Peeking into the FinTech Industry
Time to restart the table series. I was impressed by the people on lunchback once again. The value they delivered is tremendous, and I only wish you could experience the same things as I do. Wait! You can experience them: just ask someone to lunch. Here are the lunches I had this week, and what I learned.
Alastair McAlpine
I met Alastair at one of the finest restaurants in the Mood Galleria. Even though I was a little intimidated by Alistair, who was the executive director of Goldman Sachs, we started off casually, talking about life in Stockholm and Singapore, two cities we had both lived in. We agreed that Singapore is busy working every day, but has a lot of conveniences, while Stockholm is quiet and beautiful for a quality family life, and which one you prefer probably depends on which life stage you are in.
Alastair has a background in traditional finance, but he’s very interested in the new developments in the finance industry, namely FinTech and Blockchain. To feed that interest, he keeps track of a lot of finance startups, and he has built an extensive knowledge base.
He was one of the most well-prepared mentors I have ever met through Lunchback. Several times, he brought out the notes he had made in advance of our meeting, with thoughts and feedback on my project. Everything he said led to a concrete and actionable piece of advice. He was especially helpful on the subject of how to monetize our service intelligently.
I don’t think I have ever had the privilege of learning from someone who is so senior. In a single lunch hour, I learned so much from this knowledgeable person.
Jonas Adolfsson
I met Jonas at Jensens steak house near Centralen station. Jonas works for Qliro group as the manager of business analytics. Qliro is an e-commerce platform and it includes payment solutions. Jonas has a very analytical mind and a strong background in the user-focused software business; his previous job was for Klarna, which is a major success story in fintech.
My conversation with Jonas began with me laying out Lunchback’s current state, and the challenges I’m facing, like the conversion rate. At this early stage we don’t know what our conversation rate could be, so we are doing a lot of work to figure out what could push the rate higher. Jonas highlighted the importance of KPI because, in his opinion, a focus on KPI is the major reason that Klarna became one of the most successful startups in Sweden.
As lunch progressed, we dove deep into a technical discussion on how to build the best recommendation engine from an analytical point of view. He said that normally a team will spend a lot of time arguing over which metric should be used to create recommendations, but he thinks this is a waste of energy. It’s more important, he says, to observe user behaviour with an open mind than to establish behavioral rules to guide the next users. In short, behaviour pattern reconganition is most powerful machine learning mechanism, and it has been proven by many successful companies.
I went away with several ideas for how to observe user behaviour, and how to use what I might learn. After lunch, as I was writing down notes on what Jonas had taught me, I got an email from him with some recommendations on books to read and people to follow on Quora. Here and here are some links he shared with me.
