When Frank Bolella talks about competitive advantage, he doesn’t start with market share or patents. He talks about translation, i.e the rare ability to move seamlessly between the languages of business strategy and technical execution.
It’s a skill honed in the retail back offices, sharpened in utilities and insurance consulting, and ultimately deployed in boardrooms where billion-dollar technology decisions get made. Now, it’s the foundation of Metafide, the fintech startup blending human insight with AI to predict market movements in ways that feel as much like a game as a financial strategy.
The Spark
Bolella’s career had been on a steady upward trajectory. Five years in technology strategy and operations consulting gave him a front-row seat to how enterprise giants operated, and, more importantly, where they stumbled. But something was missing: the chance to shape strategy before the playbook was written.
That’s when Frank Speiser, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of SocialFlow, called. Speiser had an idea and he wanted Bolella’s help to build it.
“He saw my passion for fintech and financial literacy,” Bolella recalls. “And he knew I could bridge strategy and product in a way that could give this idea real traction.”
The idea became SURGE, Metafide’s flagship platform, a short-interval, competitive trading environment where humans predict market moves, AI learns from their decisions, designed to be fun, fast, and rewarding, without losing the rigor of a serious trading tool.
The Road to SURGE
Metafide’s journey hasn’t been a straight line. Like many early-stage ventures, product iterations came fast, each teaching the team where real value lived and where it didn’t. The latest version, powered by AI neural networks, doesn’t just use machine learning for prediction, it treats human judgment as an asset to be captured, refined, and amplified.
That philosophy is starting to resonate. The company has built a waitlist of over 110,000 users and attracted a $3.275 million seed round led by Payton Jonson of DIY Fund, with backing from Blockchain Founders Fund, Cogitent, and other blockchain- and AI-focused investors.
Strategic partnerships, like their integration with DogeOS, the application layer for Dogecoin, are designed to position Metafide not just as another trading app, but as a platform with cultural relevance in Web3.
The Competitive Edge
Bolella credits his consulting years with giving him the muscle memory to operate at speed without losing structure. “In both a Fortune 500 pitch and a VC meeting, simplicity wins,” he says. “You need to tell a story that flows logically, is backed by reasoning, and is anchored in quantitative data points. If you can’t do that, you’ll lose the room.”
He also sees his technical literacy, knowing how applications are actually built, as a differentiator. It allows him to sit in a product meeting and connect every line of code back to a business goal, a trait he believes many strategy-first peers lack.
Web3 in the Classroom and Beyond
Bolella’s time at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business wasn’t just about case studies and lectures. As president of the Blockchain Club, he studied under economist Campbell Harvey, attended Ethereum and blockchain conferences, and hosted industry leaders like Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam.
“It gave me real-world anecdotes about how crypto and Web3 could reshape financial systems,” Bolella says. “And it taught me the value of relentless curiosity and bold experimentation, traits you see in the best founders.”
He’s become a vocal advocate for integrating Web3 education into university curricula, arguing that the next generation of business leaders can’t afford to treat decentralized technologies as a niche topic.
The Next Five Years
Ask Bolella where he’s focusing his energy, and the answer comes quickly: creating customer experiences so distinctive and rewarding that users turn into advocates. In his view, that’s the only reliable growth strategy, whether you’re selling enterprise software or a gamified trading app.
Metafide’s long-term vision is ambitious: become the most engaging predictive trading platform in the market, trusted by users for its accuracy, loved for its community, and respected for how it blends human intuition with AI performance.
