Last Day at Capital One

Today is my last day at Capital One.

It’s a great company that always puts customers and associates first. I got to see them time and time again go above and beyond to do the right thing by people, even at a real short term cost to the business. But that’s how you build an enduring brand that people trust. And what is a bank but trust?

It was challenging and rewarding to be tasked with leading the innovation function in such a highly regulated space. I learned a lot about Credit, Risk, and financial rails. I got to meet a lot of thoughtful and genteel people — and, as a DC-headquartered company, got to have a lot of very early morning meetings, too!

When joining, I had hoped our team could write the book on how to run a lab successfully at a place like a bank, and we penned a few chapters: radically embracing autonomy and agency, falling in love with problems over solutions, building fast prototypes, partnering closely with Legal and Risk early, executing on projects with the business as a joint venture, and rigorously evaluating the likely business impact of our work to hold ourselves accountable for doing material work that was neither staff augmentation nor off in la-la land.

I’m proud of the great work Labmates delivered for the company, including the company’s first in-house built generative AI solution. Our team authored half the company’s patents!

I’m now off to my next adventure, back to building in the proverbial (and literal) Silicon Valley garage. It’s really tremendously exciting how quickly a small team can move with modern tools and vendors, especially agentic coding assistance. More on what’s cooking soon. But if you’ve ever struggled with figuring out why your home network isn’t working well, ping me.

Meanwhile, thank you, Capital One. I’m long $COF.