Curve: Building an $800m FinTech after being laughed out of the room by Mastercard, with CEO & Founder, Shachar Bialick

Curve CEO and founder Shachar Bialick is a multi-exit entrepreneur with a background in the Israeli Defense Force special forces.

“There's a joke in Israel: how do you win a competition in racing? You start as fast as you can, and you slowly increase the pace.”

Curve brings all your credit cards and debit cards into one app and card. The idea first came to Shachar in 2006, but he knew that launching a business is all about timing. 

And so he waited until 2014 to pick it back up, when he knew the world was ready. After creating a proof of concept in 2015, and raising the first series seed funding of £1.2m in 2015, Shachar launched Curve in 2016.

“When we [first] went to MasterCard and told them about what we’re trying to do and the vision we have, we were laughed out of the room, literally they said, ‘Have you opened the MasterCard rules?’”

So how did he rack up 4 exits? How big can Curve really be? And why is he using Amazon, Netflix and Spotify to validate his mission?

--

Sponsors

Vorboss - get better internet: https://vorboss.com/secretleaders

Vanta - get 20% off security certifications like ISO27001 and SOC2: https://vanta.com/secretleaders

Vertice - save on your SaaS or cloud spend ($5k off or a free benchmark) using the code secretleaders: https://www.vertice.one/l/secretleaders

--

Newsletter

Sign up here: https://secretleaders.email/

You can find our historic newsletters here: https://www.secretleaders.com/episodes