EP 117 - Lithic - Robin Gandhi

Transcript

Roland Siebelink - Host (00:46)
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Scaling Without Breaking. Today's guest, very special to me, I've worked with him for a number of years already. Here we go. Most payment infrastructure is built to sell. You design features for a pitch deck, you price them for a market and you ship them fast. The result, processes that everyone tolerates, but nobody really loves. Today's guest helped build some of the rare exceptions that people do love in fintech. At Adyen he watched it go from 1 billion to over 55 billion, is that right? He then went to do it again at TripActions and Nium. And now he's doing it once more at Lithic, where the entire platform was built first for their own use, and then only opened up to others when customers noticed nobody had anything bad to say about them. That's definitely rare in fintech, I would say.

His bet right now, the next wave of payments isn't humans tapping cards, it's AI agents making real-time spending decisions. And craft-built infrastructure is the only kind that won't break under that pressure. With that, everybody meet today's guest, Robin Gandhi, the Chief Product Officer of Lithic.

Welcome to Scaling Without Breaking, Robin.

Robin Gandhi (01:59)
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. That's a solid intro. Now I have to make good on it. Let's do it. I'm excited.

Roland Siebelink - Host (02:05)
Robin, I wanted to hone in on that craft question right away. There's a phrase used in the prep that really stuck with me. Craft matters in FinTech. Most people would say speed matters or distribution or unit economics, but you're saying something entirely different. What do you mean by craft and why does that give you an edge at Adyen, Nium, Lithic, and other companies you've been at?

Robin Gandhi (02:29)
Yeah,  it's not like those other things don't matter because obviously you need to sell your product.  I don't want to discount them completely. But I think what I found, and this is something that I've found since the days that I was at Adyen, is that actually caring about what you're building and putting energy into doing it the right way really delivers a product that is unmatched in the market.
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And I think what I've learned is that those detail - it's easy to say infrastructure in the end just feels like tools and because they're tools and they're pipes, you just say, okay, well, I just need to move water from this side to the other side of the pipe. How hard should I even work to make that pipe beautiful and strong and how much effort should I put into it? Because nobody really cares, in the end, it feels like a commodity. And I think

if you take my days when I was at Adyen - this is  the days when Adyen, Stripe, others were just starting. If you were to ask banks, is there a market in acquiring? And this is when Square was also getting started. And people would say, no, there's nothing there. There's no money in it. What are you doing trying to go after this commodity?
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But I think what, at least at that time, what the three of us did,  between Adyen, Square, and Stripe, we proved that  it matters. If you put effort into your craft, if you care about what you're doing, you can actually deliver something that's pretty magical.

I'll give a concrete example with Adyen. At Adyen, we were just focused on making sure that payments went through.

We were in the business of payments acceptance and nothing else. And what we wanted to do was make it so perfect that no one could ever say that we weren't the best possible platform out there for payments acceptance. And now here I am at Lithic.

One of the reasons I joined here is that we had a very similar philosophy. You build things in the right way. When you do, and you  mentioned it in the intro,  it's one thing - it's a strange thing  for customers to say, but I hear it constantly, which is, I don't like my existing vendor, but you are the one processor that I've never heard anyone complain about.

Roland Siebelink - Host (04:45)
Yeah. What does that look like in practice, Robin? Is that  a team culture you build? Is it the kind of people you hire? Is it process? Is it just being adamant about reaching a higher bar? What is it? How do you manage that?  you link?

Robin Gandhi (05:07)
To be honest, I think it is all about culture. I think it comes from the top. I think that we had that leadership at Adyen, we have that here. I'll tell you at Lithic,  both of  our founders come from an engineering background. They wanna do the right thing and do cool stuff. When they built the issuing platform, you  alluded to it before, but we have a consumer brand called Privacy and that's been running for last 10, 12 years. And they ran into a problem. The existing providers  that we were using weren't working and they say, oh, let's just build something really cool and let's make sure that it works really well. But you have to have that culture from the top that saying, let's build something really cool and let's build something that works because that's what matters.

I think that that's where, if you don't get that from a culture perspective,  then inherently  from the top, it's gonna be  more sales driven or it's going to be more - not to say that we don't need to think about the market. But instead of thinking about how we build a great product, it's about how we think about the market.

Roland Siebelink - Host (06:24)
But I wondered also, Lithic is obviously very successful, but there's also this tension perhaps where  every startup goes through this, where in the beginning you just sell to fellow startups and you share all the DNA. And it's very easy to  fulfill their

are customer requests. But now you're also starting to power Coinstar's consumer card, I believe, bringing on Sterns as a bank partner. Those must be very different. How does that change your approach to how you run your product team? What you prioritize? What even changes in the DNA at Lithic, if that's the case?

Robin Gandhi (07:02)
Yeah,  you're right. In the early days, most of our customers said, wow, you're building really cool stuff. Just tell me all the cool stuff and I'll make it work. And then now as we're working with larger organizations, they still want to do cool stuff. Folks

But I think what it means for us is that now we have to package things together. Up until now, I've had a lot of great LEGO blocks that I say - if you get a box of 300 different colors of LEGO blocks and you go, just have fun. If you're a super creative person, you can do it.

Now I have to do a little bit more to say, my Lego blocks are great, but here's what you can make with them. What does that mean in practice?  We're running financial card programs, and so I need to provide them the tools and services to allow them to manage for fraud, for customer support, for transaction monitoring. If disputes come in, how do you deal with that?

I think the super ambitious ones have just been like, me your APIs, I'll plug them in. And now I'm spending a lot of time saying, okay, we have the APIs, but  what if somebody  wants to tell me, hey, you're an expert at this and I've heard you built really great things, but you're going to have to help me out here.  I think that's where I'm spending a lot of time and that's where we're going to evolve. To say, in order for us to  properly scale this and get past just the super, super technically ambitious developer mentality customers, how do we take it to that next place? But I think they will all come along.

Roland Siebelink - Host (08:40)
Exactly. moment you start attracting enterprise customers, at least is what I see, and as you know, I work with many scaling startups, I often see is the moment they started adding real enterprise customers that may not have that deep tech DNA themselves, then the product roadmap also starts getting pulled in different directions. To some degree, it's like, can you stick to your core vision?

On the other hand, it's like, well, but I'm a big enterprise customer. I need you to do this for me. Sometimes even highly-custom What's been your experience with that being stretched into three different directions, especially from a product team perspective?

Robin Gandhi (09:28)
Yeah, I  think that we inherently will have to make some compromises as the customers come in and ask us for certain things. The way that I've tended to look at things is from an overall perspective and from a long-term view. If a customer comes and says, hey, I need X or Y, I will rarely wanna do it if it is true custom and it will never get used by anybody else. And I think the story tells well, even to the customer. Do you really want me to build something super custom that nobody else is gonna use? Because that just means that you're now my one outlier that is never gonna get - not to say that I'm not gonna love you - but inherently, you're gonna be something that I have to maintain on the side.
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I think as product people, what we need to get good at is  hearing what they need and seeing if we can turn it into something that more customers can use in a more elegant way. Cause it's easy for someone to say, I use this today - because we get this a lot.

We have folks from legacy providers. And one of the reasons that I think most programs stay with legacy providers is that they've done a whole bunch of custom stuff. And really sticky for them to leave. And so the hard conversation that we tend to have, and I think  it's happened everywhere that I've been in the past, the hard conversation that we have is, I know you have all this custom stuff with them, but you're not coming to us because of the custom stuff. You're coming to us because we're going to take you to the future. And so, you tell me what stuff is non-negotiable and you tell me what your needs are and let me see if I can meet them in a way that probably will satisfy other customers that look like you.

To answer your question,  I try very hard not to do the highly, highly custom thing because I don't think it serves anybody well. But look, this is business. In the end, we need to make money.  I'm not saying that you don't bend those principles here and there. And I know we did this at other places that I've been. But you do it very rarely and you do it for the largest customers. But in general, you try to get to a place where you're building things for everyone, whether it's today or tomorrow.

Roland Siebelink - Host (12:06)
That must also be one of those pressure points where it really makes a difference whether the founder is a more salesperson by background or more an engineer by background. Maybe that's actually explaining why in some degree the big champions almost all seem to have that tech background as you said.

Robin Gandhi (12:23)
I think you're right. I think you're right. If you come from more of a sales background, you're mainly looking to figure out how you're gonna close that deal and go to the next one and close the next one.

Roland Siebelink - Host (12:36)
And you don't want to hear internal processes, just do it.

Robin Gandhi (12:40)
I'm also not knocking sales leaders. But I do agree with you. I think  if you have leaders that are thinking about how do I provide the best possible service rather than how do I close the deal, I do think that it makes a difference.
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And inherently, there has to be balance. You can't look for perfection because we're a startup and we're trying to make a market. We can't be fully towards perfection on product, but you also can't be on the other side either.

Roland Siebelink - Host (13:21)
You said in our prep call, your favorite word is no. I hope that applies mostly to business and not to your family. Saying no 80 % of the time is the only way the CPO rule works, I think you Talk to me about that a bit more.

Robin Gandhi (13:25)
I think I meant it tongue in cheek a little bit, but like, think that the the the If you're going to build great craft, you do have to make the right decisions.  And you do have to say this, maybe this doesn't make sense.  This doesn't make sense for us to do right now. This is  one of my favorite phrases, and I get made fun of it all the time because I will say this doesn't make any sense. Why would we do this? But.

I think that having  the ability to balance that with  also saying, look, we got to make money. How are we going to make money? What are we going to do? I think is really important. And I think if you don't have folks in the room, especially on product and enge saying, "no," then everyone's going to say yes. Then you're going to make some bad decisions. What I've always said is  it's my job  to be practical and it's my CEO's job to to push the boundaries, and in the middle, we will do some great stuff.

Roland Siebelink - Host (14:39)
This is interesting because some  earlier stage startups, when they hire their first product leader, many times I see them looking for, I need a product visionary. And I always push back on that as well. And not to say you're not visionary, Robin, but it's more to say, your first product leader you hire as a founder probably needs to balance your visionary instinct as a founder. How do you look at that?

Robin Gandhi (15:03)
Yeah,  I'm probably not the first product leader that we've had here at Lithic. But having said that, I think I would generally agree with you. It is also my job to push the boundaries and be innovative and think about where we can do more with, especially today, agentic and Stablecoin and everything else. But in the end, this is more the founder's company than it is mine. Inherently, it is.

And so, they're the ones that should be pushing the boundaries the hardest. And then it's up to me to say, well, within what you want to achieve, here's what's reasonable. Here's what can actually happen.

Roland Siebelink - Host (15:40)
And you mentioned in our prep call that there has to be some tension. I think you referred to this healthy tension with  the founders you work with. If you're not pushing Bo and Bo is not pushing you, then something is wrong in the setup.  What's been your experience with strong founders that you worked with as people in different companies. What are some ways of working with them? What are some ways that typically work and working with founders the best?

Robin Gandhi (16:13)
Yeah, I  think  that in order to be a founder, it takes a special person. Inherently, you have to believe in an idea and you have to go after it. Because in the end, you're going to be doing this for a lot of years. you have And the only way that you survive and come out of the other end, you have to have a lot of perseverance and inherently probably a little bit of stubbornness as well.

And so I think  the thing that I've found is  know, not bottling that up. Cause there's this energy that I think to the same point that we were making about, where do you lead vision from, I think that inherently the co-founders are going to have the energy, they're going to have the vision, and so you don't want to bottle it up too much. But you need to have the right relationship so that you can say,

we're going to do that, but here's when we're going to do it or probably that doesn't make a lot of sense or here's why we should practically do something slightly differently. I think  as I've worked with founders,  it's about finding that right balance. And sometimes it's easy and sometimes it's hard. What I've really enjoyed in my  time here at Lithic is that  we are able to find that right balance,

where we push and pull each other in the right direction without getting frustrated. To your point, if there's no tension, then what am I doing here? But I think that as long as the tension is not so strong that everyone hates each other, that we're in a good

Roland Siebelink - Host (17:45)
Robin, I want to start talking about your agentic stuff in a minute, but before I also wondered, is it just the tension between you and the founder-CEO as a CPO that you're managing mostly or to what degree does the broader executive team come in play there?

Robin Gandhi (18:10)
I'm trying to involve everyone in the executive team in the roadmap because what I say is, this is how we make money. Whatever we build is how we make money and it's how we get paid and how we're going to turn this into something big.  I think it's important to involve the entire leadership team. We have monthly or bi-monthly syncs with pretty much every team to say, what are you hearing? What do you see in the roadmaps that's not working? How can we change things? What can we do to help you? Because I think if you don't do that - even if I'm connected at the CEO CTO level,  it's not helpful if I'm not doing the right thing for sales or for marketing or for compliance, because  I think every stakeholder is what allows us to  grow to where we want to be.

Roland Siebelink - Host (19:06)
it sounds like it's more managed on a bilateral basis through one-on-ones and maybe team sessions rather than having the full discussion at a leadership team workshop on a quarterly basis. That's more  to seal it off, I guess.

Robin Gandhi (19:19)
I would say the roadmap itself, we try to just keep like commercial, like our head of commercial and then  also CEO, CTO, and maybe the CFO  in the room. And we just  finalize the roadmap and then we get it out to everyone. Cause there's also a point where we have enough inputs that we should just go ahead and move forward with it. I think, especially in a startup world, you don't want to have - analysis paralysis.

As long as you're involving a decent portion of the team, I think you should just take the signal as good and move on.

Roland Siebelink - Host (19:48)
I'm sure that the question every product manager or senior product manager has on their mind, but how do you get them to accept that there's limited resources?

Robin Gandhi (20:05)
the age old question of limited resources. I make a really hard push to make sure that folks understand that. When I put the roadmap out, I say, OK, this is the roadmap. Here's how much extra capacity.  I know that things will come up. And so, I try to allocate  about 20-25% of the roadmap for things that might pop up. Okay,

this is how much you have in your bucket. This is what you can use. If you bring me anything, we're going to figure out if you're taking money out of my bucket or if you're taking stuff out of the roadmap.

Robin Gandhi (20:42)
Again, this is  is  where it matters from the top. If from the top everyone's saying, yeah, I get it. We have limited resources. We cannot go after everything. And if we see something amazing and we think we should change the roadmap, we will. But we'll make it with a conscious

Roland Siebelink - Host (21:05)
Okay, let's now talk about your own I think you mentioned that with arcade.dev, you're building the world's first AI shopping agent that can actually check out. Did I get that right?

Robin Gandhi (21:20)
Yeah,  this is what I'll do. I will walk you through it. It's interesting, this is how fast AI moves Last August, I was presenting at a conference and I put together an agentic demo, basically saying, I can create...

I guess one thing that's helpful  to talk about first is that, before Lithic became Lithic, we were a company called Privacy. And Privacy is a company that provides virtual cards on top of a banking account or a debit It's a way that  if you decided to go to sneakerheads.com and you didn't want to give them your own credit card, you could just generate a card that way. What we did when we were trying to do the agentic demo last August was we said, okay, how can I get an agent to pick up one of our Lithic cards, create a Lithic card, and then send it to buy And so we used a company called Arcade, which is a company that brings together a lot of different secure services. We work with Arcade to start creating the ability to pull cards from us. It's great.  Go shop at Amazon or Shopify; failed.

OK, great. Why?

What happened? It looks like they think it's a bot. And so for the last 30 years, we've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we're going to stop online fraud. And so, as soon as it comes from not a device, basically  from a server, it just automatically blocks it. Then we say, I wonder if I could make a donation to the local library. That failed, too.

So we realized this is not going to be so easy. At that time,  about a year ago, we said, okay, let's use, use. there's another company called Rye. And Rye is basically a shopping cart API. They have direct connects into Amazon and Shopify. And so we gave the card to Arcade's agent and then that agent went to Shopify. It bought  a hundred pens  and it did the checkout.

Robin Gandhi (23:31)
It waspretty cool. And everyone was like, wow, that's awesome. I haven't seen it in real life. Now with OpenClaw, it's so easy. You don't need anything. If you look at our numbers now on privacy, it's just skyrocketed because you have all these agentic developers that are now just,  setting up privacy accounts, creating cards, and now the transaction that I couldn't get through at the library is going through everywhere. And why? Because, now, OpenClaw has made it look like it's you on your computer doing it. the merchant, it doesn't look any different. What's the difference between you shopping on your own computer or you giving that card to your computer and letting it click through?

Roland Siebelink - Host (24:20)
At the basis, it's OpenClaw basically having access to your personal credentials that makes it look as if OpenClaw is you instead of an agent, right?

Robin Gandhi (24:30)
Well, it's not even - when I say personal, it's still a Lithic card, so it's still safe in that way. It's not your Amex card or whatever that you have in your wallet. It's a safe virtual card, but because they're on your computer, it's sending all the data signals back to nike.com that make it. It doesn't come through the cloud; it comes through your computer. Was it a MacBook? Yep, it was a MacBook. What did they use? Chrome.

Roland Siebelink - Host (24:49)
Because it doesn't come through the cloud, of course.

Robin Gandhi (24:57)
Did they slowly click through it? Yep, they slowly click through it. All of the signals that were being used to prevent bot activity are no longer valid.  I don't think Open Claw is a solution necessarily, but it's just  an interesting place that we're in that  things are moving so fast.

Roland Siebelink - Host (25:02)
Well, this has been great, Robin, but I did want to also spend a bit of time knowing the person behind the business as we understand a little bit - what made you become the successful CPO that you are now?

Robin Gandhi (25:21)
It's pretty cool.

I was. For a very long time, I was going to become a doctor.  I worked in a microbiology lab. I was in a genetics lab doing myotic non-disjunction on flies, which is insane. I  was doing a dual major in business as well. And I think the people that I met in business school when I was in undergrad,  just listening to them talk about  what they were doing just was like, man, this is so cool.  I will tell you the one thing I do miss, I do miss science a lot, but I do think that  I made the right call because

listening to them talk about all the really interesting things that you could do within the business and entrepreneurial context, it just  got me going. And so I've always had a little bit of an entrepreneurial piece to so I've done small things here and there, but I think that's why I enjoy this. I could never go back to corporate life at this point.

Roland Siebelink - Host (26:46)
Last question, Robin, where can people find out more information about you, about Lithic, and also what are you looking for in terms of help from listeners? What is Lithic looking for? How can they help?

Robin Gandhi (26:59)
How to find about Lithic, lithic.com. If you want to reach out to me, Robin@Lithic, feel free to reach out, send me a LinkedIn, easy enough. I think if you're thinking about anything in the card space, one, I'm always happy to bounce ideas. Even if it's not Lithic and you're just thinking about things in FinTech or cards, reach out, always need help.

Also, if we can partner together on something, that's even better.  It's exciting. It's interesting. We're in a great time.

Roland Siebelink - Host (27:27)
And you're still growing your employee base, it looks like. Are you all still in hiring mode? What's the perfect Lithic employee that you look for?

Robin Gandhi (27:32)
You better believe it. If you're looking for an amazing place, come by.

Someone that's smart, curious, and is really passionate about what they do. And then, like I said, low ego. I think when we find that, you're like, this is gonna be a good fit.

Roland Siebelink - Host (27:51)
Okay, very cool. Okay, Robin, we've been talking for a long time. I'd love to talk for another hour or two, but there is an end to  every recording. you so much for joining the podcast. Of course, people want to get in touch with Robin, you don't dare to contact him directly, I'm happy to make an introduction if you know me already. And for the listeners, thank you again for making it to the end and we'll have a new episode with another awesome guest next week.

Robin Gandhi (28:16)
Thank you very much. appreciate it.

Why Craft Still Matters in Fintech | EP 117

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