Richie! So excited to do this interview with you. To set the stage, tell us a little bit about who you are, what it's been like building Finix, and your journey so far.

Hey Dez, likewise. My name is Richie Serna, I’m the CEO and co-founder of Finix. Finix is an acquirer processor that works with tech-enabled merchants, marketplaces and software  platforms to embed payments, which creates a better product experience, and ultimately adds a new revenue stream to their business. I've been in the payments space now for about 10 years; I got my start in the payments world at a startup by the name of Balanced. Balanced was actually the first payments API ever designed specifically for marketplaces, predating Stripe’s Connect product. We ended up selling that business to Stripe back in 2015. Shortly after that, I started Finix.

Amazing. And one question I think that we should address head on is, you're directly competing with Stripe. They're one of the largest privately-owned startups out there today. They're one of the stalking horses of the IPO window. They’re incredibly well capitalized, and have a who’s who of investors, so my question is - how do you think about competing with the juggernaut that is Stripe? And then how do you think about competition generally and instilling a sense of urgency across your organization?

We have never shied away from that competition. But one of the things I always tell our team is: we're not building for the sake of competition, we're building for our customers. Our very first company value is: Customer First. And that's how we approach every single decision we make, because what's going to make or break the business is our customers. They're the ones who keep us up at night. We've always been in this business to build an incredible product experience for them. That said, we love competition. Competition is great for innovation, and it's great for the ecosystem. We don’t just compete — we consistently win. If Stripe didn't think that we were legitimate competition, we’d still be a Sequoia-backed company*.  

I've always thought about competition in two dimensions, intrapersonal and interpersonal. There’s competing against ourselves and there’s competing against others out in the market. The way I frame it to the team is: Think of it as two types of bike riders. There are people who want to race bikes and see if they can beat the person next to them. Then there's the type of person who wants to race to see how fast they can push themselves. Both of those forms of competition are incredibly healthy, and beneficial. That's something we try to instill in our team, and something we look for in talent– people who like to push themselves and push their teammates. It’s something that's really special about our team and culture.

* Finix and Sequoia parted ways following Finix’s Series B. Sequoia, also an investor in Stripe, purportedly reversed its investment in Finix due to a conflict of interest.