How Slash Grew From $10 to $300 Million in 2+ Years. Victor Cardenas, CEO & Co-Founder of Slash

Victor Cardenas: Around $300 million in annualized revenue. We move $30 billion a year across all payment rails. That's up from roughly 10 million in annualized revenue in January of 2024. You have product market fit when you do not write your own product roadmap, you win when your customers write your product roadmap for you. One fun fact about Slash is that only two people have ever left Slash to join another company. Everyone else has either left to start a company or themselves or they've been like ghosts. We have this culture of if it's solvable, solve it. If it's not solvable, don't even worry about it, do the next thing. Burnout comes from putting in a lot of hours towards something that is not showing any results. I do not get tired of working from 9am to midnight every weekday for six years straight because the number has gone up.

Miguel Armaza: Welcome to Fintech Leaders. I'm Miguel Armaza and over the last six years I've recorded nearly 400 conversations with with the top leaders in fintech. I also co founded Gilgamesh ventures, a fintech VC where we've backed almost 50 companies around the world. In this show we extract how the best builders and investors in fintech think, what they've learned and how you can apply some of these lessons to your own work. If you enjoyed this conversation, I invite you to leave a review on Apple spot, Spotify or YouTube. I sat down with Victor Cardenas, CEO and co founder of uh Slash, one of the fastest growing fintechs in America that went from 10 million to 300 million in annualized revenue in just over 24 months. Slash just crossed a $1.4 billion valuation after raising a hundred million dollar Series C. Led by Rivet Capital, Costa Ventures and Goodwater Capital, the company powers over $30 billion in annualized payment volume across wires, ACH, stablecoins and card spend across 5,000 businesses. Victor is a Venezuelan immigrant who moved to the US at age 18 to attend Stanford, but dropped out two years later and is now also a Thiel Fellow. He started slash at age 19 to serve sneaker resellers, but lost 60% of his revenue almost overnight and had to scramble and rebuild the company in 2023 with a focus on vertical banking. Victor, welcome to Fintech Leaders.

Victor Cardenas: Miguel, thank you so much for having me on.

Miguel Armaza: I'm excited to record this. You've been getting a lot of attention. Uh, Slash has been on a tear when it comes to growth and a lot of people want to know kind of what's behind the story. So I'm excited for you to tell us that story and maybe we can start. Uh, I just have a simple question that you've explored before, but it's good to get started with that one. Are you a fan of Kanye West? Why yes or why no?

Victor Cardenas: Look, I would say I'm a huge fan. Well, with a grain of salt, I'm a huge fan of Kanye West. That's a statement I'll make and I'll covet it later. I'm a huge fan of Kanye west. In that, uh, he forced me to dream a lot bigger. Some listening may or may not know, but, but Slash started out as this neo bank purpose built for sneaker resellers. You know, after our first year in business, literally right after we raised our Series A, 90% of our customers were sneaker resellers and 70% of all the spend on Slash was at Yeezy, Kanye West's brand. And so no, obviously at the beginning I was quite grateful to Kanye because he let me start my, my entire business, um, because he birthed this, this basically micro economy of sneaker resellers. Um, and then right after we raise our Series A, this very interesting thing happened, which is he went on these at the submitted grants for that reason. I, you know, I don't, don't like him very much. Uh, and then Adidas and Easy Cut ties, his brand ceased to exist and Our revenue cratered 60% over the course of a few months. And that, uh, was the most grueling time on my career as an entrepreneur. I thought I'd have to give money back. We'd actually like, scaled headcount quite a bit. We had to let people go. Just a very, very tough moment for me. But in hindsight, the best thing that ever happened to our business because it forced us to, to refound it. It forced my, my co founder and I to ask ourselves, what can we do to serve businesses in much larger and more attractive industries? And that's when kind of the thesis of, uh, building vertical specific financial products was birthed and it really forced to refund the company. So yeah, I think, I think people would expect me to say I hate him because he made my business creator 70%. But I think it was a great forcing function, uh, for us to dream a lot bigger. And were it not for that, I think perhaps we would have ended up being like some vertical SaaS for sneaker resellers or maybe tried to compete with like StockX or Goat, and the business could have gone in a completely different direction.

Miguel Armaza: Yeah, it's funny, he was a big part of your initial growth story from zero to, I believe it was five or something. And then he was also a big part of forcing you to reinvent yourself. To take us, I know it wasn't like a one day to the next kind of drop. It was a bit gradual. I mean, emergency mode, but gradual drop of revenue. But take us to those days. How did you manage your conversations internally with your founder, with your employees, with your board, with your investors? You know, how. What was the mood and how were you confronting it?

Victor Cardenas: Yeah, I'd say, like, look, our aspiration was never to build the biggest credit card for sneaker resellers. Like, we always wanted to do something a lot bigger. And we always viewed this market as a springboard into something that got us to our, uh, first few million dollars of revenue that we could then use as a base to, to figure out how to serve businesses and other industries. But it's interesting because I think the best analogy for product market fit someone's come up with, I forget who came up with it, is that pre product market fit, it feels like you're pushing a boulder up a hill. And then post product market fit, it feels like you're chasing it down the hill where there's so much demand for your product that, uh, you can't really keep up. Your customers are getting very mad at you because your product is not working the way it's supposed to. And that's definitely the stage we were at. Uh, right around we raise our series A, right. And then basically a little bit after that is when Connie starts going on these podcasts, like the Yeezy and Adidas starts having, you know, these clashes, the drops start occurring with less frequency. A lot of our customers, like, start kind of like going out of business or saying, like, because most of our customers are like these young teenagers, right, that, that we're doing this stuff and they're saying, hey, you know, I'm going to get a job or I'm just going, to, like, focus on college.

Miguel Armaza: And it wasn't just affecting you, it was affecting your customers even more so.

Victor Cardenas: Exactly, exactly. It was affecting our customers. But look, the thing we realized, we had, um, we had two very valuable things when all this was going down. During the months where we went from chasing the boulder down the hill to start pushing it, uh, up the hill, we realized we had two things going for us. The first is we actually had the infrastructure built out to offer baking services to businesses in any segment. And then the second is we had an extremely entrepreneurial customer base. We had a great brand among, um, 7,000 of the most entrepreneurial young people in America. If you're 19, 20 years old and you're making $20,000 a month reselling sneakers, odds are if you can no longer resell sneakers, you're going to figure out what to do next. You're going to start another business. You're not going to get a 9 to 5 job. And so when I started doing what m my day to day consisted of, when I realized this market was basically completely toast and left from under us was I just started hitting up every single one of my customers one by one and asking them what can I do to get you to keep using my product now that you're going to start another business? And it was basically like two big things that they told us to do in uh, like late 2022, early 2023. It was you need to do everything, offer me everything my, my bank account offers me right where first for sneaker resellers they had this like very simple product where they needed like a few different virtual cards. Our product was very similar to if you've heard, I mean you're fintech expert, like privacy.com, like uh, almost like a pre prepaid version of privacy.com that these guys use. They're like I need to be able to send wires and be able to send ACHs. I need you to integrate with my QuickBooks. I need to be able to invite my employees because now I'm starting this e commerce company or I'm starting this Amazon FBA business and like I have all these other needs in a bank account outside of what you were narrowly providing before. And then the second one was I need you to offer me rewards where we used to issue debit cards and we weren't giving m our customers any rewards. We were keeping 100% of the interchange revenue that uh, that this generated for us. And now our customers could get the capital one spark. Now our customers could get the chasing. Now our customers could get like a ramp card, right? And so they said like I just need to be able to, to earn cash back on my ad spend or inventory spend or whatever kind of spend I'm going to be incurring now that I'm starting a new business. And so 2023 was basically the year where we just did that. We're like, okay, we're going to build a full fledged B2B banking platform one and we're going to start issuing credit cards instead of debit Cards. We're going to make this big infrastructural change. And one other thing that we did is we got as close to the metal as we possibly could where we realized that fintech is, or financial services, broadly speak, like, businesses tend to be rate sensitive, like high spend businesses are rate sensitive. They want to get great rewards. And so if you want to have a business with meaningful gross profit and gross margins and compete at the same time, you need to, you need to have as least, the least amount of intermediaries possible between you and the end customer. And so before our stack kind of looked like us and there was this banking as a service company and then that banking a service company that's integrated with an issuer processor. And then that issuer processor is the one that actually integrated with the network. And then we had a bank underlying the whole thing. And so afterwards we said, you know what, we're just going to process directly with Visa. So no baas, no issue or processor. Like, we're building our own. We're integrating directly with Visa and we're integrating directly with the bank because in the US you can't be a paid sponsor, you can't be a Visa principal member if you're, if you're not a bank. So we started working directly with column and that's basically what we did in 2023. And it was always back to your question of like, what were my conversations like with my co founder? What were my conversations like with, with my board? It was like always. And I think I've been pretty good at this, like very practical of there is a way out. Like the overwhelming feedback I've gotten is just build all these other things I expect in a bank and figure out a way to offer me rewards. And then if I knew it, that if we did that, we'd be able to at least reacquire every single customer that we lost. And they don't have equally as large or larger businesses in some other segments. And most of them went and they started doing like Amazon FBA selling, that was a huge one. Affiliate marketing, that was a really big one. And then like Econ, like starting some sort of like Shopify store. So that was what we did in 2023. And obviously it was like very distracting seeing the number go down and the momentum being in the opposite direction. But the focus was always on how can we do that next thing that will allow us to get on our footing again. And that's what, that's, that's really how we got out of that Rut how

Miguel Armaza: much of your pre 23 stack was reusable versus obviously you had to build a lot of new things.

Victor Cardenas: So there was a period of time where we had like two parallel stacks. Like we had our old, you know, we worked with our old bank partner Piermon bank and with column and so the way we had written the code made it so that we could like run two different stacks in parallel. But we basically had to rebuild everything from scratch. We had to rebuild and build a lot more from scratch. Right. It wasn't like integrate with a BAS company that gives you a very nice easy rest API. It's like start processing directly with Visa. So um, it was like a huge engineering year. Like it was a year that I was only focused on engineering and product. But that's an investment that's paid dividend over the years in that we have like the lowest cost basis possible and we literally the only way we can get closer to the metal now is by actually getting our own charter.

Miguel Armaza: I was going to save that for later but when are you going to get your own charter?

Victor Cardenas: At some point in the history of slash slash will have a charter. I think for the foreseeable future we won't at least you know, in the course of the next like three to five years. Probably not just because in fintech there's like two directions you can innovate in. You can innovate up which is on the product differentiation side of things of like I am going to complement a bank and card product with some value additive software or some sort of workflow automation or you can innovate down which is like I'm going to get like regulatory creative and I'm going to find a way to serve the, this segment that perhaps other people in the are not, are not quite willing to serve. And we think the biggest opportunity exists in innovating up. Like not necessarily innovating down. And I think if we start trying to get a charter that's going to consume a lot of my, the organization's time and focus is very valuable and I think you see it in the strategies of different companies. Ramp for example has always been very focused on, on innovating up. I think they even haven't gotten as close to the metal as ah us like they process with Marketa and stripe issuing and there's all these people that abstract away the actual financial plumbing associated with their business but they're just constantly shipping product and finding a way to give time back to their end customers. And that's kind of what we want Our same strategy to be where getting a charter is this pretty herculean efforts and we have amazing partners in and Colin who are quite flexible and so we feel pretty well covered there.

Miguel Armaza: Makes sense. Makes sense. There is a risk though that the window is now open. It might close and we don't know. I mean for the last 15 years it was extremely hard to get about a new banking charter. So you know, but I'm sure you, you know that better than I do.

Victor Cardenas: Yeah, of course. I think, I think like I'm not sure even if there's a change of administration from Democrat to Republic, like one, if, if, if the Republicans say like in power the next election, the odds are that that window will extend. And I'm also not sure. I guess we'll have to see how whether the Democrats view the granting of charters so Mercury and Airborne and Ripple and all these different companies as like a net societal benefit and the window might be perpetually open or not. Yeah, I just feel like a bigger strategic priority to make our product a lot better than, than, than, than try to innovate down and get, and get a charter ourselves.

Miguel Armaza: Victor, let's talk about your growth. Maybe tell us about your numbers and then I really want to talk about what's driving that growth because that's the more interesting part of the story.

Victor Cardenas: Just high level numbers. Around $300 million in annualized revenue customers. You know, we move $30 billion a year across all payment rails, wire, ach, stablecoin hardware. And yeah, that's up from like roughly 10 million in annualized revenue like in January of 2024. So you know, two, two and a half years and we went from like 10 to 300 and we all preemptively answered the direction you wanted to take the conversation in which is like what's been driving the growth and what's been driving the growth is in difference to all the B2B neobanks that came before us or even legacy financial institutions. We're specialists, we are not generalists. Our mandate has never been let's build a 20% better version of Chase or like a version of Chase with a nicer UI and then run a bunch of Facebook ads and hope we get a lot of people signing up for our product because we're this slightly better digital alternative. It's how do we build a hyper differentiated product for businesses in one particular segment so that two things can happen. We get much more retentive customers. If you provide much more to your customers like some sort of software or localized human rail that they care very much about, they're much more likely to retain with you for a very long time. And two, we do get better referral flywheels. Again, if you build a product that's very purpose built for a particular segment, your customer's willingness to refer is going to be much higher. And so I'll give an example of what that looks like the longest time. Others are catching up, but I think for like, you know, almost two years, Slash was the only business banking platform in the US that let businesses send and receive USDC and USDT natively from their business banking platform. So you could just put a wallet address and click send money and then we would convert your dollars into crypto and, and send it to whatever counterparty you wanted it to send us to or vice versa. And this in a sense was like vertical differentiation for us. There's lots of businesses that have part of their treasury in crypto or it stables part of their treasury in dollars. There's lots of businesses that make large sums of cross border payments to businesses outside of the US and they much prefer, uh, uh, and their counterpart is much prefer to receive a stable coin payment than to receive a swift transfer because they don't have to pay an FX fee and a fee on the way in and vice versa. There's also lots of businesses in the US that have international customers that prefer to pay them for services in stables than in dollars. And so that's like one form of vertical differentiation or one question we ask ourselves which is like how can we have a structurally differentiated right to win in one segment instead of just going up to a customer and being like, we will offer you slightly more money than the next person to sign up or we will offer you slightly better rate. Um, and we're kind of friends. And so that's really been the grand philosophical, uh, or strategic motor of our growth over the past 24 months. Stablecoin payments is one version of that, but there's kind of like a slightly different answer for every single one of the verticals that we have a present in.

Miguel Armaza: Yeah, maybe take us through that breakdown. So sounds like stablecoin driven payments is an important part. I'm sure there's also local US Payments. Then I wonder, how about credit products? Uh, do you offer credit to your customers and then we can talk about other things?

Victor Cardenas: Yeah, well right now we do. So we offer, we have a secured card and then we have a card with net 30 terms which we are just starting to roll out. But for the longest time we've only offered A security card where your limit is equal to the amount of money that you deposit into your account. So credit really has not been the differentiator at all. It's been more on the software or access to specific uh, payment roles like, like stablecoins that have been quite differentiating. That's, that's one example of that. You know, another example is Slash works with lots of, with lots of marketing agencies, so businesses that uh, run ads on behalf of other e commerce brands. And so we built an entire suite of product that allows our customers to seamlessly manage the prepayments they get from their end customers. So I'm an agency, I have a hundred different customers. Status quo before slash comes along is at the beginning of the month, customer 1 sends me 100k, customer 2 sends me 50k, customer 3 sends me 300. At the suddenly I have $9 billion sitting in my Chase bank accounts and nothing in my Chase bank account tells me one of that belongs to each one of my hundred customers. So I need to have a few people on payroll that track every inflow, these incoming wires on a per customer basis and all the outflow, which is like all the cards spend right on the other side of things. And so these are high velocity businesses. They have lots of customers that can get very messy with Slash. What they can do is they can create a distinct virtual account for each one of their end customers, give the end customer visibility into how much their prepayment is left and then automatically charge their, their agency fee. And and so that's another example of you know, one market that's pretty interesting for us where we've said, hey, let's not just offer the same thing everyone else offers. Like let's build this vertical specific accounts receivable product uh, for them that, that allows them to essentially manage their, their entire practice from Flash. And so it's really examples like that of let's get intimately familiar with the financial workflows and business in new segments, build for them and then the referral flywheels will just get started and, and, and the retention will be much higher

Miguel Armaza: on the marketing agency angle. I read in my research that at Some point about 1% of meta ads were processed through the Slash card. Is that still the case?

Victor Cardenas: Yeah, I would say it's more than that. I haven't run the numbers recently but uh, it's more than that still for sure.

Miguel Armaza: Do you fear there might be kind of like easy 2.0 with meta trying to crack down on um, pay by card perhaps?

Victor Cardenas: Knock on wood. Hopefully not I mean already they are moving some of their advertisers away from card into ach. And so it's something that like we have in the back, we have none in the back of our minds. Like we actually like have quite front and center. But I think we learned our lesson from this Yeezy debacle a few years ago. My personal time and the leadership's personal time is spent on like diversifying the business and finding a way to deliver value to businesses in lots of different segments. So uh, yeah, I think there definitely is a little bit of concentration risk there. But you know, knock on, knock, knock on wood. It won't be as catastrophic as it once was. But if it was, dude, we'll just keep power. There's nothing you can do except you just keep going, move moving forward and figure out a way there's. Look, I keep coming back to this idea of in the US I think there's over 50 or 60 banks that are worth over $10 billion. And so is there space for there to be three, four or five fintechs that enter into that pantheon um, of large financial institutions in the US 100%. It's just a matter of figuring out where the deposits are, where the cardsman is and then just going out and getting it and, and getting it by being smart about go to market and then also about product.

Miguel Armaza: I think you're right about the size of the market and I think last year was a uh, particularly good year for fintech mainstream because it validated to the whole market, not just fintech insiders like you and I, but it validated to the whole market that hey there are multiple fintech companies worldwide, not just in the US that are gone across the $100 billion mark. You know some of them have already cross it but there's a, you know a bench of like at least a dozen that are probably going to cross that within the next few years. Go going back to your product of natively sending stable payments. I mean if you offer great B2B banking software and then in that software you offer that ability to initiate stable payments, my guess would be that that would attract a lot of international customers. Maybe talk a bit about your international uh, customer base.

Victor Cardenas: So we slash works with mostly until very recently. So in August of last year we launched what we call our global USD account. Oh and I think touching on stablecoin back cards is like a very, I think that's a very interesting subject. Uh, it's like a very fast growing market. So we can talk about that in A bit. But the vast majority of the money that's moved that's that slash moves or slashes and move money slash bank partners uh move is for US companies. Granted a lot of these US companies are owned by people that are outside of the U.S. but the majority of these customers that we work with are primarily US businesses that either have you know or uh, like large perhaps like importers right or suppliers that they pay abroad and have to pay in stablecoins or or vice versa where they have customers that they are getting paid from abroad. Um and uh, these customers prefer sending a payment via stables than via dollars. Um, but no in all this last year. So yeah so the vast majority of our business is US but international is becoming increasingly important make company called uh Rain pioneered or basically invented this concept of a stablecoin backed card, an instrument that you could use to spend down a stablecoin balance. And uh, they've been extremely friendly to developers. There's a long tail of not very well funded companies that have been able to launch these simplecoin uh back card products. And I think now them and Reap, who are the two big like infrastructural players. REAP just got acquired by Kraken pricing like $700 million a month in stable in card volume which is, which is super impressive, you know almost at the $10 billion mark. And we're a customer of Reigns and uh, we're leveraging their infrastructure to be able to issue USD cards, USD back cards to businesses all over the world. And that actually was one of our big promises or things that got investors very excited about Slash which is this idea of the world is becoming an increasingly dollarized place. Like anyone anywhere in the world can make money by vibe coding a piece of software and they're likely going to sell that in dollars to businesses all over the world. The US consumer, the US business is the best person to sell to. So lots of people like sell products into the U.S. economy. And right now all these business owners all over the world are forced to interact with local banks that have subpar USD banking features or they can't even issue a card for example that doesn't charge them an FX fee if they spend in the US and so all these businesses are going to need an instrument and high quality dollar based financial services and and we want to be the dominant stablecoin back card and the dominant call it USD digital banking platform for businesses not only in America but but abroad as well.

Miguel Armaza: Is it safe to say that you're betting the future growth on the company in large washerless deals.

Victor Cardenas: I would say it's definitely an important part of it. In the US still less than 5% of American businesses bankers spend with a fintech I think Ramp, I think has 2% market share. Brex is comparable in size. And you add us up, uh, Mercury, these other guys like it roughly works out to 5%. So it's still very greenfield in the US and with agentic coding, the delta and product quality, between what traditional financial institution that was not built recently can offer and what a fintech that can innovate on product very quickly can offer, it's going to just get much, much larger. So I'm of the view that in the US B2B fantasy is going to go from having 5% market share to probably like, I don't know, 30, 40% market share over the course of the next decade. And we intend to be one of the major players there. So international is even more Greenfield but there's still so much business left to be done in the US that we also are not taking our off the ball.

Miguel Armaza: Victor, I've heard you say in past interviews that your older self would not want to compete with today. Victor, today as a founder, right? And then you've learned a lot of things. I actually want to go one by one of the things that you've said that you've learned that I'm curious, your approach is, number one is learning how to hire. What have you learned about building a team?

Victor Cardenas: When you're first starting a company, you hear all these things from investors and other founders about culture. And it was a very foreign concept to me for a very long time. I always thought of it as something that you had to impose on the organization of. There are certain things that you have to do or events that you have to organize or rules that you have to make. But I really come to the realization that it's built kind of the other way around of the people that you hire and the example that you give, uh, primarily the people that you hire and also the example that you give are what creates culture. And so I've learned that as hard as it may be to turn down people that are culturally inconsistent with the kind of organization that you want to build, you have, you have to do that. You just have to hire people that fit the mold of your business's ideal worker. So at Slash, we have a very, we have a culture of high intensity, we have a culture of high ownership, but we also have a culture of missionaries.

Miguel Armaza: Right.

Victor Cardenas: Like one fun fact about Slash is that only two people have ever left Slash to join another company. Everyone else has either left to start a company themselves or they've been let go. So, and another thing about Slash is we've never hired somebody from our competitor and no one from Slash has gone, uh, to another competitor. Because we hire somebody that works, uh, at a competitor, it's likely that that person is more of a mercenary than they are a missionary and that they'll be willing to leave your company to go to another one. So Sam Altman tweeted the other day something like, it's much better to let yourself get screwed over every once in a while than to be very cynical. And, and so my approach is, okay, I'm never cynical. I always assume good intentions, uh, from everyone. And so I just try my absolute best to only let people in the door, uh, who I think are like very mission and vision aligned with us. And then we also treat our people very well. So the biggest thing I've learned, I went in a bunch of different directions, but if I had to distill it down to one thing, it's hire people that are consistent with the kind of organization that you want to build. And in our case, it's people that, that have something to prove and are excited to work very, very hard. It's. You literally feel it like the conversation. There have been points in time, right around the time of this Yeezy debacle, they're like, we had to let some people go. And the conversations I had with employees and the problems I had to deal with were completely different from the ones even though the organization was much smaller than the ones I deal with today. They were about people talking about PTO and people talking about this benefit and people talking about like flexibility of where they wanted to work from. And it was just like at the time I was like, oh, this is the uh, reality of running a business. Like once you get sufficiently big, this is the like, kind of thing that you deal with. But now we're a much larger company, you around 70 people. And I literally never have to think about those things because I bias to, towards hiring and people that, that want to work hard and are enthused about being at a high intensity organization.

Miguel Armaza: You say that you look for missionaries and you have a missionary culture. How does that express itself in kind of the day to day or even in the product?

Victor Cardenas: We have a very high willingness to do the next thing culture. So what that means is, let's say go back to this like easy debacle days, right? Like that is probably the largest problem I've had to deal with. Like existential threat to the business I've had to deal with as an entrepreneur. But every entrepreneur knows that you deal with these fires every single week, right? Every single month of varying sizes. And so we have a team of people that understands that that's the nature of running a business and is always very forward looking of a problem. Any given thing is either solvable or not solvable. And if it's solvable, um, the thing you have to do right away is go attack it right away. And if it's not solvable, you just have to start executing in some other direction. And they never really dwell on the moment. And so I think that's one of the big benefits, right where everyone is so bought into this idea of we need to make this business generational. We have a shot at building this generation's J.P. morgan, one of the important financial institutions of the 21st century, that it's just, we have this culture of if it's all, we'll solve it. If it's not solvable, don't even worry about it, do the next thing. Instead of dreading the current moment and living too much in the present, we're always kind of like lunging ourselves towards the future. And uh, in the product, the way that reflects itself is just well. This is another thing I talk about frequently to our team which is you win or you have product market fit. When you do not write your own product roadmap, you win when your customers write your product roadmap for you. And I think that's one way that it translates that we have a very practical team of we know that the way to build the best product is by answering to the questions of our end customers. And so that's one way that the culture definitely is reflected in, in the actual product that we build.

Miguel Armaza: That's actually a great segue for my next question which is how to build product. Now you're uh, you went from monoline at some point to multi product, right? And you're, you're launching a bunch of innovative products. What have you learned about actually building product?

Victor Cardenas: So we only have one product manager at ah, slash and for the longest time I was like the product product manager. And so it's very helpful. This is like a very victor take. I don't know if this is a common way that things are done, but for there to be almost like dictatorial approach to it of there is one person that is the arbiter of what gets shipped and what doesn't because they have a unique understanding of how all the different features that you build mesh well with each other. And so again, I think, yeah, those are props are uh, too two biggest learnings, which is you win when you are shipping things that your customers are asking for. Because we have this very vertical by vertical strategy. It's almost like we're starting a new business every single month, every single time we say, hey, we want to, we want to start serving this new vertical. We ask ourselves the same kinds of questions I'd be asking myself if I were starting a business from scratch, which is like, will this have primer get fit? Are we going to be pushing this boulder up this hill or down? How do we get to the point where we're chasing the boulder down the hill and in this vertical, like, what are all the way unique ways we're going to go do go to market build a brand in this segment? And so I have a, uh, just a deep desire to always ensure that we are shipping something that somebody is asking for instead of we are shipping something that we think will be, will be cool or just we have some abstract idea that it's important for it to exist.

Miguel Armaza: Engineers are, you know, famously, I, I'm not sure if hard is the word, but they're different to manage than like a, a team of salespeople. Right? Like, uh, what have you learned about managing a team of engineers?

Victor Cardenas: Yeah, what matters is they need to. Engineers are obs. If you hire good engineers, they're obsessive. Like, if good, uh, uh, a phenomenal engineer is one that loves to write code more than they love to do anything else. And your entire job as a manager is to get them to love doing the work that they are doing for your organization more than anything else. And so it's almost like what matters most is you need to match the right engineer to the right project that will motivate them the most and find a way for them to feel compelled about its importance. And I think one thing we've done very well is engineers are work very closely with designers. Like, we love having engineers that flex up and understand how the product's actually been used and we actually force them to ship the dashboards then that the business is going to use to interpret the success of their product so that they close all these loops. So uh, the key is get them obsessed over the product that they're working on and ideally get them obsessed with the actual outcome. So have them look at, at the chart of, you know, there's one engineer of Ours that like shipped our entire invoicing product. Right, like our entire like accounts receivable product. And so he's constantly talking to our go to market people of like you know, uh, I loop me into this conversation with people that, that, that are working on this or like you know, why, why did the growth slow down this month versus versus in others? And so I think those are, those are some of the learnings that I've had managing engineers and, and, and and

Miguel Armaza: it's quite fun stepping back at the a little bit more macro level. As the company CEO. What are some of the KPIs that you track the closest?

Victor Cardenas: Yeah, I actually think it's important not to track that many. At the end of the day what KPIs matter for us is card spend interchange revenues downstream from that. So that matters a lot. Assets under management, interest bearing and so they generate revenue for us and then any other kind of payment volume that that is fee generating for us. So in our case like stablecoin payment volume. So those are really the three things that I look at. It's like we have right here outside of the Office 7 TVs tracking a bunch of different things but there's only really one chart that matters which is that one. I think it is important every single time you launch like a smaller feature to track its actual success so that your evaluation of whether or not to keep investing it is grounded in some sort of numbers. But it's helpful to have a small number of KPIs that you track towards to keep you and the organization focused.

Miguel Armaza: Do you track them daily, weekly, monthly?

Victor Cardenas: Yeah, multiple times a day. Of uh, I just have the TVs up and it's just like I just glance at it every. So when I didn't have TVs up I would just always like twitch like check how they're doing. It's like it's not telling me anything new. It's just like I've literally been looking at, you know, I knew trailing 30 day card spend for 5 years every single day, multiple times a day since like literally may of 2021, which is when we started the company.

Miguel Armaza: Is there a KPI that you previously thought it was important to track that you don't really track closely anymore?

Victor Cardenas: Yeah, it's interesting because I don't know if I ever thought it was like extremely important but a lot of times people ask me like how many customers do you have? And it's like I don't think that's a very good question because you know, I can have a customer that makes me 2 million bucks a year and I could have a customer that makes me $2 a year or loses me money every year. So we don't really track the number of for example like businesses on Slash. We track like some segmented version of that, of how many customers in this vertical of this particular size do we have? Because that is what is actually conducive to growing the underlying important KPIs. So that doesn't really matter. I would say probably also the total payment volume, like the $30 billion number that I quoted, like doesn't really matter at all because like a lot of that payment volume is non, non revenue generating. It just sounds cool. You know what do you say it. So those are, those are two. Yeah. It's just important that the things that sound cool to others or maybe on a podcast are not things that, that you yourself actually pay attention to on a day to day basis.

Miguel Armaza: So I know that you've said that Slash is going all in on AI and you've launched I think as an AI chief of staff and maybe tell us what does it mean to go all in on AI for you?

Victor Cardenas: The biggest way we've gone all in on AI is on internal tooling. If you think of what the original promise of a Neobank was, it was a place where you could open a bank account digitally. That was very important. Right. But similarly importantly, it's a uh, it's a bank with no bank branches. And so new bank had a structural cost advantage over ITAU and all these other legacy banks in Brazil because it was, it was all digital. Right. They didn't have to have all this real estate all over the country to acquire a bunch of customers. So they had a, a structurally better cost base than, than the legacy incumbents. I think now there's an opportunity to start a neo NEO bank where there is another very important cost base that the legacy banks have that AI native companies are uh, well positioned to do away with which is your entire back office. Every bank spends a meaningful portion of its top line on line level. People that perform roads, repetitive tasks that just keep the actual bank running. So processing disputes, parsing documents when somebody buys for an application, submitting a star filing to a regulator, responding to a robust information from a bank partner dealing with fraud recalls performing like manual account verification. So many of these like processes associated with maintaining the actual organization are very manual and have had headcount thrown out by these legacy financial institutions. And our approach is let's identify this whole thing, right? Like let's be the business banking platform with the lowest opex, right? And then that actually is a structural differentiator. Because what's our goal? We want to be the, the fintech that has the actual, uh, lowest gross margins, not the low, I mean, still decent, but the highest EBITDA margins, right? Like if you have very low opex, that gives you the right to be more aggressive in the rates that you actually provide. Your. So that is the main way we're going all in on AI. It's creating this new kind of, of structurally leaner neobank. And then obviously we think a lot about how can we use AI to deliver a better product experience to our customers. So for example, this AI Chief of staff twin that we launched, uh, uh, is a product that lets you perform every action you can perform from the slash dashboard, but in natural language, which is valuable and has gotten great usage. But really the AI is mostly at the back end. That's how we think about it.

Miguel Armaza: I just had a guest, Rob Havert, uh, who's the founder of Motive, and he was saying that he thinks all the big banks, with all the tools that we have today, they could probably be run with 5% of the staff. Do you agree with that?

Victor Cardenas: Yeah, I would agree with that. I would agree with that. But it's so. It's so hard for them to actually do that. Just it's culturally hard. It's like, is there a person with enough agency at these banks and enough of a desire to win and stay relevant in the ne this next era that's going to drive and make the extremely hard decisions necessary for that to happen? I don't think so, but 100%, with all tools that exist, I think they could be run with a small fraction of the actual headcount that they have.

Miguel Armaza: Victor, let's talk about Venezuela. Uh, I mean, I've heard your story before. You grew up in Venezuela up until fairly recently, right? I think you were born during the Chavez era, so it's all you've known. At age 18 you relocate to Stanford for your undergrad, and since then you've lived in the US but most of your life you were in Venezuela. There's been a huge change. How are you confronting this new reality? Uh, what's your reaction? How do you feel about all this?

Victor Cardenas: Extremely ecstatic about all the changes that are occurring in Venezuela. I would have never imagined that I would have gone back to Venezuela. I was just there last week for my brother's graduation. You go to the hotel, the lobby of any major hotel and all you hear are Americans and hedge funds, uh, people and private equity people looking to invest in the country. And so I think Venezuela has the potential to be the energy hub of the Americas, probably the second largest economy in the Americas, provided a rule of law gets established and we have many, many decades of reinvesting, uh, the productivity that comes out of oil proceeds into, into the country. I couldn't be more bullish on Venezuela one day in my life. Definitely far away from now because I'm so uh, dedicated to running Slash. I definitely want to find a way to go back and contribute to my country in a meaningful way. But is very interesting. Even fintech, right like Arbor right now has been in the news because they are going to be the correspondent bank for, in the US for Banco Venezuela for example, which is the largest bank in Venezuela. And I think there are other American banks that are very interested in getting to that correspondent business. So that's also something I'm thinking about a bit too as a fintech founder. Which is what's the largest bank in Latin America? It's new Bank. They're $70 billion market cap. Bank or market cap. I don't know if by deposits are large, but for sure market cap. But in the, in, in the Gulf, right? In, in, in Qatar and Saudi and, and all these countries, I think there's over a dozen banks that are worth over $100 billion. Right. And why is that? It's because they're the banks that support the, the, the, the massive oil sector and the massive uh, natural gas sector that exists in all those countries. And so is there an opportunity for a, uh, Large Financial Service, B2B Financial Services business to be built in Venezuela over the course of the next decade? I 100% think so. Could Slash could not be slash, like maybe, who knows. Um, but I definitely haven't lost touch with that as well. A lot of my friends that left haven't been back. My family's actually still there. So I've probably been back like once or twice a year, every single year since, since I've left. Just so excited. And would encourage any American listening to this podcast to just explore potential investment opportunities down there. Just because it's all. Every sector of the economy is going to grow in lockstep with the recovery of the oil sector.

Miguel Armaza: The mainstream kind of financial media is paying a lot of attention mainly to oil and gas plus mining as investment opportunities, I would argue. It sounds like you also are saying this, that behind that is financial services and obviously driven by fintech.

Victor Cardenas: Yeah, I think so. I think actually I'm not sure if driven by fintech to be honest with you. I think there's just massive credit opportunities there. Right. What are the sectors that are going to be uh, recover the fastest are the ones you mentioned oil, mining and gas. And so these are very credit heavy operations and historically banks and as well have been ridiculously profitable because they lend these deposits to all these big infrastructural energy projects. And so I think those are probably the most interesting opportunities. Are there other interesting opportunities that maybe fintechs could tackle? Like perhaps giving Venezuela installer access, stuff like that? For sure. It's unclear to me how you build that centibillion dollar bank that exists in Saudi and Venezuela now, but it's definitely something that's in the back of my head and I've been asking myself uh,

Miguel Armaza: quite a bit about Victor before I let you go. We're going to go into just uh, some rapid fire questions. Feel free to take 10 seconds or 60 seconds or more if you want. Uh, there's talk that your generation, meaning Gen Z, they don't read a lot of books. I wonder if you're a big reader and if so is there a book that you recommend often?

Victor Cardenas: I am a big reader and the only thing I read as of like two years ago are biographies. Last few I read were Napoleon's biography, Alexander Hamilton's biography and Juan Vicente Gomez's biography who was the president of Venezuela from 1905 to 1930 until um, upon his death. Yeah, I really recommend, I really recommend people read history because you can learn an awful lot about the present by understanding the past. And the best way to learn history I think is through people's stories because they're equally as compelling as novels. Um, so I used to not be a history buff but then I got obsessed with learning about like the great men and it's been equally as enjoying to me to read biographies as it's been to read uh, novels.

Miguel Armaza: Who's an entrepreneur you deeply admire?

Victor Cardenas: Vlad Tenet from Robinhood and Nikolai Stronsky from Revolut. These guys have willed like multi Deca billion soon to be. Well, Robinhood was 70 billion financial services businesses from nothing into something. And you're very just adjacent to what I'm doing. So try to learn a lot and read a lot about how those guys made their businesses work.

Miguel Armaza: Have you gotten to meet them yet?

Victor Cardenas: I've gotten to meet a lot. I haven't gotten to meet Nikolai, um, but I could probably ask Mickey from Ribbit for an intro to him. But I'll only ask for the intro when uh, I have something very relevant to.

Miguel Armaza: Actually speaking of Mickey, uh, what's it like working with Mickey Malga?

Victor Cardenas: It forces you to be practical. Mickey always asks very real grounded questions and he gets to the essence of problems quite quickly. So it forces me not to be hand waving to always think about what's tangible right in front of me.

Miguel Armaza: Since you started slash, what is one thing where you've changed your mind?

Victor Cardenas: I've changed my mind on the importance of structure. I used to think structure was extremely important to the success of um, any given organization. Now I think a moderate amount of structure and a high willingness to do the next productive thing is much more important. Is much more important for you as an entrepreneur, for everyone on your team to be decisive and, and productive at every given point of the day than to be reflective and pensive about the best way of going about doing things.

Miguel Armaza: I think you're a Teal fellow, is that right?

Victor Cardenas: Yes. Yes.

Miguel Armaza: So what's the best thing of uh, that community of Teal fellows?

Victor Cardenas: Friendships Honestly hasn't been very commercial for me. Um, there's a few Teal fellows that have flash cults and need to work in getting all of them onboarded have made. I made a lot of really, really good friends that obviously have a lot in common with through that program.

Miguel Armaza: Do you think from the outside looking in, do you think the public understands what the Thiel Fellowship is?

Victor Cardenas: I think the outside world thinks it, it's much cooler than. I think it's awesome. I think there's, there's a lot of great people that do the program but it really doesn't have a lot of structure. Really just kind of get a grant and you uh, have the opportunity to meet the your fellows once or twice in a structured manner and then it's kind of up to you to make the most of the community.

Miguel Armaza: You've talked about burnout and how you think burnout doesn't come from working hard, comes from other factors. Maybe expand on this.

Victor Cardenas: It comes from seeing no results. I do not get tired of working from 9am to midnight every weekday from, for six years straight because the number has gone up, you know, and because I know that more hours work translates to a more productive organization and that's very motivating to me. I think burnout comes from putting in a lot of hours towards something that is not showing any results. So orient all your hours towards something trackable is is what I would say.

Miguel Armaza: And uh, finally Victor, what has you excited about kind of the next year

Victor Cardenas: or two of Slash Global global expansion. Slash is going to be the number one stablecoin backed card by the end of the year. I think the biggest one is re pay right now and they do like a couple hundred million in volume per month which is a small fraction of or it's or it's a definitely a fraction of what we do on the like non stablecoin back card set of things. And so making taking Slash to businesses all over the world and giving them access to quality dollar financial services that's that's got me really excited.

Miguel Armaza: Victor, thanks for bearing with all my questions and then congrats on everything you've built and uh, really appreciate you spending the last hour with us.

Victor Cardenas: Of course. Miguel, thank you so much for the invitation.

Miguel Armaza: Thanks for tuning in and I hope you enjoyed this great episode with Victor from Slash. If you want more interviews, make sure to subscribe, follow and leave a review on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your shows. It helps and means a lot. And if you have any suggestions or thoughts about the show, just drop me a line on LinkedIn or email. See you next time.