After a decade of building payments infrastructure, I'm moving on to focus on sustainability and writing.

👋🏾 Hi! After more than four years of helping build Finix into a leading payments company, I am leaving to pursue other professional goals, namely working on climate issues and writing about payments-related topics more regularly.

Why? Between Finix (where I was employee #16) and Balanced (which I co-founded), I have been building payments infrastructure companies for nearly a decade, and I’d like to think about different problems—or at least familiar problems with a new perspective. Last January, I let Finix CEO, Richie Serna, know that I’d be leaving Finix. I wasn't in a rush but I had to set a deadline for myself (Jan. 2023) or I'd continue to find reasons to stay because the team and the product are so important to me. I've spent the last year transitioning my responsibilities to other Finixians. Specifically, the formidable Carolyn Reynolds (whom I've ~absolutely~ loved working with) will be Finix's main PR/comms contact going forward. My last day is this Friday.

When I joined Finix back in 2018, I didn’t know exactly what I would do; I didn’t even have a job title. I just wanted to be helpful and thought it would be fulfilling to build another payments company. Since then, I’ve helped Finix grow far beyond the scale we achieved at Balanced. Today, Finix is poised to be one of the most important financial service companies of the future. The company already moves billions of dollars a year for tens of thousands of merchants, with 99.999% uptime. If you compared Finix to Nilson’s 2021 list of US merchant acquirers, it would rank in the top 30 based on TPV and merchant count! And the future looks even brighter. The company is releasing features at a faster clip than ever, payments volume is growing rapidly, and we signed a record number of new customers in 2022.

Personally, I’ve done some of the best work of my career at Finix, learning and growing alongside so many wonderful Finixian (too many to name here)…I’ve helped raise money from investors, created and scaled Finix’s marketing/comms teams, helped establish our product design function, and helped the company navigate COVID-19, among other things. I want to thank every Finixian who helped make my time at Finix so fulfilling. Memories like this will be with me for the rest of my life.

Lastly, I want to say a huge thank you to Richie Serna for 1) carrying on the legacy of Balanced with Finix and 2) trusting me to define so much of the narrative and early culture of Finix—I know how much this company means to you.

As for what’s next: I am taking on a few consulting engagements through March as I get my writing cadence up:

• Consulting: I’m helping a climate-tech company with its fintech strategy and an early-stage fintech company set up its content marketing operations.
• Writing: I’ll be publishing annual reviews and other musings on my personal site and will begin writing about payments, technology, and commerce concepts more regularly at Batch Processing.

I’ve written sporadically over the past decade but a few posts I published in 2021 convinced me that writing on the internet could be a viable way to make a living.

• For example, this post about Block's attempt to build a closed-loop payments network using their Square, Cash App, and Afterpay ecosystems has been read over 10,000 and described as "superb" by a product leader within Block.
• And this post explaining why PayPal might be interested in buying Pinterest (my former employer) has been described as “very good” and “brilliant” 😎

I’ll share more about Batch Processing in a few weeks. If you haven’t already, subscribe here.

See you out there!