Rebuilding payments from first principles. Co-founder of @notabene_id YCS20.
Joined March 2007
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I felt this for years running a company. It isn't you. Finance keeps one system of record and you run the business from another, so nobody can answer the questions you actually have.
Every founder I know has imposter syndrome about their numbers. Even the ones with MBAs.
Your board asks, you don't know, and the finance team can't tell you what it costs to hire someone or close a customer.
It isn't you. It's two systems of record.
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I agree. While we had to hire to scale, I did step back when we hired our first head of sales. I shouldn’t have. Last year I spent a lot of time with customers again, which really was great.
In particular for infrastructure founders, you need to be close to your customers, and you do that by selling.
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We've talked about this for a long time, @ajunge_m. I want it for every company I've run. Know what to cut before it renews.
"In the end you never know whether you're using all of them or not." A pre-seed founder, on SaaS subscriptions. Your agent now records the tools and seats you use, flags what's unused, oversized or renewing, and what each change would save, priced from your contract's terms.
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Pelle Brændgaard retweeted
Omarchy 4.5 is finally here! Traditional desktop mode, M1/M2/M3/Neo compatibility, 50 languages, 7-second installs, and a million other features, fixes, and improvements. omarchy.org/news/2026/11/oma…
While ledgers are set up to do this, in a world with heavy manual work in the contract to cash reconciliation it is a huge source of work for finance teams.
Treat your books like Git.
Set a contract up wrong? Your agent can void it, set up the right one and record the invoices and payments again, for most contracts.
Reports read as if the mistake never happened. The history keeps the original, the fix and why.
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This is so true. It gets worse the further on you are. It’s imperative you have a good team to manage as it becomes very hard to do founder mode unless you’re very mindful of it.
Most investors have no idea of the damage that the mere distraction of talking to them does to a startup. Here's a typical example. And this is a YC company too, meaning they have an easier time fundraising than the median startup.
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Pelle Brændgaard retweeted
Another takeaway after three years of building a company is that the returns to just "being a good person", and not acting transactionally, are higher than I expected.
There are so many transactional, boring, and at times immoral people in the tech industry that if you act with sustained warmth, authenticity, humor, and integrity, great gifts will be laid before you. White pill.
This is very good advice. Having the wrong investors can really hurt you. Their point in this video of loss aversion is one of the largest issues that my European founder friends complain about from dealing with European VCs.
I should say it’s not all of them, just the majority that fit this pattern. There are also a ton of these on the East Coast.
youtu.be/kWPvdAZGd3A?is=1hRy…
I've been experimenting with Google AntiGravity on Gemini 4 Argon. The model seems to be great. But the permissions auto classifier is driving me nuts. There is zero smarts in it.
Argon creates compound exec commands in my repo and can't figure out `pnpm format && pnpm lint && pnpm vitest`. Claude went through this phase more than a year ago.
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"If we want to solve real world problems, we need to play with the real world rules."
@ajunge_m on why Anyenk built on Notabene's rails. Compliance as a product requirement rather than a burden, and an open network so any counterparty can connect.
Pelle Brændgaard retweeted
Re: agent payments & x402/MPP. I love x402. I built a version of x402 in a weekend in March of 2023 (402 is way better). Growth has been great, I believe in its future.
BUT! x402 is a bad way for serious companies to buy API access.
Why? Does Ford buy screws at Home Depot? Does the smoker buy loosies at the bodega? Why would a McDonalds franchise buy salt at the Whole Foods. These are all bad ideas! Ford buys screws direct with long term contract. The smoker buys a pack. The franchisee goes to corporate.
Buyers and sellers both benefit from long term and scale alignment. The buyer forecasts a certain amount of demand and commits capital. The seller commits capacity and makes capital investments if necessary, which allows them to lower their costs.
Now, back to McDonalds and Ford... if the McDonalds is *out of salt*, they arguably should go to the corner store to keep things moving.
This is Tourists in the Bazaar -- better titled, "Why Businesses aren't tourists, but Agents might be". Buying a loosie only makes sense if you're smoking one cigarette or trying a new brand. Using x402 only makes sense if you don't plan to have a long term relationship with the provider or if you're just getting started.
If you're doing something more than once, the relationship is good for everyone. Think long term.
This is not a super smart read on it. First really good actual crypto card was @gnosispay running on @monerium (EURe). Now the crypto card market is focused on the developing world where everyone naturally wants USD. It was just a very small sample size of issuers early on.
Euro-backed stablecoins once dominated spending: In early 2024, around 88% of crypto card volume settled in EURe, much of it on Gnosis. As of July, EURe’s share has fallen to about 2%.
Dollar-backed stablecoins have since taken the lead. USDC handles about 58% of card spending and USDT about 26%, up from roughly 48% and 7% a year ago, respectively. Crypto payment card spending now happens overwhelmingly in digital dollars.
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