Throughout my career, I've been fortunate to help scale some of the most special and category-defining enterprise software startups in recent years. I particularly love working at startups building enterprise tools precisely because of this ability to meaningfully affect the work environment of whole industries and population segments.

Over the past 10+ years, the world of tooling has been completely revolutionized in waves. Beginning in the mid-2000s, offerings like Amazon Web Services, Heroku, and GitHub ushered in an era of exceptional developer tools, giving technical teams reliable, high-quality ecosystems that enabled them to accomplish more, without sacrificing the quality of their work experience. These shifts also upended traditional cost technology structures: lightweight cloud services displaced data center deployments and on-site IT solutions; and end-users increasingly became the decision-makers when selecting vendors, preferring high quality designed experiences in their tools over frustrating legacy vendors.

This disruption changed a wide range of enterprise tooling segments. Zendesk transformed the help desk setup and operations status quo while giving support professionals a higher quality work experience in the process. Companies like Fastly, Pagerduty, Datadog, and Honeycomb have empowered operations, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams with the same improved tooling experience their software developer colleagues were able to adopt. Today still, companies like Expensify, Gusto, Airtable, and Notion are shifting the paradigm of traditional business operations software.

The common theme here is clear: people want and deserve exceptional tools and high-quality work experiences.

Jareau Wadé, Finix's Chief Growth Officer, and I met each other over six years ago, and he's been diligently recruiting me to his projects ever since. But, when he told me about Finix, the value proposition resonated.

Legacy tooling and outdated vendor processes have been the default experience for finance and payments professionals for decades. Many of their systems are still near-impossible to understand, unreliable, provide atrocious support, and are outrageously priced. I saw my close friends and colleagues at previous companies–GitHub and Fastly in particular–slog through terrible payments tools and knew there were opportunities to change this reality.

Finance and payments professionals driving the software products we love deserve exceptional tools and exceptional work experiences. Finix is here to usher in that change. Finix's platform offers the payments visibility and control of a modern enterprise ecosystem, while simultaneously reducing implementation barriers, and upending traditional cost models in the legacy payments world.

Finix improves the operational experience for payments, risk, and engineering teams; and significantly changes the revenue and total-cost-of-ownership picture at the executive level. This is a foundational transformation that will reshape the world of payments forever, and I'm excited to be a part of it. It took six years for me to work alongside Jareau in this world, and I'm excited it's finally happening at such a great place.