How America Is Exporting Its $40 Trillion Debt
- Alex says stablecoins can help export the U.S. debt burden while extending dollar demand. Tommy cites roughly $40 trillion in debt; Alex says more stablecoin supply means more Treasury purchases by issuers, which could restrain yields while dollarizing other economies. His caveat matters: debt is “still going to be an issue”; this buys time.
- The main commercial opportunity is B2B money movement, with established payment processors positioned to capture more margin. Alex says 80–90% of Cyclops’ work concerns B2B flows, where faster settlement and cheaper currency conversion matter more than replacing consumers’ credit cards. Processors retain merchant distribution and can “cut out their middlemen,” potentially capturing economics previously earned by banking partners or networks.
- Cyclops turns a multi-provider stablecoin build into one integration for payments companies. Four years building for Shift4’s merchant base exposed the burden of coordinating five to 10 providers, sometimes a much larger stack. Cyclops offers “one relationship with us, one onboarding, one integration,” covering merchant settlement, checkout acceptance and payouts without requiring customers to assemble a crypto engineering team.
- The Giving Block’s advantage came from specializing where Coinbase Commerce and BitPay stayed generic. Alex estimates it now works with 70–80% of the world’s 100 largest nonprofits. A donation button “isn’t enough”: tax receipts, reporting and teaching fundraisers how to approach crypto donors made the product specific to the market.
- The March 1, 2022 sale to Shift4 was an expansion decision built around founder control. The Giving Block had raised $1.5 million at a $10.5 million valuation and was already profitable. Shift4 offered both nonprofit distribution opportunities and a broader crypto mandate; Alex wanted a buyer supporting “the next 10x growth of the company.”
- Cyclops expects more than 10 payments-company customers by year-end, against an initial target of three. It emerged from stealth in March and brought forward its Series A to July as interest accelerated. Alex’s ideal prospect has already spent a year or two struggling with infrastructure integration: “Guys, rip it up. Start over. We’ll get you live way faster.”
- Alex wants “a five or 10 billion dollar exit at least,” with an IPO still among the options. He expects substantial exit optionality within three to five years, but says the first successful sale is an “accelerant,” allowing the founders to take bigger swings. His hypothetical after a $10 billion sale: “Next company better be 100 billion.”
1. Small businesses taught Alex to sell a complete solution
Alex’s starting point was blunt: “I always really wanted to make a lot of money,” partly to help his parents. Their encouragement made entrepreneurship feel available: seeing someone like Elon Musk on television meant “there’s no reason that can’t be you in 20 years.”
His high-school businesses included domain trading and selling neighbors’ unused goods on eBay or Craigslist for a 20% commission. At his peak, he sold hundreds of domains a week, registering them for $78 each and often selling them for $20 or $30; volume was the model. For the resale service, he collected items, photographed and listed them, shipped them, collected payment through PayPal and delivered a check. “I’ll handle everything” was the proposition; older customers’ difficulty using the internet created the opening.
At Wake Forest, Alex knew he wanted to go through business school; after college, he took a management consulting job for broad exposure to industries, problem-solving and potential collaborators. He enjoyed and learned from it, but nights and weekends remained dedicated to finding the business idea. Trading through the 2017 ICO cycle brought crypto into that search; the question was “what and when” to build.
2. The Giving Block won by designing only for nonprofits
The idea emerged from conversations with Pat, a college friend working at a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. Pat initially mocked crypto; reading the Bitcoin white paper was his turning point. Their 2017 thesis combined growing crypto ownership with a nonprofit market larger than investors assumed and slow to adopt technology. Generic payment tools struggled with nonprofit onboarding and omitted essentials such as donation tax receipts.
Starting in 2018’s bear market, they bootstrapped because investors dismissed the nonprofit opportunity. They kept their day jobs while initially building The Giving Block on nights and weekends, then shifted to part-time before going full-time. They became profitable before raising; Kyle Samani of Multicoin was an early backer who engaged with the market-size question. The jump to full-time came in spring 2020, as COVID panic and falling crypto prices made quitting especially risky. The exchange underscores the “layered risk” of asking people to donate what remained; Alex says they were stubborn enough to believe crypto would come back and be bigger than ever.
The first roughly 50 clients were already accepting crypto through inadequate solutions. The Pineapple Fund supplied a research opportunity: an anonymous donor or group distributed approximately $50 million across 50 nonprofits, many receiving Bitcoin for the first time. Alex’s team interviewed recipients scrambling to open accounts, receive donations and sell volatile assets. They did not process those original gifts; they learned from the operational mess.
Specialization extended from reporting and receipts to teaching fundraisers how to address crypto Twitter: “Please write Bitcoin as one word.” Alex estimates The Giving Block now works with 70–80% of the world’s 100 largest nonprofits, including organizations such as Save the Children and United Way. The competitive answer to Coinbase Commerce and BitPay was narrower scope: “We’re going to build it just for them.”
3. Shift4 bought a nonprofit channel and crypto capability
The Giving Block raised $1.5 million at a $10.5 million valuation around late 2020 and early 2021, then sold on March 1, 2022, with much of the funding unspent. A sale was not the plan: strategic-investment conversations produced acquisition interest. After several approaches, the founders hired a banker and ran a process; that banker introduced Shift4.
Incoming buyers initially fell into crypto exchanges and nonprofit fundraising platforms. Both seemed to restrict future growth to someone else’s existing customer base. Shift4’s proposition was “two for one”: enter major nonprofits and cross-sell traditional payments, while acquiring a team capable of building crypto products for merchants far beyond the nonprofit sector.
Tommy highlights that the founders appeared focused on continued growth rather than simply maximizing the sale price. Alex agrees: it felt early to sell, and they wanted help achieving “the next 10x growth of the company.” Remaining hands-on and in control was explicit; not every buyer accepted that. Shift4’s founder-led culture and acquisition experience gave them confidence.
4. Ownership became a management practice and a hiring filter
Alex’s principal lesson from Shift4 founder Jared was disciplined attention to what the business does well and “what actually makes money.” He describes an Elon/SpaceX-style emphasis on “extreme ownership, extreme accountability,” direct communication and performance. That appealed to founders worried about bureaucracy inside a larger company.
The concrete example was support requests: Jared might not answer them personally, but he read them and understood recurring problems. Alex admired his ability to know what was happening across departments without micromanaging. The intervention was a question—“Why are we doing this a certain way?”—that required someone to explain the underlying decision.
Cyclops now makes those expectations explicit before hiring. Every candidate interviews with a co-founder, and the aim includes “scare away the wrong people.” Job descriptions warn against expecting a corporate nine-to-five role. Alex looks for candidates who proactively demonstrate ownership and enjoyment of startup work; someone resentful about an occasional late call fails that cultural test.
Complementary responsibilities help the founders operate together. Pat handles creative direction, marketing and vision; Alex concentrates on product, partnerships and daily operations. David, a lawyer they met through his D.C. blockchain incubator, owns compliance, legal and regulatory work. His progression from adviser to their lawyer to Shift4 colleague made him a natural partner in the next business.
5. Cyclops replaces an infrastructure project with one integration
The founders stayed at Shift4 for roughly four years after the acquisition. Alex focused largely on stablecoin solutions for its then-200,000 merchants: settlement, payments, payouts and treasury applications. Repeated frustration with assembling providers eventually became the founding insight. “We need to stop complaining and just do this,” he recalls; they had lived the customer’s problem themselves.
A typical implementation required five to 10 providers, with the broader stack potentially running to dozens. Regional on/off-ramps, primary and backup wallets, transaction monitoring, travel-rule requirements and other compliance components each introduced onboarding, contracts and maintenance. Providers’ global coverage often disappointed. The engineering challenge was keeping the collection working as an enterprise product.
The Giving Block’s approach carried over: focus exclusively on payments companies and make the offering specific enough to cover their needs together. Cyclops promises “one relationship with us, one onboarding, one integration,” with products ready to white-label. The pitch is that a payments company does not need to become a crypto company or hire 20 crypto engineers.
Merchant settlement in stablecoins is the leading use case. Checkout acceptance of crypto and stablecoins comes next, alongside payouts to merchants’ customers or workers. Alex’s illustrations include Uber- or DoorDash-style platforms, payroll and contracting businesses, and casinos paying winnings. Shift4 became both an investor and an anchor customer, rather than simply the founders’ former employer.
6. Global B2B flows matter more than replacing credit cards
Blue Origin provides the memorable consumer example: customers can pay for a space ticket through Cyclops using crypto or stablecoins. Alex says prices are not publicly disclosed but run into millions. Such purchases often involve non-Americans owing dollar-denominated invoices without dollar bank accounts. International wires can cost 2–5% with poor banking arrangements; stablecoins offer an alternative to slow, opaque conversion and transfer processes.
Tommy asks how much money cheaper rails ultimately return to consumers and businesses. Alex’s honest answer is that it is “really hard to say,” because the recipient of the savings varies. He rejects broad assumptions that payments companies disappear: they own customer distribution. Instead, they can remove banking or network intermediaries and sometimes earn better margins on stablecoin transactions.
Tommy’s instinct is that card companies lose their fees. Alex’s pushback: “Call it 80, 90% of what we’re doing is really B2B flows.” Consumers still value points, lounge access and cash back. He does not expect that behavior to change very soon; the immediate opportunity lies elsewhere.
Agent commerce influences everything Cyclops builds, although current activity remains relatively small. Alex expects it to grow each year. Implementation includes helping payments companies make outdated merchant checkouts usable by agents—effectively auditing them for AI readiness. He explicitly avoids assuming every agent will use stablecoins: future payment flows will mix fiat and crypto.
7. Stablecoins extend dollar power and buy time on debt
Alex links U.S. policy support for stablecoins to dollar demand. He cannot recall the precise share, estimating dollar denomination at “90 something%” and subsequently “probably 99%.” His proposed flywheel: more stablecoin supply creates more Treasury purchases by issuers, lowering rates—or, as he qualifies it, “at least tries to keep them down a little bit”—while dollarizing other economies.
Tommy raises the apparent contradiction: America has roughly $40 trillion of debt while its currency becomes more important. Alex calls stablecoins “a way of exporting the debt or at least kicking the can down the road a little bit longer.” He does not present this as a solution: debt remains an issue, but the mechanism provides more time.
On foreign monetary sovereignty, Alex says countries will not “go down without a fight.” From nearly 200 currencies, he thinks the count is “probably fewer than 25” in five to 10 years; Tommy suggests perhaps five or 10 on a meaningful-use basis. Alex expects some central banks to impose barriers as easier dollar access reduces reasons to hold local currency.
The commercial transmission reaches Cyclops through payments companies serving global merchants. Businesses operating across dozens of countries want to dollarize balance sheets, exit local currencies sooner, improve conversion rates or receive money faster. Growing stablecoin access also becomes an expected service. Alex reduces the sales argument to two benefits: saving money and getting it faster.
8. Early traction has raised the ambition for the next exit
Cyclops incorporated roughly a year before the conversation, in August, raised a Castle Island-led seed round that October, emerged from stealth in March and completed its Series A in July. Alex says inbound interest brought the Series A forward; it had not been planned for that year. Castle Island had pursued The Giving Block before its acquisition and maintained the relationship.
The original first-year goal was Shift4 plus two other major payments companies. Alex now expects more than 10 by year-end. His ideal prospect has already struggled to build the product: some companies announced infrastructure partnerships two years earlier and still have not launched. “Guys, rip it up. Start over. We’ll get you live way faster.”
Alex expects exit options within three to five years and leaves an IPO open, but wants “a five or 10 billion dollar exit at least.” Cyclops has received its first offer. Alex calls the first exit an “accelerant”: it taught the founders what they need, gave them investor relationships and made fundraising possible; Tommy observes that their personal finances are covered. The founders also want to keep going bigger. If this company sells for $10 billion, the ambition resets: “Next company better be 100 billion.”
His closing advice returns to The Giving Block’s beginnings: “Most of them just never try.” An idea can start on nights and weekends until there is product-market fit and a reason to commit further. He cautions that knowing the full workload might deter people; enjoying the problems is essential. He hopes Cyclops becomes a training ground for future founders.
Full transcript
Did you ever think you’d sell a company to a multibillion-dollar public company?
Absolutely. I knew it was just a matter of time. Like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to quit my job to go all in on The Giving Block.”
That’s a lot of layered risk.
Really high conviction.
They donated something like $50 million across 50 different nonprofits completely anonymously.
Sounds like the Indian prince giving you money by email.
1. Why Start Cyclops
The Giving Block works with probably 70% or 80% of the 100 largest nonprofits in the world. You can buy a ticket to space and pay in crypto or stablecoins through us. I was like, “Guys, rip it up. Start over. We’ll get you live way faster.”
Probably a lot of companies that don’t like you.
Probably not. Let’s say we sell this company for $10 billion. The next company better be $100 billion, right?
I love that.
Alex, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Tommy.
You’re the co-founder of Cyclops. You’re also the co-founder of The Giving Block. How’s your day in Florida going?
Good. I love it here in Miami. We’ve got a nice, sunny day.
Your co-founder doesn’t live here, though.
No.
He chose wrong.
Yeah, he chose wrong. He came to Florida briefly, then he bailed on me. Now he’s in Nashville.
It’s crazy. You could get investors excited about that, you know.
The other co-founders are in Michigan, too. David’s in Michigan, so—
Started from a pretty low bar.
Yeah, exactly.
I think you should get paid more.
Probably.
You’re anchoring the company.
Really? The best state.
Exactly. So, we’re going to go through your life story, but when you started, did you ever think you’d sell a company to a multibillion-dollar public company?
Absolutely. I knew it was just a matter of time. I’ve taken a lot of shots and started a lot of companies. I know we’ll go into that, and it definitely won’t be the last time either.
I like that. Walk me through how you got started on the entrepreneurial kick. When we did some prep work, you mentioned buying and selling stuff on eBay. You did a bunch of jobs when you were starting out. What got you into that mentality?
I always really wanted to make a lot of money. That was kind of the starting point, honestly.
“How do I make as much money as possible?”
Pretty much. I was interested in making more money from an early age. I grew up in a pretty average household. We didn’t have a lot of money, and we had our own ups and downs. I always knew there was more out there and wanted to help my parents financially, too.
From an early age, I was always hustling, and my parents were super supportive of that.
That’s nice.
They were pretty entrepreneurial themselves, too. They never had any big hits like we did with The Giving Block, but they always encouraged us. They’d say things like, when you see Elon Musk on the news, “There’s no reason that can’t be you in 20 years.” There’s literally no reason that can’t be anyone. It’s all out there for the taking. You just have to go for it.
How much do you think your parents being that supportive helped you? Do you think you would have figured it out anyway?
I think it’s one of those things where it’s very hard to say. I think it would have turned out very differently, because most people wouldn’t even be comfortable thinking that way. They just think, “Okay, I’m going to go to school, get a good job, be a management consultant or investment banker.” That’s how you make a lot of money—the more traditional path. Doctor, lawyer.
Yeah, exactly.
That extra push of “You should just try stuff” made a difference. It doesn’t matter if you’re 14 or 15; you can still make money. The other thing I heard all the time was, “Oh, well, you’re so young. You don’t need to worry about making money now.” I was like, “Well, if I make money now, I’ll make even more money later.”
What was your first business?
2. The Door-to-Door eBay Hustle
There were a couple. One of the more interesting ones was a business buying and selling domain names. I basically just read about it online. This was when I was in high school. You saw domain names starting to sell for a lot of money back then. I still remember some selling for millions of dollars in the news.
I read a book and researched the best way to run a domain-name business. At my peak, I was selling hundreds a week. I was registering them on GoDaddy for $78 each. Often, I was only selling them for $20 or $30, sometimes a couple hundred dollars if I had a good one. I was really just doing volume. It was pretty fun.
And that’s a lot of money in high school.
Yeah.
You don’t have any bills, so—
Exactly. At the same time, I started some other businesses. There were the classic ones, like landscaping: you rally a couple of friends, shovel some snow, mow some lawns, do some mulching.
One of the more interesting ones was helping people sell things online, mostly on eBay and Craigslist. It was really clear back then that older people didn’t know how to use the internet very well. They didn’t know how to sell their car or old golf clubs on eBay, or even a digital camera they weren’t using anymore.
It started with finding things around the house that we weren’t using and selling them. That ran out pretty quickly. Then I started asking around and going door to door. I’d ask people, “Do you have something old that you’re not using anymore? I’ll sell it for you. Give me 20% commission, and I’ll handle everything. I’ll pick it up, take pictures, list it, ship it, collect the money on PayPal, and bring you a check at the end of the week or the month.”
I also did the eBay business in high school. It’s crazy because the post office would ship you unlimited USPS Priority Mail boxes for free. You could do the whole nine yards.
Yeah.
Were these older people scared to work with a young high school kid who wanted to sell their stuff?
Some were definitely skeptical, but there were people who stood out as very supportive. I try to be the same way now. If you meet a kid in high school who’s really hustling, try to be supportive. Even when people come to your door selling Girl Scout cookies, I try to encourage that entrepreneurial mindset in younger people and pay it forward.
I’ve even gotten involved in Junior Achievement Miami. I’m on their board here, and about once a month I teach a class of high school students about entrepreneurship and the stock market.
That’s awesome.
Yeah.
I’ll take 100 boxes of Girl Scout cookies. There you go—the economy.
As you were running these successive businesses growing up, it sounds like you kind of got addicted to it. But then you go to college, and there’s obviously a gap in entrepreneurship. Did you pick it up afterward, or when did you get back to it?
I never really gave it up. Once I knew I could make a little money and it was working, it just made me want to do it even more. In high school and going into college, I spent less and less time playing sports and doing other things because I wanted to get home and work. I wanted to make some money.
I tried to keep that going through college. It was a little harder, but I tried to be self-sufficient and always make enough money to be fairly financially independent, even in high school and college. I bought my own cars, paid for car insurance, and helped with housing expenses, food, and other stuff.
Through college, it was more odd jobs here and there. I even picked up jobs on campus that were less entrepreneurial, but I was always working.
Was there ever a time in college, as you got close to graduating, when you thought, “Hey, I want to go work at a company”? Did that ever go through your head?
Yeah, and I actually did. Coming out of college, I got a management consulting job. I knew I wanted to go through the business school at Wake Forest, but beyond that, I was having a hard time deciding what would set me up for the best path for entrepreneurship.
I ultimately landed on management consulting, thinking that would give me broad exposure to different industries and problem-solving, and let me meet a lot of interesting people. I did that for a few years and learned a ton, but I was always looking for what the big idea was going to be. It took a while, but I guess it didn’t take that long.
Sounds like a death sentence to put someone like you in a cubicle.
Yeah. Well, at least in consulting, we were traveling a lot, going to client sites and really hustling.
When you were doing management consulting, was it frustrating, like, “I want to go start a business. I want to do a big thing”? Or was it more like, “I’m going to crush this while I’m doing it, but I have this lingering feeling that I want to start my own business”? How was it?
I definitely learned a lot and had a lot of fun doing management consulting, but I was always brainstorming and trying to figure stuff out on nights and weekends. I started trading crypto and rode the 2017 ICO hype wave.
It was all just a matter of what I was going to do and when, and waiting for the right moment.
What was that moment for The Giving Block? I keep saying “first company,” but it’s really the first big company.
Yeah, the first big company. Pat, my co-founder of The Giving Block, went to college with me at Wake Forest. We were both living in Washington, D.C. at the time. He was working at a nonprofit while I was in management consulting.
Funny enough, he was the guy in our friend group talking people out of Bitcoin and crypto. He was literally making fun of our friends who got into crypto and Bitcoin, which is hilarious. I was the friend trying to talk everyone into it.
It’s crazy you connected despite being on opposite sides of that.
We were friends regardless. We actually became even closer after college than we had been in college because we were living in D.C., hanging out, and were both very entrepreneurial. Pat had a similar background of random startups and things in high school. When we were out in D.C. having beers, we’d always be talking: “Damn, we’ve really got to start a business. What are we doing with our lives?” We were always kicking around ideas.
Eventually, I got him into crypto. He always says the “aha” moment for him was reading the Bitcoin white paper. I don’t even remember how I actually sold it to him. I probably just kept talking about it often enough.
He just saw the chart.
Maybe that was it. He started investing a little bit and messing around. Once we were both really hyped about crypto, it was as simple as asking, “What could we do in crypto? What’s a path we can carve out that we’re uniquely able to solve and able to do better than anyone else?”
So, what is The Giving Block?
The idea was, first, that crypto was going to get bigger and bigger. Second, nonprofits are bigger than people expect in terms of market size, and they’re very slow at adopting new technologies.
This was in 2017, when we first started talking about it. You can imagine us going to a nonprofit and saying, “Hey, guys, heard of Bitcoin?” There were lots of skeptics at those nonprofits.
“Please leave my office immediately.”
Back then, crypto and Bitcoin donations were just starting to happen. If a nonprofit wanted to accept them, they’d go to something like BitPay or Coinbase Commerce. There were some generic solutions out there, but none were made for the nonprofit market. Even getting onboarded and going through KYB with them was a disaster if you were a nonprofit, because they didn’t understand nonprofits.
And then there was the interface. If you made a donation with BitPay, they weren’t giving you a tax receipt. The Giving Block was created to allow nonprofits to accept crypto donations.
Yeah. Got it. I guess I skipped right past that.
No, I just want to be sure everyone listening understands. What were the largest nonprofits you worked with, or maybe the most interesting ones? I’m not sure what you’re able to share, but I’m curious.
By now, The Giving Block works with probably 70% to 80% of the 100 largest nonprofits in the world.
Wow. The Giving Block has incredible dominance in the market, still to this day. When we started, it went pretty slowly, and we were luckily stubborn enough to stick with it until we got some of those bigger clients, like Save the Children and United Way, as well as big universities. Of course, we signed up Wake Forest, where we both went to school.
It’s like the classic momentum you start building: first you’ve got 10, then suddenly you’ve got 20, then 100, then 1,000 nonprofits. Once you become the market leader, it compounds quickly from there. We were the only ones taking the approach we took in the market. We thought getting a button to donate crypto on your website wasn’t enough. Anyone can do that. You need to tailor things to the nonprofit market, like reporting, tax receipts, and how to fundraise.
We would teach their fundraisers how to talk to people on X, like Crypto Twitter. We’d say, “Please write Bitcoin as one word. You’re going to scare everyone away if you keep writing it as two words. It’s going to look like a scam.” Lowercase “b,” one word—stuff like that. It was very hands-on.
That’s crazy. So 80% of the largest nonprofits in the world accept crypto using The Giving Block. You mentioned there was a low point, but you stuck it out. What was that low point like? Did you have no clients? Where were you guys?
We incorporated the company in May, with hilarious timing, as the bear market was starting. That first year, honestly, not much happened at all, and we were both still working our day jobs. It was very much a nights-and-weekends thing.
So The Giving Block was part-time for you both?
It was to start, because we had no investor relationships. We didn’t know any VCs. I sent a million cold DMs to people, but no one took it seriously. If you’re a crypto investor, you probably know nothing about the nonprofit market. Most people wrote it off as being too small.
We bootstrapped the whole thing and kept our day jobs. Then our day jobs became part-time. Funny enough, when we made the full-time jump, it was the spring of 2020, when everyone was freaking out about COVID. Everyone was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to lose my job.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to quit my job to go all in on The Giving Block.” That was an accelerant for us. That was our tipping point.
You’re making it sound easy. That definitely was not an easy choice.
No. The funniest part was that, for those first couple of years, everyone was so skeptical of crypto. Everyone was like, “Oh, see, look, it was a fad. It’s going to zero.” We were just stubborn enough to believe crypto was going to come back and be bigger than ever, so we stuck it out.
The crazy part is, you have a global pandemic, COVID, and crypto prices that fell off a cliff. You’re leaving your job to start a company and trying to convince people to sell the crypto they have left, or donate whatever they have left to nonprofits. That’s a lot of layered risk.
Yeah. Really high conviction.
Yeah.
That is crazy. So how did things accelerate? How did you sell the first big nonprofit? How did you get to the point where you thought, “This is what we’re going to do. It’s working. Let’s take that”?
3. The $50M Anonymous Donation
The funny thing is that our first 50 clients or so were actually nonprofits trying to accept crypto but using bad solutions. They were using BitPay or Coinbase Commerce and really struggling. We went and interviewed all the nonprofits we could find that were accepting crypto and learned whatever we could about how they were doing it.
Something was happening around the same time called the Pineapple Fund. Did you ever hear about that?
I don’t think so.
It was on Reddit. It was a person or group of people who posted on Reddit saying, “I made a lot of money investing in Bitcoin, and now I’m going to give a lot of that money away. Hey, nonprofits, basically apply here.” You can imagine it sounds like the biggest scam ever.
Sounds like the Indian prince giving you money by email.
Exactly. Some nonprofits thought, “Well, why not? Let’s give it a shot. Let’s apply. Let’s go for it.” They donated something like $50 million across 50 different nonprofits, completely anonymously. We still don’t know who it was to this day.
Most of these nonprofits had never gotten a Bitcoin donation before and were scrambling to figure it out. So we talked to those 50 nonprofits and asked, “What did you guys do? How did you do it?” They were like, “Oh my gosh, it was a disaster.”
Wait, so the $50 million was donated through old providers?
Yeah.
Your competitors at the time?
Yeah.
And then you go on Reddit and say, “Use us”?
Not even that. We would reach out.
This was all happening in parallel. We weren’t ready in time to actually help them with those donations, so we were seeing it happen in real time. A nonprofit would open a random exchange account or find some sort of third party that could process the donations. It was a mess, right? Even the volatility of the donations was an issue. They’d open a wallet, get the donation, and say, “Oh my gosh, wait, now we have to sell it. What do I do?”
It’s crazy to think of. I mean, the $50 million donated is obviously nuts, but that was back then.
Yeah. What’s that $50 million worth today? Bitcoin was between $15,000 and $20,000 at the time of the donations.
$200 million, $250 million, something like that.
Yeah.
4. Beating Coinbase by Going Narrow
Damn. It’s also wild to think that Coinbase wasn’t built well enough to accept payments, because at the time, you’re looking at the largest U.S. exchange, and that’s your competitor. Everyone’s using it, and you guys are saying, “No, we can do it even better.” That’s another hurdle that you overcame, I think.
Yeah. Our competitors were way bigger than us. We were a bootstrapped team of a couple of people, competing against Coinbase and BitPay and these other big, well-funded companies. The problem they made—and honestly, in a lot of cases, they continue to make—is that when they offer products like that, they purposely make them generic and broad so they work for a lot of different types of customers. They’re not perfect for any one industry; they just sort of work for everyone. That’s a tricky part about being a big business like Coinbase. It’s hard for them to go all in on, let’s say, the nonprofit market and really specialize.
So, how did you get confident you could beat them? Did you try the product and think, “This will never improve,” or was it talking to the foundations and nonprofits and thinking, “This isn’t good enough”? What gave you confidence that you could beat them?
Just by tailoring it to a market and going narrower than they were. That’s really what it was. We learned what nonprofits actually want and need and said, “We’re going to build it just for them.” If anyone besides a nonprofit wants to use this, they can’t. It won’t actually work or make sense. It was that specific.
It’s awesome. There’s so much layered risk—COVID, the selloff, the competitors. It’s just cool that you guys did it.
The other funny thing was that, since it was bootstrapped, we actually became profitable pretty early on. We weren’t able to raise any VC money until we were profitable and didn’t even really need the money anymore. Things were going well, and we thought, “Let’s raise money, get some support.” We had some awesome guys who were early checks, like Kyle Samani from Multicoin. He was one of the first guys to respond to my cold messages on Twitter and stuff like that.
Yeah, he’ll respond. He’ll argue, but he’ll back you.
Yeah. We had plenty of smart people asking, “Is the nonprofit market big enough? Does this make sense?” All these things. But he was the one to really engage and take the time to think it through, rather than think, “Well, it’s literally called the nonprofit market. Why would we invest in a company that we make money off of?”
5. Sold to Shift4 a Year Later
Yeah. So, time goes on, and you eventually sell to Shift4, a multibillion-dollar publicly traded payments company. How did that come about? When we were talking before, it sounded like there wasn’t that much time between starting or raising for The Giving Block and then selling it.
Yeah. We started in 2018, raised at the end of 2020 going into early 2021, and then ended up selling on March 1, 2022. It’s crazy—a year, door to door from raising to selling, pretty much. We hadn’t even spent most of the money we had raised yet. We were already profitable, too. Back then, valuations were very different. We raised $1.5 million at a $10.5 million valuation.
Wow. A VC’s dream: $10.5 million and an exit a year later.
Yeah. And the thing was, we weren’t actually planning on selling at the time. We were thinking, “Things are going so well. Let’s try to get some investments from strategic partners and really get dialed in on some of these key relationships.” Some of those conversations turned into, “Rather than invest, would you guys consider just selling the company?” We were like, “Maybe. We’ll always hear you out,” but it wasn’t really the plan.
When you got—when the first potential acquirer told you that, what was your reaction?
I was really caught off guard. I just didn’t expect that to happen so soon. Then, when it started to happen a couple of times, we kind of got cocky. I was like, “Let’s see what else is out there.” We hired a banker, and then we ran a process.
Interesting. So, you had organic interest in acquiring the company, then hired the banker. Who found Shift4?
The banker actually brought us Shift4. That was awesome. We didn’t know much about Shift4 at the time, and there were a couple of different types of buyers. Our inbound offers were either from crypto exchanges on one side or nonprofit fundraising platforms that weren’t doing anything with crypto yet. Neither exit was that exciting to us because it felt like it was really limiting our upside. If you go to a crypto exchange, you’re just dealing with their customer base; with one of these nonprofit providers, you’re just dealing with their customers.
When we started to run the process with a banker, they started bringing payments companies to us, and those had way more upside. It seemed so much more interesting because we could do so much more than what we were doing at the time. It would let us expand to different crypto and stablecoin products that had nothing to do with nonprofits, whereas we felt much more boxed in with those other options.
Despite all the acquisition offers, it sounds like you guys were thinking about this in terms of, “How can we continue to grow The Giving Block?” rather than, “How do we get the best price?” That sounds like a pretty unique take from a founder.
Yeah, it was because it was so early. We felt like it was sort of too early to sell. We wanted someone who was going to help us do the next 10x growth of the company. This wasn’t something we were ready to walk away from yet. We still really wanted to be hands-on and involved, and we were explicit in these conversations: “We’re only selling to someone who lets us stay in control, hands-on, and really see this through.” Basically—
Were they all receptive to that?
Definitely not. I think that’s part of the reason we ended up with Shift4, because it was still a founder company. They had done a lot of acquisitions, and they gave us confidence that they weren’t going to get in our way. That was a huge factor for us.
What were the first times meeting Shift4 management like? Walk me through that.
It was always really impressive. They seemed like they understood everything better than any other buyers we were talking to. Maybe that’s because they’d done a lot of acquisitions, but I think part of it is just that their strategy and management team are incredibly talented. There were a lot of former bankers, as you’d expect, IB guys. The CEO, Jared, was a founder, too. When these guys looked at a company, they went so deep compared to everyone else, who seemed to take a high-level view of it.
They also took the unique view that buying us was sort of a two-for-one: They wanted to get deeper into the nonprofit market, but they also needed crypto capabilities, which they didn’t have yet. Most of the other companies were looking at it just through the nonprofit lens.
Got it.
For us, it was more interesting to have both those angles. On the nonprofit side, they buy The Giving Block, and that’s now a foot in the door to most of the biggest nonprofits in the world to cross-sell them on traditional payments. And, by the way, the team can build out things for the Shift4 merchant base that have nothing to do with nonprofits.
Did you know the synergies for them, from your point of view? Did you know that’s why they wanted to buy it?
Yeah. We went through really detailed discussions of what this was going to look like if we went with them. That’s part of what was so convincing: seeing that vision of being able to work on essentially 2 businesses at once.
6. From Shift4 to NASA
Love that. So, Jared founded Shift4. When we spoke before the podcast, you said he started his first business at 16. Shift4 is obviously huge. Now he runs NASA. Next-level entrepreneur.
Yeah.
Kind of similar to your story, just minus NASA so far.
Yeah. But I’ve got time.
You’ll get there. What was it like working with Jared? He’s obviously an extremely successful entrepreneur, built a huge company, and is still going. What were the greatest lessons from working with him?
Yeah, he and the team there were super inspirational and really great role models for us.
And by the way, the company he started when he was 16 was Shift4.
So, how old is he now? Like early 40s?
Wow. So, yeah, he really saw that opportunity.
He started a payments company 24 years ago.
Yeah. It was online payments.
Credit card payments were just getting started, basically. It was around 2002. I think it was the late ’90s, even. He was really early in that trend.
But he survived the dot-com bubble, I guess.
Yeah. But an incredible entrepreneur. He had other businesses on the side, and he was also a pilot. So I think he had a lot of dreams about flying in space and all those things. Him getting to lead NASA now seems like a lifelong, or childhood, dream.
And Pat and I—I mean, working for him and working for Shift4, he really brought an Elon and SpaceX mentality to running the business: extreme ownership, extreme accountability, no BS. Everyone was very direct and performance-based, which was really appealing to us coming into a bigger company, where you worry about things being really bureaucratic. I think you see that at other founder-led companies, too. It is a little different.
7. Lessons From Jared
With the current CEO, Taylor, for example, those guys have worked together forever. They’ve kept that spirit alive at Shift4, which is really impressive. The leadership team has also been generally really impressive.
I think a lot of people might ask you, “What’s the best lesson learned from Jared?” I want to ask you a little differently: In hindsight, after being at Shift4 for so long, what’s the one thing you took away from your time with Jared? I think that might be more interesting.
I think it’s his mindset. I try to be more like him and be disciplined in my thinking, so I don’t get distracted by shiny objects. He really stayed true to what the business was supposed to be doing, what it was good at, and what actually made money. Then there’s holding people accountable and enabling them to do a good job without micromanaging them.
It’s hard to pick one thing or one aspect. It’s really the way he operates. We looked up to how he ran the business, and we still think back to those times and draw on them for how we run the business today. We learned a lot. Even seeing him get into the details of a support request was impressive.
I mean, he might not necessarily respond to them, but he’d go in and read them and understand the problems. He really kept a good pulse on every part of the business.
We were always so impressed by how he seemed to know exactly what was happening in every department without being a micromanager. He would understand the problems and go into things to figure them out. He’d come out saying, “Why are we doing this a certain way? It doesn’t really make sense to me. Can someone explain this?”
It’s an interesting skill, to be knowledgeable about everything but also not micromanage, because I think your first instinct is, “Well, let me just go start fixing all these things.”
Yeah.
That’s cool.
We try to be the same way. I still do that kind of stuff with Cyclops today. I did that at Shift4 and The Giving Block, too. We try to be hands-on without being micromanagers.
8. Hiring to Scare People Away
We’re going to get to Cyclops next, but just on the Jared question: How did working for Jared change your management or entrepreneurial approach with your new company, Cyclops, versus The Giving Block?
We spent a lot more time from day one thinking about the culture, the principles of the company, and what we wanted people to think made a good Cyclops employee or team member. We address that head-on, even in the interview process. We think it’s as important to scare the wrong people away as it is to attract the right people.
Even in our job descriptions, we say, “Don’t come here if you’re looking for a corporate nine-to-five job. This isn’t it.” Every person we hire has to interview with one of the co-founders. The number one thing we’re trying to do is scare away the wrong people. I go in there telling them, “Oh my gosh, this is going to be so much work. Are you sure you want to do this?” That’s pretty much the approach we take, because it only takes a couple of slackers to screw up that culture.
So, you’re spending a ton of time on the culture, and you want to hire. How does somebody get through the interview process? Who impresses you? What kind of person?
They have to proactively bring up the traits we look for, like ownership and accountability. They have to seem like they love the startup grind and hustle. Anyone who’s like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I had to have a late call yesterday,” is so out.
I know a bunch of people on your team, and they’re all killers, so it’s good to know. Okay, so you guys started The Giving Block, got acquired by Shift4, and kept your foot on the gas building for years within Shift4.
Yeah.
And then you decide you want to start a new company, Cyclops. There are so many questions around that. Why start Cyclops? Why not stay at Shift4 and keep doing what you’re doing? What’s the difference between Cyclops and Shift4? Walk me through that.
We stuck around for roughly 4 years after the acquisition.
Long time.
It was a long time, and probably longer than we expected to stay. We were always very open with them that we wanted to start a business again at some point. This wasn’t the last business we wanted to do, but we wanted to see this through, stick around, and make sure things went well.
I was mostly focused on building stablecoin solutions for the 200,000 merchants Shift4 had at that time. We looked at things like stablecoin settlement, payments and payouts, and different treasury use cases. To do that, you do what everyone knows: go out to the market, talk to all the different providers, and stitch together a solution. It’s funny how similar this ends up being to The Giving Block, and I’ll get to that in a second.
Basically, 4 years into it, me, Pat, and David were sitting around complaining about how bad everyone else was and how difficult this was, because it should be so much easier. We were like, “Okay, we need to stop complaining and just do this. Why don’t we just do this ourselves? We’ve lived the problem we’re trying to solve for 4 years. Why not? Who’s going to solve this problem better than us? No one.”
Just to be specific, so I understand: Shift4 would handle payments on the crypto side. You had to stitch a lot of providers together, and with Cyclops, this is the solution to use?
Yeah. We would go out and get on- and off-ramp providers, wallet providers, and transaction monitoring. Suddenly, you’ve got 5 to 10 different providers pulled together for, let’s say, a pay-with-crypto product or a stablecoin settlement product. You need an engineering team to manage all that and keep it together, plus the contracting and onboarding with each provider. It gets very messy very quickly.
Maybe the biggest problem of all, very similar to The Giving Block, was that no provider was building for payments companies. They were all going very broad, and we said, “This is crazy. Payments is a huge industry. How is no one focused on this specific industry and its use cases?”
How many providers did you have to stitch together?
Usually, you get an on- and off-ramp for the U.S., and then for every other major geography you want to work in, because many providers aren’t very global, or they say they are and the solution isn’t very good globally. Then you have a wallet provider, plus a redundant wallet provider in case something happens. Then you’ve got all the different compliance stuff, like Travel Rule vendors, Chainalysis or TRM. It’s dozens of providers. It’s a huge stack for building these crypto rails and crypto payment solutions.
And so our idea was: Let’s go narrower by just working with payments companies with a profile like Shift4’s. The second piece is that, because we’re much more purpose-built for them, we can be an all-in-one solution. They have one relationship with us, one onboarding, one integration, and everything can be white-labeled and ready out of the box. They don’t even need a crypto engineering team. Part of the pitch was, “We know you guys aren’t a crypto company and probably aren’t going to become one. You don’t need to hire 20 crypto engineers to build this product. Let us—”
So Shift4 comes to Cyclops, your new company, the one you’re currently running, and they say, “We want to accept crypto payments”—or, sorry—
Yeah. Well, the Shift4 piece is a little unique, because they became an investor and a client in Cyclops. So that was a big anchor customer for us. But other payments companies say, “We want to start settling our merchants in stablecoins.”
That’s the number one use case. The others are that we want to allow our merchants to accept crypto and stablecoin payments on the checkout page. The third use case is that we want to pay out—or our merchants want to pay out—their customers in stablecoins. This could be a marketplace for gig workers, an Uber or DoorDash kind of company, a payroll or contracting platform, or even a casino paying out winnings.
There are a lot of cases for paying money out to people, especially if it’s global. Stablecoins can make sense.
It’s kind of crazy because, in my crypto-native head, sending a stablecoin is so easy. It’s like, “Give me your wallet address and I’ll send you a thousand bucks.” But from your point of view and what you’re building, there are dozens of providers. It’s a very messy process. It seems very complicated, like two very different worlds, because when I think of payments, I think of it as so easy and crypto-native.
9. A Ticket to Space in Stablecoins
Yeah. Part of it is because we’re operating in such a highly regulated environment, and it’s so B2B. It’s not like you and I opening a wallet or an exchange account and figuring it out because we’re crypto-native enough. This has to be an enterprise-grade product that can be white-labeled and rolled out to hundreds of thousands of merchants. It’s just a different scale and a different kind of expectation for how things work.
What’s a customer or company that listeners would know that you work with and enable?
Maybe one of the cooler ones we’ve worked with is Blue Origin. You can buy a ticket to space and pay in crypto or stablecoins through us.
How much does a ticket cost?
They don’t disclose the price publicly, but it’s millions of dollars for a ticket.
So if I want to go to space, let’s say it’s a million bucks, and I want to buy that, I go to Blue Origin’s website or something, check out with crypto, and you handle that process?
Exactly. Even for that, the interesting use case is that it’s usually people from outside the U.S. who want to pay in stablecoins for these big transactions. In general, most of the consumer payment use cases are in the high-end and luxury markets. The reason is that non-U.S. people don’t have U.S. dollar-denominated bank accounts, but they have an invoice they need to pay that’s denominated in U.S. dollars. For them, sending a traditional wire from wherever they are means crazy FX fees, and it’s slow and opaque.
I mean, us sending wires in the U.S. is annoying.
Let alone. But it can be 2%, 3%, 4%, even 5% for some of these international wire transfers if you don’t have the right banking setup. But you can access stablecoins pretty much anywhere, so it’s almost always much cheaper for them to use stablecoins they already have, or get stablecoins and settle the invoice that way.
10. Who Stablecoins Cut Out
As Cyclops grows, there are obviously so many fees with payment processors and wires—2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, like you just said. There’s a lot of money being taken away by third parties like banks and everyone else. It sounds like if you’re able to enable stablecoin payments at scale, you’re returning a lot of money to the consumer and the end business, rather than to middlemen. Obviously, Cyclops is a middleman, but a more efficient one. How much money in aggregate do you think you’d return to the world? Do you think about the global scale of your business in that sense?
Yeah, a little bit. It’s really hard to say because who it gets returned to and when it gets returned to them is going to vary a lot. I think when people think about crypto and stablecoins disintermediating companies, they take too broad a view. Even with payments companies, which I think most people would consider a sort of middleman, I don’t think payments companies are going away anytime soon.
I actually think payments companies like Shift4 are best positioned to benefit from adopting stablecoins and crypto rails. The ones more at risk of being disintermediated are these other random middlemen beyond them, like some banking partners and even some of the networks. Shift4 and other payments companies can cut out their middlemen. As payments companies, they have distribution to customers, so they’re really well positioned. In some cases, their margins are better on stablecoins because they’re getting the margin their partners would have gotten.
Got it. When I think of stablecoins and payment companies, I just think Amex won’t get its 2–3% anymore, whatever it is.
The consumer side of it is hard. I don’t think the consumer side changes too much. Call it 80–90% of what we’re doing is really B2B flows. We all love our credit card points. We love our lounge access from the credit card and the cashback or whatever. It’s a zoo now.
I know.
11. Agents Need New Checkouts
It has gotten bad, but I guess the biggest thing is that I really don’t think consumer behavior changes that soon. The real opportunity here is those B2B flows.
Makes sense. Obviously, agents are all the rage: Hermes Agent, Muse, Instinct, Dots. There are too many to name at this point. How do you think about payments and money flows for agents? How does that affect your business? How do you enable it? Do you not care? If a billion people have an AI agent, are they interacting with Cyclops or not?
We spend a lot of time thinking about this. The shortest way to put it is that everything we build and do at Cyclops is designed with the expectation that a much larger portion of commerce will be done by agents in the coming years. Today it’s still relatively small, but we’re very confident that it’s going to be a lot bigger every year. Everything we build is built with that future in mind, and part of what we’re doing with these payments companies is making sure they’re ready for that future.
If you scrape the internet for merchant checkout pages, so many of them can’t even be used by an agent because they’re outdated and poorly built. As part of our implementation with these companies, we’re getting them what we call more AI-ready. We’re almost auditing their products and checkouts to help them with that. We don’t think all agents are going to pay in stablecoins, but there are going to be a lot of use cases where they do. It’s going to be a mix of fiat and crypto.
I like that. The other broad stroke I want to talk about is why stablecoins are so important for the U.S. That’s a big macro trend for you guys because it seems like it just helps the business overall. What’s your general geopolitical take on stablecoins?
The growth of stablecoins is a great tailwind for us. I think a big reason—and I don’t think this is a secret—that this administration pushes stablecoins so much is because they’re good for the U.S. dollar, essentially. I forget if it’s 80% or 90%, but I think 90-something percent of stablecoin supply is U.S. dollar-denominated. It’s almost all USDC and USDT.
I assumed it was near 100%, to be honest.
12. 200 Currencies Down to 25
Honestly, it’s 90-something. It’s probably 99%. It creates this awesome flywheel for the U.S. government: the larger the stablecoin supply gets, the more Treasuries the stablecoin issuers buy, which brings down rates or at least tries to keep them down a little bit. At the same time, it’s dollarizing all these other economies, because people around the world who don’t have access to a major currency want U.S. dollars. It’s still the most popular currency in the world by far.
It’s kind of scary for emerging countries. Do you think they’ll just hand over their economy to the dollar?
I don’t think they’re going to go down without a fight, basically. But if you look out a few years from now, we have, I don’t know, nearly 200 currencies around the world. I think it’s probably fewer than 25 even 5 or 10 years from now.
I guess even lower on just a meaningful level.
Yeah.
Five or 10, maybe.
I think it’s significantly lower than it is today. Some of them will start putting up barriers. The central banks of these countries will put limitations on it because they’re going to see this happening. But so much international business is already done in U.S. dollars, and if it just keeps getting easier and easier, there’s going to be less and less reason to use the local currency.
It’s kind of crazy. We have so much debt, like $40 trillion in debt, but the dollar is becoming more important. It just seems like opposite things, right?
Yeah. I kind of think about it as a way of exporting the debt, or at least kicking the can down the road a little bit longer, right?
Kicking it to someone else.
Yeah, the debt’s still going to be an issue. That’s unavoidable, I think, at this point, but this gives us some more time to figure it out.
So we export the dollar, the issuers like Tether buy U.S. debt, and yields go down a little bit. Everyone seems like they’re winning here except other countries that want their own currency. How does that broad trend help Cyclops?
It helps us in the sense that, one, increasing stablecoin supply is a good tailwind for us because there are more transactions happening and more money moving. But also, increasingly, global businesses are getting comfortable using stablecoins for their day-to-day business operations. There are going to be more businesses locally in these other countries looking for access to those rails and starting to expect that as table stakes for a lot of the ways they run their businesses. They want U.S. dollar bank accounts; they want stablecoin access, and they’re not always able to get it today.
What are you seeing in terms of an uptick in companies internationally approaching you for your services? Is this playing out the way we talked about?
What’s interesting for us is we really just sell to the payments companies, and then they white-label it and sell it to their merchants.
But the merchants they see who are most interested are the more global businesses.
I think businesses that operate in dozens of countries are sometimes the ones most interested in stablecoin settlement, and there are a couple of reasons. One is as simple as they want to dollarize their balance sheets. They don’t want to hold any other local currencies for longer than they need to. Even if it’s not a U.S.-based business, many of the world’s largest businesses are U.S.-based, so their balance sheets are generally in dollars anyway. This lets them get out of the local currency faster or at better prices, at better rates. Or they just want their money faster. Saving money and getting money faster are both great. Very simple, right?
13. Seed to Series A in a Year
Yeah. It’s not a hard sell: “I’ll save you money, and I’ll get you money faster.”
Yeah.
It makes sense. So, to close out the Cyclops section, how have things been going? How long has Cyclops been operating? How’s client growth? Walk us through that side.
We only officially incorporated about a year ago, in August.
Well, trends-wise, you should be selling soon.
Yeah, it’s almost time. We’ve gotten our first offer. But it’s gone really quickly. I always feel weird saying we started this about a year ago because it feels like a continuation of the last 10 years. It’s such a natural progression of everything we’ve been doing, from The Giving Block to Shift4 to Cyclops, that it feels like one long project in that way.
That’s cool. It’s a marathon.
Yeah. Last October, we raised our seed round. Castle Island led that. Those guys crushed it. They wanted to invest in The Giving Block, but they just missed it before the acquisition. They stuck around and kept hustling for us in the meantime, trying to be that first call. We raised from them for the seed, and then we came out of stealth as recently as March. We got so much inbound that we pulled forward the Series A. We weren’t planning on raising a Series A this year, but we got so many offers and found so many good partners that we thought could really accelerate the business.
That’s like six months of stealth. Well, even less: you came out of stealth in March and did the Series A in July.
Jesus. Of course, nothing generates more buzz than announcing, so we announced that in July. There’s an unbelievable amount of investor interest, in part because we’re so far ahead of where we expected to be at this point in the year.
In terms of customers, we thought, “Okay, we’ve got Shift4 as an anchor customer coming out of this year. Let’s try to get two more big payments companies signed. Three customers would be a great first year. We’d be hyped.” We’re going to end this year with more than 10, way more than we expected. The pitch is really resonating, and things are moving so much faster than we ever could have expected.
What’s the reason it’s going so well? Is it first principles, that this is the right project? Is it your hustle? What is it? How do you get 10 customers when you’re aiming for three?
One reason is simply the product offering and the value proposition. The horror stories we tell about how difficult this was really resonate with the companies we’re talking to. My ideal scenario is that I go into a payments company and they’ve tried to do this themselves over the last year or two, and it hasn’t gone well. There are plenty of examples where they sign someone and might even announce it. There are cases where they signed and announced a deal with one of these infrastructure providers two years ago and haven’t gone live. I tell them, “Guys, rip it up. Start over. We’ll get you live way faster.”
So you’re walking into companies dealing with a disastrous issue and saying, “I could solve this for you. We’ve already built this.”
Yeah. Stop trying to fight to get onto your product roadmap. We have a product out of the box that you can white-label and just use tomorrow, basically.
Probably a lot of companies that don’t like you.
Yeah, probably not. We’ll see. But we’re really excited by how much this is resonating, and we’ve built an awesome team. I give a lot of credit to the team. It’s honestly been a lot of fun building again.
14. Swinging for a $10B Exit
What’s the long-term vision for you? Do you still want to grow this forever, or are you more of the mindset that you’ll sell eventually? Where do you land?
We definitely want to exit at some point. I don’t see this becoming a family business that we try to pass on to our kids or anything like that. But we think we’ll have a lot of optionality even in the next three to five years. We think it’s a pretty short timeline before we’ll have a lot of opportunities to exit. That doesn’t mean we don’t take it all the way to an IPO, but this needs to be a massive exit to be interesting to us. We had one good exit already, and we’re not in a rush to sell again. We’re going to really swing big and push it. This needs to be a $5 billion or $10 billion exit at least.
Could you speak to the point that you’ve already exited? Could that slow you down in some instances because you’re comfortable, or could it speed you up and direct you because you don’t have to worry about money as much? Where do you land on that spectrum, Alex?
It’s more of the latter. It’s an accelerant. There are so many things you’ve learned that you don’t have to worry about, like having a team in place. Now we have investor relationships, and we can raise money. We couldn’t do that before with the last company.
A lot of the day-to-day personal-life stuff is covered after the first exit.
And also, us three co-founders are the kind of guys who always want to go bigger. Let’s say we sell this company for $10 billion. The next company better be $100 billion. You’ve got to keep leveling up.
I love that. How do you divvy up the work between co-founders? Who does what, and how did you figure that out?
It happened very naturally, and I think it worked so well because of how different the three of us are. We could not be more different. Pat, the best way to describe Pat is that he’s—
Hates crypto.
He hates crypto, or used to hate crypto. Now he loves crypto. He’s one of us now.
He’s one of us.
He’s much more the creative mind, the marketing mind, the big visionary. I’m much more focused on the product and partnerships, and the more tactical, day-to-day running of the business. Then David, our third co-founder, is handling basically the compliance, legal, and regulatory side. His background is as a lawyer.
The way we met David was that Pat and I were looking for office space in D.C. when we started The Giving Block and came across his incubator. He was running a blockchain incubator and coworking space in D.C. as a side hustle while he was a lawyer.
Everyone’s doing side hustles.
That’s how we met him. He sort of became an adviser to us, and then we hired him as a lawyer too. He helped with the deal with Shift4, and then we convinced him to join us full-time at Shift4 after the deal as a lawyer. He was kind of the crypto lawyer at Shift4 and became our right-hand man on all those projects. He was really betting on being a co-founder and part of whatever we did next, so it all worked out really nicely.
We make a great team, and honestly, we have a lot of fun together. We’re great friends.
I love it. I know we’re friends, but you’re kind of reorienting my founder lens a little bit. I would never want to compete with you in what you’re doing. That’s abundantly clear. Finding founders like you is sort of the north star for me. I haven’t met Pat or your other co-founder, but I’m sure they’re probably similar.
They’ll be here in Miami in a couple of weeks, so—
We’ll have them back on.
Yeah.
Cool. Alex, maybe in closing: you’ve started a lot of companies. There are way more ups and downs than you’re sharing. These are years of very volatile times, very hard times, and very good times. What’s the life advice you instill in people who work at Shift4? You want the people closest to you to be successful, and you’re giving them the best advice you can. What do you try to share with them?
I guess maybe two different things. If people are entrepreneurial, have ideas, and want to start a business, the biggest thing is that most of them just never try. Everyone loves to talk about the great ideas they have; very few actually give it a shot. I think there’s this perception that they have to drop everything and pursue that idea, and I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.
The way we built The Giving Block is a great example. One of these new ideas you have can start as a nights-and-weekends project, until you find some product-market fit and figure out whether it’s really something you want to pursue. I would really encourage people to put in the time and effort to give it a shot. It doesn’t mean you’ve got to quit your day job right away; you can do both for a while. It might be a lot of work, so you have to know that coming into it, too.
Unfortunately, I think if most people knew how much work it was really going to be, they might not do it. You also have to enjoy the problems you’re solving.
If somebody started a side project at Shift4, do you think you’d back them?
It depends on what it is. If it’s competitive, maybe the answer is no. But I hope we do become an awesome training ground for people to go off one day, start their own businesses, and really crush it. We’d be happy to support them if they want to do that.
Alex, thanks so much for coming on. Where can people get more information on Cyclops?
Our website is cyclops.io, and we’re on all the major social accounts, too.
Easy. Alex, thanks so much for coming on.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Tommy.