Welcome to 2024!

And get ready for our second installment of Building The Best, hosted by the fantastic Jillian Williams of Cowboy Ventures.

In this episode, Jillian is joined by the co-founders of Cognito, an ID verification and KYC provider to the fintech world, which was acquired by Plaid in 2022.

• Alain Meier, Co-Founder and CEO of Cognito (acquired by Plaid)
• John Backus, Co-Founder and CTO of Cognito (acquired by Plaid)

Building The Best dives deep into the fundamentals of creating and scaling transformative products through interviews with the best founders in fintech.

Listen here:

Building the Best Cognito

0:00

/2842.9425

1×

And on Spotify:

The Financial Stack that scales with you.

0:00

/44.2917

1×

Spend less time worrying about where your money is at & more time growing your business with Brex, the finance stack that scales with startups. Visit brex.com today.

"Oh, my God, it was impossibly tough. And honestly, that's, that's why compliance was actually this wasn't even really intentional by us, but we knew we wanted to focus on one industry.

We took the YCombinator playbook to heart with every decision we made. And one of the things that they say is to solve one problem for one specific demographic, extremely well. And for us, it was solving identity verification for crypto companies really well."
- Alain Meier

Jillian Williams  00:18

Hey there. And welcome back to the This Week in Fintech podcast, where we aim to get behind the curtain with some of our favorite in tech founders to hear their honest journeys of building their companies. I'm your host, Jillian Williams, partner at Cowboy Ventures. Today, we have Alain and John, thank you both so much for joining us.

Alain Meier  01:20

Yeah. Thanks for having us. Excited to be here.

Jillian Williams  01:25

I'm excited to chat with you guys about your founding journey and the story of Cognito and its acquisition, transition, and integration into Plaid. And so before we begin, I'd love to start just kind of for those who don't know, with each of your backgrounds and how you met and how you decided to find a company.