Walt

It's been a little over 2 months since Walt and I completed Copenhagen Fintech's incubation program. I'm writing this to all new or soon-to-be founders- if what you're building is nearish to fintech, you need to go through this program. Barbara Švigová and the program she and her team have put together are extremely supportive. This is especially true for solo founders and first-time founders. The most important thing that this program gives is just a place to be green amongst other green founders. Being able to ask the dumb questions and look across the room and see other new founders who also had the same question is an experience that has brought continued reassurance that it's OK to be new at this. We don't all have to be raising 10M at a 100M valuation. We can still be figuring things out. We can be pre-seed. We can be in discovery phase. We can have an incomplete pitch deck. Thank you to Barbara, Copenhagen Fintech, and the 3 companies I was incubating with - ID-Truster, QntRisk - Advanced Portfolio Analytics, Stratosphere trading.

On 23 June, the European Parliament's ECON committee adopted its position on the digital euro. It is a really important, solid step forward for Europe! What's absolutely clear is that, in a few years, the way money moves from person to person and person to business in Europe will be completely than it is today. There are gaps in this legislation though. If we aren't careful, the potential that the digital euro has will be squandered because we didn't enable a competitive market to interact with this new currency. It's extremely important that the people in charge of the text understand the needs of the everyday consumer. Walt has sent a proposal for amendments to the ECON's proposed legislation. Briefly, the aim of the proposal is to: "Give digital euro users the right to access and use their digital euro holdings through any certified user interface of their choice, including one not provided by their own payment service provider." You can read the full scope of what Walt is proposing be changed here: https://lnkd.in/exCph2np Thank you to the legislators in charge of this movement. We are all extremely excited and hopeful.

Wooohooooooo!!! Thank you Sifted for inviting Walt and I to speak at the upcoming Sifted Summit in London! I'll be speaking on European payments sovereignty, privacy-by-design, and what it takes to ship an independent wallet in a market dominated by Google and Apple. Find the full lineup here: https://lnkd.in/eBWN5e7f If you're in town, come by and say hi!

Over the weekend, we pitched Walt to a ship load (lol) of investors in a shark tank with 2 other startups! What a unique experience that was - a sunny afternoon, Cole Bittel talking about the need for data privacy options, and a flash mob playing techno in the background of it all. Thank you to Folkemødet for inviting Walt to pitch at the Investor's ship last week! And thank you to Mikael Bak and the other judges for terrific analysis of Walt's future and how to get there. See you next year!

Dear Copenhagen. Did you enter Distortion using Walt? I did. My friends did.

Over the weekend, someone used Walt to board a flight... And the plane didn't crash. Check out the beta release for Walt Passes. And you too can board flights without sharing your data with Google and without crashing the plane.

Sup LinkedIn. Just bought walt.eu (Note to self- if Walt doesn't work out, become a domain scalper. Wow...) Happy Friday.

Whenever I (Cole Bittel ) introduce Walt, I inevitably start talking about one of its core principles of advancing EU sovereignty. And if the person I’m talking to is a potential customer, someone who might want to download Walt and start using it to tap-to-pay, this seems great, but more importantly to most people is that Walt is a private solution, that it doesn’t share or sell (or even centrally store) transaction data. But quite often, I am introducing Walt to bank executives or investors. For these people, EU sovereignty matters a great deal. And to them, they want to understand my relationship to the EU, both personally as the founder, and commercially as the Walt legal entity. I was born and raised in the US. I moved to Denmark about 8 years ago and have my permanent residency here. But my accent, both when I speak Danish and in English, makes it very clear where I came from. I think it’s really understandable then, when the stakes are high, for my and Walt’s relationship to Denmark and the EU to be a topic of interest. As the founder and currently only employee, my personal life choices very much dictate the future of the company. In the same level of transparency, I would like to clarify that relationship publicly. * Walt is a Danish company. Walt will always be a Danish company. * I live in Denmark. I don’t know where they’ll bury me, but I intend to live the rest of my life in Denmark. * Walt intends to deliver the first European-wide tap-to-pay solution because Europe is its home. In many ways, building a company is like raising a child. And perhaps it is that same relationship that I and Walt have to Europe. An American living in Europe created a thing. But because of where and how it was created, it is European, more so than the American that created it ever will be. Before finishing this update though, I would also like to dismiss any notions that Walt is anti-American. I believe that the principles of Walt are for the betterment of humanity. I believe that no one suffers more from Big Tech and the lack of privacy than Americans do. No one emails me asking for Walt as much as Americans do. (written by a human)

On Friday morning, Walt Lite went live in a preview release. An email was sent out to the waiting list. The download process was made intentionally difficult because of the beta-ness of the release: ideally only about 50 users would download and give feedback. To make a difficult download process, the email instructed users that to download Walt, they needed to join a chat room where they could then request a download link. Hopefully, about 50 people would make it through this bad user onboarding experience. But it didn't quite work out like that: * 2 minutes of sending out the email, 150 people had joined the chat room. * 10 minutes after, 500 people had downloaded Walt Lite * 15 minutes after, I decided to shut down the link to the download * 2 hours after, a post went up on Reddit ( https://lnkd.in/e5ZaJ6Y3 ) about Walt getting 1000 upvotes. This market exists. Walt will land squarely inside of it. (Thank you to all the Discord voluntary moderators who helped me organize and create clarity in those chaotic first hours.)