Dec 12, 2023 · 35m · a16z
Launching a New Category with Modern Treasury's Dimitri Dadiomov
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of Andreessen Horowitz's 'My First 16' series, host Seema Amble interviews Dimitri Dadiomov, co-founder and CEO of Modern Treasury, about category creation, early customer acquisition, and establishing trust in B2B FinTech infrastructure.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 3.3 Guest teaching 4.6 Guest disagreement 0.4 The host pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 32:08 Startups Die of Suicide, Not Homicide
Dimitri dismisses conventional startup anxiety over market competitors by asserting that companies almost never die from competitive homicide, but rather from internal suicide.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 13:00 Probing Research vs Sales QuestioningSeema presses beyond generic descriptions to challenge Dimitri on whether his team actually varied their line of questioning or personnel when speaking with prospective sales leads versus research contacts.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 27:58 Biology Birding Analogy for Product DiscoveryDimitri educates the host on product discovery by drawing a detailed parallel to avian taxonomy, explaining how marginal feature requests converge like subtle bird species variations.
The host holds their own ▶ 31:56 Synthesizing Customer-Centric StrategySeema succinctly captures and demonstrates deep understanding of Dimitri's strategic orientation, framing his posture as intentional non-distraction by market competitors.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16z Legal Disclaimer | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Seema sets up the interview with standard context around Modern Treasury's origins at LendingHome. Dimitri explains the complex internal payment operations and spreadsheet math required for loan disbursements. | |
| Defining the MVP and Initial Bank Partnerships | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Seema asks how Modern Treasury determined its MVP and initial bank partners. Dimitri details their three-legged stool framework (API, UI dashboard, and bank integrations) and why Silicon Valley Bank was their launch bank. | |
| Acquiring the First Customers | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Seema probes into how the founders differentiated research interviews from sales calls. Dimitri gently reframes their targeting approach, noting they kept outreach intentionally broad across company sizes before landing a small healthcare startup co-founder. | |
| Building Trust in Financial Infrastructure | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Seema asks how an early-stage startup builds enough trust to handle customer money movement. Dimitri explains that trust in financial infrastructure is fundamentally a long-term availability bet backed by personal founder relationships. | |
| Category Creation and Go-to-Market Strategy | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Seema inquires about category creation and GTM sequencing between sales and marketing. Dimitri modestly rejects taking credit for coining terms while explaining why they intentionally delayed hiring dedicated sales reps for over two years. | |
| Prioritizing Feature Requests & The Birding Analogy | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Seema asks how Modern Treasury prioritized feature requests during growth. Dimitri educates the host using an undergraduate biology analogy comparing marginal feature requests to newly discovered, look-alike bird species. | |
| Evolving Trust at Scale & Competitive Focus | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Seema synthesizes Dimitri's philosophy, pointing out his strict focus on internal product value over competitive tracking. Dimitri re-centers the point with an aphorism that startups rarely die of homicide from competitors but rather suicide from internal errors. | |
| Advice for Early-Stage Founders & Conclusion | 2 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Seema invites closing advice for early founders. Dimitri advises founders to spend less time over-optimizing business models and pricing levers, and focus heavily on building a product users love. |
Statements from this episode (11)
Early B2B Fintech Founders Most Frequently Ask About Initial Customer Acquisition
“The number one question I get asked by early B to B FinTech founders is, how do I acquire my first set of customers, as well as, how do I get my customers to trust me with their money?”
Dadiomov: Companies underinvest in payment systems because they aren't core competencies
“And it's one of these things that's really not core competency for most of the companies I was talking to, and so they couldn't justify the right, like, level of investment, and at the same time, it was, like, the same thing that they all needed.”
Modern Treasury built its MVP in ten weeks and launched in five
“It probably took us about 10 weeks to build the MVP in a functional way. And then, you know, it took us about five months total to go live with the first customer.”
Mid-sized companies have too much internal inertia to buy from early startups
“Like very quickly we realized these companies would not, they would have too much inertia internally to actually sign up with a small startup.”
Modern Treasury founders mapped every operational task to explicit decision-making owners
“We kind of wrote out on a spreadsheet, like all the things that we had to take care of as a founding team, just like anything from like, you know, run payroll and do taxes to like set up the AWS kind of instance to be able to do customer service once we have c…”
Dadiomov: Payment operations was not recognized as a software category pre-Modern Treasury
“Payment operations was not, Really a topic that people talked about. Obviously it was present in a lot of places, but nobody thought about that in a, or talked about publicly, at least in in like a software category kind of way.”
Modern Treasury builds all features for both API and manual UI
“So one of the design principles that we've had is everything we build is available in both the API and the UI, and you can do things by hand or you can automate them, but there's nothing is going to be a hundred percent automated. The world is going to be like…”
Modern Treasury waited two years before hiring its first salesperson
“We did not have a sales team for a long time. We kind of invested more heavily in marketing upfront and we brought, and we've got a lot of inbound leads coming from content, coming from bank referrals, coming from other activities that we're doing. And so it r…”
Dadiomov: Customer feature requests naturally converge into minor product variations
“Like when you get feature requests in the beginning, they seem to be kind of random and they seem to be kind of all over the place. And as you talk to more customers and you do more product discovery, you discover like more and more of the feature requests are…”
Dadiomov: Companies rarely die of competition, they die of suicide
“Very, it's very rare at least that companies die of homicide. They usually die of suicide. Companies usually mess up in some way that is actually just, It's very internal. So when you read a lot of business books, I think people talk about like competition, bu…”