of a shaky start.
But we ended up building a we ended up building a pretty good bank and it's about 6 million people using it now.
Fantastic, and our banks, obviously, Monzo, you during your time at Monzo. What did were you still deep in that technical side or did you kind of cover a variety? Did you wear many hats during that time?
Because what you sort of have to wear many hats like that?
Exactly. Could you? Could you talk about what it was like at the beginning and as you scaled to that many users the the challenges and the learning experience?
So there's a pretty common path that a lot of people take, which is they they start off as as specialists and then they become generalists and then they become T-shaped people, right? Which is where you have a broad set of base skills.
And one particular skill. And when you're in a startup and you've only got eleven people every day, everybody needs to do multiple things. So my role at Monzo was like my T-shaped skill was sort of DevOps. So I'm good at deploying software and building pipelines to deploy software.
I'm not the best distributed systems engineer. I'm I'm not the best go programmer. But my role at Monzo involved everything, and I'm not even joking about this. It involves changing locks on doors. It involved racking hardware it involved like it involved ridiculous things like begging the people from the office downstairs.
If we could plug in internet like plugged into their internet until our internet got delivered. It involved finding data centers that involved like it just involved everything you know, like, like setting up security cameras like, you know, and the day to day writing of software as well.
Like, You just have to do everything is a small company, but. And as I mean, if you are very fortunate and the company that you're working for takes off, then what happens is your job is to hire people smarter than you and then get out of their way.
So every like I was the first engineer on on so many parts of one's own like lending and and and the platform team and just so many, so many different things the open banking team and lots of different teams.
I would be the first engineer. I would go in there and I would sort of work out what needed to be done that had a six month like lead time. So quite often you need to fill out the right forms or start the right processes off or, you know, sign datacenter contracts or hardware or, you know, talk
to Amazon Web Services and all these things that take a long time. So I would be the first engineer staffed onto the project and get it to the point where, like smarter people in me, specialists could take over and then take the project, take the project on.
So we never really had a job title for what I did. Like Tom used to joke I was head of whatever I was working on at the time, but eventually I found this role that I really, really love, which is I actually came up with the title of Scout I because I love being I love like I
love to live in the future and I love to like, like, come up with ideas and either prove that they're not going to work very, very quickly or try and work out like take an idea and fall in love with it and take it as far forward as you can until you know why it's not going to
work or it's ready to be worked on by the people. And I must have worked on probably 20 things at Monza that I absolutely fell in love with, and only four or five of them managed to see the light of day.
So in that kind of role as Scout and having an eye on the on the future all the time, how how did that help then? And you're your kind of next step beyond Monzo and beyond as well?
Yeah. So that the the role that I ended up with is very similar to what a CTO does. A CTO is somebody who can translate sort of an idea and understand it. Like for like I have a full and complete understanding of the technology requirements to achieve a goal, right?
That's what a CTO needs to do. And when engineers get really, really good as they get more and more senior, they don't they they don't necessarily become better programmers, although that's one thing that you can do, but you become sort of a master of getting things done.
And sometimes that involves pushing buttons and writing code, but off as often as not, it involves like picking up the phone and calling somebody who has the answer to the question you need or realizing that there that you know somebody might have done this before and like looking on GitHub or just knowing how to Google for things
like big you become, you become a lot more efficient and effective when you realize that your job is to achieve a result and not just to write code. And like, somebody gave me this piece of advice two years ago, which is that when you get to a certain level, if you're doing it right, it feels like cheating
. It shouldn't feel like hard work. If it's hard work, it means that you're working at the limits of what you're capable of doing. And another there's another great quote, which is that if you write code as smart as you can possibly write it, then you're not going to be smart enough to debug it when it goes wrong
. So it should feel like as you get better, like the job should feel like, it should feel more like cheating, it should feel easier.
And with front it, what, what, what what was the kind of the service that you're providing there? How did you come up with that idea?
So front, it's like friend whose mission was to like, really fund his missions, for example. Jamie, my co-founder, his girlfriend, got of notice that their landlord was kicking them out, and she lived with a bunch of flatmates and she didn't have the money to pay another rental deposit, knowing that she wouldn't get her first rental deposit back
in time. So that was that is front his mission to solve that problem. And there's a couple of different ways you can solve that problem. You can you can lend people money who don't have a rental deposit, so give them a low interest loan and let them, like spread the cost of their deposit over twelve months.
Or you can work with the deposit protection schemes to take a like take a credit risk on people, but let them move their deposit from place to place. Both of those, whenever you're taking a credit risk on somebody, you need to be able to exercise the privileges of a lender to get paid back.
So if someone doesn't pay you back and better, report them to the credit reference agencies. So to do that, we had to become a regulated credit, a regulated credit lender. And so we went through the Innovation Sandbox, the FCA innovation sandbox.
And normally when people start lenders, they're quite large companies like, you know, we've only ever been twelve people. So we're a very small company. And yet we managed to get fully regulated as a as a consumer credit lender, which involved about a year of doing paperwork while we were building our systems out as well and working with
the FCA because what we wanted to do was quite quite different. Like, we lend people money, but we don't give them the money, we give the money to their estate agent. So. So that's basically the mission to front it.
And yeah, it's been going for two years and I'm stepping away from it, but I'm moving to Singapore wanting to be a little bit closer to to my parents. But but yeah, it's going well.
So moving over to Singapore, you're you're going to. Well, it was another fintech in Southeast Asia, which I think I saw a tweet that you did a couple of weeks ago having a little circle over Southeast Asia and as more people here than like the rest of the planet.
What's the what's the kind of the opportunity that you got to, you got to be looking at over there?
Yeah. So I mean, I'm sort of going back to the thing that I think I enjoy the most, which was was was building banks like building a product that people use every day. Like, I remember the first day when I saw a Monzo card in the wild, when I saw one of those hot coral cards in the
wild and I was it poured on Curtain Road in Shoreditch, getting my lunch. And the person in front of me pulled out a bright orange, you know, bright coral card. And just like absolute swell of pride, like, oh my god, people are using the thing that we that we built.
It's amazing. And I want to be close to. I want to be close to products that people use every day because it's just so it's so exciting to have that impact on people's lives. And I don't think, I think the like challenger banks, I think the pace of acceleration is going to increase.
There are when we built Monzo for the first couple of years, we used to talk about table stakes, right, which is that we were building a bank that wasn't any better or different to any other bank. We had to build all of the things that you could do with your current bank.
And the only real difference was that you could for easy card and that your transactions appeared immediately instead of three days later. Like that wasn't a huge amount of innovation, although at the time it was considered disruptive. Now, Monza is at a point where it's starting to do things that you know, like you can now pay your
bills from a pot and you can automatically split your salary when it comes in. And there's this great social features like like bill splitting and shed tabs and and there's so many cool things that we managed to build on top of Monzo that other banks that haven't replicated.
Like if this, then that and and coin and, you know, round ups and all sorts of cool things. And but I don't. But I think the pace of innovation is going to accelerate now, and I think there are different challenges in different countries like remittances and a big thing for British people for if not for a lot
of British people. But in South East Asia, a lot of people will work outside the country where they ask you to send money across borders. And there's lots of there's lots of exciting challenges that that I that I'm really excited about an especially of the intersection of crypto as well, not necessarily cryptocurrencies, but giving people the ability
to to, you know, store their money or send send money across borders in a way that is is a lot cheaper than what's available now. Like, one of the things I'm really excited about is like Glass. I love Southeast Asia.
I travel all time well. Before the pandemic, I used to, and I remember being stuck in this town where there was no ATM, and I was like, I didn't have any cash on me and like, I wanted to like, you know, buy a beer at the bar and I couldn't.
There was no cash, so I had to like, go find a guy in a tuk tuk and like, get him to drive me 25 minutes to the nearest to the next town that had an ATM, only to turn around and come back.
Now my phone had data the whole time, right? Why couldn't I do a peer to peer transaction from my bank to his bank? Because my bank was in the UK and his bank was was in the Philippines? So there was no international peer to peer system.
So I'm really excited about about helping to solve that problem. Basically, I think you should be able to send, like any two humans on Earth should be able to use this power of the internet to to settle any debts between them at any time.
So I think that's a really exciting thing that hasn't been hasn't been solved by any existing challenger bank. So that's what I'm that's what I'm most excited about.
So you've been involved in fintech for 20 odd years or so from the early kind of open banking challenger bank holidays through to fintech now open probably split into many different subsets of, you know, it's kind of a word that encompasses at least how we talk about it in work in fintech.
We talk about it in that broader sense with encapsulates the everything from what some people say on a fintech 1.0 with the challenger banks all the way to kind of fintech, 3.0 with DeFi and Web3. And you just talked about crypto.
Can you can you talk about how you see fintech and why you think is important?
I think you're going to start to see the blurring of lines a lot, right? Like you don't think of a ticketing system as fintech, right? But in the future, like right now, if you buy tickets in India on another ticket swap app or they or Ticketmaster app like those tickets are stuck inside that app.
And one of the problems with the way e-commerce works right now is that we don't have atomic swaps now. If you haven't heard the term atomic swaps before, what it means is that like if you meet somebody in a car park to buy tickets from right, you give them the tickets and they give you the cash and
that that is an atomic swap like you literally hand them the thing and they hand you the thing back, right? And if and if one person tries to like, take the money and run away with the tickets, you can chase after them and get your money back right?
And online on the internet, we've not had the ability to do atomic swaps for a long time. There's no technical reason why we can't do it. And you see, like within within one sort of ticketing app, you'll say atomic swaps.
You'll say, like, you know, they'll take the trust and third party will take the money out of your account and put and send you the ticket. But that's only within one sort of walled garden. The power of the technology that Satoshi Nakamoto built this this idea of decentralized, trustless systems is that we can do atomic swaps with
people we don't trust without having to have a trusted third party. So I want to see a future where you know that horrible thing, where you buy a ticket for your friend and they just never pay you back and you have to keep sending them like payment reminders and payment requests and stuff.
Well, I want to see a future where you basically use you can peer to peer, send them not just money, but you can pay to pay, send your friend a ticket, but they can't get the ticket until they actually send you the money.
So you have an atomic swap built into your app so you can see the lines start to blur between what's fintech and what's not. Like, you should be able to exchange anything for anything else and and in a risk free way, and not just within a walled garden like not just on Monzo, but you should be like
if your friend uses Starling, you know that their bad decision. But if they hear Starling, they should be able to like you should be at a peer to peer, send them a ticket and they should get a peer to peer, send you the money.
And but both those things should happen, or neither of those things should happen. So I think the I think the power of of this some decentralized Web3 technology is that it's going to remove a lot of fraud and friction from our world and allow us to sort of like do things that are the things that are, like
, really cool, like you should be able to like, buy your kids like a Fortnite skin and send it to them as a Christmas present, right? As a birthday present. And you shouldn't have to like, you know, your grandparents don't have the Fortnite app.
They're not going to create a Fortnite account just to like to buy, you know, a game character or skin or a level or something, right? But they should be able to go to like eBay or OpenSea and buy one of those things and send it to their kid and send it their kids, Monzo.
And then they can send it from Mondo into Fortnite and use it. So I think this I think the I think the distributed Web3 technology is super exciting and it's going to blur the lines between what's fintech and what's not.
And how do you see it going back to your scouts kind of role before looking into the future? How do you see then the lines and this is going, you know, 5:10 years or more into the future? The blurred lines between, you know, in real life me space, some people call it and then the digital online metaverse
, you know, web VR, exile kind of worlds. How do you see because of things that you've been talking about then into operating into those worlds as well?
Yeah. Like, I had this. So I'm moving to Singapore and my my girlfriend has four or five boxes full of albums from when she was a kid, and all those albums have photographs in them and she hasn't opened them in the last three moves.
And I said to her, like, instead of like transporting these around the world again, why don't we take them out and take photographs of them and put them on Google Photos so they'd show up? They show up in the kitchen on the photo frame, right?
Like, so we're already starting to value things that are digital more than we value things that are not digital. I think that that trend is going to continue. I think we have like too much stuff, if that makes sense, like in the world and the stuff you own stops you from, from moving around and you know, it
costs you money to store and and and you but you can you can drive the same. I mean, I can look at a photograph I took 20 years ago that I uploaded to the internet, and I get the same sense of like pleasure for the fact that I still have that photograph in the same sense of sentimentality
because I have a digital copy of that photograph. I don't need the piece of paper anymore. So I think like a lot of the thing, a lot of the time we attach sentimentality or two to physical objects where it's not the physical object, it's the it's the memory that we actually care about.
So I'm actually pretty bullish on the Metaverse. I don't think it's going to look. I don't think the Metaverse needs to start with virtual reality, although I'm a huge fan of VR. Like, like we use VR all the time, like, yeah, especially during lockdown, my girlfriend and I would put our headsets on and play table tennis, or
we'd like play a round of golf. I love VR. I don't think the Metaverse needs to start in VR, but I think you'll start to see. You'll start to see things that are know metaverse type, things that are sort of blurring the line between where you've got scarcity and you've got, I don't know like that.
There's I think there is definitely something there. I think the blurring of virtual reality and the metaverse is wrong. They are like they can be completely separate things. The virtual reality is just one place you can experience the metaverse, but I think it's going to be it's going to be like everything that's digital if it becomes portable
and something that you can actually own. Then I think that's like a lot more exciting than than just like, you know, you have a hat in one particular game or something, right? But like when you can actually carry stuff with you and attach sentimentality to it and know that it can't be taken away from you, that's that's
really exciting, I think.
Well, that's an NFT, isn't it?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. So we yeah, we we recently met a few weeks ago and had lunch and, you know, kind of shared a lot of similar ideas and visions and so on. one of the things we spoke about then was how right now we're on the cusp of something and very early, very early days on where you had, you
know, kind of the the interface moments that you had back in the late nineties with Netscape and so on, providing then putting a bit before where you were just playing around with your apple to a computer when that suddenly was was getting connected to the internet was doing more interesting, different things.
Then you had kind of the interface moment and web 2.0 with social media and mobile phones and all the other kind of services everyone's using all the time now. But the Web3 interface moment hasn't happened yet, and it's kind of a way off, really, to a certain extent.
Can you just talk about how exciting it is right now in terms of what's kind of there and everything is wide open for for young people and people who have been working for 20 odd years as well, but people to understand the potential and the opportunity that's here right now in Webster.
Yeah, I.
Really I really think like the internet changed the world. Fundamentally, it changed it massively and enormously and fundamentally. And I remember, like I remember back in probably 2001, I remember sitting in Leicester Square and I had my palm pilot talking via infrared to my to my, my phone and checking my email while I had to like, you
know, the infrared had to be lined up perfectly with the phone or it didn't work. So I had to like, literally sit there. And I remember like daydreaming about how amazing it would be if if if everything had internet access all of the time and I couldn't get this idea out of my head, I started walking around
London getting like, Oh my God, I could like, I could turn these lights on and off. I could, you know, I could check my email anytime I wanted, and it pretty much came to pass exactly as I imagined it, right?
And I think I've always been pretty fortunate that I always live about three years in the future, and I'm always like, hungry for that, that next thing and I am completely 100% convinced that there that society is going to be in the same way that society is better because we have.
The internet and, you know, mobile phones that work everywhere, and you can access all of the world's information if you want it, or you can go and read Facebook and read conspiracy theories, it's up to you, right? But the world is genuinely more interesting.
And to me, at least than than than it was back in the early 2000 or the late nineties that I have, I am completely convinced that the world that's brought about by decentralized technology, by NAFTA and by web webseries is going to be a better world than the one we live in now.
And one of the like a lot of people are saying, like the financialization of everything is going to take all the fun out of life. You know, everything's got a token or everything's got to an NFT. And like, we already live in a financialized world, most people only have like they only have access to one type of
money. And it's it's fiat money. It's pounds and the same money that you used to pay your your restaurant bill or your gym membership. You could also be using to to donate to a local club or somebody that buys a forest.
But because it's the same money, because we only have this one type of money, then people are actually like, Oh, I can't, I can't, you know, I can't support you. I can't support your art project, or I can't, you know, support this new restaurant opening, or I can't do this because I'm trying to save for a house
, right? So everything becomes as expensive as it possibly can be because because we only have this one type of money, and I don't think that's right. You know, like the the future, the future that Web3 enables is that when you make a donation to a project, you don't do it by like just gifting money.
You do it by joining a DAO and you get something back, you get the DAOs token, and that DAO token might let. You might let you sort of vote on what happens. You know, like my my own project, my own side project, it's called the tree dao.
And we like I want. I love forests. I love being out in the wilderness, but I could never afford to buy a forest. But I found a whole bunch of people who who wanted to protect. Some will some woodlands and we, we, you know, clump together.
And we raised about £100,000. We bought a forest and everybody got tokens. Yeah, equivalent to how much money they put in, and they can use those tokens to to vote on what happens to that forest. And if you're holding one of these tokens or if you're holding one of the NFT, is that you can make with these
tokens, then you have the right to go, use the forest and have a picnic or scatter your grandmother's ashes there or bury a cat or take photographs on your wedding day like you can do. You can exercise all of the privileges of owning this forest, and you can even sell your tokens if you want, like you can
sell your tokens or you're in phase. And I love this idea that we will end up with a wallet that contains not just money, not just pounds, but we'll end up with a wallet that contains links to the parts of the fabric of society that we care about.
So you might have, you know, your wallet might contain a part of a forest that somebody's gifted you because you live nearby, and it might contain a 10% off voucher for a restaurant that you backed in the early days to get it going, and it might contain tickets to your friend's art club.
You know your friend's art art exhibition. It might contain NFTs that you co-founded. Did that that it's taken off. It's worth now worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It, like your wallet, should contain more than just cash and I think will be a much more interesting world.
And the nice thing about the the nice thing about what's in your wallet is that it's digital and it follows you around. So you'll be able to see things like you better say things like because you because you backed a particular charity.
Like I say, you say you might donate like £50 to shelter, right? Right now you donate £50 to shelter, you get a receipt. Nothing else, right? But in the future, you'll donate £50 to shelter, and what you'll get back is 50 like bed tokens, right?
And then Airbnb might say, You know what? Like, for every bed token you have, it will give you like £10 off your £10 off your next booking, right? So like you, you sort of like you can. You can incentivize things in a much more complicated world and you can build a much better world.
Buy, buy, buy this digital technology. Buy this Web3 technology.
And I think some of the things have been talking about there with towels, which is decentralized autonomous organizations for for where that term might be new to people. And also with NAFTA as well. If you look at what's happened with NAFTA over the last year, there's been this focus on digital, which is kind of the first step
of a new case for NAFTA. But I think all of the things you've been talking about and the ways we can use tokens and wallets and so on is all these next steps of of NFT usage and lots of other Web3 DeFi type usage.
So with that in mind, could you talked to kind of young people who are looking at starting out their career? Who might earlier in the conversation you said you was a bank and it was really boring, but you've been working in fintech and it's really exciting.
That's obviously 11 draw. But with this, with this very early days of where we are with Web3, can you talk about what people should be thinking about looking at skills? They should start acquiring the curiosity and futurism that can kind of help guide some of the some of the direction they're taking?
Yeah, I mean, like I remember my mom when I was about eleven years old saying that, like most of the jobs that you work out haven't been invented yet, and she was completely right. Like, there are some, but there are some skills that I learned when I was when I was young that like, I'll keep with me
forever. And like one of those is coding, like if you can, I don't believe that. Don't believe that. I don't believe personally that there are some people who can't code. I believe that everybody can and like learning to use it.
Learning to speak the language of computers will help you for your entire career. Another one, which is really, really like funny, is that like people don't learn to type like if you like, if you learn to, like, actually type with all ten fingers and do it properly, you will like it takes like three weeks to do and
you will be 15%. You will sound 15% smarter and faster, and your arguments will arrive in front of other people 15% sooner. Then then other people's arguments and like that tiny little like that tiny little change you can make.
It's one of the seven habits of highly effective people, right? Sharpen the saw. So work out which tools that you're going to use the most in your life and then shopping them. You know, if you're going to if you think your career is going to involve computers, then learn to speak the language of computers and learn to
type with all ten fingers. And it sounds really, really silly, but it makes a huge, huge difference. And like, learn to develop that, that curiosity muscle, it's actually not. It's actually not very hard to. Instead of sitting down at Netflix, sit down at, you know, like sit down on a YouTube channel and like watch watch a lecture
about distributed systems or whatever, whatever technology you want, like flying cars or NAFTA, or something like just like learn to learn to to like get that sense of novelty from from things that will actually help you in the future.
It's a tiny little change. It's just a habit you build up and then suddenly you'll you'll you'll know about things three years before everybody else, and this is the best piece of advice that I ever got from anybody.
Right? I'm not going to say who it was because I don't agree with a lot of the things that they say. But they said to me that that most trade in the world used to be geographical, right? You'd sell your boat to India and you fill up, fill up on spices and sell back to London.
You'd sell the spices for a profit. But most trade now is not geographical. It's temporal. You buy things now when they're cheap and you sell them in the future when they're expensive. And like, if you're struggling to save money to buy a house, that's because people bought them back when they were cheap.
And now they're selling them to you now, and they're expensive. And there are things. But as a young person, you have this huge advantage in that you have an empty mind with the ability to learn, and you're going to be around for a lot longer than the people who own all these assets now.
So your job is not to try and buy the things that are expensive now. Your job is to try and buy the things that are cheap now so you can sell them when they're expensive later. And that means that if you want to get ahead in this world, you need to work out what the future is going
to be. You need to look at what the trends are and look at what's coming down the pipeline and look at what everyone else is getting excited about and get invested like, you know, join join Discord and like, find a community that you like and find the technology that you like and find the programing languages that no
one's writing yet. And learn what like, guess, guess what's going to be big in the future? And and like, you know, take a stake in it, like, get involved in it, like join a a project work in something like most of the banks have been around for three or 400 years, like they may not be around in
20 years. If you go and start your career like learning about, you know, like compliance and a huge bank that hasn't been around for 100 years, like, you know, they may not exist in five years time we might all be using, we might only be using cryptocurrency or Monzo.
Revolut styling advice might have completely replaced them, so your your your skills will be completely useless.
I completely agree with everything that, you.
Know.
This is something that we've been trying to kind of make. Just open people's eyes up about the opportunity there and and there, instead of looking at these kind of traditional industries, which some of them are just going to disappear.
But some of them, you know, aren't going to innovate that quickly because just various things there are at play with them. But in technology and in fintech and Web3 and crypto, it's a very exciting place to be. But it's not only picking a sector that's growing quickly.
Yeah, if you look at the growth of something like financial services like they're growing at, well, 5% every year and have done so for the last four or 500 years or so. You look at fintech, it's growing anything between 20 and 1,000%, depending on which sector you're looking at.
So it's picking the right sector, picking the right writer.
Right? Every generation gets an elevator. You just have to pick the right one, right? You have to look and work out whether whether the thing that you're getting on is the elevator of your generation. Like my parents' generation, it was, you know, buying technology shares, you know, buying shares in Apple or, you know, or buying shares, you
know, buying houses basically was there was there elevated because you could look at it, you could look at the population demographics of the post-World War two Baby Boomers and just tell that like, you know, we were going to run out of land and house prices were going to go through the roof like every generation has an elevator
and like, you know, my I mean, I'm 44 years old now, so I think my generation was was my elevator was probably like learning to code, you know, and and I think that, you know, ten or eleven years ago, cryptocurrency came along.
It was probably like the smallest but fastest elevator in history, the express elevator. So I think you're you're not late to this in any way. Cryptocurrencies only been around for ten years, and it's have only been around for three years, and we have only been around for a year.
So if you get involved in this technology now, it's like, I remember like I remember when I got here in 1999, I didn't buy a house because houses were too expensive. Man, was I stupid? I should have bought a house in 1999.
I'd be like, I'd be like, So much better off now. We're not. You're not late to technology. It's not too late to learn how to code. It's never too late to like, get involved in in NAFTA. And that doesn't mean going out and just buying a bunch of random nifty.
It means learning how to code doing like a, you know, doing a data science course or do have a Python programing course or do it like learn a little bit of rust if you already if you already know one of those two languages or go to Rabbit Hole Dot GE and like learn how DeFi works and like
and then ask yourself the question like, Is this safe? You know, am I going to lose all my money or am I going to get scammed? And then ask yourself, like, why am I able to earn five, six, 7%, you know, interest where my investment is not protected, but I'm only able to earn no point, not not
1% interest when it is protected like white, like what is the difference there and and like this? Yeah, it's just it's just an incredibly exciting time to to be to be getting into technology like, you know, with things like cloud computing, which is like still an enormous, enormous amount of of of an advantage to people who are
starting companies nowadays is that you can just get unlimited like you can like you can if you start a company right now. If you learn how to program and the software that you know you write as you a new company, it needs to run on a bunch of computers that you're doing something.
It's really computationally intensive, like you can just go and ask the cloud computing companies for like £100,000 worth of credit and they will just give it to you, right? Late has never been easier to like start a company right now.
You like this. There's like unbelievable amounts of help to anybody that wants to take a chance and start a company. And even if it doesn't work out, it doesn't. It all that happens is that you end up with this incredible amount of experience and you, you yourself become more valuable even if it doesn't work out.
So I could get involved in startups like get involved in like get involved in startups, get involved in in the future, work out what the next elevator is and and like there really isn't like your grandma might say, get safe bank job.
But she's giving you the worst piece of advice ever because if you take a nice, safe bank job, you are guaranteed not going to get on the elevator that all your peers are going to get on.
Simon Vance, Kaleena, thank you so much for this interview. Best of luck in your move to Singapore.
Thanks a lot.