Terry Angelos
Showing 1–3 of 3 transcripts.
- a16z51 min
What Happens When AI Agents Can Spend Your Money?
The recent evolution of AI agents from passive observers to active transactional actors has triggered a "Wallet Wars" landscape where payment processors like Stripe, PayPal, and ShopPay compete to connect their credentials to these new digital arms. In this environment, VGS acts as critical infrastructure by transitioning from a simple credential vault to a network provider of agentic tokens that secure billions of stored credentials across major payment networks. This shift enables agents to execute purchases while preserving merchant-consumer relationships, though it simultaneously introduces new challenges regarding fraud liability, rewards model disruption, and the strategic response from merchants ranging from Amazon's blockade to Walmart's embrace.
- a16z46 min
a16z Podcast | The Oral History Of TrialPay — Obstacles and Opportunities in Payments
TrialPay founders Alex Rampell and Terry Angelos pioneered offer-based digital payments, navigating shifts from shareware to social gaming and mobile apps before splitting the company in 2012 to launch the offline commerce startup Yub. The legacy TrialPay business eventually scaled sufficiently to be acquired by Visa, while the founders analyzed critical lessons regarding distribution barriers, infrastructure defensibility, and the risks posed by verticalized commerce ecosystems. Their insights further extend to the potential impacts of Central Bank Digital Currencies, which could reshape global payment sovereignty and introduce programmable money capabilities controlled by state actors.
- a16z46 min
The Oral History of TrialPay -- Obstacles and Opportunities in Payments
Founded in 2006 by Alex Rampell and Terry Angelos, TrialPay pioneered offer-based payments by evolving through software, social gaming, and mobile markets before restructuring into a core ad business and a new entity called Yub in 2014. The original company eventually secured an exit through its 2018 acquisition by Visa, which integrated TrialPay's technology to expand into transactional advertising and mobile rewards. Rampell's post-mortem analysis highlighted the strategic imperative of controlling payment infrastructure, a lesson that informs current trends in verticalized commerce, payment unbundling, and programmable digital currencies.