In this Episode
In this episode, Rory Holland speaks with Joshua Silver from Rainforest about the evolution of fintech—in Atlanta particularly—and the innovative approach Rainforest takes in providing embedded payment solutions. Joshua shares his journey in the fintech space, the challenges of building a startup, and the importance of customer service and support. He emphasizes the need for a human-centric approach in the industry and discusses the future of Rainforest and the broader fintech landscape.
Key Takeaways
- Embedded payments can significantly increase revenue for software platforms.
- Joshua’s experience in healthcare payments shaped his understanding of the industry.
- Embedded payments can significantly increase revenue for software platforms.
- Joshua’s experience in healthcare payments shaped his understanding of the industry.
- The need for better service in the payments infrastructure market led to the creation of Rainforest.
- Building a fintech startup involves navigating complex regulatory challenges.
- Customer service should be a priority in fintech to enhance user experience.
- The brand Rainforest aims to bring humanity back into the fintech space.
- Continuous improvement in product can reduce support tickets.
- Hiring exceptional talent is crucial for customer-facing roles.
- Networking and mentorship are vital for success in the fintech industry.
Podcast Episode Transcript
Rory Holland: Hey, this is Rory Holland with Mighty Finsights. Excited to be talking with my friend Joshua Silver from Rainforest. Joshua, welcome on.
Joshua Silver: Hey Rory, thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Fintech in Atlanta and Beyond with Joshua Silver
Rory Holland: Yeah, my pleasure. So good to have you on. We were connected by a mutual friend in the Atlanta area. And as I was describing for you before we hopped on, I spent some years down there. It’s really neat to see how fintech is growing like crazy in Atlanta. How’s that been for you?
Joshua Silver: You know, I’ve been building fintech businesses in Atlanta for coming up on 20 years. Atlanta has always been a great home for payments companies and innovation. You’ve got Georgia Tech right down in Midtown. That’s a great source of talent. So I personally couldn’t imagine building a fintech business anywhere else at this point.
Rory Holland: Well, you can come to Austin. It’s grown too.
Joshua Silver: That’s true. You know, Atlanta’s got a long, long history in payments. You know, lot of the, you know, major processes were all started here and innovated here. And I think something like 70% of all transactions in the United States still flow through Atlanta at some point.
Rory Holland: It’s an incredible number.
Joshua Silver: So, it is still a massive, massive hub here.
Rory Holland: Well, tell us a little bit about Rainforest.
Joshua Silver: Yeah, so Rainforest is a payments -as-a-service company. And what that means is we help software platforms add payments into their products. And for those of you who may not be super familiar with embedded payments or embedded fintech, what that means is financial services, whether it’s payments, banking, bank accounts, lending, all sorts of other products traditionally were distributed by financial institutions, banks, credit unions, etc.
What we’ve seen over the last decade or two is software platforms are starting to distribute those types of services. And, a real concrete example that I like to give people is imagine Uber. What they did is they took the payment terminal that used to be distributed separately and they combined it with the ride scheduling service. And so now as a consumer, you can go take a ride and pay payment is as simple as closing the door.
Another great example would be if you have gym membership, being able to book all of your appointments and classes, as well as being able to make the actual payment inside of the platform. And so all these platforms, whether it’s Uber or a gym membership platform, all of them need to have payment technology behind the scenes, an infrastructure provider. That’s what we do at Rainforest is we help all these thousands of software companies with that payments infrastructure.
Rory Holland: Yeah, so the words embedded fintech I think kind of rolls off our tongues because this is what we do for a living. So I think that’s super helpful to provide some real examples of use cases, so you didn’t just arrive here, meaning at a successful business you’ve done this before.
Understanding Rainforest and Embedded Fintech
Tell me a little bit about some of your history and how you got into fintech and financial services and then what the journey’s been like.
Joshua Silver: Yeah. So in the mid-2000s, I started a healthcare payments company called Patientco. We were one of the first healthcare companies to really simplify patient billing, as well as combine all the different payment services. And back in those days that included even things like paper checks. And then in the later years included things like text to pay, which today are pretty commonplace, but, again, back in those days, and especially in healthcare, it wasn’t.
So I spent over a decade as co-founder of Patientco building that business, really learned a lot about the payments ecosystem, how to work with the card networks, how to work with sponsor banks, how to manage risk, as well as learning how to grow a vertical SaaS company.
After selling that, spent a few years running a consulting firm where I partnered with software companies, VC firms, private equity firms, others in the industry to help them with payment strategy. So I ran many vendor-selection processes, did a lot of technical architecture, really helping all of these fast growing software companies figure out how do you make money on payments? And it was during that time period where I really realized the power of embedded fintech, which is in many cases, you actually, as a business owner, a software business owner, can double your revenue if you add these financial products.
And so perhaps just on your recurring SaaS business, the subscriptions you’re making $10 million a year, $10 million ARR. In many cases you add payments in that could actually double to $20 million. And I saw that play out time and time again with my clients. And I just got so excited and realized this is a huge opportunity to revolutionize the software industry, to make it more resilient, to generate more profit, to generate more revenue, help these businesses grow. And on the flip side, I saw none of the vendors at the time, none of the payment providers were really doing a good job servicing the space.
And, you know, in my mind, as a repeat entrepreneur, that is the hotbed of innovation there. You know, when you have a huge market that’s growing, that helps people make money on the flip side, you’re missing the vital ingredients, which is great support from the existing vendors. You put those two together and it’s time to create a company. And that is the reason and why Rainforest started was to solve that problem.
Rory Holland: Yeah, that’s exciting. A couple of things you said, I want to back up for you. You mentioned the notion of being of like double revenue. Can you give me an example or examples? How did that work in the case of the work that you were doing back then? And then maybe talk a bit about that inflection point for the innovation. When you identified that and you’re like, okay, there’s an opportunity for this. I really want to lean into this.
Joshua Silver: Yeah, so let’s take the example of gym membership software. So if you belong to a local gym, as I do every month, you’re paying your monthly fees for the gym, or you’re paying every time you take a class, or you’re paying for products like a smoothie or something like that. All of that revenue that’s being collected by those gyms historically was processed by a bank, an independent payment processor. Now, the software company that the gym uses to run their business has added payment processing capabilities and that software company earns a portion of a small percentage of revenue off every dollar that’s processed. And you can think of it as somewhere between half a percentage point and one percentage point of value that they’re making. So for every hundred dollars they process, they would make somewhere between 50 cents and a dollar. And if you look at the total amount that all the gyms on that platform process for all the membership, for all the goods, the services, the classes, the food items, etc.,, times 1%, it tends to be a really big number. And that’s where we kind of get that rough math of you can double the size of your revenue.
Rory Holland: I can relate. We belong to a gym here in town that happens to have food and protein shakes and sadly my kids know they can walk in there and get anything they want and yeah, it is my bill.
Joshua Silver: Exactly. And if the software company is doing a good job and is at the leading edge, they’re the ones processing that payment. They’re the ones who are making revenue off that transaction. And that really is a huge, huge boost to their bottom.
Rory Holland: Yeah, well, so take me back to that inflection point when you mentioned that you saw the opportunity and you leaned into it and had the courage to start Rainforest. Tell me a little bit about that.
Joshua Silver: Yeah, you know, I think the moment that I decided this was a business that I had to do and felt compelled to do was when I kept getting calls from my consulting customers and the recurring theme was, “Joshua, you and your team did a fantastic job of helping us choose a vendor. We’re six months, we’re nine months, we’re 12 months into the relationship with this payments infrastructure partner and they’re terrible. The service is terrible. They’re having technical issues. The economics aren’t as attractive as we had hoped.”
And so on. And you hear that time and time again and you know we’re doing the best job we can trying to pick from the available vendors. There just isn’t anybody doing a great job. And that’s when I started looking at what’s the root cause? And I’m an engineer at heart. So I always like to go back to why are all these vendors doing such a bad job? Don’t get up in the morning saying, “Hey, we want to provide bad service.” There’s some underlying reason.
And what I realized is it’s a couple of things where one, is none of these payments platforms were built for software platforms. They were all built for direct merchants. They were built for a world where you had salespeople running around knocking on the door of every gym saying, “Hey, we can do credit card cheaper than the next guy can put our credit card machine in.” And so they had millions of small businesses that they were supporting directly.
That’s a very different model than a payments providers selling to the management software company and that management, the gym management software company, bringing the thousands of gyms to the table for payment processing all in bulk. There’s an added entity in there, the software platform, the support model needs to change, a distribution model needs to change, the economics certainly change.
And nobody in the industry was prepared for this, not the legacy payment processors, the first data’s of the world, the TSYS, the ProPays, the Elavons, they weren’t. And neither were the newer, you know, more well-known internet era processors like Stripe or Adyen. They just weren’t purpose-built for this. And when you try to change the DNA of a company and when you try to bolt on a fundamentally different paradigm, it’s really challenging and I haven’t seen that many businesses do it successfully.
And this certainly is no exception. And so we said from day one, we are going to be purpose built for software platforms. We are going to focus exclusively on software platforms. We are not going to service direct merchants. We’re not going to dilute our brand. We’re going to stay very focused on knowing what we do and doing it very well. When you do that, that’s when, when the magic starts to happen. And that again was the moment we said “We’ve got to go do this.”
The opportunity is just too big, quite frankly, I couldn’t keep going on getting angry calls from customers saying, pick us a better vendor because there weren’t any better vendors. We had to create the vendor that was better.
Rory Holland: You had to create it. That’s beautiful. I have to imagine your experience building companies, it’s not easy. So particularly when you’re doing something innovative, like you’ve built for Rainforest, what were the first couple of years like and what were some of those challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?
Joshua Silver: Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, get asked a lot, know, “Joshua, you’re a repeat entrepreneur, you are very successful with Patientco, and had a great exit. Why go through the brain damage of going back to a day one startup, you know, when you have no employees, you have no support, you know, you have no revenue, you know, why go through the grind?”
And, you know, as a repeat founder, there are certain things that are a lot easier the second time, you know, there’s a lot of mistakes you don’t repeat.
Certainly I have a huge built-in network now. I was super fortunate that about a dozen folks came over from my last company with me to start this. And so we kind of have that inbuilt camaraderie and support and trust already on day one. That’s a huge game changer.
But on the flip side, some things are just as hard. I know, we started from ground zero in terms of the technology. It is very challenging in a highly regulated industry like fintech and payments to get going from ground zero because none of the big banks want to work with you. They want established safe players. So trying to convince big banks to, you know, take a chance on a startup is challenging even as a repeat entrepreneur. Also, you know, we are competing in a space that is very well established. There are many players who have been here either over a decade, some cases, many decades.
And so convincing a client to move something as significant as payments that have to always work 100% of the time. It has to be up 100% of the time. The money, the fees have to move correctly 100% of the time. Convincing someone to move their business from an established player is really challenging. We’ve been fortunate enough, early on we had some great design partners that took a chance on us.
And they were certainly repaid with being able to influence our roadmap and excellent support and things. But they really helped us build this business. Today, we have dozens of software platforms that use us and have grown volume significantly. And so that’s less of a discussion today, but certainly in the early days, it’s very different building a fintech business than a software business. A software business where you can just throw out an MVP after a month or two of development and iterate very quickly.
Fintech is much more of you turn the lights on or off. There’s no dimmer switch. We can’t have half a product and launch with an MVP. You can’t not be PCI compliant on day one, which of course is compliance with the card brain rules. You can’t not have a sponsor bank. Can’t not have certain things. So it’s a pretty significant investment to build upfront before you can process even your very first dollar.
Rory Holland: Yeah, I mean you nailed one of the greatest challenges to entering our space is all of the compliance and regulatory challenges and we’re kind of like flying a 747 where the pilots, turbulence concerns our customers and you can’t do hard banking turns or loop-de-loops, it’s got to work. So very difficult to innovate in our industry. So kudos to you for taking that step.
The Brand Story of Rainforest
I’m just curious, I want to ask a question just about the brand Rainforest and the story, you had to tell a different story and you entered a market highly competitive, very noisy, I would say, not as innovative as we would have liked, hence the opportunity that you have now moved into. What was that experience like in trying to shape the story and the name Rainforest? Like, where did that come from?
Joshua Silver: So we had a lot of fun developing the name and the brand. It was really important to me on day one that we were very approachable. If you go to our website, rainforestpay.com, you’ll see we’re not very tech looking. If you look at our competitors, they’re all kind of silver and shiny. We took a more human-centric approach. We’ve got lots of greens and neutral colors there, natural colors. And in a lot of ways, we’re reinjecting the human element back into an industry that’s been devoid of that for so long. And I think that shines through most often in our customer service. I was just on a call this morning with a long-time customer and the CEO opened the call and said, I just want to say thank you so much for providing us great service all the time. You’re the one vendor I never have to worry about. You guys are on the ball.
And there’s nothing more rewarding than hearing that from customers unsolicited that we’re providing great service to them. And that’s something that’s been, that’s been missing. It’s, near and dear to my heart providing great service. So that was, that was one important piece. The other kind of aspect of Rainforest is we’re all about helping software companies grow. And you, think about a rainforest, think about the biodiversity there. Think about the lush growth, the ecosystem itself supports itself and continues to grow. And we really want to do that for the software industry. Look at, you know, there’s 10,000 software companies in the United States alone and many more globally. All of them have the opportunity to become more resilient, to add revenue streams, to reduce customer churn by adding payments and other financial services. And we want to be their partner in doing that. And we want to do all the heavy lifting, the compliance, dealing with the banks, you know, dealing with risk management, all of those, those payment centric, pain-incentric functions that software companies don’t know how to do, we do that for them.
That was really the name Rainforest is helping the ecosystem grow. And ultimately, I think we will make software companies more valuable. And we’ve already seen that play out. In fact, we’ve had a few customers that have gotten acquired and many of them attribute some of the success of their acquisition back to us because we gave them the opportunity to increase revenue, gave them ownership of their customers. We gave them a great contract.
And their acquire referenced Rainforest really helped in getting you the enterprise value you wanted. And to me, there’s nothing better than helping other entrepreneurs build their businesses.
Rory Holland: Yeah, I mean, there’s so much we could unpack in that, but that’s beautiful. And I was gonna mention, I read on your website, “We’re enriching the ecosystem one payment at a time.” So you just aligned for me the notion of Rainforest in the ecosystem and the humanity that you’ve managed to bring into Rainforest is a lot of the reason why we have this podcast is humans, us, people run these companies that are trying to make a positive difference in the world. And I think often fintech is think of out of this like cold technology that’s like a black box.
It’s not because there’s humans behind it and humans are fallible, but also humans are capable of really amazing things like the innovations you’ve created with Rainforest. So that’s super encouraging to hear.
I wanted to ask you a question. You said something about customer service and that brings the humanity to life when you’re on the phone with a customer that may or may not be happy with your service.
In this instance, the gentleman was, or the young woman was very happy, whomever they were. I wanted to ask you, as you scale your business, what are some of the principles you use when you think about how fintechs could provide better support, better service, more humanity?
Joshua Silver: Yeah, so this is a topic I’m really passionate about. Actually, I just gave a full-featured talk on this at a web summit recently, and I think you could find the postings online somewhere. But the three principles I talk about there, number one is reducing support tickets by relentlessly and continuously improving the product.
When I look at most times when someone’s coming in for customer support needs, they are coming in because there was some problem. And a lot of times it comes back from a root cause perspective to a product deficiency. There was a bug in the product, the documentation wasn’t good, there was some friction, there was a feature that wasn’t built out. And so we spend a lot of time here at Rainforest looking at root causes and we say, when we get a support ticket, that’s effectively a defect because that support ticket shouldn’t have had to exist. Why, how can we fix that and prevent it from happening in the future? Was it, could we educate people during implementation better as a documentation?
And a lot of it comes back to product requests. And we do a lot of work in our product roadmap to make sure we’re always fitting in some of these small incremental improvements. Always leave about 10 to 15% of our product roadmap is just for these reactive, “Hey, we’re seeing this issue time and time again, let’s fix it.”
And when you don’t create the space for that and very intentionally, it turns out that those items never get to the top of the list because they’re not new and shiny, but it pays off in spades because you get less support requests and your clients are happier. So that’s principle one is that continuous improvement.
Principle two is reducing the resource requirements by investing in processes and automation. And so the principle here is really looking at when a customer calls in, phones and writes and texts and chats and however they get that message to you.
How quickly can our first line of contact resolve the issue? Do they have the training? Do they have the tools? Do they have the knowledge? Do they have the empowerment to fix the issue? And really, I want that to be 100%. Certainly, we’re not there today and you’ll never get to 100%, but that’s the benchmark is I want 100% of the time, us to be able to fix that issue.
And a lot of that comes down to automation. And in most companies, what I see happen, the pattern is customer writes into support. Support can’t fix it. Support has to then create a ticket for level two or three or an engineer to go in and tweak something in a database and fix it. And I say, whatever that engineer is going to have to do, let’s make a button with the right permission so that that first-line support rep can fix it. And the secret worry is if you do that enough times, all of a sudden these issues start to go away. And our support team that was inundated with tickets now can invest in creating more positive customer experiences.
And that ties directly into principle three, which is just hiring exceptional talent. I have yet to find anyone that says we don’t want to hire exceptional developers. Everyone thinks engineers need to be the gold standard and certainly they do. But, I also think your support folks and anyone who’s customer facing needs to be that same caliber. Why are you not putting well-paid, well-empowered folks in into those customer facing roles? Because what I find is when you do, you need to hire less support people. You also can turn support from a cost center into a revenue center because those support folks can manage the accounts more productively. They can be more proactive. They can, you know, operate almost in a customer success type fashion. And so that’s, that’s something that we were really proud of is, is you get a really competent, talented, knowledgeable, empowered person when you write into us. And certainly not every business can do that. You know, if you’re a consumer business and you have millions of people writing in, maybe that’s not possible, but certainly in B2B businesses, certainly in fintech businesses, I think people under invest in support. It’s usually the lower paid roles. There’s high churn. We do the exact opposite. We lean in there and we have extremely good employee retention.
The Role of AI in Fintech
Rory Holland: Yeah, and that’s encouraging. Hiring quality people, I think is the bedrock of a great company and a great brand in whatever role they may be at the bottom of the rung or at the top sitting next to you. Now that’s great. I wanted to ask a follow on to that. As you scale and of course, A.I. is growing like crazy, so are you beginning to implement A.I. into any of your product or any into your customer support, for example?
Joshua Silver: So today, we use a very light AI today and we’re looking to invest more in AI, primarily to make us more efficient on the back office. I have not seen a whole lot of success yet with things like AI chatbots. I know some competitors are starting to implement those just as a consumer even. There’s nothing more frustrating than you have a problem and you have to go 15 questions in with a chatbot before you can get to human.
I’m of the personal opinion that the chat bots, for example, aren’t quite ready for prime time yet. Certainly not in a complex B2B type industry like we operate in. And so, I do think AI can be really helpful in certain areas. We’re not at the point where I’d say it’s going to be a huge revolutionary impact on our business. I think it’s going to improve it, like much the same way hiring great employees is a stepwise improvement function.
And so we’re continuing to find areas where anything that’s being done manually can we use AI for, but certainly we’re going to keep the humans in it for a long time. That’s important to us.
Rory Holland: Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. I think it’s not quite there yet. I think there’s some interesting applications into customer service that I’m seeing and in other consumer-oriented things like the airlines. I’m seeing some of the airlines are adopting it to help limit some of the friction should you need to make a change or actually before you talk to a human. Personally, I would prefer to talk to a human, but I think we’re at that point where it’s starting to change.
The Goldilocks Principle in Payments
I read an article on your site that I really enjoyed and it references the word Goldilocks, not the character. But I’m kind of curious where that came from and like help me understand like where that came from and what it means and like what does that mean for the future.
Joshua Silver: Yeah. So this concept really was originated during my consulting days. I oftentimes would sit with founders or leadership teams and say, we’re at a fork in the road. There’s kind of two paths we can go down. Path one is we’re going to under invest in payments infrastructure. We’re going to partner with someone on basically a referral model. You’re going to refer customers to them and they’ll pay you for that referral on the recurring residual basis.
That’s kind of one path and historically that was the main path. You know, if you go back 10 years ago, that was the way pretty much everybody did payments. It was referral basis. The other end of the spectrum is a do-it-yourself. You’re building everything in house and you really are the payments company or the fintech company. And the challenge with that is the gap between the referral model and the do-it-yourself model is really big.
And you have to have so much volume, billions of dollars of year-end volume for it to make sense to do it in house. And so for a mid-market client, maybe they’re doing three, $400 million a year in payment volume, which is pretty significant, but still in the scheme of all payments is pretty small.
I would sit with them and say, we can invest more heavily and do more in-house. You’ll earn more, but you’ll bear the risk. You know, you own the problems or we can leave money on the table and you don’t have the problem with the referral model.
And nobody was ever satisfied with it, right? It was either too hot or too cold, if you will, in the Goldilocks analogy. And we said, we need a model that’s just right, somewhere in the middle. And that’s exactly what Rainforest is, is we’ve taken the best of both worlds. We handle all of the risk and the compliance and fraud monitoring, all the stuff that’s really hard and kind of don’t want to do. But we also give you most of the benefits of having done it yourself in house. We give you full ownership of the clients, we give you great economics, we give you a full white-labeled experience. And so, we’ve really reduced this false choice of referral model or do it yourself. We now have this PayFac as a service model that’s working extremely, extremely well.
Rory Holland: Where did that come from for you? Did that just read a book to your kids or like did you wake up one morning like? Just right Goldilocks.
Joshua Silver: You know, I do have some young children. I’ve got a six-year-old daughter and four-year-old son. So, you know, maybe subconsciously that is, that is where it came from. But, you know, I think it just, it time and time again, we’re having this over or under investment conversation. And it was just very reminiscent of it’s either too hot or too cold. And everybody just wants that just right. And so that’s, that’s what Rainforest is.
Future Plans and Industry Insights
Rory Holland: Yeah, you guys have made so much progress. It’s wonderful to see it. And the innovations you share with us are wonderful. I wanted to ask, like, what’s next? Where do you see how this is going the next couple of years for you guys and maybe some thoughts on the industry?
Joshua Silver: Yeah, well, first and foremost, we spent the last couple of years really proving out that this model works well. It’s what the industry wants. And so, you know, we continue to see gaining market share. You know, we’re growing extremely rapidly right now, increasing volumes substantially and increasing our client count. One thing that’s very important to me in business is to get the fundamentals right and to not lose that focus.
I see a lot of inexperienced entrepreneurs say, “Hey, we’ve had some success here. Let’s add product two, three, four, and five.” I’d much rather go a mile deep and an inch wide than vice versa. I see a lot of people spread themselves too thin. They go a mile wide, but only an inch deep and nothing really works well. I would much rather have a slimmer product set that works extremely well. So we’re going to continue to invest very heavily in our core.
We’re not moving on to lots of other products until we have the absolute best payments offering in the industry bar none. And we are very well far down our way to that, but we haven’t achieved it yet. So that’s item one is we’re going to keep doubling, tripling and quadrupling down on what we do well so that we continue to win in that market and provide the best experience.
Then beyond that, we are very customer centric in terms of growth plans. We spend a lot of time with customers understanding what are they thinking about next. Most cases, payments is the first embedded financial product that software companies add.
And then it’s a question of where do you go next? Is there an opportunity to add lending and credit products? Is there an opportunity to add bank accounts and banking as a service? Is there maybe some accounts payable types of products and global remittance that could be done? And so we have a pretty interesting strategy around some of those products and how do we maintain our core focus, but still be able to offer those.
You’ll see a lot more to come on that in the coming year.
Rory Holland: Yeah, it’s going to be exciting next couple of years, that’s for sure. There’s no shortage of interesting ideas. It’s those that can take it to market properly and really serving the needs of the market that they’re choosing to focus on. I love the go deep, not wide. I think that’s great. We follow that here at CSTMR and choosing to be focused in fintech, whereas we had lots of opportunities to go different directions when we started the agency.
Challenges and Opportunities in Fintech Growth
I wanted to, if you’re so willing to share, like you shared some of the challenges in the beginning of starting the company. I’m kind of curious what your challenge is now and are there any asks of our audience? Because there’s a lot of folks that listen to us that are, they’re all in our industry. And I think oftentimes, we as founders can kind of hunker down and huddle around our teams and focus on internally on trying to solve problems and challenges. And I’d like to use this as a forum if you’re so willing to maybe share some of the challenges that you see that are here now for you and what might be coming next year. And if there’s any asks, you might have a folks that are listening.
Joshua Silver: Yeah, two big challenges come to mind. The first is just market awareness. It is an incredibly big market we’re in and not everybody knows we exist yet. 95% of the time when someone learns about us, they say, “Hey, this is a much better option than we have today. I wish I had known before I’ve gone with one of your competitors.” So market awareness is huge.
So any software companies that want to add payments capabilities to their product, please have them get in touch with us, please let us know. We’re a great option for anyone who may be considering Stripe or Stripe Connect as their kind of product that focuses on this. That’s who our most direct competitor is. So if you are on Stripe Connect today or thinking about it, make sure you chat with us first.
The second is around talent. We’re always looking for great people. We tend to hire folks who have lots of payments experience. Going back to the higher exceptional talent, certainly we do hire some entry-level folks and folks from other industries, but we over-index much more than any of our competitors in highly-experienced individuals in the payment space because payments is really complicated and there’s no amount of onboarding I can do in three to six months. That’s going to replace five or 10 years experience. And so if you are looking for a new role, we’re almost always hiring in all departments, whether it’s go to market, engineering product, et cetera.
So keep an eye on our website, send us a LinkedIn message and get in touch if you’re looking for career opportunities.
Rory Holland: Yeah, we’ll put the website and I’d like to put up the conference you recently did about customer support. We’ll put the link in the show notes.
One last question. For someone that might want to enter our space, and there’s so many different ways to enter it, I’m curious what, based on what you’ve learned over these years and the successes you’ve had and the hills you’ve climbed, any advice or recommendations for somebody who might want to come into the space?
Joshua Silver: Certainly find great mentors, find people who are a few steps ahead of you in the journey in a very similar space because that network is going to be vitally important. And even now, you know, I’ve been doing this a long time and I still have a Rolodex of folks that I call every single week for something here or there. And it may be a three minute call, but I’d say, “Hey, I’m looking for someone in this.” or, “I know, have you worked with this bank before?” Don’t underestimate the power of the network. Don’t underestimate the power of founders helping other founders. That’s been a huge help to me as I’ve built all of my businesses.
And I think it’s really hard to do alone. I know, fintech is one of those areas that’s so complex. There’s no book, there’s no single book you can read, know, payments 101 to go get up to speed. It’s a lot of scattered knowledge and knowledge you get through time and experience. And so having great networks can help you do that. That’d probably be my biggest piece of advice.
Rory Holland: Yeah, that’s wonderful. Yeah, surrounding yourself with really great people. I think the word community comes to mind for me. That, yeah, just getting yourself surrounded by great people. I mean, that’s not new advice per se from us, but I do think it’s something good for folks to remember.
And I have a couple of kids too that are going to be soon entering the workforce trying to connect them with good leaders of companies that I think could be assets for them to talk to, buy them a cup of coffee. Like just offer it up. Most people are happy to share their stories and help you avoid some of the holes that they might have fallen in or the busted noses that they got along the way. You might just avoid some of that.
Well, this has been wonderful. Anything else you’d like to share about Rainforest before we close out?
Joshua Silver: Absolutely. No, really, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground today. So, really appreciate the time and being able to share some of the insights and remembering that bringing the humanity back into fintech I think is super important and something that we think is going to be our sustainable advantage going forward.
Rory Holland: I love that. I would love to chat offline with you just because yeah, that’s part of what we’re up to here. And you talk about brand awareness and building brands. It’s folks like you behind these companies doing good things. It’s really inspiring. So I appreciate you, Joshua.
If you guys want to find Joshua, it’s Joshua Silver at Rainforest, you can find him on LinkedIn. He’s got some fun posts. I read some of them ahead of the call today. Be sure and check him out and follow him or rainforestpay.com. We’ll put some links into the show notes. Joshua, appreciate your time today.
Joshua Silver: Awesome. Thanks, Rory. Good to be on the show.
Rory Holland: Thank you.
