Andrew Kortina
Co-Founder, Fin. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderengineerauthorinvestor@kortina ↗kortina.nyc ↗
Andrew Kortina is the co-founder of peer-to-peer mobile payments platform Venmo, which was acquired by Braintree and PayPal. He subsequently co-founded operations intelligence company Fin and publishes essays on technology, economics, and philosophy.
1shows
1appearances
11statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Andrew Kortina said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Kortina: There is nothing morally wrong with doing heroin all day
“I don't want to go, like, sit around and do heroin all day. Like, I'm sure that would be, like, really fun, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But it would be very tough for me to, like, not feel bad about that, even though I don't think it's …”
Kortina: Buddhism does not motivate civilizations to attempt massive projects
“I had this thought once, like, you know, Buddhists are not gonna get us off this planet when the sun burns out. Like, it's a very From my sort of, you know, 50,000 foot view of it seems like a very like internal focused life is struggling. How do I cope with t…”
Kortina: The singularity already happened, and money is the algorithm
“Thought about the singularity is that it already happened, and money is the algorithm that is already controlling all the people and telling them what to do. The machines have already taken over, I think.”
Kortina: Tech companies oversell moral meaning compared to Wall Street
“My problem with the way that Silicon Valley does it is they, they've always had this, like, Wall Street is the bad guys. They're all about making money. Silicon Valley is about, you know, building the future and, you know, like, achieving, like, the American d…”
Kortina: Virtual assistants must be generalists to compete with humans
“With Finn, we're competing with a full-time human assistant and a full-time human assistant will just do whatever you ask them... If we built that, we just wouldn't be competitive with a human assistant. So we kind of took into this, we have to be able to do a…”
Kortina: Cultures linked dignity to work to build survival surpluses
“Why would a culture connect dignity with the idea of work? And it's, I just think it's been a useful thing to do. If you live in a very uncertain world, Where there's things like, you know, a horde of locusts can take out the crops for the year, and then there…”
Kortina: Linking dignity to productive work is dangerous in post-scarcity
“As that becomes less necessary and there's more abundance, then we're less sort of resource constrained. That connection between dignity and, like, doing useful work maybe becomes dangerous, and, like, if, you know, maybe not everyone has to be productive, may…”
Kortina: Immersing in craft silences overthinking and existential despair
“It's very meditative to like, one of the things that's awesome about writing software is you can just like go into this, you know, state where you're just, you spend 10 hours and you're like, whoa, that was so fun. It's like playing a video game, right? Or, I …”
Kortina: Venmo's only options before selling to Braintree were shutting down
“Well, one, it was, the options were shut down Venmo forever or sell it.”
Kortina: Investors burned over $1B to subsidize Venmo peer-to-peer transactions
“I'm sure it's probably been over, like, a billion-dollar investment now to, like, wire up all these bank handles and subsidize all the peer-to-peer transactions with the hopes of someday turning on Payments to the merchant network”
Kortina: Venmo prioritized transaction notes to humanize peer-to-peer payments
“Actually we wanted to kind of like humanize the money and make it less about the dollars and cents and more. That's why the note is like such a focal point of them. I was like, what is the thing that you're doing? What does the moment that you're sharing with …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Andrew's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Co-Founder, Fin | 1 | 11 | — | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |