Let’s talk about the very costly mistakes many inexperienced FinTech founders make. 

If you are a FinTech or a Crypto company founder and you find it incredibly frustrating…

• observing how everyone else in the company is willing to spend money on non-essential things because they are not the ones who do the fundraising and don’t actually realize how hard and uncertain the next funding round will be…
• constantly trying to empower your team and delegate more decisions to them, but having nevertheless all important decisions escalated back to you…
• listening to complaints or “constructive feedback” from your leadership team about each other, you know it’s counter-productive, but you have not been able to put an end to this.

This could be happening because you are making some or all of the following “logical” mistakes:

• You get status updates on important projects from your junior project managers and their dashboards and you trust the status.
• You are researching existing projects of your competitors, signing up for their services, reading their T&Cs, doing test transactions on their platform.. trying to reverse-engineer how exactly they structured it and how much this service may cost them, and your findings are inconclusive.
• You want your company and your decision-making process to be data-driven, however, you know that many important risks or signs of real progress are not captured by your dashboards.
• Every time there is a delay or friction with a project, someone will suggest that this happens because of the lack of ownership or poor communication and the proposed solution will be to appoint a dedicated resource or a project owner to solve this or to hire a new person with a specific knowhow to “own” this. In most cases, this won’t work.

I see these symptoms a lot, so if it happens at your company, you are definitely not alone. It’s common, but it does not have to be.

I would diagnose this as an “all-or-nothing” illusion, meaning that the organization or a business may feel that until everything is solved and every item on the project dashboard is green, you cannot move. Obviously, nothing can be further from the truth, because every founder can recall the early days of their company, when they had nothing and did not even know half of what is required, and still were able to get things done.

The common strategy or a common solution in all of the cases is to be able to find the right next step and unlock just one area, which allows your business to keep moving forward without having to resolve or wait for all the other areas to turn green.

The reason why I recently got involved in project management, partnerships, or product design areas was that initially everyone in front of them was a compliance problem, or they wanted to do something unusual and they asked me whether or not they would be breaking any rules. I started applying “just in time” principles beyond compliance – to partnership negotiations, hiring decisions, product design, and even budgeting. The results are truly amazing – so stay tuned!

In the meantime, here are some basic principles to remember:

There are no bonus points for perfectionism. In fact, perfectionism will actively slow down your growth – whether it means spending too much time reviewing your customer onboarding information, monitoring their transactions, or trying to create a totally risk-free compliance environment. 

The success of any function is not proportional to its resources. If that were the case, big banks would never conduct shady or fraudulent operations and would continuously grow their market share, and it’s obviously not the case. Elon Musk with Twitter showed us that most tech companies actually hire way too many people.

I have never seen a FinTech project fail because of compliance or be shut down because of compliance. Yes, you can get into compliance troubles and overspend, but it’s rarely terminal – it’s almost always product/market fit, running out of money, wrong partners, poor timing, or bad (fraudulent and incompetent) leadership. 

Make sure to have a great day today! ✨