Simon Taylor

My X timeline feels more like the bluesky timeline with each passing day.

The overton window moved again.

Same accounts on X who thought tariffs were 4D chess now hate them.

Study history.

Smoot-Hawley is the last time the USA tried tariffs.

It's considered one of the worst acts of Congress in history.

It drove the Global Depression and led to the rise of fascism.

Stripe's $1.4 trillion Year: Q&A with John Collison on the 2024 Annual Letter Acquiring Bridge for $1.1bn, $1.4trillion TPV, and Stripe Billing beats $500m ARR. A conversation and Q&A with John Collison, President of Stripe, about their 2025 Annual Letter.

In a lot of ways the market feels frothy right now, but even Stripe is raising at lower valuation than 2021 www.fintechbrainfood.com/p/stripe-joh...

The tech-right be like

But what you see is people cherry pick a handful of tragedies and assign these negative traits to a wider group of people.

The vast majority of whom find it as abhorrent as you do.

Maybe its working to get elected.

But where it leads is worse.

Why does being fiscally conservative and wanting a much smaller, more competitive government also have to come with being "anti-woke?"

DEI may be imperfect and rate-limited economic growth.

But the principle is good.

Diversity of talent = Higher quality output.

It's good to come from a place of competition and want to win.

It's bad to spoil for war or donate to a president's inauguration to curry political favor.

When policy is for sale we all lose.

The Tech Bro Military Industrial Complex is as vulnerable to regulatory capture as the one that preceded it.

Oligarchies are rarely efficient markets.

There's too much upside in winning that phat government contract.

On the environmental cost of AI, this by @simonwillison.net w is useful. The models we use today have become orders of magnitude more efficient in the last year, and each prompt likely uses much less energy than many seem to think.

But the aggregate impact of ever-larger data centers is very real.

If you're in FinTech and haven't read @sytaylor.bsky.social's State of Fintech 2025 report yet, it's a must read covering all corners of FinTech - payments to asset management, AI to Fraud Prevention and Credit Defaults. Helps clarify the matrix docs.google.com/presentation...

Are we still doing bluesky or no?

We've had planes that mostly fly themselves since the 70s but are we finally ready to give up driving?

Road injury still the number #1 cause of premature death of the working age and children in the west.

There's a compelling case that it's irresponsible to have humans drive.

Robotaxi's are significantly better than humans. Waymo had 88% less property damage and 92% less bodily harm.

Now you have to wonder what this evidence will mean.

Less accidents with public transport means we need less bus and train drivers?

Can we actually change that fleet?

"We need to figure out how to make crypto closer aligned with AI - it's the natural micro payments and token solution" Shopify CEO

"Crypto solves so many AI problems and AI solves so many crypto problems" Ben Horowitz

"These need to be harmonious areas of excitement" Tobi...

Will AI replace jobs?

Exhibit A

The founder of midjourney

The State of Fintech 2025 - Age of the Fintech Hyperscaler.

We're just at the beginning of this revolution.

You'll find the entire free, 111 page report at fintechbrainfood.com

There's plenty of consumer protection law but the utilisation is incredibly low because the friction is too high.

Feature request.

AI agent that is familiar with every consumer protection, baked into emails and other data sources to

1. Identify and apply for refunds (e.g. delay flights)

2. Fight for you + report spammers or bad actors to regulators

3. Discounts from utility providers on renewal

Thank you to ADGM for having me today. Incredible reception for this talk.

Ps. That's me demonstrating the approximate scale of a small sardine.

🐟

More pay by bank in the wild. This time Ryanair.

Have you seen pay by bank at checkout?

If so where?

We need to move 10x faster on unlocking the mandates of pension funds.

The tax rules around listing are also nuts.

Microsoft Co pilot is such a bad product that it is giving boomers a bad perception of Gen AIs capabilities.

ChatGPT now has over 300 million weekly users ChatGPT keeps on growing.

That's a lot of users.

www.theverge.com/2024/12/4/24...

Wait the Shift4 CEO now runs NASA and used to be an astronaut?

What timeline is this??

#YNWA

Feature request @bsky.app

Auto split long copy + paste over multiple posts.

More Pay by Bank in the Wild. This time for the Brave browser API. See the incentive to pay by bank at the bottom? 👀

Simon Taylor, Fintech expert: "We lost a generation of fintech growth" A decade ago, startups, regulators and government came together to make the UK the ‘fintech capital of the world’.

The UK lost a generation of growth in Fintech after Brexit.

We took our eye off the ball

But we can make a comeback

formventures.substack.com/p/simon-tayl...