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My guest today is Matan Bar, CEO & Co-Founder of Melio, a B2B payments platform for small businesses. The company was last valued at $4 billion and has raised over $500 million from a who’s who of fintech investors, including Accel, Coatue, Bessemer, General Catalyst, Thrive, Tiger Global, and more.
In this episode, we discuss:
Understanding your customer. Prior to writing a single line of code, the Melio team setup an old-school bookkeeping business in Manhattan to truly understand the challenges of their future clients. What did they learn?
“We found 10 businesses that were crazy enough to give us access, but everything was done through WhatsApp. And it was wonderful because we learned so many things about the B2B workflow that we could have never discovered with a questionnaire. Because the problem with a questionnaire is that it assumes you know which questions to ask.”
Importance of velocity to launch products and being comfortable with making mistakes (but correcting them very quickly!).
“The key ingredient is velocity. Build fast, of course, with the right level of quality, but build as fast as you can. So, even if you make a mistake, you'll build fast again. And companies that build fast, tend to find the right features for their customers.”
Matan used to lead peer-to-peer payments at Paypal, but then built a business-to-business payments company. What led him down this path?
“At the time I was at PayPal, consumers around the world were shifting from cash to mobile payments… I was becoming more intrigued by how one business pays another business in the US, and I was actually quite shocked to discover that still, specifically in the US market, most payments between two businesses are via paper check.”
Why his biggest mistake was optimizing new hires for skills and not for culture… and a lot more!
“The [initial] core group of people that you hire… 10, 15, 100 - their personalities, become the company's personality.”
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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.
Matan Bar, CEO/Co-Founder of Melio – Always Remember to Keep The Main Thing, The Main Thing