My Company Died—Learn From My Mistakes

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.

---

On the day I chose to start writing this, I went to an afternoon showing of Oldboy at the Alamo in Brooklyn. In the movie, there’s a quote that’s repeated at least three times:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;