Fintech Leaders
00:05:53 · Miguel Armaza, Kamran Zaki
[00:05:53] S1: Now that you're on the investor side, how do you find yourself spending your days? [00:05:59] S0: Yeah, probably maybe about 70% of it is on meeting new companies and new founders, right? Building those relationships and when there's either an explicit opportunity or when you find yourself having deep conviction that this is the right team, the right company, they found product market fit. How do you lean in and partner with them to become an investor? And then probably about 30% is with existing portfolio companies and how could I be helpful, right? As I said, in different aspects of operating, international expansion, executive search, whatever may be top of mind for them where maybe I've had some experience on my journey and can sort of pay it back to them. [00:06:39] S1: So speaking of international expansion, I know from our conversations that that was something important for you back at Adyen. Not only did the company become a lot more global throughout your decade there, but you were actually part of that expansion. When you're analyzing potential investments today or companies to partner with, is that also something important to you, companies that either are global or want to become global?
00:06:39 · Miguel Armaza, Kamran Zaki
[00:06:39] S1: So speaking of international expansion, I know from our conversations that that was something important for you back at Adyen. Not only did the company become a lot more global throughout your decade there, but you were actually part of that expansion. When you're analyzing potential investments today or companies to partner with, is that also something important to you, companies that either are global or want to become global? [00:07:12] S0: Yeah, absolutely. I think you can build amazing companies in large markets like The US. But I think from a personal standpoint, I've always had a strong affinity for global. One, I wasn't born in The US originally. Right? Was lucky enough to come here like yourself and become naturalized over time. But I also think it adds a degree of complexity for the company, but it also means that they are a whole set of complex problems you're helping solve for your customers, right? Because you're helping them grow their business, not just in one geography, in multiple geographies, help them solve whatever the complexities may be, language, money movement, local payment methods, things like that in the case of Adyen. And so it's even more fun, right, to solve even more complex problems and hopefully add even more value to your customer base. So definitely always looking for great companies in general. But if they have global applicability, then I think that's one even more exciting, but also selfishly makes the opportunity even bigger.
00:07:12 · Kamran Zaki, Miguel Armaza
[00:07:12] S0: Yeah, absolutely. I think you can build amazing companies in large markets like The US. But I think from a personal standpoint, I've always had a strong affinity for global. One, I wasn't born in The US originally. Right? Was lucky enough to come here like yourself and become naturalized over time. But I also think it adds a degree of complexity for the company, but it also means that they are a whole set of complex problems you're helping solve for your customers, right? Because you're helping them grow their business, not just in one geography, in multiple geographies, help them solve whatever the complexities may be, language, money movement, local payment methods, things like that in the case of Adyen. And so it's even more fun, right, to solve even more complex problems and hopefully add even more value to your customer base. So definitely always looking for great companies in general. But if they have global applicability, then I think that's one even more exciting, but also selfishly makes the opportunity even bigger. [00:08:11] S1: Absolutely. Think we are seeing more and more companies launch with a global mindset from day zero, but there's this rejection also from the investor side. And in many cases, justified saying like, okay, you want to go global, but you got to start with one market. Your experience, the companies that nail their global expansion, what is it that they do right?
00:08:43 · Kamran Zaki
[00:08:43] S0: I think it's a great point. So you should ideally, if there is global applicability for the problem we're trying to solve or use case, I think your vision should obviously be global. But to your point, you can't get ahead of yourself, right? From an execution standpoint, if you try and do 20 things really well, then you sort of may become a jack of all trades, but not great at one. And I think that's as much art as science, right? How do you as a founder or a core management team take these set of opportunities every quarter or year, and how do you decide which handful you're gonna prioritize and you're gonna make sure you're excellent at, right? And I think that's the key that if you're not excellent, how are you standing out compared to the competitive landscape for your customers? And so you really have to excel at least a few things and then build from there. But I think that can be different things for different companies. You could excel like Adyen did in the early days. It was all about digital. And it was about, hey, how do we help you solve this problem from a global standpoint? And I think then over time they added the unified commerce capability and then they added Adyen for platforms, embedded financial products. So that was sort of the path that they went down. I think other companies have done a great job of starting in The US as an example and starting to build multi product offering and then starting to go international. So I think there again many paths that could get you to success. It's just about having that big vision, but then executing really, really well against it.
00:10:12 · Miguel Armaza
[00:10:12] S1: Let's talk a little bit about some of the, I guess, verticals of Fintech where people are paying attention, where you are paying attention. One that we haven't talked about, at least you and I too much in the past, is stable coins. And I mean, this is this is at the core of payments disruption. You are the payments guy. I'm sure you are thinking about stablecoins. What sort of role do you envision for them in the coming years?
00:10:50 · Kamran Zaki
[00:10:50] S0: Would love your perspective on this as well. So, hopefully, is a dialogue. You know, the way I've always tried to approach things, and I think we do as Iconiq, is what's the problem we're trying to solve? And then, hey, is stablecoin the best technology or solution to solve it and or could something else do it? And I think that's where sometimes people get really excited about a thematic area, right, be it crypto or stablecoin or AI nowadays. But the key is, you know, what are those use cases or problems that are really large and can add a ton of value. And then if we work backwards, how are these the right technologies or enablers for doing so? And so to your point, I think in general, but especially the last couple of weeks, there's a lot of attention on stablecoins. And I think that's how I'm trying to think through it and actually talking to a lot of companies, but also a lot of potential end users that what are these use cases. Right? And ones that often come up are cross border money movement. Right? And then if we break it down, the question is, so in what corridors, right, are those large corridors? Are they B2B, B2C? You know, which country corridors might be the problem? Is the problem technology or is the challenge really regulatory? Right? Because in a certain country, if you're wanting to hold US denominated stablecoin, one of the first questions come to my mind is, can you hold a multicurrency denominated bank account, right, in USD? If not, is that sort of one of the big hurdles you're trying to solve? And so just think through it step by step and and sort of identify where these sort of, unmet needs are and then sort of work backwards and say, this technology, in this example, Stablecoin, the one best suited to solve it? Things start overlapping a lot, right? Because I think people have been working on solving the cross border money movement challenge for a long time, right? There's some great companies like Transferwise that are attacking this problem. There's also Revolut to some extent. You also have a whole generation of new remittance companies, right, that have targeted specific corridors or use cases. Then now I think you have a large number of companies that are building on top of stablecoin and blockchain in general to solve it.