What is Shamir Karkal's background and experience prior to starting Sila, and how did he get started in the industry?

I'm the co-founder and CEO of Sila. My background is in software engineering -- I used to be a software engineer twenty years ago. I came to the US, went to business school, and worked as a consultant for a while. Then in 2009, I was in Brussels, in Belgium, and my friend and classmate from business school sent me an email saying, "Let's start a retail bank." You'll see how crazy I am that in 2009, I thought it was a good idea to start a bank.

I left McKinsey and moved back to the US, and we started up a neobank in Josh's basement in Brooklyn. I mean, I call it a neobank now, but that word was still probably ten years in the future. We had no clue what we were doing, but we figured out how to build and launch probably the first neobank anywhere -- Simple. Just sheer determination and big-headed stubbornness was really the answer because it wasn't smart, at least.

It took us three years to launch it, because the whole partner banking industry, fintech infrastructure -- fintech itself, as a world -- barely existed. But we built it, and it finally launched it in 2012. Then in 2014, it was acquired by BBVA, which is a big Spanish bank. At that point, they were making a big push into the US. Then they just exited, sold everything to PNC and left. C'est la vie. Funny enough, somebody pointed out to me that that is still the biggest neobank exit in the US ever. Of course, Chime and others are massively more valuable now, but they haven't IPO'd and they haven't been acquired. In terms of the traditional definition of an exit, Simple is still the biggest. I was just like, "Really? At $117 million?" That seems almost a joke now, based on today's valuations and round sizes. But at the time, it seemed like a good exit. We'd raised less than $20 million, so everybody made money. And we distributed $14 million to employees.

A few months after the exit, I was in Madrid talking to the BBVA executives. One of them mentioned this idea of building a platform. I was immediately like, "Yes, please. The world needs API platforms in banking." If this had existed, then Josh and I wouldn't have spent three years just trying to smash our head against the banking system to launch Simple.

I started advising them on it. Then I eventually left Simple, moved to BBVA, and built and launched two API platforms for them as internal ventures, one in Europe, one in the US. For a couple of years, I lived a big bank exec lifestyle: I was on a plane and in Spain six times a year. And we built and launched it, the BBVA Open Platform. We signed up customers like Google. But we were never able to actually scale it as a business. At least, I was never able to do that, mainly because you could integrate into the Sandbox in a week, but it would take you twelve months to get past risk, compliance, legal and all the internal BBVA processes. That works for a Google or an Apple. It doesn't work for 99% of fintech or crypto startups. Back then, they couldn't even touch it. The BBVA Open Platform never really got traction because it never solved the compliance problems for customers. It was just too big, too slow moving. Though I think it had probably well over a million users and was bigger than the rest of the industry combined when BBVA exited the US and shut it all down -- it just tells you how unpredictable banks can be sometimes.

I got frustrated and left in 2017, thought about life for a while and decided that I still wanted to solve this problem. I just didn't want to do it the way I'd done it at BBVA, definitely not in a large bank. The way we defined the problem is that it's just too hard to program with money. If you wake up anywhere on the planet tomorrow and you decide to program with email or voice over IP, or SMS, there's a SendGrid or a Twilio, there are APIs, STK ecosystems of providers. It's not hard to do. The hard thing is to compete with Google. But most people who are programming with email are not building Superhuman or HEY, they're just plugging in some email process into their app. It's super quick. It's easier to do it than to talk about it.

The moment you come to money, the world is a very different place. There is no internet protocol for money. A bunch of crypto projects are trying, but nobody has gotten there yet. And whether you're in San Francisco or Shanghai matters a lot. There are almost no APIs or STKs. There are people like us now, and there's more available. But still, compared to anything else in the developer world, the state of the industry is twenty years behind.

And you still end up having to work with banks. They kind of all suck, they just suck in different ways. Their technology is outdated. They don't understand how to serve developers. They typically don't have API platforms or STKs or anything that a modern developer would expect. And they're extremely heavily regulated. The entire industry is heavily regulated. They don't know how to manage that, so you have to become a compliance expert and go sign a deal with a bank and figure it out. The end result is it doesn't take three years to build a fintech app or a crypto app now, but it still takes 12 or 18 months.

I'd argue that it's much easier to compete with Bank of America than it is to compete with Google. But most people are not building neobanks. There are 50 of those now or a hundred. There's a growing market. More power to them. But the reality is that the vast majority of the market is businesses and app builders just plugging in a payments flow into their app and not necessarily realizing that it suddenly took them over a line that made it regulated versus unregulated, and they're just struggling to do that. You're like, "Which business needs money?" I'm like, "I think more businesses need money than they need email."

That's the market, and that's what we focus on. I guess we are a BaaS platform, but I don't like the term because it's banking centric. I'd like to make it developer centric. That's why I like to call it "programmable money." What that also means is that we always look at it in terms of the network and how to support folks moving money and dealing with complex funds flows, as opposed to particular use cases like neobanking. It also means that we've supported crypto from day one. We have our own stable coin on Ethereum. We have customers doing everything from crypto payments to NFTs. I haven't done this scientifically, but our customer base is probably 60/40 or 70/30 fintech/crypto. But again, there are so many fintech apps building in crypto capabilities, and crypto apps doing fintech things. The whole space is rapidly converging, and we like to sit in the middle of it.