Checkout Completed!
As the pandemic hit in 2020 I first hand saw small businesses go out of business as our transaction volume dipped significantly as lockdowns hit, we immediately scrapped together a team and built a virtual terminal so that these businesses could take digital payments offer services such as curb side pick up and also make payments easier with wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay. This journey led me to think what I’d truly want to do and it was to disrupt how status quo is.
The near opportunity was e-commerce checkout — which was broken, even in the past though we modernized payments we knew we couldn’t truly disrupt checkout if we didn’t go and make the checkout experience better. Now that would involve a payments company to go into tax, shipping, returns, cart abandonment, ERP integrations, do multivariate consumer tests on the checkout, integrate wallets and all payment methods(BNPL, Apple Pay, Google Pay) etc. It required a completely different DNA and hence I set out to do my career’s best work as I had described to Greg, the head of product at Bolt.
Bolt was a small company with extremely ambitious builders, everyone was there to truly disrupt checkout, hack and ship often even iterate often. With a culture of care for each other Bolt was a dream where operationally we set high bar’s for product overviews and technical specs. Joining as the PM doing everything merchant(including international) taught me a lot, getting my hands dirty with corporate strategy was another valuable experience. We had a ton of fun: hikes, happy hours, cross functional jams to make programs successful, off-sites and an action packed work-ation in Scottsdale, random gatherings at bars in SF after work. Work wasn’t easy either: checkout is extremely complicated while on the outside it seems different — Bolt has the best set of engineers I’ve seen; most ex Google, Netflix, Facebook, Uber and a solid set of early PMs.
Bolt is a network effect business and truly disrupting checkout — working however long it took to figure out what is best for our customers and ensuring a high bar for shipping products is something unique at Bolt. Read more about Bolt from investor Tribe Capital here. Bolt definitely is a N of 1 company and seeing the number of Bolt clones across the world is sure validating.
More than launching great products for customers and pitching innovative ideas and taking it to market my takeaways from Bolt are it’s people — honestly the best part from every team the people we hired were great at their jobs and friendly folks who are now good friends who I can call at 2 AM. Seeing Bolt go from 4 PMs to a product team of 50+ was an experience of a lifetime. I know each of them are capable of building $B companies, I wish them well. As for me my order is now complete. I truly feel hard leaving this place and people but I’m moving to a very entrepreneurial opportunity at this time in my life and career. I hope my path’s with them cross again and it was an honor working with each one of them and I’d do it again in a jiffy. Again I’m off to disrupt status quo — in a more entrepreneurial way.
