Right team. Right timing. Right challenge.

I joined Natural as a founding engineer 48 days ago.

Before joining, I played the Silicon Valley game – that is, gathering and sorting companies into tiers A, B and C. Natural and a few other companies made the A-list. I had already interviewed and work-trialed with Natural, but my “I’m joining” moment actually happened mid-interview with another A-tier company the following week.

I caught myself thinking halfway through a design systems question, “why would I join this type of company?”. Not because it isn’t impressive - it is. It’s the fastest growing company in history. But these companies will always exist. There will always be an Anthropic, an OpenAI, a Cursor. Different tech, different market, same rocketship.

Later that day, my partner and I had dinner with my long time friend (and co-founder of Natural), Eric Wang. We were talking about life, shared experiences, a normal dinner conversation… and that’s when everything clicked. Mid-conversation, I stood up, walked around the table, hugged Eric, and said: “I’m joining.”

Background

Before Natural, I built backend systems at Capital One and Meta, served as CTO/Co-founder at Thera(YC23), an employee benefits marketplace, and was an engineer at an edtech startup. The consistent theme across all of it is that I like building software from the ground up.

The issue with building from scratch is sometimes it lacks direction. When product direction is fuzzy, it turns into a loop of shipping features just to see what sticks. Many know the feeling, it’s not great. What I wanted next was the opposite: a team with a clear destination, where the question isn’t “should we build this?” it’s “how fast can we get this done?”

My non-negotiables were simple:

• Highly technical problems
• Experienced engineers
• Intentional product direction

What made me say yes

Part of the decision was easy: the team is incredibly strong.

The reason that dinner with Eric hit so hard is that Natural wasn’t coming out of nowhere. I’d known Eric for years - playing basketball and studying in undergrad. After college we went our separate ways but I had the pleasure of watching Eric build Ivella with Natural’s CEO, Kahlil. So when I said I was joining Natural, it wasn’t a vibes-based decision. I had already seen them build a successful company.

Even though I’d known Eric for a long time, Ivella added a new dimension to him. He’d always been methodical and detail-oriented, but the experience of building in payments gave him the chance to turn that mindset into real reps. Making him maybe one of a dozen engineers in the world who could design and ship an airtight ledger. The sort of ability you only appreciate when real dollars are being handled by agents.

Walt is an engineering-first builder, with unusually smooth range across product and execution. He helped build systems at a public company operating at serious scale - the kind of environment where “just ship it” stops working unless your engineering fundamentals are real.

And Kahlil has that rare quality where vision is clear and the urgency is felt. When you talk to him, it doesn’t feel like he’s guessing. It feels like energy aimed in the right direction. A born founder, leader, and entrepreneur. His product eye would be anyone else’s greatest strength, but his time is better spent elsewhere. The best operator I’ve met.

Beyond the team, the timing of Natural is perfect.

Payments for agents feels inevitable. Agent adoption has exploded, and the next step is moving money with them. The question isn’t whether someone builds this - it’s who builds it best, and who builds it fastest. I wanted to be on the team that wins that race.

And “doing it right” matters here in a way it doesn’t in most domains. Payments takes the theoretical computer science topics you learned about in a class or an engineering blog post, and turns them into daily work.

What I’m building

Right now, I’m deep in the plumbing - helping lay the foundations across our frontend, backend, and identity systems.

A lot of my time is going into one question, “what does agent identity even mean?”. Is an agent more like an API key, a service account, or something closer to a human user (you can’t penalize an agent like you can with a user)? Once you answer that, everything follows: how agents authenticate, what they’re allowed to do, and how you make that feel intuitive to developers without compromising safety when money is involved.

We’re not just building features - it’s defining the core primitives that everything else will depend on.

The team

Today we had our team meeting, and like the last few, it was intense. We were going line by line through what needs to get done, and you could feel it: everyone (or at least me) was a little tense, quietly doing the math on how much work is ahead.

Then Kahlil broke the pressure with a simple reset: “126 days” the number of days Natural has been alive. It was a small moment, but it landed. It reminded me of how much we’d already built in such a short time - and that the pace isn’t chaos, it’s momentum.

That’s the vibe at Natural: high energy, deep focus, great talent - with people who genuinely care about doing exceptional work and being good to each other while doing it.

I can’t wait until the first dollar moves on Natural rails. Soon after that, like all good infrastructure, Natural should fade into the background - where the next generation doesn’t worry about agents moving money because the infrastructure and trust is just there.

Join us /careers.