Drew Wilson on Building a Bank, Selling to GoDaddy, and Designing Biological Computers

The Drew Wilson Journey: From Early Tech to Entrepreneurship

• 💡 Drew Wilson, a long-time figure in tech, returns to the podcast after a decade, reflecting on his extensive career.
• 🚀 His journey began early, building his first website at 13 and teaching himself design and coding (PHP) by 2000.
• 📱 He was an early app developer on iOS and Mac, creating popular apps like Screeny and the iconic Picto icons used by Shopify.

Plasso Acquisition and the Banking Venture

• 💰 Drew shares his experience selling his e-commerce platform, Plasso, to GoDaddy in 2018, describing it as a dream scenario with an all-cash deal.
• 🏦 He then embarked on a challenging venture to build a bank called Letter, learning extensively about the highly regulated banking industry.
• 📉 Despite significant effort and investment, Letter ultimately failed due to running out of money and an incorrect market approach, leading to a substantial personal financial loss.

Insights on Product Management and Industry Trends

• ⚠️ Drew expresses a strong belief that product managers lacking experience in sales, engineering, or design are often ineffective and contribute to team inefficiency.
• 🌐 He also shares his skepticism about the long-term utility of cryptocurrency beyond collectibles and scams, comparing its distributed nature to older technologies like SMTP.

Cortical Labs and Biological Computing

• 🧠 Drew is now part of the team at Cortical Labs, working on the CL1, the first commercially available biological computer that uses a human brain as its CPU.
• 🔬 This technology has potential applications in personalized medicine and drug testing, offering a new paradigm beyond artificial intelligence.
• 🎨 He contributes as a designer, helping to build the website and future cloud interfaces for accessing these brain-computer systems.

Clerk and the Future of Web Development

• 🏢 Drew is also the Head of Design and leads the commerce and billing product at Clerk, a company focused on simplifying authentication and billing for web applications.
• 🧩 Clerk's new billing product aims to streamline subscription plans and entitlements, offering a more integrated and user-friendly experience than existing solutions.
• 💡 He sees Clerk's approach as a modern, component-based evolution of Plasso's original embeddable billing concept.

Opacity: A New Tool for Design and Development

• 🛠️ Drew is co-building Opacity, a tool designed to bridge the gap between design and code for web app components, aiming to be a 'GitHub and Figma combined' for UI development.
• 🚀 The goal is to create a canvas that is the DOM itself, allowing designers to build components that directly translate into code, with built-in version control and prop management.
• 💡 This project stems from his experience and desire to create a cash-flow-positive company without VC funding.