A Card That Could Say No
Ruth had Alzheimer's. She was generous by nature, and the telemarketers knew it. By the time her family understood what was happening, tens of thousands of dollars had gone to charities she never chose, causes she couldn't remember supporting, and solicitors who had learned that the phone was a reliable ATM. Kai Stinchcombe watched his mother try to manage his grandmother's finances from a distance, armed with nothing - no tools, no guardrails, no Visa card that could distinguish a pharmacy from a fraudulent "charity."
That gap became True Link Financial. Not a big idea about disrupting banking. A specific, irritating problem that had a specific, engineered solution: a prepaid Visa card that lets families and caregivers set precise rules about where money can go, who can spend it, and what triggers an alert. Block telemarketers. Allow the local grocery store. Restrict ATM withdrawals after 6 PM. Get a text when anything unusual happens.
Simple to describe. Remarkably hard to build in a space where regulators are cautious, populations are complex, and the customers who most need protection are often the least able to advocate for themselves.
Every purported use case for blockchain is a contortion to add a distributed, encrypted, anonymous ledger where none was needed.
- Kai Stinchcombe, 2017Three CTOs, One Pattern
Before True Link, Kai had been a CTO three times over. He studied History, Mathematics, and Computer Science at Colorado College - an unusual triple that turned out to be predictive. Then a Master's in Political Science at Stanford, where he channeled the energy of the 2004 Kerry campaign into something lasting: the Roosevelt Institution, a student policy think tank he co-founded by sending emails to Stanford list-servs asking why progressive students didn't have a sharper collective voice.
The Roosevelt Institution grew beyond anyone's early expectations. It won a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions - the kind of recognition celebrated by Hillary Clinton. Kai had already moved into tech by then, cycling through three CTO and Head of Data Science roles at different startups. Each one built his fluency. None of them solved the problem he was starting to see everywhere: the financial system's structural indifference to the people who needed it most.
What True Link Actually Does
True Link serves three distinct populations that traditional banking ignores or underserves: seniors managing cognitive decline, people with disabilities and special needs trusts, and individuals in addiction recovery navigating financial fragility. The core product - a prepaid Visa card with customizable spending controls and real-time alerts - is surrounded by a growing platform for trust administration, disbursement management, compliance tools, and caregiver support. It's fintech infrastructure for populations that never had any.
Calling the Bluff
In December 2017, as the crypto frenzy hit its loudest pitch, Kai published an essay on Medium titled "Ten Years In, Nobody Has Come Up With A Use For Blockchain." The timing was deliberate. The argument was precise. After a decade of effort and billions of invested dollars, he wrote, nobody had identified a real problem that blockchain solved better than existing systems - not one that didn't reduce to currency speculation or illicit transactions.
The essay spread fast and generated backlash faster. Crypto enthusiasts dismissed it. Traditional finance nodded. A few months later, Kai followed up with a second piece: "Blockchain Is Not Only Crappy Technology But A Bad Vision For The Future." His thesis sharpened: the whole premise of eliminating trust was wrong, because trust is exactly what makes human institutions work. People aren't looking to transact in a trustless system. They want accountability. They want someone to call when something goes wrong.
The Two Essays That Defined a Debate
"Projects based on the elimination of trust have failed to capture customers' interest because trust is actually so damn valuable." Written in 2018 - years before the collapses that validated it.
No single person, Kai argued, has ever solved a real problem and decided blockchain was the best solution. They started with blockchain and searched backward for a use case. That's not product thinking. That's marketing in reverse.
Read the Original Essay →Building Quietly Where It Counts
True Link's funding story tracks the slow build of mission-driven fintech. A Series A of $8M in 2017, led by QED Investors with Radicle Impact and Initialized Capital. Then a $35M Series B in July 2020 - an unusual moment to close a large round, mid-pandemic - led by Khosla Ventures and Centana Growth Partners, whose investors Tom Davis and David Weiden joined the board. Total raised: over $50M.
The company appeared on the Forbes Fintech 50, was accepted by Y Combinator, and has grown to roughly $38M in annual revenue serving around 100 employees. That's not a hockey-stick growth story. That's a durable company in a market that nobody else wanted to build for.
True Link Financial - Funding History
The Road Here
On Camera
Independence as the Product
There's a tendency in fintech to describe the market as "underbanked" - a neutral-sounding term that makes the problem sound bureaucratic. Kai tends to frame it differently. The people True Link serves aren't just underserved by banks. They are actively made more vulnerable by systems that were designed without them in mind. A person with a developmental disability doesn't need a better interest rate. They need a card that won't let a predatory caregiver drain their account. A senior with early-stage dementia doesn't need a robo-advisor. They need protection from the phone.
This framing - financial protection as a form of preserving independence - runs through everything Kai has built and written. It's also why the blockchain critiques hit so sharply: he was applying the same logic. Real problems. Real users. Real accountability. Not architecture for its own sake.
He lectures on this at Harvard Business School, the London School of Economics, and UC Berkeley. He testifies on policy. He serves on task forces. But the thing he keeps coming back to is the specific - the grandmother, the card, the phone call that shouldn't have been answered.