Shah Ramezani, Founder of Noah: Hiring Exceptional Talent, Stablecoins and Building Ahead of the Market

Noah bets stablecoin rails will settle AI agent payments

Shah Ramezani picked a market before it was obvious and staffed his company slowly enough to survive it. Noah began with a blockchain thesis, landed on stablecoin payments, and kept building through the crash and FTX's collapse while the biggest issuers kept printing profits. He calls the bet informational arbitrage, argues that founders should build when markets fall rather than chase hype, and now reads AI agents as the next wave of payment volume.

Takeaways

• Stablecoins are heading toward a $4tn market. Shah cites a $330bn market capitalisation and predictions from Scott Bessent and Trump administration figures of $4tn by 2030, which would make stablecoins a bigger buyer of US debt than the top ten countries.
• Noah never lowered its hiring bar. Roles went unfilled while customer demands and support tickets grew, because Shah would not hire someone merely okay. He calls hiring his number one responsibility, and recruiter incentives do not align with a startup's.
• The best time to build is a crash. Shah says booms make every idea look good and sell on hype, so founders who chase them arrive late. An investor told him not to play yesterday's game, since the SaaS winners built when the cloud looked crazy.
• Stablecoins fit AI agents that lack bank accounts. Agents will negotiate with each other and cannot hold a JPMorgan account for regulatory and compliance reasons. Noah is moving into agentic payments because otherwise someone else captures the wave.
• Proprietary data is the moat in AI. Stripe Link has a couple of hundred million users and Revolut has 100m KYC'd customers, while pure infrastructure players like Adyen look commoditised. Doing nothing on AI could cost 30% of customers within two years.

How Noah landed on stablecoins

1. Started almost five years ago with a blockchain thesis, then settled on stablecoins about three years ago.
2. Chose the infrastructure layer for stablecoin payments rather than issuing a coin, as the fastest way to move everyone to a new standard.
3. Kept building through the crypto crash and FTX's collapse, when Tether was making hundreds of millions of dollars a week.
4. The shift came faster than he expected, driven by the Trump administration and Stripe.

How Noah hires

• Talent is run in house from around 20 employees, and candidates are met early, sometimes a year before they are hired.
• Shah sells against the job, describing the intensity to scare people off and watching whether their eyes light up.