eman.eth

a year ago we raised $5m to build a neobank for global trade today: $600m+ in transaction volume

businesses are skeptical of anyone who cold pitches them about their money. trade shows work for us because we meet buyers and shake hands face to face

douglas adams said anything invented after you turn 35 feels against the natural order of things. the people who get the most out of ai agents in the next 2 years will be the ones who refuse to be 35 about it.

the first version of shield caught phishing links for crypto users. then we noticed exporters in the us who were scared to take stablecoins from their buyers. that problem turned into the company

there is a virtuous cycle in sharing tech with others when I put my closest friends onto grok bot, I had the thought that I'm giving away too much free game but today, one of them showed me how he is using @bot to fill up his calendar with high-value meetings he evolved and adapted what I showed him and now the plug has a plug

if all you do is payments, anyone can copy you. if you go all in on one customer, a competitor has to change who they serve to catch up. most won't

hunger beats tenure I am looking for someone who is starving, famished, with an insatiable desire to build and create impact the degree, years of experience, and certification is far less signal today

unintentional experiment this week I accidentally used up 95% of my grok bot limit with 5 days left until reset so I cut grok bot out of my workflow and went back to claude code on terminal as my primary agent UI I was expecting to be less productive, but surprisingly I've built more in 2 days this week than all of last week normally, I use grok bot to route work to my claude code terminal and other agents I thought, just let grok bot manage all the different sessions I have running so I don't have to keep tab-switching but that actually led to losing a ton of important context, trying to focus on 10 things at once, and doing none of them efficiently or well everything was taking 20 back-and-forths to complete because I was trying to constantly progress 10 things at once now, I'm back to hyperfocus on one thing at a time, delivering it end to end, and then moving on to the next priority this is a much better way to flow grok bot is still insanely helpful for me but it was never intended to be this quasi-harness that I made it out to be good learning. I'm sure I'll have a new shiny tool to jack up my workflow again next week

our customers aren't at crypto conferences. they're on whatsapp, email and linkedin, and they show up to trade shows in suits. that's why we moved from getshield.xyz to shieldfinancial.com

my first company was in nigeria. we cracked palm kernels, pressed and refined the oil, and sold cooking oil to local businesses. my cofounder luis imported phones into ecuador and sold them retail. that's why shield is built for trade businesses

adoption curve doing it's thing

nice build

a lot of founders think they need a us company to bank with us. you don't. only the business credit card needs one, and we'll form it if you want the card

AI is producing more, period. more things are going to be built going forward. let's make sure we're building the right things to create more productivity, more wealth, and more benefit for all.

an app costs money. normally you either buy it or pirate it now the third option is you can reverse engineer it

your strategy determines the person that you hire and eventually the person determines your strategy

everyone is going to use agents except the 1% of people today who don't use phones its wild to think about where this goes

i felt like with AI and agentic tools the board prep would become a lot easier but the real work is sitting down and really thinking hard about what went wrong, what went well, what we need to do differently there's nothing you can do to automate that away

you only get one chance with certain users people that said no once are always going to be plagued by the reason that they previously said no even if you solve that reason

you move millions. bank like it.