I mean, it's a really interesting idea that, you know, kind of going back to the data is the new oil kind of concept,

right? For sure.

And I think we observed that very early on in this cycle of innovation and financial technology is that the absence of data really might have been a stall point for, for how we innovators were thinking about introducing emerging technologies into incumbents.

So FinTech Sandbox is 11 years old this year, and it was built as a solution to the idea that particularly market data, but now increasingly alternative data sets, critically important if you're building any innovative kind of solution for the financial services sector, no matter if it's payments or lending or, in my case, predictive analytics to price new debt.

But it's also very costly, and the procurement process was difficult.

And So really the idea came about with my co-founder, David Jagen.

He's a global investor.

What's your thought about where we go with that?

And you guys were using machine learning back then, which was kind of different, maybe new.

Completely new, frankly.

So our thesis was coming out of the credit crisis, having been an operator during in a large institution during the credit crisis, that there actually were.

non-traditional risk factors that were influencing, you know, obviously we had just come through, at least in our generation, you and I, the greatest level of distress we'd ever seen in the credit markets.

You know, some people, some of the older guys had seen, you know, the 1970s where New York City went bankrupt and things like that.

We'd never seen anything like that.

And our team, our if you could measure those non, you could identify and quantify those non-financial factors that were often embedded And research reports from the institutional investors in their own thinking.

And then I'd like to carry this arc that we're talking about into like what you're seeing in some of your cohorts, these younger founders, some of the ones that have been successful, maybe some of the ones struggling and like Where is like data, technology, all these things that have kind of crescendoed for you up to this point in your career? But maybe first tell us about FinTech Sandbox and let's talk a little bit about your cohorts now.

And what would those be? You know, are they similar to what we typically expect? Are they different? What do you look for in a founder?

Yeah.

You know, they're a little bit defined conventional wisdom for me.

I tend to gravitate towards founders who listen deeply.

We're used to being in the setting, and you and I kind of laughed about it as we were preparing to get on the call, the swinging of the bat in certain segments of entrepreneurship that isn't backed up.

It is an abstraction layer that someone thinks they can solve.

rather than listening deeply and being close to the real problem.

Has anything surprised you? Has anything, you know, happened the way that you thought it would or not? And what would you like to see happen?

How do you think that might affect all the people in this country who are living paycheck to paycheck?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think the first thing we have to observe is that the household balance sheet in our country, to borrow a term from our Federal Reserve banking system, the household balance sheet is fragile.

And in many cases, you know, the 40 million people we're talking about can be tipped very quickly into severe financial distress.

We may argue that they already are because they're using food stamps.

But this, you know, this need to actually secure money to actually close the food gap that they would have done through government programs is a clear and present challenge.

It's one I think that we look at, too, if I just kind of had to marry that through, like, where is fintech for good operating? you know, you have oftentimes these people participate almost in the shadows of our economy.

They're not fully embedded yet in our banking system and able to avail themselves of, of the real power of technology, which is to do like micro lending at scale in a cost-effective way.

falls through the cracks or, you know, goes awry, but where things go smoothly to everybody's benefit.