The Decentralized Mobile Wallet
This past week, I spent a few days out west in the bay area visiting old and new portfolio companies (more info coming soon), meeting old friends and colleagues, many of which have gone on to do amazing things at many of the big web platforms. I got a chance to spend time with them at Google, Google Ventures, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Facebook, Uber and Pinterest and also hosted a dinner for everyone. It was an amazing trip all around, but unfortunately Thursday morning before heading out for the busiest day of the trip (had to be in MountainView, Palo Alto, Sand Hill Road, Soma and other parts of the city all in one day), I left my wallet in my room.
I hadn’t even noticed I left my wallet there due to the fact that I took a Lyft to my first meeting (I actually pivoted to Uber after that as I was trying to make a phone call and the driver had been a little too chatty on a call of his own).
Whether it was sheer muscle memory, or the fact that this hadn’t happened to me in a while, I assumed at some point in the day not having my wallet would be an issue.
It turns out it wasn’t.
After taking a Lyft to my first meeting in Soma, I was able to pay for breakfast using Square Cash to pay the person I was having breakfast with. I took an Uber to my next few meetings in Palo Alto and MountainView and after heading back to the city at lunch time I was able to order food using SpoonRocket to Galvanize. I was even able to purchase a few items in between at Walgreens using Apple Pay.
It’s funny that after years and years of hearing about the mobile payment wars, Apple vs. Google, NFC vs. non-NFC, that it feels like the mobile wallet is actually a de-bundled, hardware-agnostic, ecosystem. Similarly to how the mobile operating system consists of individual apps for individual functions (as opposed to desktop where everything happened in the browser), mobile payments has actually become a similar experience.
There are apps for food ordering, for paying back friends, for hailing a ride, for convenience stores, and for restaurants, as well as a host of other applications that I didn’t need that day. It’s become about who can build the most useful app for individual use cases rather than who can build the killer mobile payment app.
Now if we could just figure out how to replace our driver’s license (blockchain anyone?), we wouldn’t need our wallets at all. Finally, it feels like we’re close to achieving a world without wallets.
