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My Company Died—Learn From My Mistakes

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Kate here. When I worked at Medium, we shared office space in New York with a couple of other companies. Amanda Peyton was the founder and CEO of one of them (Grand St., an e-commerce site for tech hardware, which she sold to Etsy). A decade later, she had founded a consumer payments company, Braid, that didn’t work out. The story that she shares of Braid’s rise and fall is captivating, and the lessons she learned along the way are valuable for any founder, whether in fintech or not. I’d been trying to write a pithy summary of my last four years with Braid, my consumer payments company. And here it was, served up on a giant screen. Braid was around from 2019 to 2023. We designed and shipped a brand-new multi-user financial account called a money pool, and raised $10 million in venture capital from investors that I’d looked up to for years. It took us about two and a half years to find product-market fit, after which we grew sustainably and quickly. We’d made software that people seemed

Skip to content We use analytics and advertising tools by default. You can update this anytime. Privacy Preferences Do Not Sell or Share Privacy Preferences x Manage optional tracking categories. Necessary cookies stay on so the site can function. Analytics Advertising and sharing Cancel Save Preferences My Company Died—Learn From My Mistakes DALL-E/prompt: "A watercolor painting depicting the scene of a startup office during bankruptcy. The image shows a small, disheveled office space with empty desks, chairs overturned, and a few boxes packed with belongings..." By Amanda Peyton My Company D

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