Joe Guzel

I'm so excited to share that we are acquiring the financial services app, @step Nobody taught me about investing, building credit, or managing money when I was growing up. That's exactly why we’re joining forces with Step! I want to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had. Lots to share soon :D

Advisor: why are you wasting time on (founder / company), you need to dump the struggling losers faster. You’ve founded several BILLION dollar companies, keep your bar higher. Me: well, hard to know; I was a struggling loser too, a few times, until we got the companies to work.

@dharmesh This is actually technically funny (not a dad joke) because getting the joke requires insider knowledge of gaap and engineering culture - a classic comedians technique of letting the audience in on something and implying that they are smart Good joke!

This is why VC is broken right now Whole swaths of the VC ecosystem think: 1) that every good deal is concensus 2) that "research" is simply doing a market map 3) that the core skill of venture is knowing what deals are hot, rather than building independent conviction

Innovation is art - it can’t be scaled. Scaling a team creates a hierarchy to reduce coordination costs. Hierarchy introduces the Principal-Agent problem. Agents optimize for status and cohesion over correctness. Going from zero to one requires a founder-led flat team.

Clearance = sub-accounting + reconciliation, layered over GRPC databases with blockchain. Think of it like ‘copy, paste, special, values’ but on-ledger—then AI optimizes the settlement layer. The goal? Zero settlement margins. Big banks already act as clearinghouses, this just formalizes it into a unified system of record.

@JoeGuzel @brunoswerneck Can you expand on what exactly you mean by "clearance"? Like what does the clearance system you've described actually do? Is it a protocol, a network, both, or something else entirely?

When I see a market map like this (for stablecoins) The goal is to find the 2-3 companies that will benefit from the VC dollars the other 100 will burn to explore the idea maze Liquidity providers & orchestrators seem like the system constraint and place to bet But I'm just a fintech guy living in a crypto world 🤷🏽‍♂️ stablecoinsmap.com

Could someone just make all venture returns public? Would be a lot more fun that way.

Stablecoins aren’t the opportunity—they’re the tool. Clearance is the non-obvious but foundational unlock. It’s the hardest problem to solve, which is exactly why it’s where the leverage is. It’s the same pattern I saw in neobanking when I left Intuit for venture. The consensus bet was credit—easier monetization, clearer PMF. But I focused on checking instead, leading to early bets in Chime, Step, Novo, etc., because checking was always the system of record. People don’t think about checking—until their card doesn’t work. Until they try to replace it. That’s where the pain points surface. That’s where the control is. Everything else—lending, payments, wealth—stacked on top. Clearance is that system of record for capital markets. It’s the read/write unlock. Own clearance, and you own the enablement layer for the new physics of fintech—agentic applications, AI-driven risk infra, and next-gen settlement rails will all emerge from clearance. Plaid was the read-only backbone of fintech. Clearance is the read/write backbone of what comes next. Neobanking re-architected consumer finance by controlling the foundation. Clearance is that for capital markets.

@JoeGuzel What’s next in crypto then @joeguzel? Stablecoin market actually seems wide open in liquidity and orchestration We’re just in the classic “every VC needs a bet” stage And idea maze is just throwaway jargon

These folks aren’t all <30, but the real distinction in the millennial VC cohort is who was trained for Board seats vs. who wasn’t. Founders building for the long haul should care deeply about this. Follow-on investors—these are the people who will create and protect value. @hberkman @CarolineBroder @NilssonRoos @ChaseAPackard @VivekKri @bmarshallg

Who are the best young VCs in the game right now? Say < 30 years. My network is pretty deep +/- 10 years to me and I benefit a lot from it in terms of learning/intel etc, but I'd love to stay fresh on who the next killer VCs are and how are they playing the game in this new era?

@semil It is 2013 right now… can you feel it? Clavier just closed SoftTech VC III—$85M, ~55 investments. I just ordered an Uber. My first ever ride. From a desktop on Mason & Union—$40 for a black car. At Intuit Corp Dev, we’re gunning for Braintree—fixated on how identity wasn’t about forms and docs, but a tokenization engine and a ledger. We lost it to eBay for $800M. A year later, PayPal spins out. Seed rounds were $2M/$10M post. The application layer was unfolding fast. Rejoice, my friend. Rejoice.

From an exchange w/ an old LP friend yesterday: When I started investing ('13), typical seed rounds ~$2/$10M post; today w/ inflation & AI, starts at $4M/$20M & goes up. Also, if startup scaled from $1m -> $4M revenue in a year, it was amazing; w/ AI, now it's closer to $8M+.

I know & accept the news moved on from the Palisades Fire. 🔥 Update: Most of us are still in hotels or Airbnbs. Even if your house is standing there isn’t potable water or gas or electricity My home burned but didn’t burn down. This is my neighbor 🧵

3 months in. More soon

@pitdesi Woolly Mammoth = Embedded Payments.

Colossal Biosciences raised $200M at a $10.2B post to bring back animals from extinction They're on track for a Woolly Mammoth calf in 2028, and are also working on the dodo and Tasmanian tiger This is super cool but beyond my pay grade... what is the business opportunity?

@thejesterhead9 @shaunmmaguire They hit my street twice already. Marina Del Rey. I’m sure it’s happening elsewhere.

There are gangs in LA deliberately starting fires so that people evacuate then and they can rob their homes This is happening at a large scale, at least 100 robbers Likely the Chilean crime syndicate

For everyone saying this is not a time for blame, this is exactly the moment that the people who have been responsible for the mismanagement of California's fire policies be held accountable. Our governor has been obsessed with holding a special session to "Trump-proof" CA, when he should be focused on FIRE-PROOFING our communities. Here are a few hard facts about the democrat-run state's failures to address fire prevention:

My focus on the U.S. comes from how uniquely this idea of ‘cognitive benefits’ dominates the discussion around multilingualism here. In many parts of the world, learning languages is about connection, culture, and empathy—not just a transactional skill. It’s just a part of life. 🤷🏽‍♂️👍🏽

@JoeGuzel @maiab Yes, this. And more, it helps build understanding that culture doesn't just progress linearly, it's wonderfully non-deterministic. And also the converse, it's the antidote to white fragility, the palpable insecurity of so many Americans over the encroachment of other cultures.

I seriously don’t understand why so many people are teaching their babies other languages. You mean they’re so lucky to be born in a nation so powerful that our native language is the GLOBAL lingua franca, and you want to teach them… something *else*? fucking crazy

@pitdesi Your dad is giving the Braintree dude a run for his money. He has the Fountain of Youth. Love it! 🙏🏽📈🎄

lol we came to a tasting menu restaurant and my dad knew he would be hungry and not like the food so he brought his own pizza and got in trouble