I read an interview this week that every founder building on Bitcoin should stop and read in full: Hunter Monk of Laso Finance, talking about the day his startup's only card issuer pulled the plug.
Here's what happened when a Bitcoin startup lost its only card issuer. Six months into building Laso Finance, their single card vendor went down. Volume went from $500,000 a month to zero. Overnight. Not a slow decline. Zero.
Monk's response is the part I can't stop thinking about. He made a list of 200 possible replacement companies and started calling them, one by one. He got a yes on meeting #92. Ninety-two. Most people would have quit at twenty.
The lesson he took from it is the headline of the whole interview: you need redundancy in vendors. If a vendor goes down, from the user's perspective — correctly — it's your fault. Not the vendor's. Yours.
Laso now runs redundant vendors at every mission-critical step. That's the whole playbook.
Why am I writing this instead of just linking it? Because the Bitcoin space keeps relearning this the hard way. "Don't trust, verify" is supposed to apply to your stack too, not just the chain. If one company can zero your revenue in a day, you don't have a business — you have a dependency with a logo.
Read the full interview here: Why Bitcoin Startups Need Vendor Redundancy. It's short, and the 200-meetings story alone is worth your five minutes.
Now the uncomfortable question: what's the single vendor that could zero you out? Fix that this week.
