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

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 move 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 deadweight loss 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 stablecoins. 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. 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 legal tender and it's just the eventuality of where the world is headed, they're all going to have to find a partner.

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. So what is the biggest market in the world? 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 torrid pace, with payment volume jumping 38x during the 10 months between its last 2 funding rounds. In today's conversation, Farouk 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. Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Granola, and Deepgram already run on Brex. One in 3 startups in the US does too. It's time to get Brex. Go to brex.com/solutions. 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.

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 attributed 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.

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 weren't possible before?

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, right? 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 infrastructure, which allows many of our customers to then access services at a fraction of the operating cost of what a product would normally. Take if it was enabled using fiat rails. 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 5 or 6 of these or 40, 50 of these or 100 and 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? 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 or 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? That has allowed our customers to then go and, you know, 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. Obviously 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.

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

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 global system, even travel borders, et cetera, there's a lot of barriers, right? And so as money moves, money has, So 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. 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 smaller. And these are 2 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 with 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. Yeah. Part of it is slow because it's a batch process. Part of it is slow because many banks are clearing through intermediaries. 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 the 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 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 programmatic money, If you're an enterprise, you can hold your money digitally. You can move it through your subsidiaries, through their custodial or non-custodial wallets 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 in 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 cost for financial products and services, right? So if you look at even in the domestic market, like many of, many people have said, you know, there's no applicability for stablecoins or tokenized money in the domestic market. 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 changes in the underlying infrastructure. Banks are not adopting FedNow. They're not adopting RTP necessarily. Where's this cost coming from? It's coming from administrative cost. 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, 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 breakeven cost can potentially start running it above breakeven 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 take people through our compliance footprint and turn them on. You end up turning more people on that go through your funnel, right? Like somebody that would've gone through your funnel that was interested in your product, maybe they live, 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've gotten rejected. Yeah. 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 breakeven cost of that has gone down because you don't have to build 2 technical integrations for that. 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, 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 mile's this or cross-border's 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.

I think a lot of listeners will have spent a good amount of time on stablecoins and, 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 stablecoins, 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 lost. Can you explain that a little bit?

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.

Yeah, undoubtedly, right?

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

Yes.

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? Independently, 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 are 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 moved 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 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. Yeah. 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 deadweight 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.

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.

Yeah.

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?

I think there's a massive opportunity for economic expansion, right? If you think about eliminating the deadweight 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 payday lending to kind of make your employees Whole, you don't need a merchant cash advance. You're 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? 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.

What do you mean by that?

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 has been sold to some private market investors as a securitization. It's a hilarious episode. You should definitely watch it. But the whole point of it is that like there is this massive securitization infrastructure in the backend. that takes basic things like residential real estate.

Yes.

And then

now shares of art, private cars.

Exactly. And the largest owners of those or the beneficiaries of those, 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 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 what comes out of that academic research.

What were the kinds of conversations that were around your family table growing up? I think you moved to the US when you were sort of 4 or 5, something like that. Yeah, what were you talking about at home that was Bringing you to this point.

You know, we were very much like an immigrant family, right? 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 is 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. But then at the same time, 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 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 access to health. They want the best access to kind of opportunity. And I think those are universal norms. 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?

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

Maybe a little bit 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.

Yes.

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. I mean, many people around the world, like, they go places they don't speak the language, right? Or they go 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, 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 can probably get to being an immigrant, right? Which is how do you navigate this like imposter syndrome of like wanting to be successful in this new paradigm without access to any of the social, like sort of 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'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 a 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 intellectual roller coaster that founders and I mean, even early team members, even team members at like even high growth companies go through on a daily basis. Right. So I think it's like, that's kind of how I view it, which is where I probably wanted to start something. Like I tried to start my first business when I was like 15 years old.

What was it?

It was an online car auction website.

Were you like a car nut?

No, no. I used to subscribe to, I was a bit of a, I guess, weird kid, but I used to go to the library and read Wired. And I was reading about like Pierre Omidyar who had started eBay. And it was like, the article was about like how this was like a marketplace for Pez dispensers or 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 that my parents are going through was like just on the internet? And, you know, I was—

Good instinct.

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

Yes.

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 honestly, like I just went through the magazine and there was like all these ads for like Latham and Watkins and all these law firms, et cetera. Right. And I didn't know what those were either. So like, we just like called one of them and had a meeting and 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-billion-dollar businesses. Pretty cool. But it was a very different time. It was, it was, it was cool. It was like an interesting experience. Um, I still own the domain name.

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

Yeah, I'm, I'm less now. I'm, I, I used to be. I was like, you know, what are the chances that 2 domains that I'm hoarding are gonna spark a good business?

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

Uh, ridearound.com.

Ridearound.com. That is pretty good. 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?

You know, honestly, I just, I no longer have the mental space to think about that. I'm so glad that we, like I met my co-founder Charles in On Deck, 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 signandwire.com. 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 can, I can, I can mentally unburden myself. And start like not renewing some of these and honestly give some of these good names back to the world in the form of registrable domains.

That's right. That's right.

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

I know.

Hoarders are different, but squatters,

you know, all of them are sort of in a closet, in a, you know, in a box rather than, 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?

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 worked at Accenture in management consulting. Honestly, it was a great role and I got to experience a lot of different things.

You really mean that?

I did. 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.

Is that a good value?

I honestly, I think it's one of the most underappreciated values 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. I've learned the reality is not quite like that. But I think one of the most valuable things I learned 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 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. And I certainly did squander a lot of opportunities by being sort of a brash, young, annoying person. Right.

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

Yeah, I was like, 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, 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 actually one of the best parts about the education system. I think it manifested itself later in life as like potentially something negative. But you have to kind of learn. And sometimes the easiest way to learn is by like making mistakes. And I think now it's like, you know, 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 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.

How do you protect yourself? You know, if you follow that through, you almost certainly wouldn't found Rain 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've heard them, but actually I don't believe it or I'm going to 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.

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 $100. I wonder what like the worst thing that could happen is.

Yeah.

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 polls.

I see. Okay.

Or whatever. I wasn't in the actual, uh, the ballot paper. 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 going to be this. Like if I do the job doing ABC, I'm always going to be the ABC guy.

Yes.

I think some of that is overblown.

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 councilor, but then also say, actually, you know, that's not for me. I'm going to do something totally different. I'm going to be a scooter mogul or a stablecoin mogul. Like, those are 2 very different things.

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 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 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 I think later in my career, at that point, I've just, I'd kind of been around operating and I'd realized that like, oh, like some of these are just like, these are easily solvable mistakes, 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 had a, you know, a brief stint at a, I mean, I wanted to start a business like sort of before I went back into banking and I sold toilet paper on the internet and I had the unit economics all wrong.

Oh, wow. Okay.

So very easily lost like tens of thousands of dollars as the business started scaling. And so like, there's 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.

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

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

Yeah.

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, like I'd been on in the On Deck 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.

This is real estate data, right?

Yeah, real estate data. That wasn't the original pitch. It was like, I was trying to build like a neobank or whatever it was for landlords. And 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 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. And so I was just re-engaging with folks and being like, okay, like I want to join somebody. I want to do something. I want to 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 was 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 or 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. 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 we like both seeded some money into it, right, together and just tried. And we were, we, I think it was just, we were a good partnership. Like we were good at sort of rounding each other out in ways that we were, you know, in 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.

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

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 the

lore,

for the lore. Yeah. It's an internal, it's a good internal, um, Easter egg.

Yes.

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

Oh, wow. I love

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

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

Like 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. 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 you know, just exploring what was going on in NFTs and some of this other stuff in the market in our personal portfolios. We were just interested in like what was happening, right? It was a really interesting space. Like Charles knew a lot more about it than I did, 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 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 and Wire. And from there, we learned that, okay, like there's potentially this pretty large opportunity. And at the time, the opportunity was there's like a $100 billion digital asset treasury market, which was companies building in the digital asset ecosystem. 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 their native currency was stablecoins. And so it felt very much like a top 50 global economy didn't have the ability to move any money or do anything. And they had no financial infrastructure. And then I remember going on the internet and looking up like, how much is the largest bank? I think the country comp at the time was like Jordan. And 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?

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

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.

Yeah.

I mean, not massive, but like not small.

Yeah. But yeah, as you, yeah, if you imagine that the country of Jordan's doubling every year, then suddenly it gets really, really interesting.

And we were like, okay, well, what if we like dig into this? Like, what if we start solving? And then 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. 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.

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—

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

Like what?

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

But that would not have aged so well, right?

Sure. But you know, many of those people eventually either made hundreds of millions of dollars in that cycle, which would've been a great outcome in revenue and like profit. Many of those folks ended up converting themselves to a stablecoin orchestration business. And then some of them have exited for billions of dollars. And it might've been smarter. I think

your game would've, either you would've had to reinvent yourself along the way or the game would've been run. I

mean, yeah, I think for us, we had conviction in what was happening here. 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. 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. And like, it wasn't like, oh, we're operating out of nowhere. We're like geniuses or genius, 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 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 in 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. And there's people that these companies that have been there for like 5, 6 years, 7 years, 8 years thinking about like, okay, 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.

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?

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 that 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 in 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 were people that were involved in some of the earlier B2B 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.

Yes. 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?

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 back end that is originating the— like, we're originating the receivable, selling that 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, 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 then we have partners that are custodians, they hold custodial assets 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 are then settling that transaction entirely on the blockchain. So there's no fiat dependency. All of it is 7 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 ability to, you know, clear the balances across the various different tokens we support across the chains we support and get them into the right sort of corresponding currency to be able to settle with our counterparties.

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

Yeah, so we think of ourselves as a money business, right? So we are financial technology infrastructure. 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, virtual accounts, pay-ins and pay-outs, fiat interoperability, token interoperability, debit card versus charge card versus credit card, et cetera. The way we think about that is that 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 actual life for a business. And our thinking was, is that as tokenized money is coming into the market, as it's gaining adoption, as there's regulatory clarity for like Genius and MiCA in Europe, et cetera, as additional countries are coming out with stablecoin legislation, as some countries are coming out with CBDC regulations over the next like 5 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, 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 the eventual demand That will come from enterprise, small business, anybody.

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

Well, I think if you read The Art of War, and I recommend it, it's like a very quick read. It's not particularly difficult. Most of it is about waiting. 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 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 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. 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 996 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. 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 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 very important to like, you know, take our 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 a DeFi protocol. We could have done a bunch of different things that would've 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. 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 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 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, you probably should Switch, right? I think for us, we were, I mean, maybe we were naive or stupid or ignorant, uh, and we weren't paying attention, but, uh, for us, it just seemed like, okay, if we just keep going, there will be a there there.

In general, I find like the argument around, um, 996 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 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 make sure you get what you need to out of the team?

Yeah, 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. That has been working for us. 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. So we're always fine-tuning it, but I think the main thing we're focused on is how do we get folks that want to solve the problem and have purity of vision on what we are 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. A lot of times it's very hard to find people like

that. You mentioned in an interview that you gave recently that the data that you guys see is 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?

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 home shares or travel or buying goods and services or streaming media or music, they're American, right? And thereby they acquire, or even AI, right? Massive amounts of our customers are transacting on AI tools. All of those are, I mean, not all of them, but many of them are here in the United States. Even many of the routers that are routing to Chinese tools, they're also here in the United States.

Yes.

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.

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

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?

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

Well, I mean, because, well, settlement for them, like on their side, it's still going through the traditional infrastructure. Right. So 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? Look, it's, it's the way I describe it to people is like, if you think about how 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.

Yeah. You don't know they're calling you from a cell phone.

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

Yeah.

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

Yes.

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

You mentioned that you haven't You're not in a war, 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 folks in the stablecoin space and I was saying, you know, what are interesting things for me to ask Farouk? They said it would be interesting to hear his take on why Stripe doesn't just win this whole thing. You know, they bought Bridge. 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 favoring some of the bigger companies in the space?

What I'll say to that is also pretty straightforward, right? Our viewpoint 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. 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 $160 billion company like Stripe, by taking advantage of this, maybe they can get to a trillion dollars, true, 2, 3, 4, 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. The amount of people that are going to be impacted by this is massive. And it is much larger than every other market combined. And so like, what is the prize that that's up 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 their ecosystem. From our vantage point, and some of the things we hear in commercial conversations is that it feels very much like a secret garden or walled garden, a closed loop approach, which again is great. 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 of 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.

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

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

I see.

Every property that you engaged with was AOL. Everybody inside that ecosystem was curated by AOL. There was private enterprise there, but it was all curated by a single party. And it was an 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. There are people, the vast majority of the world is outside of their ecosystem.

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?

Yeah, that's true.

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

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

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

Look, we're just very visionally 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. 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.

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 stuff? Like what actually needs that calibration?

A lot of it is like prioritization, right? I have a saying, the team's making fun of me for it, is everything in life is fluid. And so 30 minutes are spent figuring out which way to go, 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. 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 ahead that are interesting or important? How do we start slicing them in now so that it's not a surprise in 2 months that we have to do this?

I love hearing that this is the team thing that the team makes fun of you for, because I think something that 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 5 things that, because new people are coming in, priorities are changing. What are the mantras that are most critical to know inside of Rain?

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 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 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 company, especially if you're growing fast with new people joining, is that just because 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 infrastructure or pride of 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, 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, maybe the CEO likes it this way. Or maybe 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.

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?

It's part and parcel of what our thesis is, right? This financial infrastructure will improve and will allow for the creation and mature— maturization 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. 'Cause it's so interesting. If you talk to the people that invented the mobile phone and you said, hey, you know, people are going to play Candy Crush on a subway car. They'd be like, what the hell are you talking about? 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 is going to make a billion dollars in games and like just be one of the richest people in the world. It'd be nuts. Like, how are those 2 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. What are the net 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 dividable cash to be able to go to wherever, micropayments, the ability to have an agent consume media on a 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. What's the craziest thing of late? We're running an agentic startup program. And some of the agentic use cases are like 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 with 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.

Awesome.

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 'em 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? Don't spend more than whatever X number of dollars. 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. Totally. Similarly, if let's say I'm in the subway and I'm going home, I forgot to get Toothpaste. Hey, can you please get me some toothpaste? 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. These are micro improvements, but the net impact of these is potentially very large.

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?

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 sort of 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 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? So it's always curious. Like, I'm, I mean, I don't know. I'm just, uh, Amateur economist. So

I like

that.

That would be, that would be very useful. So

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

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?

I mean, I've already talked about Art of War. 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. 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 copyright. So it's, There you go. At very low cost.

Yeah. Amazing. Farouk, thank you so much.

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

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