Taste in Customer Selection

Taste in customer selection is one of the most underrated accelerants for growth. It explains a lot of what you're seeing play out in fintech right now.

Infrastructure companies in our space have burned years chasing mid-sized/regional banks. On the surface it makes sense: they have real "IT budgets", recognizable logos, and existing books of business. But the vast majority of mid-sized banks are prone to death-by-committee, their legacy cores are a black box their own teams can barely navigate, and worst of all, they'll pull your roadmap in directions that optimize for their constraints, not for the future of your product category.

Meanwhile, fintech-native pioneers like Affirm, Coinbase, Flex, Imprint, Mercury, Rain, and Ramp are constantly innovating. They're setting the gold standard for what modern card and banking products can be. Building infrastructure for these emerging category-leaders means you end up getting pulled into the future, fast.

Customer selection shapes the focus and speed of what you build. Visionary teams don't ask "who can we sell to?" They ask, "who, if we win them, makes us the obvious choice for everyone who matters next?"