I've spent my career in fintech, but the journey started before I had even graduated college in 2010 (I am old).

To snapshot the moment: my phone was a Motorola Slider, I had never owned a credit card, TiK ToK was the #1 song of the year (not a social app), an oil rig spilled 170 million gallons of crude into the Gulf, and the Saints notched their first Super Bowl win against the Colts.

'Fintech' wasn't a word.

Two things happened in 2010: I wrote an article in the Stanford Review on The Future of the Wallet and I became a student marketing ambassador for a company called Bling Nation.

Bling Nation was a company co-founded by Wences Casares and Micky Malka (who later founded Ribbit Capital) that raised $8 million in 2009 to turn phones into wallets via a stick-on RFID chip called a BlingTag or a 'Blinger.' Our job as campus reps was to drive adoption of the stickers, which were – thanks to some proactive negotiation by the company – already accepted as a form of payment at campus favorites the CoHo, Treehouse, Ray’s, Fraiche, and Jimmy V’s.