Once in a while things need to be summed up and put into form readable by humans. The same principles we use to decode your personal finances, we now used to decode the ever-prolonging story of Toshl. How we got started, what we did after that and what keeps us from being eternal. If you’re curious how Toshl came to be, this is the story to read.
On the Nature of Money
Existence is probably eternal. Existence of matter is a whole different story. Toshl comes along much later still.
First there was darkness, then there was light and quite a while after that some heaps of chemical/physical processes thought themselves cool enough to believe they were special because they were alive. They wanted to keep it that way, so they cooperated to prolong this “life” thing, exchanging things they needed to survive.
That exchange was straightforward at first; “I give you wheel you give me strawberry” and the like. Since strawberries tend to rot and squish if carried around, especially since you don’t have the wheel yet, something more universal was needed. So the Lydians came up with this thing called a coin to make things simpler. Naturally, things got a whole lot more complicated.
Soon we had wallets, compounding interest, Bitcoins, Libor, Forex and mortgage payments. Things got so complicated that most heaps of chemical/physical processes that now called themselves “humans” simply assumed they were too cool and important to deal with these tedious chores. Knowing how your finances stand was simply too much of a pain in the rectum for humans to bother. Even if that meant more rectal pain was coming their way, many a time in the form of insolvency.
Humans with Aspirations
There was a group of humans in Slovenia who did want to know how their finances stood. Yet the tools they found were so cumbersome and complicated they would make even a chartered accountant blush. Luckily they worked at a mobile & web studio by the name of 3fs. Coupled with testicular fortitude and naïveté, much like the Lydians before them, they set out to make their own tools and make personal finance easy and fun.
The Coming of Toshl
Old people said they saw a new star appear in the sky, a double rainbow span the hills and streets become flooded with white mice. Those people were probably seriously drunk. The humans of the Toshl team did not let themselves be bothered and in April 2010 they launched Toshl Finance.
Toshl Finance enabled people to note down their finances on their mobile phones, then automatically sync to toshl.com for safekeeping and more cool graphs. Starting off with Android, iPhone and the web, the service soon got native apps for Maemo, Symbian, Windows Phone, MeeGo and Blackberry.
To make finances more personable and remove the tedium, Toshl monsters were born. Since then Toshl was on a path to make finances more pleasant, easy and fun. Focused on fun, mobile and worldwide coverage the Toshl ecosystem developed. It seemed other humans appreciated the user experience, the financial rectal pain lessened and the community grew. Soon the humans of the Toshl team could focus 100% on building just Toshl, growing more independent as a project and company.
Asymptotically Accelerated to Speed of Light
Taking a leap of faith they traversed the oceans in search of knowledge and contacts. Landing first in London, then a few months later in San Francisco. The co-founding humans of Toshl then worked on the product by day, ferreted around tech events at night and with their antics, tomfoolery and shenanigans got to the attention of 500 Startups.
The whole team of Toshl humans moved to San Francisco to participate in Batch 4 of the 500 Startups accelerator. Much was learnt, even more people met and befriended, priorities were redrawn and refocused. Armed with a much faster growth rate, even more testicular fortitude and a renewed sense of mission, the Toshl humans continue on their path to make finance fun for those heaps of chemical/physical processes worldwide.