Life and Death in the Payments Sector
Episode publishedPodcast: Lumida Wealth : Non-Consensus...Lumida Wealth : Non-Consensus Invest Beyond the Ordinary
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Welcome to nonconsensus investing. I'm Ram Alawwalia, your host and CIO at Lumida Wealth, where we specialize in the craft of alternative investments. At Lumida, we help guide clients through the intricacies of managing wealth so they don't have to shoulder the burden alone. Through this podcast, we draw back the curtain to reveal the strategies employed by the best in the business for their clients so that you too can invest beyond the ordinary.
All right. I'm thrilled to have my friend, Alex Wilson, join us today. Alex, a journey like mine, started as consultants. We saw that it's better to be an owner operator entrepreneur and have real responsibility. And Alex built and sold a company to Shift4. And he's an entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur, going on another journey today. So we're going to talk about payments as a category. Payments notably are rallying today in a sea of red. So I highlight want that for folks, too. Second, we'll talk about specific opportunities in that category, differences in public markets and private markets.
Yeah, Ram. Good to see you too. And thanks for having me on today.
Always a pleasure. Always learned talking to you. Why don't you start by just introducing yourself to the audience?
Yeah, sure. So live in Miami. Love it here. Definitely in Miami Maximalist. Started, like you said, in the consulting days before I decided time to start a company. Went to college at Wake Forest where I actually met my co founder Pat Duffy, you also know. And we started the giving block back in 2018. Ran that for a couple of years, sold it to Shift4 like you said. And just yesterday we launched Cyclops. So that's a bit of an overview, but I'm sure we'll get into more details on each of those.
Yes, we will. We'll get into your next entrepreneurial adventure in a moment. Entrepreneurs really have to have a high tolerance for pain because you're basically waking up and asking to get punched in the face in the stomach each day. Elon says it well, it is like eating glass and you need to have a certain mindset to be a founder and entrepreneur. And I think you've got that mindset. So I to get into that too. First off, let's just start with the overall payments category. So the payments sector has been a bear market for several years now. It was obviously a very hot theme in 2021, and it's
Yeah, I think you've done a good job of covering a lot of this where a lot of it just has to do with what's hot, right? This hot ball of money, the attention economy really. And AI has sort of sucked the air out of the room for a lot of other sectors. I think payments was pretty cool and pretty hot for a long time last couple of years. And Nvidia and Corweave and these other companies have drawn in a lot of money that may have gone towards payments companies otherwise. So, I just don't think there's a lot of attention on payments companies right now. And they're maybe not as new and exciting a
Paul, do mind sharing the screen? I got PayPal on the screen here. So, it's the classic non consensus rally. Everyone hates payments. Everyone throwing the towel with the bathwater and the baby out with the bathwater and it starts to rally. There's also the business that acquired your startup Shift4. Tell us more about Shift4, the business model it has, and we'll start to kind of break out different segments in the payments category, like merchant acquiring, for example. Good, yeah.
Yeah, so Shift4, I think it's a really underappreciated business. And when we sold the Giving Block, we weren't actually planning on even selling the company at the time, but we were s
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