If you’ve spent some time around the Canaan Fintech team, you’ve undoubtedly heard us talk about the future of the industry: these days, it seems all big brands are becoming fintechs. In other words, we’re seeing many large companies that had initially built a captive and engaged audience turn around and offer financial products to further engage and monetize their customers. Examples of companies that have offered financial products that were not core to their business include Amazon, Shopify, Square and Uber. We’re seeing this landscape of companies expanding at an even more rapid clip as barriers to launching new financial products are lowered. …

I just returned from Money2020 Europe and am positive it was the best conference I’ve ever attended. It’s clear from post-conference chatter that I am not alone. After spending the last 18 months studying European fintech companies and regulation from afar, I finally decided put my feet on the ground to see if it lived up to the hype. It did: the innovation and thought leadership from founders, regulators and incumbents alike are four to five years ahead of where we are in the U.S. As a result, Money2020 proved to be deeply invigorating for me as an investor.

There are 30 or 40 different takeaways from the conference that I could speak to, but two stand…

The Dropbox S1 was released last week and regardless of how you cut it, this is an incredible story. Founded in 2007, Dropbox has 500 million registered users — 11 million paying- and did $1.1 billion in revs in 2017.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the story is that co-founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi together own 35% of the business. It’s great to see founders properly rewarded for their sweat equity. This is also another big win for, and further proof of, the consumerization of the enterprise.

Just as enterprise software shifted from on-premise to SaaS, we’re in the midst of another shift, though less pervasive, from enterprise sales & deployment (top-down) to consumerization sales & deployment (bottom-up). …

In December, we hosted the New York fintech community at NASDAQ for our last FinTech Central of 2017. Recap of the year here: Q1, Q2, Q3. The event marked the three-year anniversary of FinTech Central and I’d like to thank all of you who actively support the fintech community from coast to coast.

Over the years, we’ve hosted founders and executives from companies like Betterment, Coinbase, LendingClub, NASDAQ, Plaid, and Ripple. But for the last installment of the year, we mixed it up a bit and invited some of the top early stage fintech investors to share their thoughts. Matt Harris from Bain Capital, Dan Ciporin from Canaan and Hans Morris from Nyca joined us for the panel discussion. These three investors have backed top fintech companies such as Affirm, Lending Club, CircleUp, Orchard, Acorns, iex, and AvidXchange. While it took less than 30 seconds for bitcoin to be mentioned, Matt, Dan and Hans touched on everything from their thoughts on the current market valuations, to unique characteristics of their own investment processes, and even the companies that they saw and now regret not investing in. …

My first job out of college was helping to advise SaaS companies on fundraises and M&A opportunities. I learned quickly that for every successful outcome in SaaS, there are 10+ broken processes — and many reasons for an acquirer or investor to pass on a deal. Founders and their current investors must control what is controllable — and that’s something I spend a lot of time on with founders now as a VC on the other side of the table.

Thorough preparation ahead of a diligence process — or lack thereof — is a harbinger of success or failure. That preparation includes multiple dry runs of the presentation and a thoughtfully prepared set of diligence materials. One of the key factors for a successful fundraising process is to keep every investor at roughly the same stage of diligence throughout the process. As a founder, you don’t want one group getting to a term sheet far ahead of others, because you want to optimize around choice, and you certainly don’t want investors passing because they didn’t have time, or information that was key to a decision. Companies at all stages have been increasingly entering fundraises without completing the standard diligence materials. Since we’re deep into banana-land-fund-everything-that-mentions-AI/ML/Crypto, there are many cases where companies are still getting good term sheets without much diligence preparation at all. These are the exceptions. And I still argue that even those companies would benefit from a thoughtfully prepared set of diligence materials because they would have better optimization around price or partner. …

Canaan recently hosted leaders from across the crypto & blockchain landscape at Lending Club in San Francisco for our latest FinTech Central. Our panel included Brad Garlinghouse CEO @ Ripple, Kathleen Breitman CEO & Co-Founder @ Tezos, Lily Liu CFO @ 21, and Adam White Head of GDAX @ Coinbase.

The deeply experienced operators had sage advice for new founders looking to build companies in the space and covered hot topics related to the regulatory landscape, blockchain applications, consensus mechanisms and ICOs. Throughout, they also dispelled common industry myths that are prevalent. …

The motto in early stage technology company building is move fast and break stuff. The motto in early stage financial technology company building is move methodically and work with the regulator. This is true more than ever today because as Ben Lawsky put it, just 6 mos ago we were in a state of hyper regulation.

Members of the fintech ecosystem often point fingers at the regulator as slow to respond and inflexible. The reality is, the regulator has an incredibly challenging job balancing consumer protection, rapid technology + business model iterations and supporting economic growth. …

Canaan recently hosted our West Coast edition of FinTech Central (FTC) to discuss the current state of infrastructure in fintech. FTC, which launched in 2015, is our quarterly panel discussion about trends in the fintech ecosystem. At our first FTC, marketplace lending for XYZ and bitcoin were hot. Fast forward two years and we’ve seen a compression in global fintech investment. The data show that the first wave of fintech was focused primarily on consumer facing products, and after the panel, we now know that the underlying infrastructure of finance is horribly broken. …