Kai Stinchcombe
Kai Stinchcombe
Kai Stinchcombe is a entrepreneur based out of San Francisco, California. He is the Founder and CEO of True Link Financial, a financial services company based in San Francisco, California focused on helping seniors and people with disabilities manage their financial needs. [undefined] Stinchcombe is also well known as a critic of blockchain technology. [undefined] [undefined]
Education
Kai Stinchcombe graduated from Colorado College, Class of 2002, with a Bachelor of Arts in History, Math and Computer Science. He later graduated from Stanford University, Class of 2005, with a Master of Arts in Political Science. [undefined]
Career
Kai Stinchcombe founded True Link Financial, a financial services company dedicated to helping seniors and people with disabilities manage their financial needs in 2012. He was inspired to start the company after his grandmother Ruth who suffers from Alzheimer's and had been the victim of fraud due to the inadequate protections offered by her bank. [undefined] [undefined]
Stinchcombe was previously the Head of Risk and Data Science at LendUp. The company offers credit-building loans for people in short term financial need allowing them to escape the payday loan trap. Stinchcombe was the fourth person to join LendUp. [undefined]
In 2010, Strithcombe founded Strategic Districts, a company that built redistricting software for government. The company applied ten thousand times as much computing power as the second-most-powerful solution. [undefined]
From 2007-2010, Strithcombe was a Co-Founder and the CTO at Atkana a sales strategy software company. The company has multiple Fortune 500 clients including Merck and Eli Lilly. Atkana analyzes Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data for clients and assigns priorities for sales reps within CRM and on mobile. [undefined]
From 2004-2007, Strithcombe was the Founder and Executive Director of the Roosevelt Instititution, a college campus-based policy research organization.
Under his tenure the organization grew to have 8,000 members, 80 chapters, seven full-time and 20 part-time staff.
[undefined] When discussing the work of the Roosevelt Institution, Hillary Clinton said, “Your work through this initiative is providing a way for unblemished facts and research and innovative ideas to be heard in Washington.” [undefined]
Criticism of Blockchain Technology
Keith Stinchcombe has become one of the leading critics of blockchain technology. He posted his first blog post criticizing blockchain technology in December 2017 on Medium titled, "Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain". In the post, Stinchcombe argued that the potential of blockchain technology has been over hyped and that its only real use cases are currency speculation and illegal transactions. The blog post was later featured on Hackernoon and received 45,000 claps which are Medium's form of likes or upvotes. [undefined]
In April 2018 Stinchcombe published a sequel blog post titled, "Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future".
In the blog post, he argues that blockchain technology has failed to achieve adoption because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions. He also argues that no matter how much blockchain technology improves this will still hold true. The blog post received more than 17,000 claps on Medium in the week following its publication. [undefined]