Ever since he read the Denationalization of Money by Friedrich Hayek in college, Alex Leishman, the co-founder and CEO of River Financial[1], had been on the search for an alternative currency. The aerospace engineer major turned amateur Austrian economist wanted to build a financial institution around this yet-to-be-found, nongovernment-issued money.
Leishman thought the banking-free option explored in Hayek’s work would manifest in the form of a multi-commodity-backed currency. It wasn’t until he discovered bitcoin in 2013, through a web development course on Coursera taught by Balaji S. Srinivasan[2], that he realized this currency wouldn’t be backed by gold, oil or any other commodity — in fact, the monetary revolution he had been looking for wouldn’t be backed by anything but code.
“This fulfilled the prophecy that Hayek (and other economists) had foretold,” Leishman explained to Bitcoin Magazine. “There are predictions by both Hayek and [American economist Milton] Friedman that a non-national money would come around one day, and I realized that [bitcoin] was what this was.”
Soon after, he moved to San Francisco in hopes of working on bitcoin full-time. Between stints at Airbnb and grad-school work at Stanford University (where he served under Professor Dan Boneh as an assistant for one of the first Bitcoin collegiate courses in the world), he landed a job at crypto fund Polychain Capital. Ten months later, he finally began down the road toward building the financial ideal that Hayek’s work had so firmly inculcated into his mind.
He embarked on this undertaking with his co-founder and cousin Andrew Benson, and River Financial was born. By the end of 2019, the company would employ a lean team of 10 full-time employees and ship its product: What its CEO heralds as a “bitcoin financial institution.”
