community-finance
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Taehwan Yoon Is Turning the Neighbors Into the Power Company
A wind engineer returned from Denmark with a stubborn idea: clean power moves faster when the people living beside it own a piece of it. Thirteen years later, Taehwan Yoon is still turning that idea into financial infrastructure.
The $100 Problem Travis Holoway Refused to Ignore
A childhood lesson in Cleveland became a Los Angeles fintech experiment: let ordinary people set the terms, move money quickly, and help one another through the expensive gaps between paychecks.
The App That Turned Payday Loans Into a Neighborly Favor
SoLo Funds built a lending marketplace with no interest and no mandatory fees, betting that strangers would rather help strangers than let a payday lender do it. Two million users later, the model is either a fix for broken small-dollar credit or a regulatory magnet - and the founders keep insisting it is the first.
The Renewable-Energy Company That Turned Local Opposition Into a Funding Model
Root Energy found that Korea's clean-power bottleneck was not the turbine or the solar panel. It was consent - so the company made nearby residents investors, built a regulated climate-finance platform around the idea, and added an RE100 business for corporate buyers.