Various Startups’ Post

At 20, I dropped out of Claremont McKenna College, where I studied Economics and Computer Science (through Harvey Mudd), to build Paysail, an instant global B2B invoicing and payments solution. At the time, I didn’t even know what a startup or venture capital was; I simply had a passion for building products from the ground up. My co-founder, Liam, and I shared the lofty goal of disrupting legacy payment rails and making it possible to send funds anywhere in the world within seconds for a fraction of a cent. Deciding to drop everything to pursue this idea was a no-brainer—I knew there was no better timing to build it than the present. After raising $4M, hiring an exceptional team, and processing cross-border payments in <5 seconds for ~$0.001, the collapse of FTX left us faced with a difficult decision. We ultimately realized that consumers had become skeptical of cryptocurrency and our goal of enabling traditional businesses to leverage stablecoins for their most important, high dollar-value payments would be an uphill battle at that point in time. That, combined with the challenge of working with crypto-friendly banks and on/off ramp providers for seamless currency conversions led us to pivot away from our original idea. We rebranded as Syro and built an end-to-end secrets management solution for storing, accessing, and rotating credentials after experiencing issues firsthand with removing access while building Paysail. We reached out to 8,000 engineers and spoke with hundreds of DevOps, Infra, and Security experts, understanding the issues they faced. Following onboarding early stage beta customers and finding a lack of engagement, we moved upmarket and focused on a specific problem that continued to come up during conversations—secrets rotation. After the most fulfilling and educational 3.5+ years working on Paysail/Syro, we’ve made the difficult decision to wind down operations and return remaining capital. I want to thank (1) our investors for taking a bet on us and for their patience, support, and guidance through every up and down, (2) our employees: both those who spent a part of the journey with us, and Drayton D'Silva and Taimur Ayaz who have been there from beginning to end with relentless optimism. It has been a privilege to wake up each day and learn from and with them, and (3) to Liam for taking a chance on me when I was an inexperienced college student. It’s been a pleasure growing and learning with you throughout this journey. As this chapter of my career comes to an end, I’m excited to move forward with the same tenacity and intellectual curiosity in my next endeavor. I remain deeply passionate about building innovative products and playing a role in crafting what the future of technology will look like. As I explore what comes next, one thing’s for sure—I long for the same inexplicable feeling of urgency and enthusiasm I felt when Liam first shared with me the idea behind Paysail, and I can’t wait to find that again.