In my last post, I mentioned founding a startup.

It's called FinFam, and we're building collaborative financial planning. The GitHub of money, if you will. Enough with the telling, time for the show!

Here's a 3-minute demo:

We launched beta this week and I couldn't be more excited. Let me tell you why.

Where's this coming from?

Growing up as the son of starving grad students, when it comes to money, I've been known to default to what we affectionately call "poor man brain." Cautious to a fault. But my student parents turned into scientists, so I'm eminently convinceable. I just need to see the math, or better yet, a spreadsheet.

The problem? Making those spreadsheets. And more importantly, trusting them.

A few years back, a friend was house hunting in the Bay Area. They came to me to talk through the famous rent-vs-buy problem. They didn't want an advisor to manage money or sell them products. They came to me because I worked in fintech and thus "knew money", even though I've only been involved in two home purchases, and wouldn't consider myself an expert.

That experience crystallized something I'd been noticing everywhere:

• People trust their friends and family to have their best interests in mind...
  • But can't trust them to have the best information.
• We can trust experts to have knowledge...
  • but can't always trust their incentive alignment.

In an era of ever-advancing information (and misinformation) glut, how do we get to a place of confidence in our hard-won justified true belief?

Trust is social

After 15+ years building fintech at PayPal and Stripe, I saw money movement simplified and commoditized. But the difficulty of transacting moved upstream. We made the how of buying easier, while advances in technology made the what, when, and why so much harder.

From BNPL to crypto to vibecession, our economic realities aren't getting simpler. To compensate, 79% of young adults get financial guidance from social media (Forbes). Not because TikTok or YouTube has better models than Morgan Stanley, but because they trust the people sharing their stories.

Millions of people are already collaborating on financial decisions. Privately on WhatsApp, obscurely on Discord, and full-blown publicly on Reddit:

• /r/personalfinance - 21 million members
• /r/financialindependence - 2.3 million
• /r/financialplanning - 1 million

And dozens more subreddits and Internet forums (shoutout Bogleheads and Refinery29's Money Diaries). They're sharing detailed financial profiles with strangers on the internet, seeking advice from generous folks in full view.

There's a fast-emerging story about AI here, and I've got whole posts dedicated to that coming soon.

For now, suffice to say, we need the tools to catch up to the times.

Enter FinFam

FinFam[^name] lets families and friends collaborate on financial decisions with each other, using expert information without any commitments to said experts.

We want to holistically solve the problem of financial decisionmaking using interaction models proven by GitHub + StackOverflow + app stores. How?

First, creators publish interactive models, to FinFam's View marketplace. Then, you, a user who has a financial question or decision to make:

1. Pick up a relevant expert view. If one doesn't exist, ask in FinFam's Q&A board.
2. Plug in your own numbers and save it to a private workspace for your inner circle
3. Discuss the results, with optional AI-assisted guidance as needed
4. Move forward with confidence.

We scale the expert knowledge while embracing the fundamentals of human social trust. Users get better decisions and peace of mind.

Open-source meets fintech

My years of work in open-source and wiki ecosystems showed me the power of collaborative, transparent tools. FinFam brings that same philosophy to personal finance.

To further scale the knowledge, we make it possible for anyone to create a View. The View "source" format is XLSX, and can be edited with Google Sheets, Excel, or LibreOffice. Any published View can also be open-sourced. Just like with code, financial models are now reviewable, forkable, and improvable by the community.

Curious users can check the community's math. Numbers and discussions happen with people you trust. Everything is private by default, shareable by design.

What's next

We launched beta this week and there are now daily spots available as we add capacity. You can sign up for early access here.

I've been using it with friends and family for months now, and it has replaced Google Sheets for the financial decisions we face. There's so much more I want to share about the vision, the technology, and the journey so far.

But this feels like we're off to a good start.

Want to follow along? Subscribe to FinFam here and Sedimental here.