November 13, 2024
Matt Oppenheimer – CEO – Remitly
Cross-Border Payment Wars Heating Up, Matt Oppenheimer – CEO
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If you are thinking about starting a company or have an idea for a product, chances are that it has come from a pain point you want to solve. Startups worldwide are doing this with the hopes of growing and even the big-dog titans are doing this with hopes of disrupting the disruptive disruptors.
But what does that process look like for a leader of a private company? What pains come with making the transition to a public company? What does the scaling process even look like? Remitly CEO, Matt Oppenheimer, joins us for this episode of The Reboot Chronicles Show to provide some answers to those questions, and how he grew his startup into what is now a thriving public company that is on a global growth tear.
With no shortage of competition, like Western Union, Remitly is a cross-border payment app that enables people to transfer funds between parties. Listen in as we unpack stories and lessons of growing on a global scale, the pains of going public, and fighting off big and small competitive forces along the way.
Finding The Right Pains And Gains
The motivation that started Matt on his journey was the fact that there was a trillion-dollar market for cross borders remittances. There is a lot of pain to solve in the $1.8T person-to-person transfer market around the globe. The most common transactions come from when someone leaves their country for another to find a job and sends money back home—this is huge in the U.S. Matt having seen this, and the critical importance of these transfers, wanted to find a way to make it easier and cheaper for everyone, which is where Remitly comes in. A relatively simple starting point, the company is now a billion-dollar market leader with over 2,700 employees in 170 countries, and millions of customers who are all the better for it.
What It Takes To Grow On A Global Scale
For a company whose primary function is taking one person’s money, and sending it across the globe, there are a lot of boxes that need to be checked if you want to grow and have the right mindset. One of the boxes Matt had to check was to “hire the right people”. This is why his second hire was a Compliance Officer who came from Amazon. As for the mindset side of things, Matt mentions to grow “it takes the right investment, and that’s an ongoing journey. Like we will never arrive”. Not having a solid endpoint for a journey might be nerve-wracking for some, but if you look ahead and see an ever-long trail, then you have an ever-long opportunity to grow.
Advice For Future Leaders And Startups
With Remitly recently becoming a public company, we wanted to dive into what Matt learned from that transition. For Matt one of the challenges was the change in investor relations. As a private company, Matt put in a lot of work “making sure I was communicating and interacting with our investors in a thoughtful manner.” Then when they went public, they started to do quarterly earnings and more formal meetings, where there are quiet periods regulating when you can talk to investors and times when you can’t. But acting like a public company, when they were private with their investors, is one of the things Matt attributes to becoming a public company. A type of fake it-till-you-make-it mentality.
