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Does Sila view customers as a venture portfolio, and how does that affect the company's approach and strategy?

Shamir Karkal

Co-founder & CEO at Sila

It does, but I prefer not to place bets at all. I prefer to just say, "Hey, if it's compliant and you have the basic funding required to put together a dev team and build and ship and pay our fees, we will take all of that." In that way, our approach is probably more like a shortcut. We serve as many customers as we can. Customers do fail. We've had two or three companies that got acquired or shut down after building and shipping. You just get used to it. It's part and parcel of the business. At the same time, we also have customers that took off and grew explosively as well. In that way, it does end up looking like a venture portfolio, if you looked at our transaction data.

On the flip side, that's not how our business model works. We are independent of our customers’ successes. It's not like Marqeta placed a bet on Square. They just signed up everybody, and one of them became Square. Cash App wasn't what it is now back in 2012 when Marqeta signed them.

You will end up looking like that. You will end up having concentration from large customers just because they grow 10x a year for a decade. But I think if you look at Marqeta, they have a long list of smaller customers, too. And so do we.

Find this answer in Shamir Karkal, co-founder and CEO of Sila, on the modern payments stack
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