E04: Milind Sanghavi - Stablecoin Summer & Building Resilience

Speaker A: I don't think there's anybody out there who says money moves efficiently. There's so much conversation around stablecoin and I think most of it is noise. Every partner out there or every provider says they're the cheapest. Our view is very simple. That's never been true 100% of the time in the fintech world. Our business side of our team is very web two and our Eng team is very web three, and that's where we see the power. I think from an XP perspective, it's very, very clear. We have the connections and we, we know exactly what we want to do in this part of the world. I want to change how money moves.

Speaker B: Hi, everybody, and welcome to a new episode of True Founder Stories, a show where we discuss FinTech AI and cross border expansion. My name is Felix and I'm your host for this show. With me today is Milin Sangabi. Milin is the founder of xweave and he's a pretty impressive career across multiple companies including JP Morgan, OCBC, Visa, PayPal and Meta. He's also the founder of Xweave, which is a, uh, cross border payments orchestration platform. Minut. It's great to have you on board today.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me. Um, yeah, we're very excited to be partnering with Kadan. Loved, uh, our conversation with you and Ray and David and it's always been fun and, uh, you know, it's always hard to find, ah, a true VC who's very founder friendly. And so we've loved our conversations with you.

Speaker B: Thanks so much for the flowers. Appreciate that. And to give our listeners a chance to understand you a bit better, I have a few questions for you which require only one word answers. Are you ready?

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: All right. Early mornings or late nights?

Speaker A: Late nights.

Speaker B: Mountain hike or beach resort?

Speaker A: Beach resort.

Speaker B: All right. Um, buy bitcoin or buy gold.

Speaker A: That's a tough one. Uh, right now I'll go gold.

Speaker B: All right. This is not investment advice, by the way. Uh, electronic music or hip hop?

Speaker A: Hip hop.

Speaker B: Ship fast or perfect product?

Speaker A: Started with perfect product, but learning to ship fast.

Speaker B: Let's start at the beginning. Milind. We'd, uh, love to know sort of how you actually grow up. So maybe you can take us to the early stages of your life and talk a bit about that.

Speaker A: I grew up in, um, a serial entrepreneurial household. My dad was a serial entrepreneur, was a trader, did a bunch of really fun stuff. My mom had a couple of businesses as well. So kind of always grew up with this. Like you got to have equity you know, to put it very simply, storyline, but also saw the ups and downs of an entrepreneurial life. Uh, the time commits. Um, and you know, I always joke that, like, I don't think I ever took a vacation with my dad where he was fully present for most of the time.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Uh, but it was, it was a fantastic upbringing and gave me a lot of opportunities, including going to the US and you know, doing my undergrad at UT Austin.

Speaker B: So, yeah, maybe you take us to one moment in your early life that particularly shaped you.

Speaker A: Yeah, actually I'll go more than one. Right. Because I don't think that's ever just one. I think my parents giving me the opportunity to go and study at U.T. austin, uh, was a significant change for me. Coming from the Indian education system, moving to the US system, which was so different and genuinely value thought and almost disagreement with teachers. Um, also a, uh, very pivotal moment. And Warren Buffett always says this. It's about who you choose as your life partner. And, um, I met my girlfriend and now, now wife, uh, at UT Austin. So very, very pivotal for me. Uh, I would say, like, also getting the opportunity to join PayPal early was a very big shift coming from the old world and into the newer world. So, you know, there's always a bunch of different things. I think moving to Singapore was another one with PayPal. Getting to do EasyTap, which was my first startup experience, and then obviously starting X Weave was, is, is now the most fun of having, uh, in a very long time.

Speaker B: Maybe from moving from India to the US what was the biggest surprise or the biggest difference for you?

Speaker A: You know, I grew up in a relatively, I would say, controlled environment. Right. And I don't mean that in a bad way, but it was always like you lived in a bubble of sorts, um, and going to the US and like managing your own bank account. Like many, many. I'm much, much older than you are. Right, Felix? So, like, it was a very different time. And I always joke about this. That first time when I went to one of my closest friends, dad, and told him I was going to Texas and UT Austin, the perception of Austin was not what Austin was. It was a very, like, you know, you put it all with cowboys and Texas and all of that, but Austin was very progressive. Um, I think for me, I also started like, kind of. I paid my way through college after my first semester and like, being able to manage work and school at the same time, um, was a very big learning curve. Uh, and, you know, started a small business when I was at University, um, and then managing a girlfriend while you're doing all of that was a fun part as well.

Speaker B: Now, you've also had a very impressive corporate career. And some of the biggest names like JP Morgan, OCBC, Meta, PayPal, Visa. What are some of the most interesting impactful learnings from those names?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think those names just also show how old I am. Right. To a certain extent or experience, whatever you want to call it. I think each one of those brings very unique experiences. Um, at PayPal, we were just starting to build the checkout product in 2009 when I joined them. So what we all see as PayPal today, and the big button, um, and the ability to like, PayPal at that time was a max AB place. So you abed every single thing in the world. Uh, and it was fantastic to learn that. Like, I came from a world where we were basically doing credit cards. And so you did AB testing on like messages, but you never did AB on like, how do you drive more volume or growth or all of those things. Um, and so lots of learnings over there, obviously at PayPal, like, you started seeing the sense of a global organization. Um, and how, because PayPal at that time was also very heavy on cross border, the ability and the pain points that existed in emerging markets for payments. Um, today we live in a world where every market has their own payment gateway. That was not true in 2010 and 2011. And a lot of the sellers wouldn't get underwritten by banks, wouldn't get underwritten by the payment gateways. And so very, very important learnings, I think. And also a lot of those learnings ended up impacting how XV has been built in our case. Right, which is how do you go into markets where there's high regulation or heavy regulation and then go build along that with local partners. Uh, so very, very important learnings at PayPal. But even places like OCBC where like my team and I, we built something for Google Pay and launched with Google Pay, everybody sits around over there and says, oh, you were at a bank. Um, it was actually a really fun experience. Um, so I would say, like every piece has its pluses and minuses and it's about what you do with it in my perspective.

Speaker B: And I think you've already done a very good job leading into the next topic and the main topic for today, which is X Weave, maybe give our listeners a quick introduction what X Weave does.

Speaker A: So X Weave's goal has always been that money should move in instant, uh, or near instant time frames. And the way to do it today is historically people have used pre funding, which is essentially you hold money in what's called a nostro or a vostro or essentially a counterparty bank account. And the reason that is done is because what happens, you know, what's the assurance? And so pre funding float, as what it's also called, is actually to assure people that the money is going to show up. And what we figured out is there's a way to actually use stablecoins which are much more liquid than a pre funded instrument, and actually move it in real time. And so we started tweaking and playing around with that stablecoin idea. And as we played around with it, what we realized is different assets and different networks and different partners. There was significant arbitrage behind it. And so we think from an XV perspective, the whole goal, like our tagline, is payments, you know, 24, seven including weekends. But the reality is we are building a payment orchestrator so we don't touch the money. Which is different to most other people in the, in the web two and web three world. Uh, but we think of this thing as a payment processor or a stablecoin clearing house, if you want to call it that, where we help our clients who are businesses figure out the cheapest way to move money across borders without any regulatory arbitrage. Uh, and doing it and helping them find the best partner, the best asset and the best network. Um, and that's not just one site. So we, we kind of look at it as an end to end flow which is if fiat or whatever, it goes from one bank to a wallet or bank to bank, um, it's today colloquially called the stablecoin sandwich. We think that's a very simplistic way to do it because, or call it, uh, there's a lot more complexity behind it and XP job is to take away all of that pain on behalf of our clients and help them deliver a better product for their customers.

Speaker B: We what are kind of your customers? How can we visualize that? And what was maybe the first reaction of your customers seeing this?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it changes. Uh, I think last year when we spoke to some people, the initial viewpoint was always that uh, oh no, like stablecoins is crypto. Uh, and crypto is not looked at necessarily very positively by regulated institutions. Um, our clients are, I would call them essentially aggregators of money movement. So some of them are remittance players, some of them are treasury houses, some of them are banks. And what we do for them is again, like I said, move money across specific borders. But we are also not available in every market. Uh, we only exist in markets where there's very clear regulation around stablecoins. There's very clear regulation on who the clean partners are, uh, and to a certain extent who the unclean partners are, if you want to call it that.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Um, but, but our goal is to say these, these people are our clients. Have either a person who's trying to send money to their family or a business who's, or SME who's trying to send money to their supplier. They today don't really care. They don't care about stablecoins, they don't care about pre funding. What they care about, at what cost are you going to give it to me at, when is it going to show up and how much is going to show up. And what we believe is that the power of the stablecoin and the power of the blockchain based payment network at the end of the day is finality. So I can tell you exactly how much is going to show up. And what we've done at xpeave is essentially build out a way of mapping out every single player in that equation and what it's going to cost and how much money is going to show up at the end point today. You know this happened with us a little bit as well. Right when you guys wired your funds, like sometimes it's like hey, when is it going to show up? Is it going to be $20 less? Uh, or is it going to be $30 less or $40 less? And our thing is why like we're sitting in 2025 about to go into 2026, money should move like it should move today. Um, and look, I am not saying that it solves world hunger. Like let me just be very clear today. When you're doing US dollar to US dollar payments, it's a pretty tight flow. There's not really as much of an issue there. The issues in our part of the world are much more than they are in the developed world. Uh, and primarily that's got to do with requirements around pre funding and costs and all of that. And so that's what we want to really solve is use the power of this like kind of digital asset framework concept. Do it without any regulatory arbitrage, don't touch the money. Because we think that the people who have the licenses are actually the best holders of that information and that uh, those funds and help them kind of still use the power of the blockchain and stablecoin.

Speaker B: So when we looked at stablecoins holistically. We see basically three major benefits that drive all these use cases, which is speed, cost and access. How did you particularly land on the B2B Cross Border Transfer use case?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think the use case that we are is we are a pipe for moving money. Um, we always think of the, whether it's a B2B, a C2C, uh, C2B are modular. the end of the day, if you build the pipe to be strong enough. Um, and that's what we've loved about our conversation with you and David. Right. As we float through. The idea was we're building infrastructure. And my team always laughs at me when I say this, like we are okay with being exceptionally boring infrastructure. And I think for us, where it was very clear was, look, you can touch the money, you can apply for all these licenses, you don't know how long it's going to take, but when you touch the money comes, you know, a lot of responsibility. Uh, whereas we think that the regulators in every market have already identified players and they've given out these licenses and we believe through them we can actually still use the power of kind of bringing both sides together. Like, you know, I always say that the Web two people have historically thought that the web three people were cowboys and cowgirls and the Web three people thought the Web two guys were a bunch of nerds and geeks and none of us knew what we were doing. The reality is there are strengths on both sides. And X weave job is to bring both sides together and solve for, like I say, money movement. Whether it's, you know, it's not that we didn't toy with the B2C idea. Yeah, we did. But the thing is, does the world need another wallet? I'm not really convinced that it does. Uh, and then you need to have a whole different kind of go to market approach. Uh, we've historically always been a small team. We continue to be a small team, which we've had long discussions about. But we think that there are people today who are already touching money, who've already spent the time and the effort to have clients and build deep relationships. We now want to give these guys and these clients of ours, I would say, broader depth of solutions to meet their client needs. Better.

Speaker B: Yeah. Now you've hinted at something which is when you deal with the Web3 space, a fair share of the market are, uh, sort of the crypto bros, Right? Uh, what was the general Sentiment of the Web3 ecosystem when you launched Xweaver some of the criticism, maybe we weren't

Speaker A: cool enough to be web 3 crypto bros or crypto girls. It was a very serious conversation about like, well is it stablecoin or btc? There are enough players playing in the bitcoin space and trying to build the same piece. We decided to go down the stablecoin path because we felt that we could use exchanges and liquidity providers to move from fiat to stable and then stable back to fiat. Our use case we always wanted to target was fiat to fiat and we went through a lot of conversation about is the world going to be where everybody only operates on a stable. It may exist. Uh, I think for us the reason we also were asset agnostic and we built that as one of our core approaches is the world today pretty much operates on two, maybe three global stablecoins which are all US dollar based as is evident from what's happening in Japan, what's happening in Hong Kong, what's happened in Singapore, what's happening in the uae. Some of these progressive regulators are now going to start looking at stablecoin assets or stable assets, let's call them stable digital assets that are non US dollar based. And our goal is always to create a network where you can clear those directly. You don't have to always go through a US dollar asset. Today we do with our clients that are live. We do go through the US dollar asset but the playbook's early. Uh, we think the playbook's just being written in terms of how do you go after these web2flows. And a lot of the web3 guys always thought that the world needed to just exist only on web three. And I don't think that's a wrong view. I just not where we see the day zero need today.

Speaker B: Right. And uh, I think it's interesting to see how stablecodes are emerging across the globe and all the different countries that you mentioned, including Japan as one of the interesting markets. Uh, what are some of the biggest misconceptions maybe about stablecoins that you've encountered?

Speaker A: Uh, how long do we have? Um, I think there's a misconception that stablecoins are zero cost. Um, that is not true. Uh, and people also believe that stablecoins the only cost is the gas fee. Also not true. I think those points are not true. When you start doing non US dollar money movement or non US dollar currency movement. Uh, it's very liquidity based. Right. Um, certain currencies will price better. Uh, when you do fiat to fiat, I think that's one I think two. Most people think of stablecoin, I mean now, right. Like, again, there was a. There was. I would say, like Stripe buying Bridge was like step zero of this movement. Um, this. We just went through stablecoin summer, um, or whatever you want to call it. Ah. And I think for us it's always been a function of there is power to that asset. But the need today is still in fiat. And so how do we blend Web two and Web three? Uh, and that's the reason we've gotten accepted into Bloom. We're very excited to be a part of Bloom, um, which is MAS's digital asset movement or what's the next version of Project Orchid? Because I think that there is a very clear strength on both sides. And regulators, and progressive regulators are understanding that you don't have to be just one way or just the other way. There's somewhere in between, which is if you draw the line back to seven, eight years ago, FinTechs were in exactly the same spot when we were all scaling PayPal. There was no payment. Payment gateways were considered very risky. Um, and m. I think regulators came around and built regulation around it. I always say we're the weird Web3 startup, or one of the very few Web3 startups that likes regulation because our clients are all regulated institutions. And so for them, having any kind of even questionable flow is not an option. And that's where we want to target. And we only want the partners that want to do, like I always say, like, there are partners who don't care about kyc. Not the right partner for us.

Speaker B: Right, Right. What actually is Project Bloom? What do they try to achieve?

Speaker A: I think it's very early stages of what MAS has announced on Project Bloom. But at the end of the day, the core concept is across, you know, Southeast Asian, Asian countries. Um, Orchid's goal was always to move money much more fluidly, smoothly, cheaper. You know, all of the things that you already spoke about. And now there is a thesis that you can use digital assets to do it. Um, and that's what we are excited to be a partner with all the other Rockstar companies that are on that list. And we hope to be the next rockstar company that comes out of Bloom as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely some big names there. Yeah. Now, of course, the stablecoin B2B segment in itself is getting more and more competitive on a global level. You have some big names, of course. The Bridge acquisition was one of the first moments. The potential acquisition of bbnk, which eventually didn't come through, also put More spotlight on this. How does xweave stand out on a global market? And how do you stay relevant?

Speaker A: I should go back and look at your IC note. Right. For some of this too. But I think from an XVP perspective, it's. We're very clear. We have the connections and we know exactly what we want to do in this part of the world. Um, some people call it the Global South. Some people look at that as a negative term. I don't know which way to look at it. For us, we're looking at multiple Asian markets and the Middle East. Um, and we believe there's a way to build a very successful network business where we integrate into multiple exchanges, multiple providers in every market, and then clear across them and help figure out who, who is the best asset or best partner for our partners, for our clients. I think the play is so early, Felix, where we're still figuring out what the future will look like. I think for us to sit here and even for me to sit here and say, oh, this world ends at stablecoins would be a completely false statement. I think there's a lot of different things being thrown at it. I think with the way I look at it and way I think we built XPE to look at it is as long as you can move an asset across borders with zero regulatory arbitrage and with a lot of liquidity behind it, that asset should work. Now, today it's stablecoins, maybe it's CBDCs in the future, maybe it's a local stable, maybe it's digital gold, which you and I have spoken about a little bit. Or, uh, tokenized gold, tokenized money markets. Um, there's a lot of different plays coming. I think the reality is everybody's realizing that this pre funding game, a lot of people will say pre funding is not a cost. I would say if you go back and talk to treasury people and CFOs, there is a cost. And there is, you know, why should a company spend two hours every morning buying a certain currency, as big or small as it is, when you can have a different way of moving money? Um, that's emerging, definitely.

Speaker B: And of course, if you look at the average remittance cost globally, it's still at around 6%. Goes all the way up to, I think, 16% for South Africa. So definitely it's a big impact. You're saying you're not solving world hunger, but you definitely have a huge impact in what you could potentially achieve. Uh, what are you trying to prove by building this company?

Speaker A: Yeah. So let Me just clarify. I think I'd love to solve world hunger using xv for sure. There's no question about that. I think what it is, is if you look out onto our LinkedIn's and you cannot miss stablecoins on LinkedIn. And I think there's a little bit of an overhype over there.

Speaker B: Maybe it's also our algorithm, right?

Speaker A: Absolutely. For sure. Uh, I think there are some very good cool builders in the space who we're all trying to do it in different ways. Um, like for us today, when we speak to a lot of even investors when we were doing our extension round, um, they were like, oh, like, you should absolutely touch the money. Like that's the only way to do it. And I think the reality is in the fintech world, there have been multiple models that have been very successful unicorns without touching the money. Um, and our goal is to bring the learnings and the strengths of those. Uh, so our team, and I always say this, like, our business side of our team is very web two and our Eng team is very web three. And that's where we see the power, uh, of like, what you're trying to build. I think from an XP perspective, it's, I want to change how money moves and how do I get the right set of people along with us on that journey. Um, where we're in early days, but we think that money. I don't think there's anybody out there who says money moves efficiently. Um, somebody I'm sure will comment on this podcast. And then Felix, it's not really six and a half percent. It's actually four. Well, why should it even be four? Um, you know, we had a conversation with somebody who we were integrating with where we said, look, this, this transaction needs to be sub 20 bips. Um, and the person looked at me and was like, you know, I look like a complete to him, right? He's like, no, like you can charge 180bips. Sure. If you want regulatory arbitrage. I mean, there are players in certain markets where there's no regulation who make that margin. Um, but we believe there's a way to bring all of these things together and that's what we're very excited about. The regulators now starting to think about this now. Every box hasn't been checked yet and we've tried to solve it for us. We always, every transaction has to have include KYC and KYB information. Um, every transaction has to follow travel rule. And all of those there are partners we walked away from who would have, I think given better price, but would have added other complexities that we weren't comfortable with. So I think for me, it's about changing the philosophy of how we move money. Irrespective of use case. There's no reason why a person should pay more than an SMB or an enterprise. If you build the, uh, infrastructure right, with the right partners and the right vision and liquidity behind it, you can solve the problem in one shot. And the use cases are just opportunities then.

Speaker B: And of course, this is a huge project and it's something that's incredibly complex to build and to achieve. Uh, maybe looking at X, we've. The time that you've been building already, what are. What is the time that you really sort of doubted yourself? And how did you get through that as a founder?

Speaker A: I'll say, like, those days happen during a month as well. Um, so it's not just a past tense comment, but it's just the severity of the moments is different. I think for last year, when we spun out, we were so convinced this thing was the future, and we were so convinced this was the right way to do it. And you talk to some very smart people out there who genuinely are smarter than me, uh, and have a lot of exposure in the industry, and they. They're like, trying to tell you for two hours where you're, like, completely wrong. Those are dark days. I mean, they come. Uh, I think, you know, I always say, like, then you just step away and you kind of grab a glass of water and have it, and then you step back and you just get back on the grind. Um, I think there were some investors who backed us from day one who were like, look, m. I'm convinced, present company included. And so thank you. I wish we had spoken to you guys earlier. Um, but. But the point is, uh, you know, and then, like, I remember losing a couple of key members on the team because they felt we were becoming too web2 and not enough web3. That's always a sad day, right? As a founder, but you're happy they've at least found them as a leader. Uh, you're happy for them, but you think about that. And then, you know, there are still, even today, clients who will go out. They say, like, no, the stable card thing, man, like, it's all just. It's a fad. It's gonna go away. I wouldn't say those are like, bad days, but you just, you know, you have to persevere through them. And I'm very lucky to have a team that's like, Helped me persevere through it. Like, I don't think this is me. Um, but, but. And also, you know, there, my. Some of my investors are fantastic in terms of just supporting me through. And, you know, there's one of them that I call on most Saturdays, and he will pick up the call and just walk me through whatever I'm going through. So, uh, I think, like, that's been the learning for me is, you know, you read every book, um, you read 0 to 1, and you read all these other books and you're like, oh, this is about perseverance. But for. Also, like, as a single founder, there were some things which I was learning on the fly. And it was always about finding the right set of investors to, like, learn from and become a better founder than I was yesterday and become a better leader than I was yesterday.

Speaker B: Yeah. That leads perfectly into my question, which is, has building Axle changed you as a person and in what ways?

Speaker A: I think this is actually a question for my wife and my son more than me. I think you're forced to look for positives, right? You're forced to look out at the horizon and not what's right in front of you. Because right in front of you looks like a rocky sand beach all the time. Uh, and you know that you're going to walk through it. But it's also about where do you want to end up and who do you want on that kind of, I guess, boat or whatever you want to call it with you. And, um, it's like the bounce back. You just have to be able to bounce back. Uh, and I think that's made me much more resilient than I always. Than I ever was. And I've always been, you know, I think if you call any of my old, uh, managers, they'd tell you I was always a crazy guy in a large corporate, and one of them knows exactly what I'm talking about. Hopefully he'll be listening to this, but, you know, he created a path for me to be crazy within those large organizations. And now I, I have to be like, crazy and pushing that envelope. I would say not as much as crazy, but much more pushing the envelope and taking us all into what XPE can become, which is the future of how one of the futures of how money moves.

Speaker B: Maybe. Can you describe for us that sand beach a little bit more the future state and the successful state. What does that look like for you?

Speaker A: I think that the. The honest answer is some of this is unknown. Uh, and I always think of it, which I've Spoken to you and David about. And I love, love that conversation, right? Which is, hey, like, we got to find the right set of people around me and X weave. Not even me. I'd say more around X weave to drive us on that journey to go figure out what that pot of gold or horizon looks like. I would say the sand, the rocky, sandy beach is much more of a, you know, you can either look at it as a bad thing or a good thing. I look at it as a good thing, saying there's something at the end and you just got to, you know, walk through it. Um, but, you know, it's like when you speak to an exchange and, um, they don't have APIs that are ready and you're like, well, like, you're talking on LinkedIn about all of this stuff, but the reality is very far from the truth. Um, you get clients who are like, no, I don't want to do it. And you're trying to, you know, peel that onion back. And, you know, this is textbook B2B sales, right? It's hard. It's meant to be long, it's meant to be. It's when the flow comes, it will come, but it's hard to break into it. And so that's just the journey we're on. And we keep going through it with great support structures around us. And some of it is just resilience on our part.

Speaker B: What are some of the recent wins and, uh, good moments that have given you motivation?

Speaker A: You know, one of my old colleagues at Meta joined us, uh, Jeannie, and that was a big win. Like, you know, somebody who you've gone through a very long three year journey with, uh, is. And being able to convince them. I think our leader in Swastik is a great hire and really helps us. Um, but, but again, those wins, you know, we had a very strong team before them as well, and I was very lucky to have them in the early part of our journey. Um, I think we closed a couple of clients recently who have the potential to push extreme into a completely different stratosphere. And, you know, they're early POCs, and we've got to prove to them that our product's great. We obviously believe our product's great, but it's always when some, somebody that's a very clear market leader wants to try out your product is a big win. Uh, and our goal is to be like, you know, live up to that. I think for us, in October, we saw like 4x volume growth. And I always joke about this and people laugh. But like nothing broke, right? All of our processes were, you know, they worked. And I remember you in our early days telling me like, don't worry, like just, you know, you're on the right path. Like, just keep chugging along. Um, and you know, jungle and our Rishabh jungle and all of our investors are always saying the same thing to us. But we also realize at the end of the day, like of the sandy parts is there's so much conversation around stablecoin and I think most of it is noise. There are some very unique players who are solving very unique problems. But at the same time there's a set of players out there who do not care about the regulation. And they're just like, oh, we're stablecoin sandwich. I'm like, look, listen, it's not, I think the play is much bigger than stablecoin sandwich, right? It's about how do you do the stablecoin sandwich delivery? You know, on all the things that you spoke about, right? Finality, speed, cost. And it's very clear to us, right, like every, every partner out there or every provider says they are the cheapest. Our view is very simple. That's never been true 100% of the time in the fintech world.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, and you know, in, in our old world there was something called multi acquirer processors. They helped you figure out who would give you the best rate, the best fx, best sla. That's a concept we've kind of brought onto a Web 2.5 kind of concept.

Speaker B: Of course there's a lot of noise in the market and definitely there's, you know, some that we can disregard. There's definitely also a lot of strong players that are moving pretty fast. We see news happening every week on your LinkedIn feed. Right? Do you have to be extremely fast in this? Do you kind of view this as a race?

Speaker A: This is a marathon sprint, right? Um, it's a marathon sprint of saying, look, the first movers, do they follow the same operating principles as we do? If you just go back to first principles, our first principles are actually different from most other people and most of the companies in the space on something or the other, right. We've been told many times, become an exchange. It's not what we're ready for right now, it's not what we want to be because we believe that somebody who's in exchange today has the power to actually provide a much better product set than we have to, than we can provide and build to today. Would we potentially become one in the future? I Don't know. Right. It's, it's really hard to kind of look out and say like, I won't be this. I won't be this. I think we think that an orchestrator that is a pure orchestrator that has regulatory as a first principles that believes that our clients and their money is sacrosanct and, and should always be looked after at 100%. That's not a first principle. For some other companies. Right. For some other companies, the speed and like getting quote unquote like X billions of volume is more important. We've been slower on that. Um, and we're okay with it because we believe that structurally we're building a very different flow and uh, we think the flows will come. We just got to keep knocking on those doors.

Speaker B: That makes sense. Um, now we've talked about million. As an entrepreneur, we also want to talk about Millennium Island. As a person, how would you describe your world view? Are you optimistic about the future of humanity?

Speaker A: I think we have to be. Um, I think for, for somebody who has a 16 year old son, uh, m. Every time we think the world is about to end, the world somehow figures itself out. And that's because there's smarter people out there who are trying to figure it out. Like I'm very positive on humanity and I think there are blips that happen in these kind of arcs of story arcs or if you want to call it. Right. Like maybe the GFC is one of those arcs. Right. Like there was a bit. Everything's back to normal again or at least close to normal. Um, unfortunately those blips impact lives and impact, you know, jobs and impact a lot of other things. But I'm always very positive that smarter people out there will solve bigger things other than just payments, I would say.

Speaker B: What's your view on the blip, potential blip of Bitcoin losing a lot of value recently and the impact on the whole industry?

Speaker A: I think there's no question that that has a macro impact. Right. If you look at how much reserves are held in stable, you know, stablecoin reserves are held in BTCs in some cases. Uh, I think, you know, BTC is kind of. I always think of it as BTC's move from like institution crypto Bros. As you said earlier to like retail investors holding BTC as a, as an investment opportunity or in some cases some of them actually believe that BTC is the way of the future and the only way of the future. And some of them actually, they look at that up, you know, up to the Right curve. Um, and it impacts their lives, there's no question about it. I think some of the VCs, um, who are, you know, web3 native crypto, native VCs have a lot of BTC exposure. So we'll see a little bit of a bump in the road for sure on that. But as a core concept, BTC is fantastic. Right. Uh, it is a true, genuinely game changing technology that is out there that does attack a lot of solutions in the, in the world.

Speaker B: Yeah. And Milind, you're also a dad. Actually I recently became a dad as well.

Speaker A: Congratulations.

Speaker B: How do you balance being a founder and being a dad?

Speaker A: I think the only answer I have is, uh, and we. If you're listening to this, this one's at you. I try to balance it. Um, I try to stay present when I'm with my son and my wife. I think they will strongly disagree with that statement. But uh, I'm also very lucky to have them where they understand like, you know, SFF ended Saturday. I'd been on the road for basically five weeks, it was a Saturday and I needed to go in and the team was all coming into work and they were very like, they were like, yeah, I totally get it, uh, go do what you do. Um, so very lucky to have that support structure that understands that um, XVIV is unfortunately at times like, you know, from their perspective, unfortunately is very top of mind. But uh, I am trying to break away from the phone when I'm hanging with them when it's a dinner. My wife is also very good about setting like specific things, uh, for us to do, just the three of us, uh, where phones are off and music's on and we're just hanging in the house. But I don't have it nailed for sure. Um, so if somebody's got it nailed, please write a comment, call me, reach out to me. Happy to learn.

Speaker B: Let's assume your son follows the multi generational trend and also becomes a founder. What is maybe the best piece of advice that you've received that you would pass on to him?

Speaker A: Oh, um, resilience matters. Like Angela Duckworth talks about this a lot, right in her, in her kind of youtubes and books and all of that. Like grit, I would say, like grit for me has always been the alpha, um, where I just, I can keep going on. Um, that's, I hope, I hope he gets some of that, uh, from me. But I think, you know, he's, he's a very different kid to me. Um, he's different passions, different love. And I think as a parent, right. Like, all you want them to be is happy and successful in whatever version and box they draw for themselves. So I'm very, or at least my wife and I try really hard to not draw the box for him. Um, and that, that's what you hope for. Like, you know, if you want to be an entrepreneur, be an entrepreneur. And. But I don't think that's the only way. I think, you know, for me, it ended up being a calling for sure. Even though, like, most people look at my background, they're like, dude, are you really, you know, is that. Are you really? Was that your calling? And I certainly feel it was. Um, but he'll have his own calling and I hope that my wife and I can support him in the best way we can.

Speaker B: Well, fantastic. Um, that's all the time we have for today, actually, already. Thank you so much for joining us in the podcast. Thank you.

Speaker A: Thanks a lot. Um, love you guys. Thanks for having me in the Kadan family, but also for the podcast.

Speaker B: Thanks so much everybody for tuning in. We'll be back next time when we talk about fintech AI and cross border expansion to founders in Asia and beyond.