Zachary Townsend

[...] just opened for this summer’s class. It seems like a good time to talk about how Standard Treasury’s co-founders knew each other and laid the foundation for sticking together, raising a seed [...]

[...] (This started as an email to the Standard Treasury team to summarize the many conversations that my cofounder Dan and I had with them over [...]

[...] might get a sense of how to put together a good team. Yesterday I told the story of how Standard Treasury’s founders knew each other and today I am telling the story of hiring our first three [...]

[...] in technology is that banks have way too many people working for them. As Dan reminds the Standard Treasury team and all our customers, the banks that will survive in the future will be those that are [...]

[...] don’t have that luxury — or they are not comfortable taking that much time given how taboo mental health can be. I remember when I was in the depths of my depression spending eighteen hours in bed [...]

[...] A conversation seems to be slowly starting about mental health and Silicon Valley, or at least mental health and starting one’s own company. And in a more [...]

[...] Over the summer, I wrote two articles on mental health and startup founders. One was on how the mental health problems of the founders I know often [...]

[...] a candid telling on TechCrunch of her struggles with depression. I applaud them both. Many startup founders I know aren’t depressed though. They are anxious.They are on the spectrum of anxiety [...]

[...] even wrote a Quora question on one particular thought from that post though: that lots of startup founders I know have experienced some trauma in their past and that that trauma is often a strong [...]

[...] . We have picked the brains of bankers; fund managers; treasurers of big corporations; startup founders working on finance; startup founders trying to avoid finance who, nevertheless, touch it [...]

[...] Over the summer, I wrote two articles on mental health and startup founders. One was on how the mental health problems of the founders I know often extend beyond [...]

[...] ’s not like I’m a big fan or anything. I thought to myself: he’s an overweight guy from New Jersey, and I’m an overweight guy from New Jersey. I don’t want to die when I’m in my fifties. [...]

[...] it seems obvious that we were going to have a full and long-lived friendship. We were both from New Jersey, and then, as now, we have a mix of tough-guy go-fuck-yourself, sarcasm as humor, insatiable [...]

[...] months before I took time off to go to therapy. I grew up in a small, working class town in New Jersey and without very much money: Brown was a culture shock for me in some ways. [3] See Losing 58.3 [...]

[...] six ideas in sequence while talking to nearly a hundred potential customers: APIs for commercial banking (what we applied with), WealthFront for businesses, near real-time cross-bank settlement, [...]

[...] YC had already offered us a YC interview on the idea. I’m not sure we could sell remaking commercial banking well at the time — it is boring to the uninitiated. What we found, though, was a lot of [...]

[...] , and technologies that were designed and built in the 1970s. Starting Standard Treasury: Commercial Banking API Standard Treasury started because we experienced the difficulty of working with banks [...]

[...] to be a potential driver of the sought-after revenue growth. One such technology will be “API banking” – a concept that, though it seems to have achieved buzz-phrase status, represents a new and [...]

[...] to say about the technology and the pricing schemes of these vendors. Third, we learned that API Banking is much more than a cool feature for banks to have for corporate clients: anywhere that [...]

[...] for $117M to BBVA. It’s great news for the team, and I think it’s going to be great news for retail banking. Simple had amazing potential but also ran into many problems and difficulties caused by [...]

[...] brokerage, card processing (acquisition and issuing), custody accounts, fund administration, retail banking, private wealth banking, repo and other money markets, trade finance, know your customer and [...]

“The skill of making and maintaining Commonwealths consisteth in certain rules, as doth arithmetic and geometry; not, as tennis play, on practice on [...]

[...] now, do whatever it takes, be aggressive, and create a process. I have talked to a number of YC founders that are at much later stages than us. They admitted they had a terrible time hiring at the [...]