Andi Duro’s Two Cents
It wasn’t long after graduating from UConn that Andi Duro ’21 (ENG) started to feel overwhelmed by financial anxiety. The New York City–based computer science whiz had left a steady position at a consultancy to take a leap of faith as a freelancer. His days of dependable checks were gone; now he had big payouts followed by months of scraping by.
Though budgeting apps were already widely used to link to users’ bank accounts and provide net worth, they didn’t answer the questions Duro was wrestling with: How did he compare to his peers? How much money should he be saving and investing? Was he doing all the right things for a 20-something? Was it a dumb idea to quit his job and bet on himself? He wondered if existing technology could be used to create a social network where people could have conversations that usually feel off-limits, compare financial pictures, and see the stories behind the numbers.
In December, Duro launched twocents, a first-of-its-kind social media app that replaces your username with your verified net worth. In this pseudonymous environment structured similarly to X, Yik Yak, or Reddit, you might come across a user with seven figures in their username whose bio reads “startup founder” or a user with a modest net worth who describes themselves as “into lentils lately.”
The app skews toward young men and, as with any corner of the internet that promises anonymity, has no small amount of trolling, banter, and disparaging outbursts among a stream of cryptocurrency, memes, artificial intelligence, politics, travel, and “what I’m eating” posts. The young platform is grappling with inevitable growing pains in the challenging and evolving area of policing free speech on social media and defining hateful, targeted rhetoric. The twocents team is pursuing artificial intelligence–powered moderation efforts and is actively working to expand their user base by developing budgeting features and verified, identity-specific rooms where, say, female business owners can discuss finances or UConn alumni can discuss student debt.
The app, now available on the Apple App Store and Google Play, also offers a powerful polling tool that highlights how opinions shift across wealth levels: Users can ask for budgeting tips (or ask who wears socks to bed) and see which opinions are backed by the highest concentration of financially successful users.
“I think it’s cool how every post is flavored by the user’s net worth because that gives you a window into how people think relative to their own wealth,” said one user in response to a call for user experiences posted on the app. “It makes you check your own biases, especially with the poll results — like, are you surprised rich people answered one way? Why are you surprised? … Super interesting.”
“In real life, if you say you’re quitting your job to pursue your dreams as a musician, all your friends would cheer you on,” says Duro. “On twocents, if you say that you’re doing that, you’d get a lot of wealthy people saying, ‘No, this is risky, you don’t have a backup plan.’ It’s a cool insight — these people you think are crazy risk-takers are really spreadsheet nerds doing a lot of math and taking very calculated risks.”
Twocents verifies users’ finances through Plaid, the service behind Venmo and Robinhood. The company states that it collects no personal data and is fully read-only. By mid-May, 13,551 users had already securely linked $1 billion from bank accounts, brokerage portfolios, crypto wallets, and even assets and debts. The company raised $3 million from venture capital firms Dragonfly and Starting Line in 2025. Duro, who wrote the front- and back-end code himself, has since grown his team to nine.
Duro doesn’t consider himself to have an innate talent for finances but came at the subject, like most people do, out of necessity: having to generate enough income without a stable salary to afford Manhattan rent and grocery costs while navigating the unique tax maze that is being an independent contractor in the Big Apple. He coped with his financial anxiety by learning as much as he could about the subject to give him a feeling of agency, a process that led to twocents.
The child of Albanian parents who fled the 1997 Albanian civil unrest and the Kosovo War, Duro arrived in Hartford at 6 months old and spent his early years in a rat-plagued, lead-contaminated attic apartment. His first memories in the country were of his parents’ financial struggles, followed by their slow climb toward the American dream: successful careers, a move to the suburbs, and their first car. A magnet school opened the door for Duro to college at UConn.
“My first experiences in this country were watching my parents struggle and then succeed. It was like being a spectator to the American dream.”
COVID-19 took place during Duro’s college years, upending what had once felt like a clear path from school to career. The pandemic, combined with the financial anxiety Duro observed in his peers, demonstrated the need for tools like twocents to help them navigate what he calls “a bold new reality.”
“It’s such an innovative concept and lends itself to really honest conversations,” said a user on the app. “It’s also such a good move toward financial transparency.”
Then the feed moved on. Users were talking about retirement savings and McNuggets.
By siobhan Murray