somewhere between infeasible and impossible . It would have taken a lot of work , and banks had no incentive to do it . But Iqram and Andrew did — so they got to work .
Building the prototype , it turned out , wasn ’ t especially hard . They were soon passing money back and forth to each other , leaving a long trail of SMS receipts of their transactions : “ Iqram 20 ” quickly evolved into “ Kortina paid you $ 20 for Thai lunch at Nooch .” It was working .
What wasn ’ t working , though , was getting funding . They took one meeting after another , but couldn ’ t get anyone to take them seriously : they had no track record , no user base and a prototype cobbled together on top of Google Voice — not enough to reassure a venture capitalist . One investor interrupted Magdon-Ismail and Kortina ’ s presentation to tell them he was only interested in “ billion-dollar , home-run opportunities .” “ This will be a trillion-dollar company ,” Magdon-Ismail shot back . The investor wasn ’ t convinced .
Most investors hadn ’ t heard of this thing called “ fintech ,” a field that wasn ’ t quite finance and wasn ’ t quite technology . There was no reason to believe that , as a sector , it would be profitable . What was their plan to monetize ? How was this little tool for trading small amounts of cash between friends ever going to make a substantial profit ?
Magdon-Ismail and Kortina didn ’ t have clear answers . But that didn ’ t change their commitment to the app . They continued to find ways to make the user experience more seamless , improving it one iteration after another , sending countless text messages back and forth across the system .
Then they noticed something . Their collection of text receipts was starting to paint a vivid , if accidental , picture of their lives . The list of transactions showed where they liked to eat and drink , what bands they liked to see , who they were spending their time with . Every time someone passed money to someone else , it was because there was something interesting going on — and , collected together , all of this information about a person ’ s transactions started to tell a unique story .
What they had created , by pure accident , was a social news feed . Venmo wasn ’ t just a way of moving money . It could also be a social network , broadcasting real-time data information about its users . This could be huge . If only they could get some money .
Roommates and Venmo founders Iqram Magdon-Ismail and Andrew Kortina
Bill Ready , “ The Fixer ”
Bill Ready knew a thing or two about money . He was an unlikely dot-com entrepreneur : he had never even used a computer until he arrived at college . But he was a quick study . He dove into software engineering , and before he turned
30 , he was president of an online bill payment company called iPay . When iPay sold for $ 300 million , Ready moved on to take over one of the most important internet companies you ’ ve probably never heard of : Braintree . For Braintree , being next to invisible to its users is a feature , not a bug .
14 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Fall 2020 | www . MoAF . org