Send us Fan Mail I sat down with Max Levchin, Co-Founder and CEO of Affirm and one of the living legends of tech and fintech. He co-founded PayPal with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, invented anti-fraud technology that's still foundational today, and has spent the last 14 years building Affirm into one of the largest publicly traded fintechs in the world with a mission to replace credit cards with transparent lending. He is one of the most thoughtful and brilliant founders I've spoken with. &nb...

Send us Fan Mail I sat down with Rob Heyvaert, Founder and Managing Partner of Motive Partners, a fintech-focused private equity firm with over $6Bn in AUM, 80 portfolio companies representing over $15 trillion of assets in the wealth management space. Rob is a serial entrepreneur who started his first company at 24, sold it to IBM, and later founded Capco and sold to FIS to hundreds of millions of dollars, before launching Motive in 2016. He is a true fintech builder and it was inspiring to ...

Send us Fan Mail I sat down with Renaud Laplanche, Co-Founder and CEO of Upgrade, a consumer fintech valued at $7.3 billion. Since 2017, Upgrade has originated over $45 billion in credit to 7.5 million customers, crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue, and has been cash flow positive for years. Renaud also founded Lending Club and took it public in what was the largest US tech IPO of 2014. He is one of the most accomplished entrepreneurs in fintech and someone I personally admire. We discus...

Send us Fan Mail I sat down with Tom Sosnoff, one of the most successful entrepreneurs in financial services. Tom spent 19 years on Chicago’s CBOE trading floor and then left to build Thinkorswim, the first online broker specialized in options, which he sold to TD Ameritrade for $600 million. He then built Tastytrade and sold it nine years later for a billion dollars to IG Group. He is now building Lossdog, a career optimization platform to help fight wealth inequality. What I enjoyed the mos...

Send us Fan Mail I sat down with Andrew Endicott, fintech entrepreneur and my co-founder at Gilgamesh Ventures. Andrew is also the author of the recent book "Is Finance Technology?", a practical guide for founders, operators, and investors in financial services. The book covers everything. From the common mistakes that kill fintech companies, to how to think about risk, fraud, and regulation across verticals. I highly recommend picking up a copy. Few people have operated across as many roles...

Send us Fan Mail I sat down with Ali Mazanderani, Chairman of Lesaka, a nasdaq traded, leading fintech in Southern Africa with over $400 million in revenue and 2 million active customers. Ali is a fintech veteran investor and builder, who’s been closely involved with several multi-billion dollar fintechs in emerging markets, including Stone, Pine Labs, Kushki, Thunes and is also a co-founder of Teya. ‌ We discussed why Southern Africa is one of the most exciting fintech opportunities in the w...

Send us Fan Mail Miguel Armaza interviews George Robson, Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the most legendary venture firms in the world. Founded in 1972 by Don Valentine, Sequoia has backed some of the most successful tech and fintech companies in history including Nvidia, Apple, Google, Nubank, and Stripe. Sequoia-backed companies make up over 25% of the Nasdaq's market cap, and add up to $13+ trillion in market cap. George is one of 19 investing partners at Sequoia and was previously a p...

Send us Fan Mail Miguel Armaza sits down with Michael Calvey, one of the most successful and legendary emerging markets investors of our time. Mike moved to Moscow at age 27 in the early 90s and built Baring Vostok into a powerhouse with $10+ billion invested in Russia. They backed now-decacorns like Yandex, Revolut, Tinkoff, and Kaspi at their earliest stages. Yandex alone was a 450x return for the fund. Along the way, he survived a 98% market crash, was detained by Russia's secret service,...

Send us Fan Mail Miguel Armaza welcomes Edward Woodford, founder and CEO of ZeroHash, to Fintech Leaders for a candid, insightful conversation on the future of blockchain infrastructure and the lessons learned from nearly a decade of building in crypto. Edward offers a unique perspective as a London-born, MIT-educated entrepreneur who’s seen ZeroHash grow into one of the most critical and least visible companies powering the global blockchain ecosystem. He shares his journey— from getting re...

Send us Fan Mail Miguel Armaza sits down with Nikolay Seleznev, Co-Founder of Uzum, Uzbekistan’s first tech unicorn rewriting the playbook for e-commerce and fintech in Central Asia. From Moscow to Tashkent, Nikolay Seleznev brings global banking experience and entrepreneurial grit to a country leapfrogging straight into the digital economy. In this episode, Nikolay Seleznev shares the origin story of Uzum and how a simple, subpar online shopping experience sparked the vision for a super app...