Banham writes: “Like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.”
Simple announced that BBVA is shutting them down after 11 years of operation, and 6 years after they acquired them.
Simple is high on the list of consumer web products I’ve cherished over the last decade. I learned so much about customer service, company culture, and how an acquisition can cause the unfortunate slow death of a company and its ethos.
It wasn’t all great, though. The last few years have been painful — botched migrations, outages poorly communicated, and customer service lines that were overloaded and pushed customers away instead of welcoming them in.
Still bummed to see them go. Making the switch to.. Chase? :(
Watershed moment. The original challenger bank demonstrated the art of the possible. @simple showed us all what an elegant, transparent & intuitive consumer banking experience should look like. Changed the industry. Thank you @simple https://t.co/pxYN067LpM
— Peggy Mangot 🇺🇸 (@peggymangot) January 7, 2021
Our first mission statement was to help people worry less about money. It morphed to ‘help people feel confidence’. Either way, we wanted to help people. https://t.co/78G9mWDH6u
— Josh Reich (@i2pi) January 7, 2021
Simple set the bar for thoughtful design in consumer banking, both brand and product. At Banno in 2011 when we were building a mobile banking app for community banks while some of them weren't sure the iPhone was going to stick around, Simple kept raising this bar.
— Josh Sadler (@joshsadler) January 7, 2021
RIP @simple <3
— Jack DeFuria (@defuria) January 8, 2021
At 13, @i2pi was generous enough to let me tag along their first year. My time at Simple is one of my fondest memories—the team taught me how to think and inspired me to become a founder. Thank you @i2pi @shamir_k @adamerlebacher @0x00B1 @tomwans @kristi_berry pic.twitter.com/MFhPAgYe3W
1/10: One of the things I am proudest of was how @i2pi and I handled the Simple sale to BBVA. Out of the $117M sticker price, $14.6M in cash was paid out to 100 employees excluding founders.
— Shamir Karkal (@shamir_k) January 8, 2021
Whether digital or physical, people actually like bundles, because they supply a legible social structure and simplify the complexity presented by a paralyzing array of consumer choices.
The crew that drove a disguised Mercedes AMG in a recent Cannonball run made it from coast to coast in a record 27.5 hours at a blistering and terrifying average speed of 103 mph. The car was outfitted with a gimbaled thermal scope on the roof (for deer spotting, apparently), gyro-stabilized binoculars, a custom fuel cell and more.
Via The Prepared
“The American payments system specifically has six fundamental pillars: cash, checks, credit cards, debit cards, wire transfers, and the Automated Clearing House (ACH). They all developed separately, but they also overlap and support each other in fundamental ways. To understand how Visa and Mastercard are raking in so much cash, it’s helpful to get a sense of the underlying infrastructure on which they rely.”
