My father grew up comfortably in Shiraz, one of the oldest cities of ancient Persia. His mother tongue was farsi, his first money the rial. At fifteen, his family sent him to school in Geneva where he exchanged riales for francs, farsi for french. After medical school, he found a job in a New York hospital and once more adopted a new language and currency.
My mother grew up working class in Brooklyn. The Great Depression devastated her family’s savings and instilled a fear of poverty that was with her until she died. In mom’s family, tea bags were always used twice. Coupons were clipped. She frowned on extravagance. She was also the most generous person I’ve ever known — always the first to help a neighbor or stranger in need.
To my father, money was like language, an essential aspect of culture, an artifact of history, a symbol of adventure. To my mother, money was a source of endless anxiety, the constant fear of being dispossessed by monstrous unseen forces.
When we started Uphold in 2013, the goal was to bring all the freedom, innovation, and creativity of the Internet to money and my enthusiasm and drive was informed by those disparate money-inspired emotions that I’d inherited from my parents. Extending and expanding bitcoin’s innovations to make all forms of money — even ancient ones like gold — as free, fast and easy to use as email struck me as the kind of venture (and adventure!) I wanted to help create.
Building the world’s first financial service with real-time transparency — another Uphold innovation inspired by bitcoin’s decentralized public ledger— would, I hoped, be a step toward transforming the world’s opaque and risk-loving finance sector, which has been responsible for so much uncertainty and suffering, from the Great Depression to the 2008 banking crisis.
Technology is freedom. Fintech ventures like Uphold, AirTM, and the other apps I’ve founded or invested in over the past four years, bring innovative and useful financial services to anyone on the planet with a networked device. I know my father would smile at being able to hold palladium and Swiss franc side-by-side in his Uphold wallet. And I know mom would be proud that I’m part of AirTM, whose mission is to help people in the developing world take control of their financial destiny by connecting every bank network and e-money system in the world to a USD-denominated account.
Have a fintech app that you’re passionate about? Drop me a note at tim@cloudmoneyventures.com.
