Colors of Tech and Entrepreneurship

Colors of Tech & Entrepreneurship podcast🎧

[Colors of Tech and Entrepreneurship @ColorsofTechpod]

You walk into a store, tap your card for coffee — but the money comes straight from your crypto wallet. No bank. No approval. No waiting.

This isn’t sci-fi. It’s already happening in 2026.

But most crypto cards still suck with fees, UX, and limited tokens.

Here’s what actually works — and what doesn’t. 👇

[Colors of Tech and Entrepreneurship @ColorsofTechpod]

All of this is Leone Parise, co-founder and CTO of @tracefinance , $10B+ moved across borders, clients like Amazon and HBO.

Full conversation is live now:
🎥 https://t.co/KfkF52RMf2

[Colors of Tech and Entrepreneurship @ColorsofTechpod]

A guy joined a crypto wallet when it had 3 engineers and 50,000 users.

He left 2.5 years later. The wallet had 15 million users.

Here's what he learned about why almost none of it was a real business 🧵

[Colors of Tech and Entrepreneurship @ColorsofTechpod]

And his most contrarian take:

The AI layoff narrative is theater.

Say "we cut headcount because we're not innovating" → your stock drops.
Say "we cut headcount because AI" → your stock goes up.
Same layoff. He's watching those same CEOs quietly reopen engineering roles.

[Colors of Tech and Entrepreneurship @ColorsofTechpod]

Dr. Debra Clary breaks all of this down — plus what changes when AI makes every answer instantly available — on episode 92 of Colors of Tech & Entrepreneurship.

Out now on YouTube and Spotify 👇
https://t.co/TrkmijsDsu

[Colors of Tech and Entrepreneurship @ColorsofTechpod]

BlackBerry saw the iPhone coming.

The CEO looked at it and told his team not to pay attention.

That single decision cost the company everything — and it wasn't a technology failure.

[Colors of Tech and Entrepreneurship @ColorsofTechpod]

His team's response: "we come to you with ideas and you shut us down."

Revenue had slowed. Margin was slipping. Competitors were shipping faster.

The problem was sitting at the head of the table.

[Lam @LamTGlobal]

The recent @stripe's acquisition of @OpenRouter is more interesting than “payments company buys AI gateway.”

AI apps will increasingly choose models the way payments businesses choose payment routes: not by loyalty to one provider, but by a policy such as, “Keep response time under 2 seconds, quality above this threshold, and gross margin above 60%.”

The router then decides which model gets each request.

“Model agnostic” stops being a developer preference. It becomes dynamic margin and risk management. The winning AI infrastructure may be the control plane, not the model.

[Colors of Tech and Entrepreneurship @ColorsofTechpod]

9/ We discussed this with Matthew Schneider @mattschneid3r, CEO and founder of @BuildingInc, on episode 91 of Colors of Tech & Entrepreneurship.
https://t.co/M46nJxpowo

[Colors of Tech and Entrepreneurship @ColorsofTechpod]

1/ Real estate is one of the world’s largest asset classes. Yet tokenizing it remains far harder than the headlines suggest.

The bottleneck was never simply blockchain.

It was the data. 🧵

[Colors of Tech and Entrepreneurship @ColorsofTechpod]

8/ The founder lesson is simple: don’t begin with the technology. Begin with the broken workflow, the missing data, or the expensive decision. Then choose the tools.