Steve Chen 🇺🇸 🚀

In 1949 an epidemiologist, made the first correlations between cardiovascular health and exercise. Jogging didn’t become normalized until Bill Bowerman from @Nike wrote a book about it. I hope we look back at planning and financial maintenance the same way.

@Robert_A_Berger Or they used AI to game plan the negotiations and convinced the buyer that vision wasn’t enough… Or it’s supply and demand and the bidders believe it’s a zero sum game -first to AGI rules the world so $100M doesn’t matter.

Paying AI engineers $100M or $1B to join your company is an admission you couldn't convince them to join based on your vision.

When your 24 yo son starts reading the Chinese family history and realizes his ancestors were bad af 😂

@Shpigford @maybe Hi @Shpigford sorry to lose someone smart building in this space and appreciate your tough decision. It’s a grind and not simple or easy. If we can be helpful to any of your users please let me know. Good luck with your B2B approach.

Maybe is making a pivot to B2B tl;dr @maybe is pivoting towards B2B financial forecasting + scenario planning The Problem We’re about 6,000 paying customers short of breaking even, with only around 200 paying customers currently, most of whom joined during the beta phases when the cost was significantly lower. We likely need more than 6,000 when you consider that many resources will need to scale up to meet the needs of that many more customers. The reality is that building a B2C personal finance platform is not only technically very challenging, but incredibly slow to grow, and we can’t tackle those challenges while creating additional features people might be willing to pay for within the next 10-12 months (our current runway). I no longer believe a B2C personal finance app is our best bet for survival going forward. The market’s needs are too fragmented, and the feature set is too far from becoming valuable for more affluent customers. I believe it either has to be completely bootstrapped for years or have $10’s of millions in funding to sustain and pour into growth. We’ve got roughly $400,000 left in the bank. So what do we do with that? The Solution We sunset the current version of Maybe. Again. No more giant B2C personal finance app. The economics just don’t make sense for us. We’re pivoting to B2B financial forecasting & scenario planning tools. Specifically, we're focusing on natural-language, generative-UI + UX for creating reports and answering questions. All business financial tools lean heavily on "power", which means lots of formulas, lots of complex interfaces, and spreadsheet inputs...this is why they go up-market, because onboarding requires teaching how to use the platform. This type of tooling typically requires someone with a background in finance to even begin to use them. But what if the UI were a simple text input? “Forecast runway if we added one new employee in 3 months at a salary of $150,000”. Not a chat input, but natural-language, generative UIs. It's something we’ve actually been working on over the past few months anyways and we’re now going to apply that to a business context. Anyone on a team will be able to use it because, to obtain the data they want, they simply write it out. Thank you, AI. The focus is on iterating quickly for a business customer base that will happily spend money to make money. Our thesis here is that the core must be helpful and generate revenue from day one and we’ll be focused on what I call hyperbuilding with that day-one-revenue coming by the end of August. FAQ • Why not just keep slow-and-steady working on Maybe v2? — We simply can’t afford to. While there are certainly other personal finance tools out there that are bootstrapped, they’ve spent years slowly building. We don’t have that luxury. • What about going AI + mobile first? — I still think that’s the best move for any new B2C personal finance app and it was something we were heavily pursuing, but we don’t have the runway to pull it off. • So this is a move to B2B? — Exactly. We’re now a B2B software company building a new B2B product. • What happens to Maybe v2, Synth and Detangle? — All shut down within 6-8 weeks to save on costs and extend runway. • What happens to Maybe’s OSS repo? — It will continue on for those that want to maintain it, but we won’t be putting resources towards it as a company in the short term. • What about paying subscribers? — We'll stop monthly billing and refund everyone's most recent payment. • How are we qualified to build this new B2B product? — Most of my 20-year professional career has been in B2B. Baremetrics was squarely a business financial app. Travis also works with many businesses on a CFO level, so he has unique perspectives and connections there. Our lead engineer spent years in FP&A at a large financial institution. In addition, all of us have been neck-deep in building financial tooling for many years now. • What’s the timeline here? — First B2B dollar within a month. We’re moving at hyperspeed. • What’s the first/core feature? — Runway forecasting & scenario planning. I know for many investors and customers, this will be both a surprise and a disappointment, as what interested you in the first place was a fresh take on personal finance tools. I'm sorry we won't be able to deliver on that. The road to success has a staggering number of forks in it. However, I'm personally extremely excited to get back to the B2B space, given my history there, and the team as a whole has a renewed sense of purpose and focus with this move with an optimism about success in a way that we've just not had in a long time. An annoying number of updates coming soon. 🙂

@auren About half of the US can’t come up with $500 in an emergency…

if you are wondering ... top 2% net-worth in USA: $2.7M top 1%: $12.7M top 0.1%: $62M median: $193k ~40% of people are negative to zero net worth

Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann on why he chose Montessori for his daughter: "If this were 10-20 years ago, I'd be lining her up for top-tier schools and extracurriculars. But now I don't think any of it's going to matter. Learning facts is going to fade into the background. What matters is that she's happy, thoughtful, curious, and kind."

@deedydas Great insights - glad the spirit lives

Most important tech blog this year: OpenAI engineer and ex-founder of $3.5B Segment wrote a tell all post about how OpenAI works internally. From obsession with X, devout use of Slack to engineering culture and tech stack. A peek under the hood of a generational company.

@hnshah “Everything has a cost” @morganhousel

Every founder you admire has quietly survived moments that would make most people quit. There’s no playbook for sleepless nights, hiring mistakes, or explaining to your family why you missed another weekend. It looks like freedom, but most days you answer to your own ambition, your own doubts, and the pressure to make something real. You learn that the hardest part isn’t the setbacks, it’s staying honest with yourself about what’s working and what isn’t when nobody else will tell you. Most people think founders are built for risk. The truth is, founders are built for uncertainty. That’s the part nobody prepares you for.

Worth reading - messing with universities, discouraging the best and brightest from wanting to build in the US, breaking down partnerships with our allies is making us weaker not stronger. nytimes.com/2025/07/14/opi…

@JBenoff @ramit Feels like people need to budget way more now for the years when their friends are all getting married

My company specializes in destination weddings and the dynamic when two people are in charge of setting the preference and budget is fascinating. Interestingly, in the past year (far more so than immediately post-Covid), couples are taking those two factors far more into consideration.

My personal obsession is how people plan a friends’ trip where everyone has different preferences and amounts of money

@TrungTPhan Now do pay phones

Spent past hour explaining to my kid how we used to listen to on-demand music in a car: ▫️burning a CD with 15 songs ▫️using tape adapter to connect portable CD player to stereo ▫️keeping CD player charged by using converter to plug into cigarette power outlet He very confused.

@morganhousel You’re bringing the “Geriatric Millennial” vibes

Elder tweeters remember when posts were capped at 50 likes. It was impossible to go viral - zero incentive to say crazy things. Probably produced better content.

@thesamparr That is crazy EU: 175K heat related deaths / year vs 2-10K US US: 47K gun related deaths / year vs EU super rare #0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">perplexity.ai/search/dd0351b…

This is insane. What a wild fact. Heat related deaths in Europe: 175k. Can someone catch me up. Why doesn’t Europe have ac?

@nntaleb A couple of thoughts 1) not sure the analogy makes sense - you have time and often human capital to adjust during retirement 2) check out Die With Zero - many people want to balance the utility of their human capital (enjoy life) with being their wealthiest in their 80s/90s

My visit to NASA was illuminating: there is this engineering rule to use a 4x safety margin everywhere. Now apply it to finance. How much $ do you need to retire? To be ~100% safe, estimate what you will spend & multiply by 4. So many retirees underestimated how much they needed as a buffer against inflation, crises, unexpected expenditure, divorce,Trump tariffs, price of Gucci shoes, etc.

@signulll Who could do this? - Zuck - Elon - Bezos - Sergey - Gates And one who did. Takes a founder with god level money and the right time / risk appetite.

meta is basically the yankees or the dodgers right now. they’re loading up the roster with elite ai researchers, dumping billions into infra, & signaling we’re going for it. when you do that, the world expects rings. you don’t get to say “we’re still experimenting” after you dropped $20b+ & poached half of openai. the pressure is now insane. every paper, every product, every demo will be scrutinized like a playoff performance. all eyes on the scoreboard.

It’s easy to spot other people’s bullshit and nearly impossible to recognize your own.

@TrungTPhan The acoustics in the car are 🔥

eating Red Lobster’s $100 seafood boil in the front seat of your car is either the best idea ever or the worse idea ever…there is no middle ground

@RyanLEllis @biggsag Makes sense, but I’m not aware of any standard / accepted local poverty level #0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">perplexity.ai/search/2f3a4af…

@biggsag @NewRetirement Why not have a 2x local poverty line benefit limit? That seems to be a fair payment level everyone could agree on.

Social Security is cast as a safety net program for seniors. Given that, what do you think the MAXIMUM Social Security retirement benefit should be, measured as a multiple of the federal poverty threshold?

Was discussing this with a bunch of fintech founders yesterday at the Fiat Growth fintech meetup in SF thefintechsummit.com

@Jake___Oliver @camp_wealth Helping other people is a proven way to improve your sense of well being 💪❤️

@NewRetirement @camp_wealth Yah... my interests have changed over the years... I can't definitively say WHAT I will be doing.. But I can tell you it will be HELPING people. I have found that gives me a boost of energy and purpose.

Over the last 8 years, I’ve helped hundreds retire before 65. And one of the saddest things I’ve seen? People who made it… only to wish they hadn’t. But there’s a pattern among those who love retirement. They could answer these 5 questions 👇