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Fintech

Andreessen hires Goldman exec as a new investor

David Haber, who founded Bond Street, is joining as a general partner to make more fintech deals.

​David Haber is Andreessen Horowitz's new fintech partner.

David Haber is Andreessen Horowitz's new fintech partner.

Photo: Andreessen Horowitz

As startups drill ever deeper into trying to compete with banks, Andreessen Horowitz has added a new fintech-focused general partner: David Haber, a former Goldman Sachs executive and entrepreneur.

Haber founded small-business lending startup Bond Street, which saw most of its employees join Goldman in 2017 as part of the bank's efforts to expand its lending efforts. Bond Street offered one- to three-year loans of up to $1 million.

Haber went on to work on a variety of fintech issues at Goldman as a vice president of firmwide strategy, including venture investments in Carta (with Andreessen Horowitz) and Argentine bank-app maker Ualá. He also worked on partnerships and other issues for Stephanie Cohen, then the firm's chief strategy officer.

Haber, who is based in New York, was an investor at Spark Capital prior to Bond Street, working on investments in companies such as Plaid, Warby Parker, Twitter and Tumblr.

In addition to small business and lending, Haber is interested in range of areas in fintech from enterprise software to the "API-ification of infrastructure" to capital markets to international deals, he said.

Fintech often involves working across different areas, such as consumer and enterprise, Haber said. "Opportunities live between fields of expertise. And I personally really enjoy exploring those intersections, and that's one of the things I'm super excited about joining the team," he said.

Andreessen Horowitz has been building out its fintech team, and its portfolio includes Robinhood, Coinbase, Affirm, Plaid and Stripe.

Fintech companies are seeking bigger targets than they did 10 years ago as more startups take on big companies in areas such as banking, insurance or real estate, said Alex Rampell, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

"The scale of ambitions just tends to be a lot bigger for companies now. It's, 'Hey, you know what, why don't we beat Bank of America?' That's what Chime is going for. Chime's not trying to sell software to Bank of America. They're trying to beat Bank of America," Rampell said.

Tomio Geron

Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. He was also as a staff writer at Forbes covering social media and venture capital, and edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.

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Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

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Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

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AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

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Farewell from Protocol

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We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

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Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

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Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

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Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

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