Ethan Bloch
@ebloch
Founder @HiroFinanceAI. Previously @HelloDigit. Helped millions save billions. Avid reader, hiker, and family man.
“It just hit,” the 39-year-old fintech entrepreneur said in an interview. “I could do the thing I had been wanting to do with Digit for the last 10 years.”
Once upon a time it was thought we needed a specialized social network for close friends and family. Path is probably the most famous example. It turned out a more general approach was the solution: address book + messaging apps. iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal solved the…
At a Delta One lounge at JFK. My son: “So everyone here is a VIP?” Me: “No not really, they just spend a lot of money.”
Always love chatting with @ebloch; tons of great morsels in this on where AI is going in financial services and how to build products around customer behavior first. Def worth a listen/watch!
Just dropped our latest "Restive Perspective" with @ebloch from Go Restive earlier this year. Ethan recently brought his new business, Hiro, out of stealth so there are a ton of interesting insights on how he learned from the first business to build the second. Enjoy!
My mid-year estimates of equity risk premium, by country, are available for download, if you are interested. This is my first update in three decades, where the US equity risk premium reflects a country risk component, after the Moody's ratings downgrade. bit.ly/3GddTJz
Some personal news. Today, I’m leaving The Atlantic after almost 17 years and moving my writing to Substack. It would be convenient, for the purposes of crafting an exciting departure announcement, to have a dramatic exit story: a fight, a grievance, a shouting match with an…
❤️❤️❤️
We asked @eoghan (Founder & CEO @intercom) how they turned around a 15-year-old business: "The growth rate of the SaaS business has increased by 10x and we jumped on AI, creating customer agents for success and service, propelling the business further." "We're a previous…
Geography is destiny
Can there be an invasion of Iran? Hardly. Two maps explain why, and also why Iran is the way it is today, whether its regime will fall, what other superpowers will do, and in general why Iran is the way it is today 1. Iran is a mountain & desert fortress
Also...ethanol. Subsidies should support nascent industries moving down learning curve or having positive externalities. Ethanol has been subsidized since 1978, has no net environmental benefit and is no longer needed for energy independence. Yet OBBB will extend subsidy 4 years.
JPMD is a permissioned bank deposit token, issued by J.P. Morgan, and will be available exclusively to approved institutional clients. J.P. Morgan chose Base to take advantage of sub-second, sub-cent transactions for their clients, giving institutions access to near-instant…
Two steps closer to Cyberpunk 2077 ✅ Retinal infrared vision ✅ Regrow teeth on demand
This
The Future of Ads: Just because this was cheap doesn’t mean anyone can do it. I’ve been a director 15+ years. Brands still pay a premium for taste. The future is small teams making viral, brand-adjacent content weekly, getting 80 to 90 percent of the results for way less.
This
I also worry that all of this provides a false sense that people can ignore AI. Nothing could be more wrong, for better and for worse, AI is not going away, and even if it did not continue to develop (no sign of that yet), current systems are good enough for massive changes.
Human creativity is getting unleashed in ways we never thought possible.
Now I want to see it actually fly.
This is a part of the future I expected when I was a child. We’re actually gonna get there.
And the thing that makes me believe the most that we’re gonna get there is listen to how they talk about constructing this thing. They’ve designed it by definition to be able to scale production, keys parts were rethought to be able to have a source of scalable supply. mass…
This is a part of the future I expected when I was a child. We’re actually gonna get there.