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In this episode, I sit down with Bar Geron, CEO & Co-Founder of Balance, a B2B eCommerce payments company offering an online checkout experience built for businesses.
Launched just two years ago in February 2021, Balance now supports hundreds of B2B merchants and marketplaces, and has partnered with large platforms like Shopify, Salesforce, Magento, and BigCommerce. They raised almost $90 million from Forerunner, Ribbit, Lightspeed, Salesforce, and many more.
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In this episode, we discuss:
Learnings from his days at PayPal and why some of the best payments companies and fintech founders have a strong background in fraud management
“PayPal Israel is essentially Fraud Sciences, a startup that was acquired by PayPal… what was amazing about this startup is that they created the golden standard of fraud prevention today online. Literally every company in the world today that does fraud prevention is connected to it in some way.”
How Balance aims to transform the Trade Finance space for US and Canadians businesses
“If you go to Amazon in NYC, the experience is unbelievable... The payment is not even something that you think about... In B2B, you need to know your merchant and he needs to give you what you need, because the finance team is paying in a very specific way. This friction is what's holding trade to move online.”
The future of B2B marketplaces and what the industry has learned from the B2C World
“The first customers we learned from and got to know were B2B marketplaces that were with us in YC. And no one was serving them. No one. Stripe was serving them with the Stripe Connect platform, but it's not B2B. It's very, very B2C.”
Founder Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs… and a lot more!
"The most challenging companies are the ones that secure an enterprise at the beginning, and then it's like the worst thing in the world. Because they think that they are mature enough to sell to enterprises, and then they’re just getting stuck. Because this one enterprise is suffocating them, and they don't have the robustness of the lower side of the market to learn. So maybe the one thing I would say is, don't start up there. Go down and learn."
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Miguel Armaza is Co-Founder & Managing General Partner of Gilgamesh Ventures, a seed-stage investment fund focused on fintech in the Americas. He also hosts and writes the Fintech Leaders podcast and newsletter.
Bar Geron, CEO & Co-Founder of Balance – Future of B2B Payments, Risks of Landing Big Clients as a Small Startup, & Why Learning is Your Best Currency