Lessons From Backing The Best Founders In Fintech | Micky Malka

Every company will need a supply of machine-readable tokens

Micky Malka's Ribbit Capital is built on a bet that every company will need a supply of machine-readable tokens, and that the biggest pools of money have stayed outside AI while frontier labs built the first ones. The opening is where blockchains and AI meet and agents begin making payment decisions, and he expects founder-led incumbents to take it. Malka writes long theses to hold his conviction across a long game.

Takeaways

• Every company will need a token factory. Every company will need a supply of machine-readable tokens, and any service requires identity and value plus the intelligence behind them. Frontier labs are the first token factories, and money has stayed largely outside AI so far.
• Founder-led incumbents will win AI finance. Malka expects Stripe, Robinhood, Nubank and Revolut to capture the shift rather than startups, and points to Vlad Tenev tokenizing equities at Robinhood. At the application layer, Eleven Labs and Sierra are building token factories of their own.
• Long essays build conviction for the long game. Ribbit's essays run about 20 pages but compress onto a napkin, and a thesis takes a year to eighteen months. Malka says sticking to a small set of ideas is what makes the writing work.
• Buffett's letters teach a repeated pattern. Malka bought his first Berkshire share at 13 in November 1987, after the October crash, with a loan from his grandfather, and read the annual letters by mail. What they teach is Buffett's repeated pattern of decision-making in any environment.
• Young founders pair best with operators. Today's twenty-somethings are the fastest-learning generation and self-organise well, and many find working on software alone boring. Malka says the best results come when they are paired with experienced operators.
• Dee Hock shaped Malka's view of organisations. Hock, who founded Visa, told him the best expression of humans sits between chaos and order, and that Visa's real innovation was its association model. Malka still uses Hock's question that asks candidates to order six words.
• Reputation matters more than anything. Malka says reputation matters more than anything, and his relationship with Senra began over it. He cites Buffett's Salomon testimony and Palmer Luckey's view that reputation attacks must be fought, and backs founders who stay authentic.

From Lemon Bank to OnePay

1. Malka founded Lemon Bank in Brazil in 2003 with no investors. It used kiosks inside existing stores and franchisee stores, because it was built before the smartphone era.
2. The branchless bank grew to 7,000 outlets serving 15m customers and was sold in 2008.