When I was CRO at Lithic, our first sales hires weren't salespeople.
I had only ever been a founder before, so I knew what it took to find product market fit. Sales teams are great once you have PMF, but deadly if you build them too early. Plus, the Lithic customer was a developer or CTO who didn't react well to a commercial sales motion. They wanted to go direct to the experts.
So we chose to build a different kind of sales model.
Instead of hiring people with sales backgrounds, we hired high-motor generalists, people with finance or tech backgrounds who were just super smart, fast learners, great with customers, and could go super deep into the domain. Not interested in sales as a career, but very interested in joining a startup and wearing a lot of hats. Then, we surrounded them with support around process.
And not only was this great for early customer traction, but it became a great talent feeder for the company as these folks often moved out of sales into other roles.
As the company grew and became more complex, the model naturally evolved, but starting this way was a successful experiment and key to the early wins.
People have asked why I joined Socure for this next chapter.
The honest answer is less about the company, and more about the problem.
I've worked on different parts of identity and fraud for many years, starting at Andera where we built the first digital account opening platform for banks. This was before there were orchestration platforms like Socure's RiskOS, so we had to build a lot ourselves.
When onboarding a new consumer, which data sources need to be called? In what order? Under what conditions? What determines an accept vs decline vs review decision?
At Andera, we ended up building an internal service called ARM ("Application Risk Management") which had a visual drag-and-drop editor very much like the current crop of orchestration platforms. It was incredibly powerful and allowed Andera to support bespoke onboarding workflows for 650 banks and credit unions. It was ahead of its time.
We even considered productizing it and selling it as a new product. But believe it not, back in ~2010, there was no market for a headless API platform. Banks didn't have developers, and the fintech market was a fraction of what it is today. In retrospect we missed what was coming, but that can be a story for another time.
Fast forward, the market has matured and today this is a solved problem. Socure products are available through a number of standalone orchestration providers, and Socure has its own orchestration platform called RiskOS.
Socure's approach with RiskOS is different - vertically integrate the models with the orchestration and decisioning. This has a number of advantages in terms of performance and developer experience. Think about finally having an Apple option in an Android world, while still having the benefits of an open marketplace with hundreds of non-Socure products available. It's genuinely incredible and disruptive.
Having spent a lot of time close to this problem, I recognized the unique advantages in what Socure is building, and I couldn't help but be a part of it.
For those new to following my account, here's a quick intro.
I'm a fintech entrepreneur and operator with more than 25 years of experience building financial technology companies.
I began my career as the founder and CEO of Andera, one of the earliest digital banking platforms for online account opening. Over 14 years, we built the company from a startup into a leading platform used by banks across the United States before its successful acquisition by Bottomline Technologies in 2014.
After that, I co-founded my second startup, Ellevest, alongside former Wall Street executive Sallie Krawcheck, helping build one of the most recognized consumer fintech brands focused on investing and financial planning. After Ellevest, I served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Bessemer Venture Partners, where I was focused on fintech infrastructure and emerging financial services platforms.
I then joined one of our portfolio companies, Lithic (formerly Privacy.com), to help scale the company’s card issuing platform and lead the commercial organization as Chief Revenue Officer. Most recently, I joined Digital Onboarding as CEO.
Today at Socure, I lead the fintech and mid-market banking businesses, working with financial institutions and fintech companies to modernize identity, onboarding, and fraud prevention.
I'm excited to share more as we build in public in the coming months.
I’m getting back on X. In large part, it's to relive a period I really enjoyed as a founder 20 years ago, back when I looked like the guy below.
Before Twitter was a thing, I had a blog. I used it the way people eventually used Twitter: short, frequent posts about what was happening inside my company.
I wrote about everything: When servers crashed, when we signed big customers, when things broke, when we had no idea what we were doing. It was “building in public” before that was a phrase.
People loved it. There wasn’t much like it back then, and the audience was incredibly engaged.
My team, on the other hand… not so much. They hated that I’d share our warts.
“Why would you tell people the servers crashed?”
“Why would you admit the product has bugs?”
But I believed then, and still believe now, that transparency is how you build trust.
If you acknowledge problems and show you’re taking them seriously, people lean in. If you pretend everything is perfect, people assume you're full of it.
Plus the experience of writing provided an opportunity for clarity. Putting my thoughts and experiences down on paper at a frequent cadence forced me to reflect constantly on what was important.
Then life got busy.
Over the last decade, between building companies or joining others, I stopped writing. My blog faded.
But I’ve missed it.
So I’m going to try again.
This time, as an operator instead of a founder.
We’ll see how it goes.
Some personal news -
I’m absolutely thrilled to announce that I’ve joined @SocureID to lead our Fintech & Mid-Market Banking efforts.
🧵
I couldn’t be more excited to work with @JohnnyAyers, Matt Thompson, and the rest of this incredibly talented team. A special thanks for Dan Rosen from @CommerceVC, who I have known since his Highland Capital days, for making the connection.
I was 22 when I raised my first seed round. One of the investor’s terms was that I let him spend a day per week in my office for a year. Best decision of my career.
Very very good advice, no notes
We grew to $1B ARR faster than Stripe, Salesforce, and Palantir, while being 100% remote
This was a combination of a lot of luck, focus and an excellent team
Looking back, I can our team's success boils down some key principles I'm sharing in a 700-word long post:
I hope that it will help every startup as much as it helped us:
1. Everything is sales.
Recruiting is sales. Fundraising is sales. Retaining your best talent is sales. Dating is sales. And sales is sales.
A founder’s effectiveness = (technical skill × ability to sell).
2. You need to be in the details.
The best founders can zoom all the way in and out. If someone tells you to “scale yourself” by pulling back too early - they’re wrong.
Being in the details is important to understand what org structure best fits your company's goals. Every 'in the weeds' founder designs their org structure from first principles.
Jensen: 40 direct reports,
Elon: Engineers in charge of everything,
Jobs: Creative Dictatorship with Directly Responsible Individuals.
Zuck: The first growth-hacking team with @chamath
Founders not in the details forget what makes their products great and eventually recede into designing a standard org with standard departments which lead to standard results.
3. Your company's fate is 70% sealed by the first 20 hires
Ben Horowitz: "I got this advice like 27 times. They said 'Look, here's the key: Hire A players:' and I was like ok yeah, my plan was to hire a bunch of morons but now I'm going to hire A players" The hard part isn’t intent, it’s judgment.
The problem is you can't spot a top 1% engineer if you're not a top 10% engineer yourself. This applies to everything.
Your definition of great is just what you've seen. Founders have some blind spots. Technical founders usually build bad marketing orgs. Sales-focused founders sometimes build mediocre product teams. You need the right eyes to be able to spot genius. Ego aside, bring on a technical expert and have them vet talent for you. Your first hires are your culture, your standard, your work environment. They are the company. Get the first 20 hires right.
4. Live with your customers.
You can’t know what’s working if you’re not talking to them - all the time.
Be where they are: WhatsApp, calls, DMs, in person. The closer you are to customers, the fewer mistakes you make.
"The customer is the boss. They can fire everybody by choosing to spend their money elsewhere." - Sam Walton
5. Be extremely responsive.
If I reply in 30 seconds, what usually takes a day gets done in hours.
What takes hours gets done now.
Speed compounds.
6. Your TAM is limited by your imagination, not by the market.
Constantly rethink the pod, find other big issues that need solving and are valuable, and solve them exceptionally well. We went from contracts ($100M) to Employer of Record ($300M) to Payroll ($200M).
Each 3x'd the TAM.
7. Never run out of cash.
The only way a business dies is by running out of cash.
Profitability = power. You call the shots, not investors.
You can always act in the company's long-term interest because you know you are safe.
We reached Series A after spending <10% of our seed.
We have been profitable for the last 3 years.
Cash discipline buys freedom.
8. Over-index on angels early.
Angels are your best shot at making important people care - when it matters. They might not be involved day to day, but when you really need help, they’ll show up. If you don't know how to solve a problem, you should know at least a person who knows the person who can.
Pick the right ones, and time your asks well.
9. There's always something out there that can kill your company.
Your job is to de-risk the company. Capital, talent, and products are all a small part of a larger effort to de-risk your startup and build an enduring business. Covid-induced work from home grew our payroll and EOR business. And it seemed like RTO might kill it. But we were prepared. If you worry, you won't have to worry.
10. Stay focused.
Fundraises, competitors, headlines - all noise.
Focus on your customers. Focus on your product. Keep executing.
In the long run, the most relentless team wins.
11. Trust your instinct.
If something feels off - it probably is. Dig deeper.
Courage in your convictions matters, especially as the team grows.
Don’t let “performative democracy” slow you down.
As long as you’re in the seat, lead decisively - and unapologetically.
