Vince Molinari Built a Fintech Company by Doing What the Startup Playbook Says Not to Do
Vince Molinari explains why regulated-industry founders should expect more time and expense, learn from failure, and innovate inside the rules.
EXPERT OPINION BY DANIEL ROBBINS, CEO AND FOUNDER OF IBH MEDIA AND HOST OF FOUNDER’S STORY
Vince Molinari. Illustration: Inc; Photo: Adobe Stock, Courtesy subject
Vince Molinari has testified before the U.S. Congress and Senate, spoken at the U.S. State Department and the U.N., helped develop blockchain patents, and broadcasts daily from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. His company, Fintech.TV, is fresh off its $50 million acquisition of Tap Inc. I asked him what advice he would give someone who wants to disrupt an industry as he has. His answer had nothing to do with success.
It takes five times longer and maybe ten
“It takes five times longer and maybe ten times more expense than you ever think,” he told me. “So you have to be able to digest the pain, knowing that it’s going to be a painful process. People always look at the success portion. They very rarely look at the failures.”
Then he went further.
Pivot Like a Spinning Top.
“My personal greatest learnings came from the failures. The times I fell down, the times I didn’t get it right, the times that you had to pivot so many times in business that you felt like a spinning top.”
The daily digest for entrepreneurs and business leaders
An Inc.com Featured Presentation
Molinari walked onto Wall Street in 1988, a kid from Queens, New York, fresh out of Hofstra University, who joined Lehman Brothers. The vision came later, when he started seeing gaps in how the industry treated liquidity. Restricted stock carried a two-year holding period before it could trade on a registered exchange. But Molinari noticed what the regulations didn’t say.
It didn’t say you couldn’t sell it, he
“It didn’t say you couldn’t sell it,” he said. “We found ways to create liquidity for a two-year instrument at a bit of a discount and pass on the holding period to the next investor. All of a sudden, these instruments previously thought only sellable on a national market exchange had another liquidity event off exchange.”
That pattern, reading the rules more carefully than the incumbents and innovating within them, became the foundation of his career. And it’s the opposite of the standard startup playbook.
Source: www.inc.com
