[Terretta]

Come work at MUFG, largest bank in free world, $2.7T, which decided we have to be a tech company.

Our head of technology strategy for Americas is on hacker news at quarter to midnight. And hiring, not just for blockchain. (See my “about” text.)

Worth a chat if you’re in NYC or San Diego.

[nowarninglabel]

If you don't mind me hijacking your comment, I'm actually currently trying to solve a problem through which I am trying to connect to people such as you. Essentially, Kiva has served the world's unbanked and underbanked through crowd-funding to some success, but ultimately to reach all the underserved we need to get the data we and our partners have to large regional and global banks so they can price the risk of these potential borrowers and bring in larger amounts of capital.

It would seem if we can get the data to banks such as MUFG in a usable format, then it presents a large opportunity, however how would one even begin to interact with such a large entity to explore it?

[Terretta]

This sounds great.

You’d troll their LinkedIn looking for a title that esonated, read the job description to be sure, and try connecting, exchange enough convo to move over to their bank email, and then share the idea.

In our case, I’m the right guy. You can email me (and connect on LinkedIn if you like) and I’ll reply with my bank email. Elaborate on the idea then.

I’ve got 250 leaders thinking about how they could use new kinds of data, we’ll connect you to right groups. Even I have a team of PhDs looking for interesting things to tie together to better serve communities.

Note though, getting capital isn’t our problem, we’re interested in more ways to give it out, use it, put it to work.

[keithwhor]

I find this statement funny, if only because in the context of Silicon Valley culture, the statement "[x] is on hacker news at quarter to midnight" normally just means "[x] isn't doing any work at quarter to midnight."

(I understand what you're going for and appreciate it, it's just interesting how social signals are interpreted given different industries / contexts.)

(... and yes, me posting this comment does, in fact, mean that I'm not doing any work while I post it.)

[Terretta]

On the contrary, if your job depends on understanding trends in a field, read more:

https://qz.com/668514/if-you-want-to-be-like-warren-buffett-...

Being aware of HN is part of my work.

In my case, we get four key dimensions of value:

1. Seeing trends early is in the job description, and a small slice of zeitgeist is here. I check here, several other self-selecting subgroup sites, a broad RSS list, white paper subscription sites, etc., and typically also read one subject matter book a day. With enough dots of info across a broad array of sources, you can see trends earlier.

2. Finding emerging tech likely able to go ‘enterprise’ is also part of my JD. That often depends on leadership. Some of those leaders are here. You can tell a lot about a company from its founders. I’ve been an extremely early customer of startups found here, years later they lead their segment and we’re already on board. Examples like Hashicorp or CoreOS come to mind.

3. Emerging debates that do matter are often here early, where threads are high quality enough to get exposure to well thought, good logic, alternative views. Being able to absorb more of those improves low data decisions.

4. You can even find talent early. Many met here have gone on to release awesome tools, join or found cool companies, get acquired by BigCos... it’s great to see talented and motivated trajectories and learn it’s not all just luck.