Most payment startups treat compliance like a checkbox instead of survival strategy. Richie Serna, CEO of Finix, sold his previous payments company to Stripe and now competes directly against them, winning 60% of head-to-head deals. In this conversation with Tom Chavez, Richie breaks down why payments requires 95% feature completeness before product-market fit clicks, how to build abstraction layers that prevent vendor lock-in with legacy processors, and why focusing on non-technical power users beats pure developer experience when scaling payment infrastructure. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .
