Zac Townsend

Most of modern finance has been built for now: instant payments, real-time trading, same-day settlement, on-demand credit.

Agentic AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of acting independently in the world.

Intelligence itself will be commoditized.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

We conceived of Meanwhile three years ago, between Thanksgiving and Christmas 2021.

Short-term thinking dominates our world.

No one small can hope to win the infra layer in AI (NVIDIA) or the model layer (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta).

As an entrepreneur, I think higher valuations are usually better.

In 2013, the Bank of England revealed a decision to encourage new banks to start in their banking market.

(This article originally appeared as an op-ed in the Financial Times published Monday, April 15th).

My recent thoughts on housing policy (Broken Promises: The Housing Market in San Francisco (And Ten Ideas to Fix It)) have gotten a big response — positive and negative — on Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter, and my email box.

Almost everyone who visits San Francisco falls in love with it.

(Also see my follow-up post on getting organized, and sign up to my tiny letter to get contacted about fixing housing affordability in SF).

While it has been technically illegal to pay women less than men for doing the same job since the Federal Equal Pay Act (EPA) of 1963, women still earn substantially less than men in the United States.

(This op-ed originally appeared in the Sunday Insight section of San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, February 14, 2016).

My background While I was growing up my Dad was a postal clerk.

We're proud to say that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has acquired the assets and team of Standard Treasury.

Square has reportedly confidentially filed for an IPO under the JOBS act (Bloomberg, WSJ, etc).

We have some news upcoming about Standard Treasury.

At Y Combinator Alumni Demo Day, I had a chance to talk to the co-founders of Rescue Forensics (who have a fascinating backstory).

I have posted on my blog exactly twenty times since September 2013 when Dan and I and Standard Treasury got out of Y Combinator and raised our seed round.

At Standard Treasury we are building an API banking platform, becoming our own bank, and doing so in the United Kingdom.

At Standard Treasury we are building an API banking platform, becoming our own bank, and doing so in the United Kingdom.

Over the summer, I wrote two articles on mental health and startup founders.

This morning was my final data collection for a randomized diet experiment I have been participating in for the last year.

(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 lunch, dinner, coding, and a ton of product discussions.

A conversation seems to be slowly starting about mental health and Silicon Valley, or at least mental health and starting one's own company.

Last week Sam Altman wrote about Founder Depression.

Banks have a nearly one-size-fits-all product model which leaves value on the table.

“The skill of making and maintaining Commonwealths consisteth in certain rules, as doth arithmetic and geometry; not, as tennis play, on practice only: which rules neither poor men have the leisure, nor men that have had the leisure have hitherto had the…