Loading…
14
Why I won't hire from Toronto's fintech scene anymore, and what happened at a demo day that made me sure
I run a small payments startup out of Halifax and I sat through a pitch night at Volta two weeks ago where a team burned 12 minutes on slick slides and never once explained how they'd handle chargebacks. When I asked about their settlement flow they said they'd 'figure it out after the raise', and three investors nodded along like that was fine. I pushed back hard and told the room that in Canadian fintech, compliance isn't a growth blocker, it's the actual product, and people looked at me like I'd insulted someone's mom. Am I the only one who thinks we're funding flash over the boring plumbing that keeps money moving?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
taylor125d ago
Man, this reminds me of a buddy who ran a bar in Moncton and got pitched by a POS vendor that had the prettiest dashboard he'd ever seen. Took him four months to find out the thing couldn't split a tab between two cards without crashing, and by then he'd already switched his whole floor over to it during a holiday weekend. He lost his mind, went back to the old clunky terminal, and told me the ugly one never once dropped a payment. That's the whole game right there, the boring stuff nobody puts on a slide is the stuff that keeps you open on a Saturday night. Your chargeback question probably made that team sweat because they knew the answer was "we don't have one." Good on you for saying it out loud even if the room went quiet.
8