38x in Ten Months: Inside One of Fintech’s Fastest-Growing Infrastructure Companies (Farooq Malik, CEO of Rain)

Farooq Malik is the co-founder and CEO of Rain, a financial infrastructure company powered by stablecoins. Growing up in an immigrant family, Farooq saw firsthand the friction involved in moving money across borders. Alongside co-founder Charles Yoo-Naut, Farooq spent years building infrastructure before stablecoins became mainstream, betting that tokenized money would eventually become a foundational layer of the global financial system. Today, Rain powers card issuance, payments, and other financial products built on stablecoin rails, helping companies move money faster and operate across markets. In our conversation, we explore: How stablecoins combine the advantages of cash and electronic moneyThe barriers that still make moving money across borders expensive and inefficientThe parallels between being an immigrant and being an entrepreneurHow Farooq and Charles met through On Deck and decided to build togetherWhat Rain gained by building before the market was readyHow Rain earned the trust of early partners who later became customersWhat The Art of War taught Farooq about patienceThe misconception that stablecoins are only for emerging marketsWhy the payments market is big enough for multiple winnersWhy he believes Rain’s infrastructure is well positioned for a future shaped by AI agents— Thank you to the partners who make this possible Brex https://www.brex.com/mario: The intelligent finance platform. — Timestamps (00:00) Intro (02:46) An overview of Rain and global-first financial infrastructure (06:57) The barriers to moving money and how technology can reduce them (15:34) How stablecoins behave like cash (18:46) The economic opportunity of a more efficient monetary system (22:06) How Farooq’s childhood as an immigrant shaped him (26:00) Farooq’s first entrepreneurial venture (29:11) Lessons from Farooq’s career before founding Rain (36:09) Connecting with Charles through On Deck (39:51) From Sign and Wire to Rain (42:18) Why Rain bet on stablecoins (47:25) How a Rain card works (49:15) How Rain thinks about its business (51:12) Lessons from The Art of War (54:30) Rain’s approach to hiring and management (55:47) Why the US is a stablecoin hub (59:10) Why there’s room for more than Stripe (1:03:39)How Farooq and Charles stay aligned with limited meetings (1:05:54) Rain’s most critical mantras (1:08:56) Why Rain is ready for AI agents (1:12:30) Final meditations — Follow Farooq Malik LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhmalik X: https://x.com/rooqster Website: https://fhmalik.com https://fhmalik.com/ — Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/38x-in-ten-months-inside-one-of-fintechs — Production and marketing by penname.co https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If you look at the history of money, societies globally have converged to cash over thousands of years. Over the last 50 years, society has decided we need to be able to transmit ideas and information and now money globally. And we have to do that quickly, right? So then we moved to an electronic money system and it simply exists to ease and lubricate the movement of a dollar across the world. But if you were to look at the cost of that, that's trillions of dollars of dead weight lost in society. Rain is a stablecoin powered infrastructure business that allows our clients to build financial products and services that are all powered in the backend by stablecoin technology. If you look at traditionally enabled businesses, right, like fintech, Revolut, Wise, Airwallex or Stripe. These are businesses that have taken a decade or more to get the footprint into a place where they can now offer services globally.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  And our clients are starting global day one, right? I think that's the benefit of stablecoins, which are a global way to hold value. And when people realize that it's table stakes for their business and this is just the legal tender and it's just the eventuality of where the world is headed, they're all going to have to find a partner.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  What's the biggest market in the world? Farooq Malik's answer, money itself. The CEO of Rain, a stablecoin infrastructure player, argues that over the coming decades, every part of the monetary system will be rebuilt piece by piece. In his view, every other market will be an input into that grander civilization scale prize. Though Rain has a long way to go before it reaches those heights, it's coming off the back of an impressive few years with a recent round valuing it at nearly $2 billion. It's also growing at a torrent pace with payment volume jumping 38x during the 10 months between its last two funding rounds.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  In today's conversation, Farooq outlines why stablecoins behave more like cash than electronic money, what the art of war taught him about patience and why he and his co-founder Charles meet for just 30 minutes a month. I'm Mario and this is The Generalist. The best founders aren't spending their time on expense reports, they're busy building. Brex is the agentic finance platform that makes that possible. High limit corporate cards, banking and AI that handles the back office automatically. So your team never has to expenses get captured, books get closed and spend stays in policy without anyone chasing it down. Your team gets their time back to focus on what actually moves the company forward.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Forcel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Granola and Deepgram already run on Brex. One in three startups in the US does too. It's time to get Brex. Go to brex.com/solutions/startups.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Farouk, one of your investors said that Rain might be the fastest growing fintech in the world at the moment, which was quite a statement. Sounds like it's been a very good year.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're very fortunate, right? Like we have a number of our clients that rely on us, they trust us to provide them the service. So if Rain is growing well, it's largely attributable to the fact that our customers are doing a great job, right? Like they're succeeding in a lot of different capacities. Like many of our clients have figured out sort of the customer acquisition motion, right? Like many founders know that that's one of the hardest things. And so we're lucky to be working with folks that are really, really good at sort of grinding the gear on customer acquisition, right? And we're fortunate that they picked us to be their partner.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  There's lots of different directions that I'm excited to go in today, but maybe to sharpen the edges for folks. What is it exactly that Rain does and how does it enable new behaviors for a customer that, you know, weren't possible before?

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Sure, Rain is a stablecoin powered infrastructure business, right? So think about us as a financial services enablement platform that allows our clients and partners to build financial products and services that are all powered in the backend by stablecoin technology. That has a number of like positive externalities, which is largely driven by sort of efficiency, cost savings, faster settlement, faster sort of money movement and 24/7, you know, infrastructure, which allows many of our customers to then access services at a, you know, a fraction of the operating cost of what a product would normally take if it was enabled using fiat rails.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  And the other side of it is that Rain is a, I mean, we've collapsed a lot of the financial services stack, right? So that we're a one stop shop for many of the things that we offer. And our clients are able to then come to us and say, hey, I want to offer a product in the United States to domestic American users. I want to offer a product in Mexico or Canada or UK or Europe or these other markets. And then we can start picking and choosing, okay, like we can service, you know, five or six of these or 40, 50 of these, 100, you know, whatever, 60 to 70 of these markets and different use cases that you want. And the benefit is that you don't have to go country by country, partner by partner, technical integration by technical integration. And so speed to market ends up being significant, right?

• 5:17Speaker 00

  So you are able to save massive amount of time. Like if you look at traditionally enabled businesses, right, like fintech 1.0, you look at companies like Revolut, Wise or Airwallex or Stripe or whatever it is. These are businesses that have taken a decade or more to get the footprint into a place where they can now offer services globally. And our clients are starting global day one, right? I think that's the benefit of stablecoins, which are a global way to hold value. It's a global way to transact and putting that in the backend, it gives you a lot of flexibility on one of the most difficult things to do, which is store value, right?

• 5:58Speaker 00

  That has allowed our customers to then go and many, I mean, even other people in the market to start thinking about, you know, what if we can go global first, right? And if you look at, if you look outside of financial services or financial technology products, many of the world's biggest businesses are global first, right? If you look at Instagram, that's a global first business. If you look at TikTok, that's a global first business. If you look at X.com, if you look at Facebook, like these are global platforms where there's no distinction around, you know, can I do this, can I not do this? Information has largely been set free and now we're living in a world where transactions are being set free. Like money is starting to be set free.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Obviously there's, there's nuances and limitations on a country by country basis. And we spend a lot of time getting that, you know, sorted out and spending a lot of time making sure that we're putting our customers on the right side of all of that. But it saves our clients and partners from having to do that analysis in many cases.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  One of the comparisons that I've, I've heard someone give when you're talking about sort of like that global first approach is, you know, stablecoins are maybe the great transatlantic flight in some cases. Like, you know, you can, you can easily get money to go from one place to another, you know, a great distance, but then to almost go like the last mile in a lot of these countries on a country by country basis. That is like where there's still so much grind of, you know, off ramping in the right place, you know, different regulations, all of those sorts of things. How do you think about how that develops over, you know, the next chapter of fintech in general, of Rain in general?

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Do you start, you know, maybe you're already doing a lot of those sort of last mile things or, or do you see it differently maybe?

• 7:45Speaker 00

  I think one of the most encouraging things happening in the industry right now is the sheer amount of builders and innovators that are interested in fixing things, right? I think if you look at the global system, right, like whatever, the financial system or any, any global system, even travel borders, et cetera. There's a lot of barriers, right? And so as money moves, money has, it's like financial institutions have built infrastructure over decades. And money is not isolated in the sense that, you know, it has ended up in a specific way. If you look at air travel, for example, air travel has been hub and spoke for a long time. And money is hub and spoke. Yeah. So you go through a correspondent bank, you go to the central bank, then you clear with an international correspondent.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  They clear through a regional correspondent and then from there it goes into a domestic bank and then it goes out. Money looks a lot like travel, right? It looks a lot like human beings moving from place to place. What we've started to see in travel, right, is technology innovations that allow for smaller planes to be more efficient, to be able to fly longer distances, to connect cities that have never been connected before. Right? So if you look at, like I was in Indianapolis recently and I was walking through the airport and there was a flight to Dublin, right? Indianapolis is a midsize city, maybe, I don't even know if you could consider it a midsize city, right? And Dublin is certainly a midsize city or a smaller.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  And these are two cities that are connecting across thousands of miles for the first time because of a technology innovation in that plane that lets you connect. There's a massive bonus for the individuals that are able to use that flight to connect to the other side. The same type of thing is happening in money, right? Like there are some corridors where you're being forced hub and spoke. There's enormous friction there, right? I think this is manifested in how people like complain about cross border money movement or even like inter-party, like domestic money movement, right? Like ACH and wire still is not, I mean, like wire is fine, like, you know, it's more established, but ACH is still relatively slow. Part of it is slow because it's a batch process, part of it is slow because many banks are clearing through intermediaries.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  And so there's these types of hiccups that exist in money movement. And it's the same type of hiccups that exist even today or have existed in the past in like human movement. And so as technology is opening things up from a hub and spoke model to point to point transfers, the same thing is happening in money, right? Like stablecoins allow for counterparties to clear with each other, right? And then they're facing a different set of correspondence on a stablecoin issuing and minting and burning side than they would be if they were clearing money. And you're moving the regulatory perimeter to a different place, right? So historically, if you were a large enterprise and you wanted to settle money within your own subsidiaries, you would have to go to a financial intermediary, you'd have to move that money

• 10:40Speaker 00

  through a bunch of different financial intermediaries to then get that money into the subsidiary that you wanted and then have to do that vice versa. And that's a multi-day, multi-week process in a lot of different corridors. Your team is always focusing on that, you have to reconcile it, you have to make sure you're able to monitor that. These types of complexities are one of the largest causes of like failure to audit properly, failure to have adequate records or controls. It's not because people don't want to. It's because it's an enormously difficult human problem that has a cost, but has really no benefit. Right? So now, if you can use program programmatic money, you're an enterprise, you can hold your money digitally. You can move it through your subsidiaries, through their custodial or non custodial wallets

• 11:25Speaker 00

  in the right order, in the right way. And then you can get it out the other side. Right? That can be reconciled by a computer in a few seconds. And you can now have a resilient process in a place where you had a fragile process. And if you start extrapolating all of these micro frictions and money movement, what you end up with is you realize that there's massive hidden cost in all of the systems that we all take for granted today. And the way that that gets manifested is in higher costs for financial products and services. Right? So if you look at, even in the domestic market, like many, many people have said, you know, there's no applicability for stable coins or tokenized money in the domestic market.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  What I would say to that is that if you look at the provisioning of free credit or free checking accounts to individuals, less and less institutions are offering them. Why is that? Because the cost of offering it is getting higher and higher. Why is it getting higher and higher? There's no innovation, no, no changes in the underlying infrastructure. Banks are not adopting Fed Now, they're not adopting RGP necessarily. Where is this cost coming from? It's coming from administrative costs. Right? It's coming from the hidden cost of operating the business of moving money at scale. Right? And so if there's an opportunity to embed a better product that lets you use automation and some of the technology advancements that are,

• 12:52Speaker 00

  that many companies are now taking for granted, to then apply it to the back office of financial provisioning. Like, what does the world look like, right? Like, does everybody who is getting unbanked steadily continue getting unbanked? Probably not. Everybody that is running a program below the break even cost can potentially start running it above break even and start making a profit. These are all pretty amazing things, right? Like, one of the, one of the very simple things that we've seen across our customers, and we see this across almost every customer, right? Is because the aperture of customers that Rain can onboard is larger than your domestic only partner bank. Because we have licenses in different parts of the world. We are able to then put, take people through our compliance footprint, turn them on.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  You end up turning more people on that go through your funnel. Right? Like, somebody that would have gone through your funnel that was interested in your product, maybe they live, you know, whatever, let's say that they live in Tijuana and they're visiting family in San Diego. They see a product, they want to try it. Historically, they would have gotten rejected. Today, you could conceivably turn them on. Which now, for that platform, is the person that like, they put the ad up, that ad converted a user, and now instead of not converting, they did convert. So the average cost of customer acquisition has gone down. And then if you're using the same technical infrastructure and solution to then service that client, the break even cost of that has gone down because you don't have to build two technical integrations for that.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  What this manifests itself as that we're starting to see is that the net number of people eligible for products and services goes up. The cost of servicing them goes down, which allows companies to get a much larger return on marketing spend, much larger return on everything that they're trying to do for customer acquisition. And it drives them into profitability faster. Payment volumes grow faster. Their business is more successful faster. They're able to get to scale faster. And these are unbelievable improvements, like if you think about it. Right? And we have some clients that, you know, are on track to onboard millions of users annually. If you look at some of the most mature programs, they have a handful of millions of users.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Right? So if you think about like, what is the world going to look like? Powered by tokenized money. Like, these are the advantages. It's not like, oh, you know, last miles this or cross borders that. It's really like, hey, what if you take all the hidden friction out of provisioning financial products? Does everything have to be predatory? No. Can you provide a product that is competitive, lower cost, and make more money? Yes. Like, that is, that's like financial alchemy, right? Like, that's pretty amazing.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  I think a lot of listeners will have spent a good amount of time on stable coins and, uh, you know, thought about it quite a lot. But I really liked the framing you have used in the past when you've talked about stable coins, which is like, this is less about some extremely novel set of benefits that it delivers. And in many ways, it's actually just bringing back the benefits of cash that we, that we lost. Can you explain that a little bit?

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, look, I think if you look at some of these industries that exist today, right? Like, you look at merchant cash advance. You look at payday lending. These are industries that serve a purpose in society. Right? Now, there's a lot of people that would say that maybe some of the players that operate in those markets are not great.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, undoubtedly, right?

• 16:25Speaker 00

  Or some of them are, you know, bad actors potentially. Or they're charging rates that are far above and beyond what it would cost to service them profitably.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  I think these are fair criticisms that people have leveled. The reality is that they exist because there's a problem. And the problem is largely that settlement takes time. Right? With cash, if I'm paying for a cup of coffee and that person is then clocking out at the end of the day, the owner of that coffee shop can tip out or they can pay out that day. And then you can use that money to then take the bus home or take the subway home. And you can put that money back into society and other people can now transact with that same $10 bill. Right? Or whatever, $5 bill. And that is a huge economic boon. Our viewpoint is a very simple one, which is if you look at the history of money, like, societies globally have converged to cash. Right? Independent.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Right? Over thousands of years. So they've all evolved to cash independently over thousands of years. What does that suggest? It suggests that a non-fungible unit of exchange is probably one of the most perfect forms of monetary exchange. Over the last 50 years, society has decided, well, money, like, we're a global society, we need to be able to transmit ideas and information and now money globally. And we have to do that quickly. Right? So then we move to an electronic money system. What we left behind was the non-fungibility element of that. And so now, the way that this electronic money system operates is through billions and tens of billions or trillions of dollars afloat

• 18:01Speaker 00

  that are largely unproductive for the people whose money it is. Like, they are productive for financial intermediaries. But the people whose money it is, it's largely unproductive. And it simply exists to ease and lubricate the movement of a dollar across or euro or yen or whatever it is, across the world. And that's why it exists. But if you were to look at the cost of that, that's trillions of dollars of dead weight lost in society. And so like, for us, like, we think about this as like, look, society globally, all cultures everywhere in the world, regardless of language, color, creed, anything, have evolved to non-fungible money. Tokenized money is a way to get the benefits of electronic money and the benefits of non-fungible money.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, you had an interesting point where, I know you're an economist by training, where you, you, uh, sort of mentioned that by losing the ability to control the velocity of money, it sort of left central banks reaching for just sort of one button over and over again, which is controlling inflation.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hadn't really considered, like, in a world in which there is greater control over velocity, how do you envision economic institutions leveraging that better?

• 19:17Speaker 00

  I think there's a massive opportunity for economic expansion, right? If you think about eliminating the dead weight loss of the monetary system or even reducing it, right? Like, we're not even talking about eliminating all of it, right? It's, we're just saying, what about incremental improvements to start validating that this is valuable? If you start doing that, then you can start driving a lot of economic activity. Businesses, because the cost of running that business, if you don't need a payday lending to kind of make your employees whole, you don't need a merchant cash advance for paying, you know, whatever, 10, 15% to get that in the door. You have 10, 15% more money in the business. You can hire more staff. You can open another location after a period of time. Like, it creates this like massive boon. Right?

• 20:01Speaker 00

  I think one of the challenges in society, I mean, this is my personal opinion, is that, you know, we are kind of living in this like hyper-financialization of society. Right? And there's many benefits.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  What do you mean by that?

• 20:14Speaker 00

  I think like we've, there's like the securitization of pretty much everything, right? It's like, there's a pretty good South Park episode about the margarita machine. Where they buy a margarita machine and the warranty's been sold to some private market investors. It's a securitization. It's a hilarious episode, you should definitely watch it. But, um, it, the whole point of it is that like, there is this massive securitization infrastructure in the backend that takes basic things like, like residential real estate.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  And then now

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Shares of art, you know, private cars.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And the largest owners of those are the beneficiaries of those. You know, it's not necessarily bad because many of the winners or the owners of these assets end up being the pension plans for teachers and public employees and police and fire departments around the world. So some of that is good. But the other side of it is because there's this like hyper-financialization happening and there's like people that are extracting sort of management fees, et cetera. It becomes a bit faceless. Right? And so if you look at a lot of these businesses, they're coalescing towards this like franchise model or being part of a larger group. And it's because it's getting harder and harder to run a standalone enterprise. And part of the reason it's getting harder and harder to run a standalone enterprise is because

• 21:29Speaker 00

  if you don't have scale, you can't negotiate favorable terms from your capital partners or your payment settlement partners or your vendors. If you can make money faster, it solves some of that problem. Right? And so like, I think there's a lot of really interesting things to think about from an economic lens. I think that, you know, certainly much smarter economists and, you know, actual professional economists probably will start looking into some of the, the outcomes of what happens as money becomes sort of non-fungible and tokenized and faster and more efficient. And I'm really excited to read, you know, what comes out of that academic research.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  What were the kinds of conversations that were around your family table growing up? I think you've, you moved to the US as a, when you were sort of four or five, something like that. Yeah, what, what were you talking about at home that was? Bringing you to this point.

• 22:22Speaker 00

  You know, we were very much like an immigrant family, right? Like, like many families around the world. And it was always about like, you know, how do you kind of assimilate? How do you get access to opportunities? And a lot of it was like, how do we kind of continue building a relationship with our family and our heritage? And people back home. And a lot of time was spent on like, you know, this was not at the dinner table, but like just observing my parents. It's like, how do we send money back to do certain things? How do we, you know, yeah, like, you know, how do we get rid of some of the family assets or something like that? Whenever there's a change in the family dynamic and things like that. So it was always interesting to see kind of these barriers that existed.

• 23:04Speaker 00

  But then at the same time, I was, I was raised to be very globally minded, right? Like my parents, you know, very, I'm very grateful for them that they exposed us to the much wider world. Right? And shared, you know, a lot of different cultures and exposed us to a lot of different types of things. I always thought about the world as a place where everybody is trying to get to the same outcomes. Right? And whether you're rich or poor, whether you're in a developed country or developing market, everybody just wants the best for their kids. They want the best for themselves. They want the best, you know, access to health. They want the best access to kind of opportunity. And I think those are universal norms.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  And so when it came up, an opportunity to kind of start building a business, we really started thinking about it from like a global first perspective, right? It's like, there are people around the world, people transact with each other today. There are many micro frictions. How do we do our best to kind of reduce as many of those as we can?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Did you have entrepreneurial examples growing up? Uh, when, when did that like enter your mind as a thing that one could do?

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Maybe a little controversially, right? Like, I think that every immigrant is an entrepreneur. Like they're not really starting a business. They're starting a sole proprietorship of a new life.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Right? Like, that's kind of how I've always viewed it, which is like, you have people going from one place to another. They don't really have any business. Many, many people around the world, like they go places, they don't speak the language, right? Or they go to places, they don't know anybody. Like for me now, like looking back on my founder journey, being a founder in an industry that you don't fully understand, uh, or in a market that you don't fully understand with it, like where you don't have a network of like investors or people, your peers, whatever. It's probably the closest thing that somebody who's not an immigrant probably get to being an immigrant, right? Which is how do you navigate this like imposter syndrome of like wanting to be successful? And this new paradigm without access to any of the social, like sort of, you know,

• 25:05Speaker 00

  social crutches of how most people are accessing it. And so that, it's actually like, I mean, I've never really thought about it this way until like recently. But for me, like entrepreneurship wasn't really something that, you know, I was like, oh, there, there's a bunch of people in my family that are entrepreneurial. I always thought about it as like, my parents are here to give us access to much better opportunity set. And that's very much like being a founder, if you think about it. And there was trials and tribulations. And I'm sure if you were to ask my parents, they would say that there was a lot of very difficult times. And there was a lot of very good times and every day was good and some days were bad. And it's very much like this emotional and like intellectual roller coaster that founders and I mean, even early team members,

• 25:48Speaker 00

  even team members that like even high growth companies go through on a daily basis. Right? So I think it's like, that's, that's kind of how I view it. Uh, which is where, you know, I probably wanted to start something like I tried to start my first business when I was like 15 years old.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  What was it?

• 26:04Speaker 00

  It was a, um, online car auction website.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Were you like a car nut?

• 26:10Speaker 00

  No, no, I used to subscribe to, um, I was, I was a bit of a, I guess, um, weird kid, but I, I used to say like, I, I used to go to the library and read, um, Wired. And I was reading, uh, about like, uh, Pierre Omadyar, who had started eBay.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  And it was like, the article was about like how this was like a marketplace for Pez dispensers, whatever it was. In my head, I was like, you know, and I think my parents were like trying to buy a new car and it was like a used car or whatever it was. And I was just like going along with them, right? And I'm like, you know, wouldn't it be cool if like this process my parents are going through was like just on the internet? And, you know, I was.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Good instinct.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  I was 15 years old, right? So like, and you know, to my dad's credit, like he let me figure out, uh, if the world was going to let a 15 year old, uh, do something, uh, like that.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  And so we like tried the things and we didn't know anybody and like, we didn't know any investors. We didn't know how it worked. And, uh, honestly, like I just went through the magazine and there was like all these, um, ads for like Latham and Watkins and all these law firms, et cetera. Right? And, and I didn't know what those were either. So like, we, we just like called one of them and had a meeting and, and it, you know, it was, it was pretty clear that like, a 15 year old kid that didn't know what they were doing was probably not going to raise a bunch of money. I think the world is different now. I think like 15 year olds are building, you know, multi-billionaire businesses. Pretty cool. But it was a very different time. It was, it was, it was cool. It was like an interesting experience.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  I still own the domain name.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Oh, cause you're a huge domain hoarder, right?

• 27:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm, I'm less now. And I, I used to be, I was like, you know, what are the chances that two domains that I'm hoarding are gonna spark a good business?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  I'm the same way. I'm like, uh, if I even think about it, I'm like, I gotta, let me just see if the availability there. What was the domain for that one?

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Uh, ridearound.com.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Ridearound.com. That is pretty good.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Ridearound.com.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Wow. Oh, that's a good domain. Do you have any domains that you're, you're like, I really want to do something with this?

• 28:09Speaker 00

  You know, honestly, I just, I, I no longer have the mental space to think about that. And I'm so glad that we, like, I met my co-founder Charles in OnDeck, which is the founder fellowship. And we really connected because I was like, look, I have this like domain I'm hoarding. It's not particularly good, but it's sign and wire.com.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  And I just think it's stupid that nobody's built checkout for documents. For whatever reason, I think, um, you know, maybe he was humoring me, but it resonated with him and we started building it. And so like, that is how we ended up with Rain. So like, now I'm like, okay, well, you know, I've already gotten my ROI on my, um, domain hoarding. So like I, I can, I can, I can rest easy. Unburden myself and start like not renewing some of these and honestly give some of these good names back to the, the world in the form of registrable domains.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  I personally really have a lot of disdain for, um, domain squatters.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  I know.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  Borders are different, but squatters.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  You know, all of them are sort of in a, in a closet, in a, you know, in a box rather than, uh, you know, trying to sell them for a huge profit here. You've had this like really interesting career before Rain, in my opinion, because on the one hand, there's like a lot of traditional sort of roles in it. Like, you know, you, you work at Lehman Brothers before the crash as an intern, which is, you know, kind of a, uh, an interesting chapter. Then, you know, Booz Allen, like very traditional stuff. And then also like extremely high openness, it feels like where you also, you know, do a scooter startup. And as far as I could tell, you like briefly ran for city council. Help me understand what, what were you looking for in those early parts of your career? What were you testing?

• 29:44Speaker 00

  I don't think I've really tested anything. I was like mostly just trying to do things I was interested at the time. Right? Like, I think, um, so when I got out of school, I, I worked at Accenture in management consulting. Honestly, it was a great role and I got to experience a lot of different things.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  You really mean that?

• 30:00Speaker 00

  I, I did. I like, I'll tell you the most important thing I think I learned, um, as a young person, which is the value of sitting down and shutting up.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Is that a good value?

• 30:11Speaker 00

  I honestly, I think it's one of the most underappreciated values of for people very early in their career. Right? Like, I think everybody, we're all told that we're all very special and we're all very smart. And I certainly used to think that about myself. Uh, I've learned the, uh, the reality is not quite, uh, quite like that. But I think one of the most valuable things I learned, uh, early on was that there's a lot of people that know a lot more than you. And this is an opportunity for you to learn. And if you don't take advantage of it and you're, you know, essentially using it by squandering your ability to build a relationship by your hubris, or whatever it is, which is often uninformed or ill-informed or misguided, you are going to squander this opportunity.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  And I certainly did squander a lot of opportunities by being sort of a brash, young, annoying person. Right?

• 31:01Speaker 01

  You, you give off such a different vibe. Were you really a brash?

• 31:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I was like, I, I was probably no different than many people in the world, which is high on my own supply. Right? Which is felt like I could, you know, I was better than everybody else or whatever. Right? Like, and it's largely because, you know, um, I'm fortunate to have gone to public school in the United States. And for better or worse, like a lot of my peers and me were told that we were better than everybody else. Right? And we were always going to have a lot of success. And it was, it was actually one of the best parts about the education system. I think it manifested itself later in life as like potentially something negative.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  But you have to kind of learn. And sometimes the easiest way to learn is by like making mistakes. And, um, I think now it's like, you know, I, I, I think that, you know, one of the things I've learned is, you know, not knowing things is actually a huge, like, it's a huge power. Right? Because you can learn it and you can learn it from somebody that knows it a lot better than you. And somebody that has the experience to teach you how not to make the same mistakes that they've made. And, uh, if you don't think about it from like that perspective, you may end up in a position where you feel like you're the only person that has the wisdom to make the right decision. And most of the time that's wrong.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  How do you protect yourself? You know, if you follow that through. You almost certainly wouldn't found rein to some level, right? Like, there has to be some level of a beginner's mind that makes you think all the mistakes that people have made. I I've heard them, but actually, I don't believe it, or I'm gonna avoid it. Like, how do you keep the sort of good ignorance that you need to be a founder in some ways, but also have the wisdom to listen to people? Like, there's some tension there?

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Well, I think a lot of it is discovery, right? I think just taking things for granted that people tell you to be true is probably not the right way to go through life either, right? I think you should validate the advice. And I mean, it's like, you know, I guess there's a famous quote from Ronald Reagan, right? Like, it's like, you should trust but verify. And I mean, if you're trying to build stuff, you want to do things with your life, well, you should try trust but verify, right? Like, I wasn't particularly interested in running for city council, but like, I was like, you know, cost a hundred dollars. I wonder what like the worst thing that could happen is.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  And I filed it and, you know, I ended up on the ballot and I realized pretty quickly that I'm like, you know, I'm just not passionate about this. But I had, I learned that after I started doing it, right? Rather than just making up my mind beforehand. And so I decided not to do it. So I, you know, I wasn't technically in the race because I was on the ballot, but I was not on the the polls.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  I see, okay.

• 33:39Speaker 00

  Or whatever, I wasn't in the actual, uh, the ballot paper.

• 33:41Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  And then, you know, I think other things in my life, I've wanted to just learn different industries and try to figure things out and like just be exposed to those things, right? And so I'm very fortunate, I've had the opportunity to do that. I'm also very fortunate that I've been able to do other things, right? Like, I think a lot of people are worried about, you know, if I do this or take this job, then I'm forever gonna be this. Like, if I do the, you know, job doing ABC, I'm always gonna be the ABC guy.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:09Speaker 00

  I think some of that is overblown.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think, you know, it's one of the traits that I find most admirable is people who are willing to sort of reinvent themselves, reimagine themselves. Like, I think it takes something that's, it says something about your mind that you're able to hold in your head, like, yeah, I'll give it a shot to be a city councillor, but then also say, actually, you know, that's not for me. I'm gonna do something totally different. I'm gonna be a, uh, a scooter mogul or a stablecoin mogul. Like, those are two very different things.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Look, I do credit my, like, brief stint in scooters to, like, re- spark my interest in entrepreneurship. Right? Like, I was kind of in this, like, larger enterprise, um, motion in my career and I took a sabbatical, ended up working at a friend's scooter startup on an uncompensated basis, like, just as an advisor. And, um, it was a very magnetic place. Like, there was a lot of really young people and they were motivated and they were trying to make things happen and do stuff and like, and the company was making a bunch of very simple mistakes. And, you know, I think later my career, I, at that point, I've just, I'd kind of been around operating and I'd realize that like, oh, like, some of these are just, like, these are easily solvable mistakes.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  Right? Like, unit economics, like, if you get it right, like, on the micro level, like, you kind of don't have to worry about it for a while. Right? As long as you're not losing money in every transaction, the more transactions you do, like, the better. You generally know, okay, I'm doing okay. Right? But there's like businesses where if you don't get that right, the more, and I've had that too. Like, I, I had a, you know, I, a brief stint at a, I mean, I, I wanted to start a business, like, sort of before I went back into banking. And, uh, I sold toilet paper on the internet. And I had the unit economics all wrong.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, okay.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  So very easily lost like tens of thousands of dollars as the business started scaling. And so like, there's like, like, these are lessons you learn, right? Like, some people learn these in an MBA. And you pay for that and sometimes you learn it in real life and you also pay for that. And so it's just important to learn it.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  So you go to OnDeck, which is sort of where this, this begins in a sense. Uh, and that's where you meet Charles. Did you guys immediately sort of hit it off?

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, like, we, we kind of chatted on like a video call. I was in San Francisco, he was in New York. And a few weeks later, I was gonna be in New York. And so I just told him, hey, man, like, would it be great to catch up for the, for coffee? We connected and I kind of pitched him on this, like, sign-in wire, sort of micro SaaS idea. And, uh, yeah, and I felt like, I think he wanted to try something, right? Like, I think, you know, I think the really great thing about OnDeck was that it was a community of people that really were highly motivated to start something.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  And I think the challenge of being in a community where everybody wants to be a co-founder of something or start something is you spend a lot of time validating ideas. Right? And so you're meeting a bunch of people, they have ideas. And like, I'd been on deck, I, like, I'd been on, in the OnDeck, uh, group, like, in a different cohort much earlier, when I was like, kind of building a different business and I was trying to get people to join that business and be my co-founder for that. And like, it kind of didn't work because it was my idea. To be honest, it was probably a bad idea too. So anyways, it was a bad idea.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Real estate data, right?

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, real estate data. That wasn't the original pitch. It was like, I was trying to build like a neo-bank or whatever it was, uh, for landlords. And, um, it wasn't a particularly good idea. It wasn't like, I wasn't particularly the best founder to do that idea either. And I was trying to pitch other people to like be my co-founder on it. And like, a lot of other people weren't really the best person to build that either with, right? Like, they didn't have any experience there, they weren't particularly interested in like joining somebody's half-baked idea, they would much rather come up with a full, like, an, an early baked idea, uh, or put the ingredients together, come up with an idea early on and have that pride of ownership of wanting to do it. And like, when I kind of was in the process of winding that business down, I, you know, I decided, okay, this is over.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  And so I was just re-engaging with folks and being like, okay, like, I wanna join somebody. I wanna do something, I wanna do something else. And I don't have any idea what it is. And so we went through sort of like the idea maze a little bit together and this is just a stupid thing. I was like, look, you know, this is just a way for us to see if we can work together. Right? Because ideas are ideas. Opportunities are opportunities, but like, the biggest reason most companies fail is like co-founder dynamics. Right? Um, it's, so you, you actually fail before you even get the first customer or the first dollar, whatever it is. And, uh, I wanted to really make sure that like, you know, hey, let's, let's just try something. Let's just build something very low pressure. And I think we were fortunate that we just actually set it up properly.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  We had like, we set up a company, we gave each other equity, we like, did the stuff, we like, signed the forms, like, and, uh, we like both seeded some money into it, right, together and just tried. And we were, we, I think it was just, uh, we were a good partnership. Like, we were good at sort of rounding each other out in ways that we, uh, were, you know, in the ways that we weren't so strong, right? Like, he's really good at some stuff that I'm not so good at. I think I'm okay at stuff that he's maybe not so good at. And so I think that's, um, yeah, that's, that's essentially how it happened.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  And Sign-in Wire is still up and running, it looks like.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  It's not up and running, we still have the website up, we still have the website up. But it's, it does, it's not live, it doesn't have any, like, there's no, you can't sign up, you can't use it. We keep it live, just, you know, for-

• 39:32Speaker 01

  For the lore?

• 39:32Speaker 00

  For the lore, yeah. It's an inter, it's a good internal, um, Easter egg.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  And, uh, we keep it live because like, it's, uh, you know, I made the website, you know, Charles did everything else.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, I love it.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  But, uh, yeah, so we, we, we keep, we keep paying for the domain largely because I think our, our Google account is like just that.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. Was there a point at which you, like, clearly felt your ambition sort of entered a new level from Sign-in Wire? Or was it always sort of just like, hey, this is clearly a tester for a bigger thing ahead of us?

• 40:04Speaker 00

  Look, we didn't really have that ambition going into it, right? Like, again, our goal was to figure out if we're good collaborator. And our other goal was, let's build something people use. Right? And we built it, we had people that were asking us, hey, you know, the stablecoin thing's going on, can you add support for that? So we did a quick sprint, or Charles did a sprint over a weekend, I had no technical capabilities. Um, but anyway, so he did that and we had stablecoins running on it the following week. And then people, we shared that with some folks that had asked us for it. Those people connected us to other people that were in the stablecoin ecosystem. We were also separately going into, uh, you know, just exploring what was going on in FTS and some of this other stuff in the market, uh, in our personal portfolios. We were just interested in like what was happening, right?

• 40:49Speaker 00

  It was a really interesting space, like Charles knew a lot more about it than I did. Um, but I did notice something, which was that some of the smartest people I knew in traditional financial services were going into digital assets. And I was like, I'm probably, I'm too stupid to know what it is that they're seeing here, but like, that's definitely, something's going on. And so I was interested in figuring out what that was. And, um, we just got sort of plugged into the slipstream of people that were interested in stablecoins. Just sort of by engaging with early customers for Sign-in Wire. And from there, we learned that, okay, like, there's potentially this is a pretty large opportunity. And at the time, the opportunity was, there's like a hundred billion dollar digital asset treasury market, which was companies building in the digital asset ecosystem.

• 41:33Speaker 00

  And their goal was to make money, right? Like, they were businesses, they had raised capital, they had teams, they were selling products and services, they wanted to make money. And, um, their native currency was stablecoins. And so it felt very much like, you know, a top 50 global economy didn't have the ability to move any money or do anything. They had no financial infrastructure. And then I remember going on the internet and looking up like, how much is the largest, I think, the, the country comp at the time was like Jordan. And I, I remember looking it up, I'm like, how much is the biggest bank in Jordan worth? And it was like billions of dollars. And I was like, you know what, like, what if we become the biggest bank in this small economy?

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And by the way, Jordan is growing every year, you know?

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's growing every year. I'm like, okay, what if we become like the largest infrastructure player in this like, small ecosystem? I looked up the math and I was like, oh, well, you know, you could be pretty big.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  I mean, not massive, but like, not small.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yeah, as you, yeah, if you imagine that the country of Jordan's doubling every year, then suddenly I guess we're really, really-

• 42:30Speaker 00

  And we were like, okay, well, what if we'd like dig into this? Like, what if we'd start solving? And the people were like, please help us solve these problems. The more we looked into it, the more we dug into it, more we figured out that like, wow, like, this is most likely, I mean, look, it's already the contemporary future because people were already transacting in real time around the world. And there was billions of dollars of it. We also realized that this more or less is going to be significantly better than the traditional infrastructure when there's regulatory clarity. We started digging more into it and I looked up like, you know, what were central banks and regulators saying about this stuff? And government regulators were saying one thing. Central bank regulators were saying, this is the future of financial services.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  So you're like, okay, well, central banks will most likely get the world that they want because they are the ones that drive global monetary policy.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  I mean, of all the things that you could have picked during that era of like very peak crypto-y stuff, like you really picked a good one. Like, you know, I think.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  Look, I think yes and no, right? Like, we could have picked things that would have had a much faster maturity arc, would have had a much faster valuation jump, right? Much faster revenue arc.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Like what?

• 43:41Speaker 00

  Like, you know, like we could have picked like being a NFT checkout, right?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  But that would not be have aged so well, right?

• 43:48Speaker 00

  Sure, but you know, many of those people eventually either made hundreds of millions of dollars in that cycle.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Which would have been a great outcome in revenue and like profit. Many of those folks ended up converting themselves to a stablecoin orchestration business. And then many of, some of them have exited, right? Uh, for billions of dollars. And like, it might have been smarter, right? Like it's a tiny value money.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  I think your game would have, uh, you know, either you would have had to reinvent yourself along the way or the game would have been run.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  Um, I mean, yeah, it's like, I think for us, like we, we just, we had conviction in what was happening here, right? For us, like, because I came from that institutional background and Charles had spent time at Intuit, which is also a large business. I think one of the things we realized was like, you can't bootstrap time. You can't bootstrap time in market. You can't bootstrap number of customers served and for a period of time. Right? And so our thinking was like, look, institutions are going to have to adopt this because central banks will effectively mandate it. Um, and regulations will come in that makes this interoperable with existing financial infrastructure. And that was our bet. It was an easy bet to make at the time because there was draft bills that were saying that in like Europe and the US.

• 45:02Speaker 00

  And like, it wasn't like, oh, we're operating out of nowhere or we're like geniuses or genie, like whatever, like we're, you know, fortune tellers. It was just, there was all this stuff, like you could just see it and read it, right? And it ended up taking a lot longer than we expected, which very easily could have gone a different way. And, you know, we're, we're just very fortunate that things just started moving in the direction that they did. And things started evolving the way they did. And we've actually been just incredibly, you know, pleasantly surprised at like just the massive amount of enterprise interest and what this means for their business, which means that many people like us have been following this technology for several years. And they've had working groups and they've thought about this.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  And there's people that these companies that have been there for like five, six years, seven years, eight years, thinking about like, okay, what, when we can act, what would we do? And so many of these people now are coming to us and saying, hey, we have a fully baked idea. We're ready to go. This is how we would use this, this, and this, and we want to turn it on.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  When did that change? Like how, you know, how long was it really a grind for? And at what point did it start to feel like the market was pulling you a bit more than you had to push it?

• 46:12Speaker 00

  We were always very fortunate for the grind, right? Because we knew that we were building the hard stuff, right? Like we were building the financial infrastructure, the authorization technology, the settlement technology, the reconciliation infrastructure, the ability to do it from multiple chains and multiple tokens and multiple currencies. All that stuff was hard. Building that without massive market demand pressure was actually really good, right? Because we got to build it, we got to test it with the customers we had. That was, had a natural organic growth curve. So we were continuing to grow. We were continuing to build our time and market and our reputation with our customers. I think one of the coolest things about it is that many of our customers, like on the consumer side today, the founders of those companies

• 46:55Speaker 00

  were people that were involved in some of the earlier B two B partners that we had. And they ended up quitting and becoming founders and doing stuff. And they had a good affinity, like the positive affinity with Rain because they used us as like their corporate product. And it worked, right? It just worked, like it worked for them and they trusted us for it to work for their new company. And we were really fortunate to have gotten into that slipstream to have that trust, which is the hardest thing to bootstrap, right?

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Yes. If you use a Rain card today, you know, let's say I am going to the coffee shop and you know, one of your customers, you know, you're powering it. Like what exactly is happening in the flow?

• 47:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I mean, we have different types of products. We do sort of a pre-funded product or a prepaid product, which is playing against an on-chain balance. We also have credit products. The credit products are a lot more complicated because there's usually a warehouse lender or another capital partner on the backend. Uh, that is originating, like we're originating the receivable, selling that to a, to a capital partner. Then there's a repayment period and the repayments can come in. We have programs where some of the repayments come in fiat, you know, just the normal traditional way. We have other products where it pulls against like a DeFi protocol and then you just pay the DeFi protocol back. So there's a bunch of different ways that you can architect the credit stuff. On the other side, we have sort of a wallet linked spend product, right? Where you can connect any wallet with any balance on any blockchain and any token.

• 48:20Speaker 00

  And you tap that instrument. There's a way for us to kind of put that into a pending state, the same way that systems work today. We never take that money from you. Like it's always in your custody for any of these custodial products. And we have partners that are custodians, they hold custodial assets, um, under the licenses. And when the settlement comes in for, the request for the finality of that transaction comes in from the payment network, we're then settling that transaction entirely on the blockchain. So there's no fiat dependency. All of it is seven days a week, 24 hours a day between us and our partners and then also with the payment networks. We have our own kind of internal, uh, ability to, you know,

• 49:02Speaker 00

  clear the balances across the various different tokens we support, across the chains we support, and get them into the right sort of correspondent currency to be able to settle with our counterparties.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  And how do you sort of conceive of the business and its sort of constituent parts? Like, do you think of it as sort of a credit business and a different chunk like, or, or how do you put the pieces together in your mind a bit?

• 49:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we think of ourselves as a money business, right? So we're financial technology infrastructure. We're, we're software for money, like a money, we're effectively a money router, right? Like you're familiar with token routers for AI. We're a money router, right? And part of the value of routing is you want to understand the context for that transaction, right? And why it's being done, where it needs to go and what is the path that it needs to go down? And that's how we think about our business. The other side of it, which is like the complexity of like, hey, the different products like credit, uh, virtual accounts, payments and payouts, fiat interoperability, token interoperability, debit card versus charge card versus credit card, et cetera. The way we think about that is that

• 50:10Speaker 00

  these are all different use cases for the operating system we're building for money, right? Money is the lifeblood of every business. Like that it is literally their, their actual life, uh, for a business. And our thinking was, is that as tokenized money is coming in, uh, to the market, as it's gaining adoption, as there's regulatory clarity for like genius and Mika in Europe, et cetera. As additional countries are coming out with stablecoin legislation, that some countries are coming out with CBDC regulations. Over the next like five to 10 years, people are going to realize that this is just not only real money, not only is it legal tender, it's also table stakes for their business. And when people realize that it's table stakes for their business and this is just legal tender

• 50:55Speaker 00

  and it's just the eventuality of where the world is headed, they're all going to have to find a partner to do the thing with. Like, you know, the way we think about it is that how can we be in each individual use case so that we can support, um, the eventual demand that will come from, you know, enterprise, small business, anybody?

• 51:13Speaker 01

  I think you've, uh, said before that you're a fan of The Art of War. What are the places in Rain's history where you've had to rely on some of those lessons or strategies most? Are there things that come to mind?

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Well, I think if you read, if you read The Art of War, and I recommend it, it's like a very quick read. It's not particularly difficult. Um, most of it is about waiting, uh, right? Which is not particularly exciting or sexy. But if you're an early stage company, you're up against so many different things. Like you're up against resource constraints. You're up against like the ability to execute, uh, with a limited set of resources and people. You're up against a deficiency in the amount of trust that people place in you. You're up against people with more money, more resources, larger platforms. And I think Art of War is useful because the book is really about like being an underdog and like, how do you

• 52:06Speaker 00

  use the attributes of whoever you're competing against, against them, right? And that's why it's like super interesting. Like, I mean, that's why I really like it as like a book about being a founder, really. Uh, not to say that like we're in a war, like we're definitely not, we're very fortunate to not have to do any of the hard stuff that happens in war. But I will say that it is really valuable to think about like the importance of patience. Right? Like I know that, you know, many of my peers and a lot of other really talented founders and builders are out there doing like nine, nine, six, and they're grinding and they're doing as much as they can. A lot of the time you kind of have to do the work and you have to let the world kind of respond.

• 52:48Speaker 00

  And just simply keeping the tempo up or pushing is doing as much as you can, doesn't necessarily get you the outcomes you want. Like sometimes you have to, like, stand by the riverbank and wait.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Until the right time or the right weather or the right whatever. And then you got to cross and do the next thing, right? And I think that was really poignant when I read it and it was, and it was very important to like, you know, take your time, like, you know, when things weren't going well, there was opportunities to pivot into things that were going well, like we could have launched a token. We could have launched out DeFi protocol. We could have done a bunch of different things that would have created economic value in that time. But for us, like, we didn't have any counterpoints to our thesis or vision, right? We were thinking, okay, this is going to be the future of financial services. Regulations are going to come in eventually. There'll be regulatory clarity and enterprise interest.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  And there was actually no counterpoints, like, you know, banks like JP Morgan were running JPMD offshore. Like other institutions were exploring tokenized deposits. Countries were passing regulations or markets like Europe were passing regulations. And so it very much felt like, okay, well, there's no like counterfactual that we're up against, which is that this is not true. The world we believe is going to exist is not going to exist. And so it kind of made it easier to just stay focused. Whereas like, I think if you are up against counterfactuals that say, okay, your idea is stupid. And here's why, and here's the reasons why, like, you probably should switch. All right. I think for us, we were, I mean, maybe we were naive or stupid or ignorant and we weren't paying attention.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  But for us, it just seemed like, okay, if we just keep going, there will be a there there.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  In general, I find like the argument around nine nine six that, you know, like Twitter becomes obsessed with. Sort of dull because it's just like, of course, to build something excellent, you have to do excellent work and there's lots of different ways to do that. The way that you were just describing it then, is it, is it fair to say that your culture is more output driven than input driven? Do you care about like, maybe it's not exactly those hours, but how do you, how do you make sure you get what you need to out of the team?

• 55:01Speaker 00

  Look, I think we hire people that have agency and we give them the responsibility to deliver the thing that they're responsible for. Then we get out of their way, to the extent possible, right? That has been working for us, right? I think one of the biggest challenges that every company probably faces as they grow is things that used to work, stop working, new things have to work, right? So we're always fine tuning it, but I think the main thing we're focused on is like, how do we get folks that want to solve the problem and have purity of vision on like what we're hoping to accomplish? If you can solve for those things, you end up with people that want to do that, right? And they have the patience to do that.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  A lot of times it's very hard to find people like that.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  You mentioned in a, an interview that you gave recently, that the data that you guys see is, you know, very compelling around stablecoin flows and that much, much more of it sort of originates and terminates in America than people realize, you know? I think myself included, I often think of stablecoins as sort of like an emerging market story, you know, an Argentina story, a Nigeria story. What are people missing there and like, what is the, what explains those flows to America?

• 56:15Speaker 00

  One of the easiest ways to explain that flow, right? Is that the United States is the source of much of the world's innovation over the last several decades. Right? Many of the world's largest platforms for, you know, home shares or travel or buying goods and services or streaming media or music, they're American, right? And thereby they acquire, or like even AI, right? Like massive amounts of our customers are transacting on AI tools. All of those are, I mean, not all of them, but like many of them are here in the United States.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  Even many of the routers that are routing to like Chinese tools, like they're also here in the United States.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  And so that explains a lot of where the money ends up, right? Where consumers around the world are increasingly and continuing to buy US goods and services.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  And people just don't realize that many, much of that purchasing is already done with stablecoins across these services.

• 57:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, tens of billions of dollars. I mean, and this is just getting started. It's unbelievable. Like we, there's like merchants that are getting billions of dollars of annual volume in stablecoins. We've chatted to some of them, they're like, we had no idea, right? It's pretty crazy, right? It's a really cool part of the market that we get to see, which is just, you know, how many of these people are not even aware that this is happening under the hood?

• 57:38Speaker 01

  How can that be that they're not aware of it? Because it's such a tiny percentage of the whole for them.

• 57:42Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, cause well, settlement for them, like on their side, it's still going through the traditional infrastructure, right? It's like the way they interface with it is the same way they interface with everything. So for them, they'd have to opt into it, right? It's, look, it's, it's, the way I describe it to people is like, if you think about how a mobile phone adoption worked, like if you had a landline, you didn't, you never had to opt into a mobile phone, right? Like somebody could call you and you picked up the phone the way you're used to.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't know they're calling you from a, from a.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  Maybe the quality was worse, right? Like quality was bad. And so like, maybe that's how you found out.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  And then they would say, okay, you know, can I text you? And you'd be like, what are you talking about? You can't text me, I'm on a landline.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  And so that's how people mostly found out about they were interfacing with mobile phones, right? Like the consumer told them. And that was a really amazing way to get adoption for mobile phones, right? And so for us, like that, that's the exciting part about this is that our customers can opt in and no one else has to, right? Like we have, if you had interoperability, so if you want to send money in and out of an account, you want to send money to a European bank account, whatever it is, Mexican bank account in and out, you can do all of that. You want to use a payment credential to pay for something at any POS terminal, largely anywhere in the world. You can do that too. And the consumer doesn't have to pick and neither does the merchant. And that's really exciting for us.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  Just because technology is shifting or there's innovation happening, why does anybody have to opt in? Why, why force them to make a cognitive decision?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  You, you, you mentioned that, you know, you haven't, you're not in a war, uh, which is true. But the market you're in is certainly one that people are interested in, right? Like you have people who are, you have competitors, you have big incumbents that are interested in this space. When I was talking to some, some folks in the stablecoin space and I was saying, you know, what, what are interesting things for me to ask Faruk? They said, it would be interesting to hear his take on why Stripe doesn't just win this whole thing. Uh, you know, they bought Bridge, uh, they're clearly very interested in this space. Stripe, Visa, whoever you want to pick, like, why doesn't this become winner takes all with, you know, favoring some of the bigger companies in the space?

• 59:49Speaker 00

  What I'll say to that is also pretty straightforward, right? Our viewpoint that is that all money is changing everywhere in the world for everybody, whether you like it or not. And if you want to quantify the opportunity space for what that means, that means that every institution anywhere in the world, including individuals and your local bodega, whatever it is, has to figure this out. And there's going to be an upgrade of everything in the backend at some point, just even to support interoperability with the new stuff, even if it's not moving everything to the new stuff. What that means from a magnitude perspective is that money quantifiably is larger than AI. It's larger than food. It's larger than oil and gas. It's larger than municipal water supplies. It's larger than government spending.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  It's larger than defense. It's all of these combined. So if you think about how many trillion dollar companies there are in AI, how many trillion dollar companies there are in every other market? How many trillionaires there are individually? That's the addressable market for what's up for grabs. That is enormous, right? And so for somebody out there to be a hundred and sixty billion dollar company like Stripe, by taking advantage of this, maybe they can get to a trillion dollars, two, three, four, however big. That will still be a fraction of what is up for grabs. And so our viewpoint is that if the entire world is shifting, why bother thinking about like, oh, I'm going to compete with so and so, or I'm going to compete with that?

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  The amount of people that are going to be impacted by this is massive and it is much larger than every other market combined.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  And so like, what is the price of that stuff for grabs? What is the, what's the, what's the first place company going to be worth? What's the second place company going to be worth? Like it is unfathomably large. And so it's almost not even worth thinking about. The other thing that we would say is that the Stripe team is excellent. Like they're executing very well. They're, you know, we have a ton of respect for them. They've been an amazing business in this fintech space for a long time. And the way we think about it is that like, they have made up their mind to go after kind of a platform strategy, which is very much built on individual building blocks that are in, in their ecosystem. From our vantage point and, you know, some of the things we hear in, in commercial conversations is that it feels very much like a, a secret garden or wall of garden, a closed loop approach, which again is great.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  Like they have scale, they have massive merchant adoption, they have massive volume and their ecosystem is very large. The reality is, is that in any, again, if you look back to most innovation, right? In most industries, if you look at the early days in the internet, the early days of the internet was punctuated by. People that wanted to build a closed-loop ecosystem. And it was enormously valuable. Right? If you look at AOL, that was an enormously valuable business, like massively valuable.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Wait, help me out there. What do you mean by a closed-loop system for AOL?

• 1:02:44Speaker 00

  It was a curated internet, right? And AOL was on all sides of it. Like, it was the only way to access it was through AOL.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  I see.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  Every property that you engaged with was AOL. Everybody inside that ecosystem was curated by AOL. There's private enterprise there, but it was all curated by a single party. And it was enormously valuable business. There were some companies that were building the open internet. And the open internet was the wrong decision for a long time. But ultimately, it was the right decision. Because the open internet is an order of magnitude, much, many large orders of magnitude, larger than the closed internet. That's kind of the same thing we feel like is going to happen here. Which is that there is going to be credible opportunities for people to build a very large, valuable property around their ecosystem. Because they have distribution, which is phenomenal.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  There are people, the vast majority of the world is outside of their ecosystem.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  I'd love to talk a little bit about your style as a builder, how you run the company. We've touched on it maybe a little bit. But one thing that struck me was you and Charles apparently do one 30-minute meeting a month as the only sort of standing meeting. Is that still true?

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true, yeah.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  How do you maintain enough alignment that that's the only sort of, you know, on-the calendaring conversation that's required?

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  To be honest, I don't know. I don't know how we do it.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Do you just really, you guys sort of see things very similarly naturally?

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  Look, we're just very vision-aligned. Like, we are hoping to accomplish the same thing. And everything is working off of that. So everything we think about is driven by that. We're very aligned on like how we want things to work. And where, and what it takes to get there. And like, we set the agenda at the beginning of the year. We fine-tune the agenda, I guess, in these 30-minute sessions. And we get on with it, right? Like, there's so many other demands on our time. Like, we trust each other, right? Like, he runs a very large part of our organization. And I trust him to do a great job. Right? I think similarly, if, I don't know, I don't want to speak for him, but I hope that he trusts me to do a good job.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  I would think so, given this is the arrangement. If I have to imagine what requires that 30 minutes a month, is it like 90% people's stuff? Like, what actually like needs that calibration?

• 1:05:04Speaker 00

  A lot of it is like prioritization, right? Like, you know, I have a saying, the team's making fun of me before it, is everything, life is fluid. And so 30 minutes are spent like figuring out like which, which way to go, really, on what? Right? Because in one month, we may have a priority for one thing. Next month, we may have a different priority that is superseding that old priority. And so a lot of it is just calibration. Like, most of the time we spend together is calibrating. Which is, hey, what are the things your team is sprinting on? How do we kind of move them up or down the queue? Who are the deals that we're closing? Or what are the opportunities they had that are interesting or important? How do we start slicing them in now? So that it's not a surprise in two months that we have to do this.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. I love hearing that this is the team, thing that the team makes fun of you for. Because I think something that, you know, CEOs learn as they scale, as far as I can tell at least, is that you end up having to repeat certain messages over and over and over, right? There's like five things that, because new people are coming in, priorities are changing. What are the mantras that are most critical to know inside of brain?

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  Look, I had a meeting the other day with several members of our team. One of the things I shared with them is that, look, when you join a company, maybe at the scale people perceive us to be at, right? I wouldn't say it's the scale we're at. We're still a very small, scrappy company. And we like that. We want to stay that as long as possible. But whenever people join from like outside, and they come in and they're like, wow, like this is a whatever, I mean, people project so many things on us. And what I told them is that, look, you're here because you're special. And you have made it, and you meet our standards. You have a lot of great ideas about how your day-to-day sucks. And how it can be better. You are probably hesitating on sharing what those are.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  Because you feel like there's some organizational inertia or some amount of special effort. And smart people have spent a lot of time making it the way it is. But most likely, the way things are is just because they had to be this way. And it wasn't something that was well-considered or thought out. It just became this way because we've had other things to worry about. And so if you have good ideas, you should raise your hand and say, hey, this sucks. I have a better way to do it. Or, hey, I already tried a better way to do it. And we should all do it this way. Right? So I think it's really important to always share with the team, especially in early-stage companies, especially if you're growing fast, with new people joining. Is that just because

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  the market says that you're a Series C startup or whatever it is, doesn't mean that we are what most Series C startups would be. Doesn't necessarily mean that we have that pride of, you know, infrastructure, or pride of, you know, durability, or whatever it is, on our side that we have thoughtfully curated. There's a lot of things we're trying to thoughtfully curate. But not everything is going to be like that. And if you're coming in and you're immediately being confronted by something that sucks or is broken, that's not by design. That's largely because it's an oversight. Or, you know, it hasn't been stress-tested to be able to, you know, support somebody that has the experience and caliber that you have. And so we should be fixing those things. So like,

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  that's one of the things that we find ourselves repeating over and over again, which is like just reminding the team that they have the agency to make this the kind of place that they would like to work at. And make this the type of place where their day-to-day is the way they want it to be. Right? I think a lot of times, like, you have that organizational inertia. And if you don't specifically say it, it ends up, people just get that negative reinforcement. Where they're like, well, you know, maybe the CEO likes it this way. Or maybe, maybe the, my manager likes it this way. And if it's not working, or if there's manual intervention required for basic things that are enormously chafing to you, it's not by design.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Speaking of fluidity, there's sort of this new economic buyer that has entered the world, which, you know, are agents. How does that impact the way that you view what it is that you're trying to build? And, you know, the way that you steer this ship?

• 1:09:13Speaker 00

  It's part and parcel of what our thesis is, right? This financial infrastructure will improve. And will allow for the creation and maturation and adoption of things that we haven't been able to think about today. Right? I think that's the coolest part. Like, I think I've said this before, which is one of the coolest things that has come out of like mobile phones. Like, I'm like obsessed with like the mobile phone kind of adoption curve, because it's so interesting. If you talk to the people who invented the mobile phone, and you said, hey, you know, people are going to play Candy Crush in the subway car? They'd be like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, it's crazy. And if you tell them, you know, you're going to invent this device that connects to like a radio wave to send a phone call? And some guy's going to make a billion dollars in games?

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  And like, just be one of the richest people in the world? It'd be nuts. Like, how are those two things connected? Right? And so what's really exciting about this industry is that element. Like, I'm super excited about like, what are the things that our clients and partners and collaborators are going to build? That wasn't possible before. There's a lot of things that are possible, and you can upgrade them, make them better. More than that, new things that were never contemplated, or were contemplated but were not technically feasible. And that's the really exciting part, right? It's, you know, it's like tokenized money movement, programmatic settlement, infinitely divisible cash, to be able to go to wherever. And micro-payments, the ability to have an agent consume media on a

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  per-view basis or per-line basis. How does that potentially reinvigorate printed media? How does that reinvigorate content? How does that create a different dynamic from what exists today? Like, there's so many interesting sort of rabbit holes to think about where the world will go. And it's impossible to know. But the exciting part about it is, we meet founders and builders every day. That are trying to do crazy stuff, right?

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  What's the craziest thing of late?

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  We're running an agentic startup program. And some of the agentic use cases are really super interesting, right? It's like, how do you, and they're not connected to payment cards at all. It's just like, how do we get agents to transact for various different things? We have a client that's built a really cool AI concierge service. Where the concierge will just do stuff for you, and they'll just invoice you.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  Right? Like, it's just basic stuff. Like, it's stuff that people have wished, you know, I wish I could get tickets to the US Open. And I think about it today, and I forget. And then I don't know where the email is. And then I forget, and I just don't have it. And a bunch of people with bots get all the tickets. And then they sell them to me for a much higher price. If I think about it, I ask my agent, I'm like, hey, can you get me US Open tickets? You know, don't spend more than whatever, X number of dollars.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  It's a machine, it's going to remember. Right? Like, that's a very simple, interesting use case that lots of people can use. Similarly, if, let's say I'm in the subway, and I'm going home, I'm like, you know, I forgot to get toothpaste. Hey, can you please get me some toothpaste? Or like, I don't have cell service, I can't pull up the delivery apps. I can get the text out between stations, and the agent can do the thing. Like, these are micro-improvements, but the net impact of these is potentially very large.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I totally agree. Well, I always like to end with a more sort of thought experiment or philosophical question. If you had the ability to run any experiment in the world with unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what's an experiment you'd like to run?

• 1:12:45Speaker 00

  I'm like fascinated by the concept of like UBI. And I would probably, if I had unlimited resources and no risk of blowing things up permanently forever, I'd probably run that type of experiment. I'd see like what people do when you have something like that. Right? I think more and more people are worried about the prospects for, for the human condition, right? I mean, I don't know if it's right or wrong to be worried about it, but I know that a lot of people are. And many folks have suggested, oh, well, you know, we'll just have UBI, and it'd be great. Like, we'll have machines do everything, and we'll all have all the money we need. But what is, what is the all the money you need? What is the right amount? Like, what is the right amount for who, at what age, wherever? And like, what would they do with it?

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  So it's always curious. Like, I'm, I mean, I don't know, I'm just an amateur economist, so.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  I like that. That would be, that would be very useful.

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'm just, I'm curious about that type of experiment.

• 1:13:39Speaker 01

  If you could assign a book to everyone on earth to read, and know that they'd understand it, what would you want to assign?

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  I mean, I've already talked about Art of Work. I think that that is a, I mean, look, it's a really good book. And it has a lot of applicability, right? I think it has applicability in building a business, and I think it has applicability in relationships. Many of the lessons to learn, I guess the main lesson to learn is that just be patient. And not everything's going to go the way you want, and other people have lots of leverage. And you sometimes can't do anything about it, right? So I think that's a really good book. And mostly, like, the way that the world is now, that people just don't have time to read. And so it's, I think it's like 95 pages or whatever. So it's a quick read. Lots of applicability in your personal and professional life. And it's off, off copyright, so it's available

• 1:14:28Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 1:14:28Speaker 00

  at very low cost.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, amazing. Faruk, thank you so much.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you for having me.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  That's it. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Generalist Podcast. Please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast app. Ratings and reviews help others discover these discussions. So if you enjoyed the conversation, I'd be grateful if you could take a moment to leave one. For all past episodes and more, visit us at thegeneralist.substack.com. See you next time as we continue to explore the future.