How Cyclops uses regulatory clarity — the Genius Act and MiCA — to shorten the education phase of enterprise sales | Alex Wilson

**Alex Wilson** (0:00)
Five years from now, we look around and people aren't actually talking about stable coins anymore, because it's just a way that so much money has moved, that it's just the way you're moving money. You stop even calling it crypto or stable coins, because it's just a payment rail in the background, the consumer doesn't even notice.

**Brett** (0:19)
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by frontlines.io, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump in today's episode.
Today, we're speaking with Alex Wilson, co-founder and co-CEO of Cyclops. Alex, welcome to the show.

**Alex Wilson** (0:58)
Hey, Brett, thanks for having me.

**Brett** (1:00)
Of course, so you're back again building another crypto company. First one you founded in 2018 What's the biggest difference between 2018 and founding one now?

**Alex Wilson** (1:08)
So in 2018, we started The Giving Block to help charities accept crypto. And as you can imagine, everyone looked at us like we were crazy, telling charities to talk about Bitcoin and accept Bitcoin and crypto donations.
Got a lot of nos and stuck with it though, and sold that business four years ago. Now started Cyclops just nine months ago, and crypto has gone quite a bit more mainstream since then. Maybe the biggest difference is the focus is really on stable points more than anything today in the world of crypto.

**Brett** (1:35)
What was your time like at Shift4? I feel like that's one of those fascinating companies. I didn't even know about them until Jared got named head of NASA, and I started to just dig into the history of that company. It's a crazy story. I feel like it's a largely untold story or maybe I'm just missing the story being told.

**Alex Wilson** (1:50)
Yeah, it is, I would say, largely untold and I think in part because Jared's a pretty modest guy.
But it is a really cool story. I even recommend people watch the Netflix series that covers a bit about Jared and his time going to space commanding some of those SpaceX missions. But when we sold The Giving Block to Shift4, we weren't actually planning on selling originally. We were raising money from strategic, and we got some inbounds, some interest, and actually the bankers we were working with brought us Shift4. I'd never heard of Shift4 at the time.
Most of the other companies interested in buying us were crypto exchanges, non-profit software providers, and payments was a great place for us to land. Part of the reason we chose Shift4 is actually because of how inspiring Jared Isaacman was as a leader. Dropped out of high school at 16, started Shift4 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and grew it into a multi-billion dollar global payments business. He was an awesome guy to work for for four years. Pat and I, my co-founder, learned a ton working for him, and he brought a lot of lessons that he learned from working with people like Elon and being around SpaceX a lot. These ideas around ownership and accountability and excellent, even using some of the terminology like mission control for how you handle getting clients live and operating in a no-loss scenario. Really awesome guy to work for, and great to see him leading NASA now.

**Brett** (3:08)
It's always hard to narrow it down to one thing, but if you had to narrow it down to the one big thing that you learned from him, what would that be?

**Alex Wilson** (3:15)
He was very good about really knowing every part of the business well. He wasn't this CEO or leader who didn't actually understand the business. So he never lost touch with what it's like to be a customer that's onboarding, what kind of notices are going out to customer, what it's like calling support.
He would jump in to problems all over the business and make sure he really understood the problems of the customers we're having, and never lost touch with the business. That's something we've tried to carry forward no matter what we're working on, no matter how big our team is. And I think that's something a lot of CEOs lose as the company gets bigger, where they're kind of up in the clouds and they forget what the day-to-day is really like.