Simple was one of the original app-first banks with a focus on transparency and user experience. It announced recently that it would be shutting down.
I think it’s unfortunate. Simple was the model for the startup I’m at today, which had set out to build what is now called a “neo-bank”. Its 2014 sale to the European bank BBVA was a big inspiration.
I found this most notable about Simple’s demise:
The Portland company faltered as it tried to resolve a central tension over whether it was foremost a bank or a tech company.
That paragraph linked to a Jan 2019 article that explored this further:
Simple has long struggled with the central question of whether its priorities lay in banking or technology. A bank must be dependable, steady and unfailingly reliable. It’s holding people’s money, after all.
A tech company is a different beast, nimble and imaginative, revolutionary and willing to accept failure so long as it innovates.
To Reich [the founding CEO], there was no question about Simple’s identity: It was, and would always be, a tech company. Last year’s overhaul was engineered to make that plain, sacrificing a measure of growth to focus on developing and introducing new banking services.
Over a decade ago the Internet legend Yahoo! famously tackled the same question – was it a tech company or a media company? As it spent years navel-gazing attempting to answer what should never have been a question, it found itself becoming increasingly irrelevant, ultimately being sold for parts.
In my experience there is such a thing as company DNA. When a startup’s founded as a tech company, I don’t think it can ‘become’ anything else.
If you find yourself asking if you’re a tech company or you’re X, you’re in big trouble.