How Accidentally Enrolling in C Led to Building Passiv, a Bitcoin-era Fintech Startup

What we talked about.

Brendan Wood, co-founder of Passiv, traces his path from a childhood in Newfoundland to building a fintech startup born out of investing frustration. After moving to New Brunswick for university, he studied mechanical engineering and mechatronics, only to stumble into programming through a scheduling mix-up that placed him in a C course instead of MATLAB. That accident sparked a lasting love of code, leading him through GPU programming research, a stint at Radian6 and Salesforce, and five years at Y Combinator company Priceonomics, where he learned to build full stack products from scratch. Along the way, Brendan discovered Bitcoin through Hacker News in 2010, mined it briefly on his MacBook and university GPU rigs, and stayed curious about decentralized systems. The real catalyst for Passiv came from his own investing life: managing six brokerage accounts by hand, wrestling with spreadsheets and high fee mutual funds, convinced him there had to be a better way to automate portfolio management. That frustration became the foundation for Passiv, the company he built to solve the problem for himself and others.

An engineer who fell into C by accident and Bitcoin by curiosity built Passiv to fix investing's tedium.

The questions, and the answers.

Where does your story begin?

I grew up in Newfoundland and stayed there through high school. For university I moved to New Brunswick, which felt like a big change since I'd spent my whole life on the rock. New Brunswick has a reputation for not being a happening place, but compared to where I grew up, it felt like a lot more was going on.

What did you want to be as a kid, and how did you end up in mechanical engineering?

I always said I wanted to be an inventor, inspired by shows like Teddy Ruxpin, but people told me nobody invents things anymore. It wasn't until high school, around 16 or 17, that I realized engineering was basically that career. I chose mechanical engineering because it seemed the most well rounded, touching chemistry, statics and electrical.

How did you end up learning C instead of MATLAB?

I accidentally enrolled in a C programming course that shared a course identifier with the MATLAB version I meant to take. The professor told anyone expecting MATLAB to leave, so I panicked and talked to my academic advisor. He said very few students get the chance to learn C instead of MATLAB, so I stayed, and I fell in love with it.

How did you first hear about Bitcoin?

I think I first heard about it on Hacker News back in 2010. At first I didn't dig into it deeply, I figured it was just another one of those internet things. It was only after it kept popping up and I read more discussions that I realized it was a decentralized system secured by a network of computers, which really interested me.

What was your early Bitcoin mining experience like?

In early 2011 I tried mining on my MacBook Pro's CPU when Bitcoin was worth about a dollar. It sounded like a jet engine and ran at 100 degrees constantly, so I only let it run for three days and got three or four coins. Later I mined a bit using research GPU rigs, but by then it barely covered the electricity.

What did you do after Radian6 and Salesforce?

I went to Priceonomics, a Y Combinator company in San Francisco, and spent about five years there. It never became a huge rocket ship success, but I learned an enormous amount, including how to build a product from scratch and manage a team full stack. That experience basically became the technical foundation for how I built Passiv.

What led you to start Passiv?

I started investing through my employer's matching plan, but the mutual funds had almost two percent fees, which I realized would cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars over time. I switched to managing my own index fund accounts, but by 2016 I had six accounts with different targets and it became incredibly tedious to rebalance by hand, which pushed me to automate it.