An Investment in Knowledge
Not exam prep. Not a thesis. This is the working knowledge people in the industry are expected to already have — the protocols, rails, and vendors underneath the products everyone uses, explained from the ground up.
Narrated Series
Three companies read your bank accounts so an app doesn't have to. Plaid, the category leader that survived a collapsed Visa acquisition; Finicity, the quieter number two Mastercard bought for 825 million dollars; and Akoya, the data network eleven of the largest U.S. banks own outright. Education, not advice.
The hidden machinery that moves your money between firms. The 40-year-old ACATS pipeline, why a transfer bounces over "Bob" versus "Robert," and the two hardest cases of all — inherited IRAs and business accounts, where the owner can't speak for themselves. Education, not advice.
The essays as they sound on the phone. Ten short broker-and-caller calls — a full transfer that looks lost, the check that shouldn't be cut, a trust that owns itself, an inherited IRA you can't combine, a Roth conversion nobody explained. One scenario each: the confusion, the catch, and the thing a good rep refuses to let you do. Educational dramatizations, not advice.
A quiet piece of infrastructure decides whether an app can see your other bank accounts. Founded in 1999 to fix a fragile hack called screen scraping, bought by Envestnet for roughly 660 million dollars in 2015, sold off again in 2025. Education, not advice.
Not a computing story. A money story — how a few thousand lines of code came to be worth more than a trillion dollars, told from the beginning. Eight parts, from the problem Bitcoin was built to solve through proof of work, keys, valuation, and the frontier. Education, not advice.