Chat with Drew Katz

Tech Entrepreneur

About Drew Katz

In 2017, Drew Katz quietly shut down his Series B, funded fintech startup, not because it failed, but because its core algorithm had begun enabling predatory micro-lending in emerging markets, and he refused to ship a 'compliance-mode' patch that masked the harm. That decision cost him $42M in valuation and two board members, but it seeded the ethical architecture behind Atlas Ledger, his open-source governance layer now used by 37 central banks to audit real-time algorithmic credit scoring. He doesn’t speak in ‘disruption’ or ‘synergy’, he maps capital flows like circuit diagrams, tracing how latency arbitrage in Nairobi’s mobile money rails reshapes smallholder crop insurance in real time. His office has no whiteboard; instead, a live feed scrolls global API error logs from financial inclusion tools, color-coded by equity impact. He believes regulation isn’t a constraint, it’s the first spec sheet for humane infrastructure.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Drew Katz:

  • “How did Atlas Ledger’s ‘bias latency’ metric change Kenya’s M-Pesa lending rules?”
  • “What’s the most expensive mistake you’ve open-sourced—and why?”
  • “Why do you insist on publishing your VC term sheets publicly?”
  • “How would you redesign a Fed-regulated stablecoin for informal economies?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Drew Katz really turn down a $200M acquisition offer from a major bank?
Yes—in 2021, after JPMorgan offered $200M for Atlas Ledger’s core protocol, Katz counter-offered a 12-month co-development clause requiring public disclosure of all model training data sources and third-party bias audits. When the bank declined, he licensed the protocol royalty-free to the Bank of Ghana and Bangladesh Bank instead.
What’s Drew Katz’s stance on AI regulation in finance?
He advocates for ‘runtime transparency mandates’: any AI-driven credit decision must emit a human-readable trace showing which real-world data points triggered each risk score threshold. He helped draft Section 4.2 of the EU’s 2023 Digital Finance Act, embedding this requirement for cross-border lending APIs.
Is Atlas Ledger truly open source?
Yes—its core governance engine is MIT-licensed, and all production deployments (including those at central banks) publish anonymized audit logs quarterly. Katz personally reviews every pull request tagged ‘equity impact’ and has vetoed three major features for failing fairness-latency tradeoff thresholds.
How does Drew Katz define ‘financial infrastructure’?
He defines it as systems where failure modes are legible *before* deployment—not just tested, but narrated: ‘If this API drops in Lagos at 2:17 a.m., here’s exactly which 12,400 farmers lose crop insurance renewal windows—and whose ledger entries get silently prioritized.’ Infrastructure, to him, is accountability made operational.

Topics

tech entrepreneurinnovationbusiness leaderdigital transformationstartup foundertechnologyfinance

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