Mint

Cory Doctorow explains adversarial interoperability: building tools that connect to a dominant product without its owner’s permission, so people can move between services without abandoning their existing communities. He traces how projects such as Samba, Apple’s iWork, and cable TV challenged incumbents, and argues that laws and contracts have made this kind of competition riskier. He connects market concentration to weak competition, regulatory capture, and declining trust in how public claims are checked. For founders, he sees opportunities in tools that help people leave or work around platforms while retaining access to their networks, and in products that support resilience and recovery.

Michael Babineau explains how Second Measure turns messy credit card transaction data into an analytics product that lets investors and companies answer questions about consumer spending. He traces the idea to a data problem at a hedge fund and to tools he and co-founder Lillian built for analyzing behavior in online games. The talk covers the platform’s uses in company diligence, competitive analysis, and consumer research, along with the work of resolving merchant names and correcting sample bias. Babineau also discusses how customer research, custom projects, and editorial work guide product development, and why the team hires for strong statistical fundamentals and careful reasoning.

The talk gives three startups focused advice on finding a small group of users who deeply value their product before expanding. Salary Fairy is urged to move beyond curiosity by helping workers act on salary predictions, measure meaningful outcomes, and build growth into the product. PareUp is advised to launch quickly, focus on dense areas and proven food categories, and make sure buyers and vendors have a good local experience. The couples expense app is encouraged to stay focused, get its first users, learn from their behavior, and find a sustainable way to acquire users despite limited virality.

Jessica Mah describes how inDinero began as a Mint.com-style accounting product for small businesses, then struggled despite press, funding, and rising vanity metrics. She explains how she and co-founder Andy cut costs, let employees go, stepped back, and asked what businesses would actually pay for. They pivoted to doing accounting, taxes, and payroll themselves, found a paying customer, and rebuilt the company around real revenue. The talk teaches founders to face difficult realities, stay grounded through success and failure, and define confidence on their own terms.