Charlie Kroll

Head of Fintech @ Socure

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

@RaminNasibov Police Quest (or really any of the old Sierra games)

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

@defyneric @privy_io @dynamic_xyz @thirdweb @crossmint @turnkeyhq @magic_labs @raincards @Stablecoin @KulipaXYZ @wirexapp @reapglobal @iron @BVNKFinance @UR_global @dakota_xyz KYC/AML @SocureID powers the biggest neobanks

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

@BrianLaManna_ Agree

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

They’re both hard for different reasons. Anyone can be a startup founder just by declaring it, but actually raising money, landing initial customers, recruiting the early team, and dealing with the stress and uncertainty of keeping something going that isn’t really taking off - these things are extremely hard

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

When I was CRO at Lithic, our first sales hires weren't salespeople.

I had only ever been a founder before, so I knew what it took to find product market fit. Sales teams are great once you have PMF, but deadly if you build them too early. Plus, the Lithic customer was a developer or CTO who didn't react well to a commercial sales motion. They wanted to go direct to the experts.

So we chose to build a different kind of sales model.

Instead of hiring people with sales backgrounds, we hired high-motor generalists, people with finance or tech backgrounds who were just super smart, fast learners, great with customers, and could go super deep into the domain. Not interested in sales as a career, but very interested in joining a startup and wearing a lot of hats. Then, we surrounded them with support around process.

And not only was this great for early customer traction, but it became a great talent feeder for the company as these folks often moved out of sales into other roles.

As the company grew and became more complex, the model naturally evolved, but starting this way was a successful experiment and key to the early wins.

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

People have asked why I joined Socure for this next chapter.

The honest answer is less about the company, and more about the problem.

I've worked on different parts of identity and fraud for many years, starting at Andera where we built the first digital account opening platform for banks. This was before there were orchestration platforms like Socure's RiskOS, so we had to build a lot ourselves.

When onboarding a new consumer, which data sources need to be called? In what order? Under what conditions? What determines an accept vs decline vs review decision?

At Andera, we ended up building an internal service called ARM ("Application Risk Management") which had a visual drag-and-drop editor very much like the current crop of orchestration platforms. It was incredibly powerful and allowed Andera to support bespoke onboarding workflows for 650 banks and credit unions. It was ahead of its time.

We even considered productizing it and selling it as a new product. But believe it not, back in ~2010, there was no market for a headless API platform. Banks didn't have developers, and the fintech market was a fraction of what it is today. In retrospect we missed what was coming, but that can be a story for another time.

Fast forward, the market has matured and today this is a solved problem. Socure products are available through a number of standalone orchestration providers, and Socure has its own orchestration platform called RiskOS.

Socure's approach with RiskOS is different - vertically integrate the models with the orchestration and decisioning. This has a number of advantages in terms of performance and developer experience. Think about finally having an Apple option in an Android world, while still having the benefits of an open marketplace with hundreds of non-Socure products available. It's genuinely incredible and disruptive.

Having spent a lot of time close to this problem, I recognized the unique advantages in what Socure is building, and I couldn't help but be a part of it.

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

For those new to following my account, here's a quick intro.

I'm a fintech entrepreneur and operator with more than 25 years of experience building financial technology companies.

I began my career as the founder and CEO of Andera, one of the earliest digital banking platforms for online account opening. Over 14 years, we built the company from a startup into a leading platform used by banks across the United States before its successful acquisition by Bottomline Technologies in 2014.

After that, I co-founded my second startup, Ellevest, alongside former Wall Street executive Sallie Krawcheck, helping build one of the most recognized consumer fintech brands focused on investing and financial planning. After Ellevest, I served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Bessemer Venture Partners, where I was focused on fintech infrastructure and emerging financial services platforms.

I then joined one of our portfolio companies, Lithic (formerly https://t.co/rvSf6AAGbU), to help scale the company’s card issuing platform and lead the commercial organization as Chief Revenue Officer. Most recently, I joined Digital Onboarding as CEO.

Today at Socure, I lead the fintech and mid-market banking businesses, working with financial institutions and fintech companies to modernize identity, onboarding, and fraud prevention.

I'm excited to share more as we build in public in the coming months.

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

I’m getting back on X. In large part, it's to relive a period I really enjoyed as a founder 20 years ago, back when I looked like the guy below.

Before Twitter was a thing, I had a blog. I used it the way people eventually used Twitter: short, frequent posts about what was happening inside my company.

I wrote about everything: When servers crashed, when we signed big customers, when things broke, when we had no idea what we were doing. It was “building in public” before that was a phrase.

People loved it. There wasn’t much like it back then, and the audience was incredibly engaged.

My team, on the other hand… not so much. They hated that I’d share our warts.

“Why would you tell people the servers crashed?”
“Why would you admit the product has bugs?”

But I believed then, and still believe now, that transparency is how you build trust.
If you acknowledge problems and show you’re taking them seriously, people lean in. If you pretend everything is perfect, people assume you're full of it.

Plus the experience of writing provided an opportunity for clarity. Putting my thoughts and experiences down on paper at a frequent cadence forced me to reflect constantly on what was important.

Then life got busy.

Over the last decade, between building companies or joining others, I stopped writing. My blog faded.

But I’ve missed it.

So I’m going to try again.

This time, as an operator instead of a founder.

We’ll see how it goes.

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

@blader Singularities must be happening regularly in galaxies too far for us to detect. Nothing unique about this one.

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

@jasonrohrer This is incredible

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

@lessin Your subscription is tax deductible if you’re making money off it, same net effect

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

@zachtratar @NotionHQ Fix the voice recognition, let it learn regular speakers’ voices automatically. And let users manually correct voice attribution once in the summary and it automatically corrects it everywhere else and remembers for next time.

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

@regulatorynerd Nice to have you back!

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

@Milajoy I thought you needed to commit crimes to be arrested in America you dolt

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

@haridigresses @mikulaja @haridigresses has the right take here

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

We are hiring across the company so please reach out if you’re interested in being part of what we’re building.

LFG 🚀

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

Some personal news -

I’m absolutely thrilled to announce that I’ve joined @SocureID to lead our Fintech & Mid-Market Banking efforts.

🧵

[Charlie Kroll @CharlieKroll]

I couldn’t be more excited to work with @JohnnyAyers, Matt Thompson, and the rest of this incredibly talented team. A special thanks for Dan Rosen from @CommerceVC, who I have known since his Highland Capital days, for making the connection.