This article is part of Fintech Leaders, a newsletter with over 32,000 dreamers, entrepreneurs, investors, and students of financial services. I invite you to share and sign up here!
I sit down with Kurt Lin, Co-Founder & CEO of Pinwheel, a cutting-edge payroll data connectivity platform helping fintechs and financial institutions access data from over 1,400 payroll providers in the US.
Founded just a few years ago, Pinwheel now executes 4.6M+ processes per month and has raised $80 million from GGV, First Round, Coatue, Primary, AmEx, Jackie Reses, and many more top industry investors.
In this episode, we discuss:
Kurt’s serial entrepreneurship and why he considers himself constitutionally unemployable
“Growing up as a kid, I was a troublemaker… But in hindsight, I realized that I always saw things and in my mind was like, ‘that doesn't seem like the right way to do it’, so I would always speak up… as I got older, I realized that I had this view of the world where I would see a system or something that was broken and I would want to fix it and finally I had the means to do so.”
The power of consumer payroll data and why Kurt is convinced payroll systems are one of the major frontiers of innovation in the fintech industry today.
“One of the things we realized you can do with [payroll] data is be able to say, even if you don't have a credit history, if I can show enough information around their income, show that there's low volatility, that they're making good money at their steady employment, you can give lenders a lot of reassurances that this person is actually worth lending to.”
Scaling a remote team. Pinwheel went from four employees pre-pandemic to almost 90 today. What did he learn in the process?
“Be super, super intentional about the early hires, because they are the blueprint, whether you like it or not, for everyone else. Because they're going to be hiring folks on their teams.”
Lessons from years of fundraising and how a challenging equity raising environment could look like for entrepreneurs… and a lot more!
“Someone that I'm close to once told me, ‘jobs are short careers are long’. So you need to build relationships… and just like with dating, when you find someone who gets it, you'll know that there will be a connection and you can tell they're leaning in, and they want to learn more, and they want to support you.”
Want more podcast episodes? Join me and follow Fintech Leaders today on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app for weekly conversations with today’s global leaders that will dominate the 21st century in fintech, business, and beyond.
Previous Episodes You May Enjoy:
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.
Share this post