In 2015, Rex Salisbury was working as a software engineer at now-defunct mortgage startup Sindeo where he built out the back end for fully automated online mortgage pre-approval.

At the time, he was working for Andy Carra, who served as that company’s CTO after co-founding SoFi.

It was Salisbury’s first foray into fintech, and high on the excitement of getting a new product live in a highly regulated industry, he admittedly got bit by the fintech bug. At that time, the sector was nowhere near the force that it is today, just “emerging as a meaningful and sizable category,” Salisbury recalls.

“This meant there were many other software engineers, product managers and founders doing what I was – bringing new technologies to bear on an industry that was painfully out of date,” he said. “I wanted to meet these people.”

After a number of coffee dates and meetups, Salisbury determined that something more formal was required. So in 2016, he started his own community, Cambrian. His goal with Cambrian was to cultivate a community focused on founders and builders in fintech.

Soon after the organization was born, Salisbury began holding monthly events in San Francisco and New York, hosting an annual product summit and inclusion summit, along with quarterly job fairs. Speakers included the likes of Credit Karma’s Ken Lin, Deel’s Shuo Wang, Betterment’s Jon Stein and Plaid’s William Hockey & Zach Perret, among others. His work caught the attention of venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

“When they reached out, it became apparent that it could be a very interesting opportunity – many of the things I had been thinking about scaling with regards to Cambrian were similar to the work at a16z,” Salisbury recalls.

Read full article: https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/from-software-engineer-to-venture-capitalist-ex-a16z-partner-rex-salisbury-unveils-new-early-stage-fund/