July 24, 2024 | Insights

Builders & Buyers: Noah Breslow of Bain Capital Ventures on Navigating Fintech’s Future and Scaling Startup Success

Venture Banking

A profile of Noah Breslow, Bain Capital Ventures, a man in a blue shirt wearing glasses, with the text

Builders & Buyers is dedicated to showcasing leading figures in the fintech industry and their contributions. Through candid and in-depth conversations, Stifel Bank’s Managing Directors, Josh Dorsey and Jake Moseley, aim to connect audiences with the thought leaders driving the future of finance. The series will explore personal journeys, company building, investing strategies, and topical macroeconomic conditions.

Notes from Josh Dorsey, conversation moderator:

Noah Breslow is a charismatic and insightful leader who currently spearheads the Platform Team at Bain Capital Ventures. Throughout our conversation, Noah’s vibrant personality, preparedness, and deep industry knowledge shine through brilliantly. What I loved about our discussion was that Noah’s gained wisdom through experiences was on full display. Noah is a product founder plus scaled operator, which you’ll discover as he discusses being a founder, CEO, and investing partner. You’ll especially enjoy stories and learning during his transformative years leading OnDeck through hyper-growth, IPO, and sale. I feel fortunate to have gotten to know Noah better and share his wisdom with you all—enjoy!

Josh: Here’s an easy question to start us off – what’s your favorite book?

Noah: I love CEO biographies and autobiographies. One of my favorites is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight—it’s the story of Nike’s inception and growth, filled with perseverance, grit, and deal-making. Another crucial book for me is Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. It discusses the critical role of sleep for our physical and mental health. Learning how to get a good night’s sleep regularly was pivotal during my 14 years transitioning from startup operator to public CEO.

At Bain Capital Ventures, you run the Platform Team and get exposure to companies at all stages. Your team also “fills in the gaps” to complement a company’s strategy. Could you explain a bit about the Platform Team? What have you learned from building the team? Specifically, I am curious if you’ve seen recurring themes.

Let’s start with the team. Since joining BCV, I’ve realized that it doesn’t matter if you’re a fintech founder, an e-commerce founder, or an infrastructure founder. Most early-stage founders face similar challenges. They need capital, of course, but they also need top talent, customers, partners, and a way to get their story out there.

At BCV, our Platform Team focuses on these needs beyond just providing capital. We have three main groups to support this. First, there’s our talent team, which helps with everything from early engineering hires to later-stage executive recruitment. Then, we have a customer development team that opens doors for the portfolio, leveraging BCV’s advisor network as well as its extensive global network of 1,500 employees and hundreds of portfolio companies. These networks help us unlock significant value for our startups.

Third, storytelling. When the press amplifies a founder’s story, it reduces the need for direct outreach and attracts inbound leads at no extra cost. Our marketing team runs workshops to help founders refine their messages and communicate effectively with the press, partners, investors, and potential hires.

What are some of the challenges these startups face?

The challenges can generally be split into two phases. The first phase is finding product-market fit. This is where you’re building, iterating, and working with design partners. You’re trying to get a sense of whether the market is pulling your product off the shelf rather than you having to push it. It’s about the product meeting roughly 90% of customer needs.

Once you’ve nailed product-market fit, the focus shifts to scaling. A lot of my time with founders is spent on creating repeatable systems for growth and operations. This means moving beyond founder-led sales and hiring a sales team that can grow in a systematic way. It’s crucial to understand the performance and ramp-up time for these new hires.

On the operations side, it’s about making the onboarding and installation processes efficient so you can recognize revenue from new customers quickly. Building these repeatable systems is key to turning a startup into a large enterprise. 

Could you talk about the “third chapter” of embedded and decentralized finance? What does it mean for BCV, and can you give some examples from your portfolio that fit this theme?

The idea of the “third chapter” has evolved in different ways over the years, but one consistent theme has been the evolution of fintech, which we break down into three waves. The first wave was the shift from analog to digital. The second wave involved moving from direct offerings to embedded solutions within other platforms. The third wave, central to the “third chapter,” is all about moving from centralized systems to decentralized ones.

This move to decentralization seemed so promising that we created a dedicated fund for it—the BCV Crypto Fund. This fund focuses on investments in financial infrastructure that use decentralized technologies. For example, one of BCV Crypto’s investments is in Worldcoin, which is building identity infrastructure for a decentralized world. This tech is designed to verify personal identity in an era where digital authenticity is increasingly challenged by things like deep fakes.

At BCV, we’re also looking at companies that are innovating around traditional fintech services such as payments, lending, and identity verification but are doing so through decentralized frameworks. Companies like Bridge and BVNK are working on APIs that integrate payments with stablecoin infrastructure, making the process of moving money more efficient and secure beyond traditional centralized systems.

I also wanted to talk a little about lending in fintech. OnDeck was one of the first big alternative lending companies. Given your experience from its early stages and incredible growth, how do you view the state of lending in fintech today?

Lending is a unique and capital-intensive area in the startup world. We were lucky to grow OnDeck during a time of very low interest rates, which gave us a boost. Today, while there’s still interest in lending, it’s harder for new players to break in because big names like OnDeck, Square, PayPal, and Shopify have established strong programs. The OnDeck business, for example, is now close to a billion dollars in revenue and very profitable.

Lending is easy to get into but tough to scale. The capital requirements are high, and as you grow, you gain significant advantages. Your credit models get better with more data, your operations gain economies of scale, and your brand recognition helps attract higher-quality customers.

What should new entrants consider in today’s lending environment?

First is the risk-reward trade-off. As a VC, we have to realistically evaluate what these companies will be valued at as public entities. Lending companies are often valued at multiples of earnings, similar to banks.

Another key factor is having structural advantages. This could be a distribution edge, like a partnership or integration with other software, a unique data and underwriting advantage, or a regulatory edge with special licenses or permits. Without one of these edges, it’s tough to stand out long-term. Ideally, you want an edge that strengthens as you scale.

It sounds like integration and partnerships play a significant role in the success of these companies.

Absolutely. Take Affirm, for example. It’s a lending company that trades well publicly because of its strong embedded relationships with ecommerce companies. This integration gives them a significant distribution edge, enhancing their valuation and market stability.

“For anyone starting out in fintech today, the scene has changed a lot from 10 or 15 years ago. There’s been a huge surge in funding, especially during the low-interest rates and the venture capital boom around 2021 and early 2022. New players need to critically evaluate their unique value proposition and make sure their solutions are significantly better than what’s already out there.”

Can we dive into your experiences at OnDeck? I’d like to focus on three areas: lessons learned, your approach, and your personal journey. Starting with lessons, what key insights from OnDeck do you now apply at BCV?

There are tons of them! What’s funny is that leading a company over a long period exposes you to its many phases. Now, at BCV, I have the opportunity to work closely with our founders who are at various stages in their journey. Some of them are in the early stages. Some are in the middle, and some are in much later companies that are thinking of going public or being acquired at some point. A significant lesson for me was the need to adapt my leadership style as the company scaled.

In the beginning, leadership was very much one-to-one. The energy and passion I brought to the role were critical, and most employees were people I had personally hired and knew well. Direct, personal relationships formed the foundation of how I ran the company.

But as we scaled, I distinctly remember reaching a point where I wasn’t as familiar with some of our new hires. I needed to move to a one-to-many approach, especially as we reached 600, 700 people. This phase involved training leaders and established team members,  whom we referred to as culture carriers, to help disseminate the company’s values and objectives. These leaders would carry forward the messages, ensuring that communication wasn’t bottlenecked through me. Holding on to a one-to-one leadership style doesn’t scale and can disappoint team members as the company grows and they have less access to you.

That’s interesting. So you also refined communications through emails and town halls to ensure consistency?

Exactly. This approach kept our communication in sync. We regularly updated our core messages to match current conditions and strategies. Plus, leadership meetings with our top 20 or 30 people were essential for aligning our messaging and focusing on key opportunities for the next few months.

It’s amazing to hear how OnDeck evolved. I didn’t realize it had grown to that size.

Yeah, we grew significantly, and it was a big transition, especially for someone who had been in startups all their life. It was a challenge but also a tremendous learning opportunity.

Could you share insights on your leadership approach, specifically any strategies from OnDeck that you’re currently applying or discussing with your portfolio companies?

A key concept I often discuss is the importance of addressing challenges promptly—what I like to call “taking your medicine a little earlier.” Whether it involves a tough conversation about someone’s performance or a critical business decision that’s pending, it’s crucial not to delay. Hard decisions don’t become easier with time. It’s about jumping in with both feet, confronting these decisions head-on, and encouraging a diverse set of viewpoints to ensure you’re covering all bases.

Another major lesson from OnDeck is the importance of spending more time on people, culture, and recruiting. In the early days, I focused heavily on product improvements and other direct actions to scale the business. But as we grew, I realized my role needed to evolve towards recruiting people who could perform these tasks even better than I could. It’s about preparing your organization for rapid scaling.

As a leader, you should regularly assess your daily activities and envision someone else handling parts or all of those responsibilities 12 months from now. This approach helps you scale your perspective and effectiveness.

It seems common for founders, especially in tech hubs like Silicon Valley and New York, to revert to focusing on the product rather than on broader leadership roles. How do you guide them through this?

There’s a natural gravitation towards the product, which can be a bit of a trap for CEOs past the product-market fit stage. While it’s important to keep the product front and center, it’s equally important to find the right balance. As they scale, founders should empower their teams to handle the details of product management so they can focus on wider strategic concerns. It’s also important to be consistent in how you evaluate performance across different departments. Leaders often find themselves being tougher on areas they know well and more lenient with those they don’t. Recognizing and adjusting for these biases is key to leading fairly and managing your team effectively.

I’m curious about your thoughts on the future of fintech. What trends or developments are you and your team particularly excited about?

We’re really excited about several areas in fintech right now, especially around the office of the CFO. The tools CFOs use have drastically improved over the last decade, allowing one or two people to manage tasks that used to require entire teams. This shift has made CFOs more strategic players. For example, our portfolio company Aleph is an FP&A tool that integrates seamlessly with Google Sheets and Excel, streamlining the financial planning and analysis process.

We’re also into how services are turning into software, especially with AI. Simple processes like lending, payments, and basic insurance are already automated, and more complex transactions, like mortgages, are getting there too. We expect heavy automation in areas like wealth management and accounting soon, though human involvement will still be crucial in highly regulated sectors. AI is revolutionizing these fields, making service delivery much more efficient.

On another note, we’re closely watching what I like to call the “picks and shovels” of the industry. This includes areas like fraud detection, identity verification, compliance, and security auditing—we have some investments in these areas like Socure and Norm.ai, but we are always interested in more. Every player in financial services needs strong solutions here.

I’d love to know – as a founder, what advice would you offer to someone just starting out in fintech, especially considering you were initially hesitant to jump into this field?

When I was approached by Matt Harris to join OnDeck, I was a bit hesitant because of my limited knowledge of fintech at that time—I had more of a traditional software background. Back then, we mostly called it financial services. Matt convinced me that I’d figure it out, and honestly, the complexity of the problems we faced was what really pulled me in. OnDeck had this massive challenge of shrinking a 90-day bank loan process into just a few hours, which took us about a decade to perfect and scale. I’ve always been drawn to tackling big, complex problems, navigating regulatory hurdles, and making an impact on the economy.

For anyone starting out in fintech today, the scene has changed a lot from 10 or 15 years ago. There’s been a huge surge in funding, especially during the low-interest rates and the venture capital boom around 2021 and early 2022. New players need to critically evaluate their unique value proposition and make sure their solutions are significantly better than what’s already out there. Since Americans generally stick to their service providers, your innovation really needs to stand out to convince them to switch.

Also, keep an eye on how AI is evolving. Make sure whatever tech you’re developing can adapt to the best models available in the future. It’s worth thinking about whether your solution will be tied to specific technologies or if it can flexibly incorporate advancements from different sources.

Lastly, think about where the value you create will go. With software becoming easier to produce, especially with AI, there’s a trend toward tech-enabled services and some downward price pressure on pure software business models. In services, the willingness to pay tends to remain more consistent, giving service providers who effectively integrate technology the chance to capture better margins. So, focus on creating value where it’s most sustainable.

Would a services approach be similar to what Carta did with valuations, automating processes to scale them?

Exactly, Carta’s handling of 409A valuations is a perfect example. Before them, the industry was all over the place—prices and methods varied widely. Carta used the data they were already handling to automate and streamline these valuations, which added a ton of value right alongside their core offerings for startups. It’s a smart way to expand on what you already do well.

Similarly, one of our portfolio companies, Thoropass, tackles SOC2 audits by mixing software with traditional audit services. This approach provides a one-stop solution and has significantly boosted productivity for Thoropass’s auditors, enhancing their unit economics compared to traditional audit firms. This mix of tech and service is something we’re really excited about and see a lot of potential in— we have already incubated two ventures in this area and are looking to incubate and invest in more.

Let’s talk about defining moments in your career. What has significantly impacted you, both professionally and personally?

For me, defining moments often come during times of crisis or confusion when I’ve had to seize opportunities or tackle challenges head-on. It might sound strange, but I tend to perform better under pressure. For example, when I was 25 and working in a startup in London, my boss abruptly left the company, and I suddenly had to lead an engineering team while living abroad. That was a huge growth experience for me personally and professionally.

At OnDeck, there were several similar moments. Before becoming CEO, the business was flatlining, and despite being more of an engineer and product person, I took over sales. I had to redesign the sales team and operations to get us growing again, which eventually led to my promotion to CEO and the company going public. Over the years we were public, we faced several high-pressure decisions relating to M&A, strategic partnerships, and the need to balance growth with profitability.

In these moments, it’s crucial to be crystal clear about your decisions, understand why you’re making them, seek advice from mentors and advisors, and then move forward without second-guessing what needs to be done.

“I rely on a few principles when making decisions. I’m big on expected value—I like to consider all possible outcomes and their probabilities. I also think about Jeff Bezos’ two-way door versus one-way door framework: Can I reverse this decision if needed, or is it irreversible? My decision-making style is collaborative; I gather input from my team, board, and colleagues.”

Do you have a specific process or framework for making challenging decisions?

I rely on a few principles when making decisions. I’m big on expected value—I like to consider all possible outcomes and their probabilities. I also think about Jeff Bezos’ two-way door versus one-way door framework: Can I reverse this decision if needed, or is it irreversible? My decision-making style is collaborative; I gather input from my team, board, and colleagues.

The decision to sell OnDeck during COVID-19 is a prime example. It was an incredibly challenging time for our business model. We weren’t a bank and didn’t have deposits, and our customers were being forced to shut down, meaning they couldn’t repay their loans on time. This put us in structural default with our credit facilities. For the first time in 14 years, I realized we had to sell the business. It was a tough decision, but it was the right one, and our board ultimately supported it. Our entire team executed really well during that time—I will always be grateful for their work.

Your colleague at Bain, Matt Harris, commented that you have been a “clear-headed mentor to many founders.” What makes a good mentor, in your mind? And, have you had any mentors in your life that have had an impact on you?

Ultimately, a mentor is part teacher, part sounding board. I believe it’s crucial to demonstrate empathy, patience, and reliability by being consistently there for your mentee. It’s about showing up and asking insightful questions rather than relying solely on pattern matching. A good mentor tells you what you need to hear, not just what you want to hear. I’ve gotten better over the years at being direct with people when necessary.

I also like the analogy of a mentor as a shock absorber: Lifting you up when you’re down and providing a reality check or setting sights higher when you’re overly confident. For instance, a founder in our portfolio felt he could relax a bit after potentially meeting his sales targets well before the year’s end. I had to remind him that in a competitive industry, every day counts and the world doesn’t care if you are ahead or behind. 

Reflecting on my journey, I’ve been fortunate to have incredible mentors, mostly current or former CEOs, who shaped my understanding of business dynamics. At OnDeck, we had amazing board members like the late Jim Robinson, former CEO of American Express, who was always willing to offer guidance, especially in challenging situations. There was also Ron Verni, former CEO of Sage, who excelled in communications, sales, and organizational design, and Dan Henson, who trained under Jack Welch at GE and served as the CEO of GE Commercial Capital. These three CEOs, along with others on our board, were real mentors to me. Their invaluable guidance on managing people, handling high-stakes situations, strategizing, and navigating critical moments shaped my approach to leadership and business growth.

Lastly, is there anything specific you do to maintain balance in life, considering your demanding roles?

It’s really important to keep your energy up over the long haul. For me, that means making time for things that recharge me—like spending time with family, exercising, traveling, and getting out in nature. I’ve also learned to avoid splitting my attention. When I’m with my family, my phone generally stays down. If I’m in nature, I’m not checking the stock market or Slack messages.

I call it sustainable risk: Giving your best every day but in a way that you can keep up over the long run. 

Beyond the interview:

Here are links to where you can get to know Noah better.

Written by

Josh Dorsey

Josh Dorsey

Managing Director

Jake Moseley

Jake Moseley

Managing Director

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