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Howard Lindzon is a GP at Social Leverage and the Co-Founder of StockTwits. He's known for his early-stage FinTech bets, including a seed investment in Robinhood. Below are his 2018 predictions for FinTech. Fun Fact: Howard invented the $Cashtag on social networks.

I am blown away by the fintech explosion in 2017. I have been investing in financial startups (and creating a few) the last 11 years dreaming of a year like 2017. I have been trying to soak it all in and ponder what could happen in the coming years.

I don’t think we have seen anything yet.

I get the luxury of looking at the Stocktwits data that CEO Ian Rosen shares with me and while yes Bitcoin and Crypto is in a bananas growth and chatter phase, I am content knowing millennials are not chatting about oil, P/E ratios, gold and utilities.

Robinhood announced free options trading. CEO Baiju Bhatt announced that 200,000 people have requested it in the first 7 hours.

Coinbase hit the number 1 spot in the App Store the other day.

eToro is now in over 150 countries. I talk to Yoni Assia all the time and hear the growth numbers in crypto (deposits and volumes) and just shake my head.

The mental athlete is cool. Compounding and network effects are cool. Investing is cool. Learning the language of the markets is cool. These apps are cool:

🚘Rally Road is a platform where you can purchase equity in blue-chip classic cars (Ferrari, Porsche, etc.). This is an interesting alternative asset class that is now accessible to the masses.

🍿Real Vision is like a Netflix for financial investing and trading stocks.

💲Blockfolio is a useful bitcoin and altcoin portfolio management tool.

📈TradingView one of the best charting tools on the web for crypto and stocks you can find.

Lets face it, there are apps we reallllly want to start using, but never actually do. Most fitness apps, the app you just downloaded two days ago but haven't opened, and Not Hot Dog fall into this group.

Here are a few loved and neglected apps recommended by the community:

Square Cash: "I love Square. I have two friends that use Square. Everybody else is on Venmo."

Bumpers: "Love this app. It's simple, easy to use, creative, fun... I respect it but I never use it."

Dropbox: "It's perfect...But somehow, I never find myself using it."

Ense: "Ense is like Twitter for audio. I dig its simple design but never think to use it."

Headspace: "I realllllly wanna start using it! It's been on my homescreen for 2 weeks. Haven't actually opened it."

Here's the full-list of fantastic products recommended by people who don't actually use them. Add your own. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Today Magic Leap, the super stealthy startup that raised nearly $2B in funding (!!!) just revealed its first product.

Founded in 2011, the Florida-based startup is developing augmented reality technology (although you won't see these words used anywhere on their website) to change the way humans interact with technology. The demo videos are stunning. 😳

Naturally, consumers are skeptical that Magic Leap can live up to the hype. Will it power the OASIS (Ready Player One reference for those confused) or become another Google Glass? We’ll find out in 2018 when the device ships.

In a more predictable surprise, the killer app for AR launched today. 💨

Y Combinator president Sam Altman has had a front-row seat to the successes and challenges of some of the fastest growing companies of the past decade. Stripe, Dropbox, Airbnb, just to name a few.

AngelList asked Sam what advice he had for founders and employees at high-growth startups, and what they should keep in mind when it's time to hire and scale up the team. Below is his response, including a list of 20 YC startups that are entering hypergrowth and hiring aggressively.

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Why Join a Company That's Scaling Up, by Sam Altman

There a lot of advantages to joining a company that’s growing quickly, but one of the biggest ones is that they offer more opportunities faster to employees. Joining a hypergrowth company is the best hack to get a lot of promotions fast.

Your job will evolve as quickly as the company scales. That means you’ll constantly be learning new things and figuring out where you find the most satisfaction. It’s shocking how much can change at a startup in one year.

Spending a few years somewhere that’s scaling fast will give you more varied experiences than many people get in a decade at a large company. You’ll become more confident in new environments and have better pattern recognition for good opportunities.

Meeting impressive people is another very good reason to join a company that’s scaling. The best companies tend to attract really smart people who will eventually go off and do great things. The networks people build early in their careers at hypergrowth companies are often their most important professional networks ever. The PayPal Mafia is the canonical example of this.

As an employee you have an advantage founders don’t — you can wait to see if a company is really working before committing to it.

How to choose?

You can trust your judgment here — if you know people love the product, if you know great people work there, and if you can tell it seems to be growing fast among important users, if you can identify some sort of compounding advantage over time, and if you believe the market will one day be huge, don’t overthink it.

One thing to watch out for is joining the hot startup of the month without doing your own research. Press attention and success are often not correlated.

Hiring Advice for Founders

If you’re a founder of one these companies and have to hire a lot of people fast, here’s some advice:

1. Spend more time on it
2. In the beginning, get your hands dirty
3. Look for smart, effective people
4. Have people audition for roles instead of interviewing
5. Have a mission
6. Hire people you like
7. Have a set of cultural values you hire for
8. Don’t compromise
9. Be generous with compensation packages (especially equity)
10. Watch out for red flags and trust your gut
11. Always be recruiting
12. Fire fast
13. Put a little bit of rigor around the hiring process
14. Don't hire

I expand on each of these points here.

Conclusion

Good luck. Choosing where to work and choosing who to hire are both challenging but important tasks.

If you’re currently looking for an opportunity, here are some YC companies that are aggressively hiring.

Over 4,500 makers from 124 different countries participated in the Product Hunt Global Hackathon this November, competing for $250,000 in prizes. According to the judges, the results were seriously impressive.

Today we’re excited to announce the 10 winning teams across 6 categories: Blockchain/Crypto, Social Impact, AI/Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, Slack, and Google Assistant – in addition to the 3 grand prize winners.

Category Winners

💰 Blockchain/Crypto: Supermax 

🙏 Social Impact: Donate Your Website and Sempo

🌐 AI / Machine Learning: Audify

😮 Augmented Reality: Scavengar

🍭 Slack: Klue

🗣 Google Assistant: Autometa

You can read a detailed breakdown of each of the categories and the winning teams in Winners of the Product Hunt Global Hackathon announcement on Medium.

Grand Prize Winners

🥉 3rd Place: Kenza is a plug and play application for data scientists and developers to quickly build, train, and deploy ML models at scale. The entire judging team was impressed by how easy this service is to use compared to existing solutions.

Thanks to our partners, the Kenza team will receive $15,000 in AWS credits, a Global Classroom Course from Girls in Tech, and access to Stripe Atlas. Congratulations to Pavlos, Alex, Thelxi, and Joakim!

🥈 2nd Place: SweetBud is a magical coffee cup lid that makes any coffee taste sweet using electrical currents to stimulate your tongue. The entire team was impressed by the uniqueness of this solution and the amount of progress made in just a month.

Sierra and Simon will receive $25,000 in AWS credits, a Global Classroom Course from Girls in Tech, and access to Stripe Atlas.

🥇 1st Place: Token Tax files all of your cryptocurrency taxes for you, integrating directly with Coinbase’s API to import all of your investments and export a single PDF that you can submit directly to the IRS.

Huge congratulations to our top winners, David and Alex. They’ll receive a $100,000 in AWS credits to pursue Token Tax (or any other project you’d like), a fully-inclusive trip to TechCrunch Disrupt, a Global Classroom Course from Girls in Tech, and access to Stripe Atlas. 🎉