Money on the internet
As a kid from the middle of nowhere: the internet (really, money on the internet) was a way for me to gain agency in the real world.
It felt like a magic trick; convincing people on the internet to pay me for faceless keyboard work, building websites, et cetera. Taking that money, still on the internet, to go and act in the world with its weight. When crypto showed up, I thought it was profound that 12-word phrases, scribbled on a piece of paper, could hold an arbitrarily large sum of money. After all, my parents still had to accompany me to the local bank for me to open my first bank account.
I’d later be pulled in, mostly by accident, to work professionally in crypto, and then in payments. I was driven mostly by proximity to engineering talent. I’d learn in time that something specific to these domains resonated with me.
I met Kahlil and Gabby serendipitously, at a basketball game at Miami’s Kaseya Center; we were hosted by a mutual bank partner. I recognized him as the author of an “agentic payments” memo circulating on X, and I mentioned it to him immediately. To be honest, and I didn’t admit this to Kahlil at the time, I didn’t have a serious view on “agentic payments,” and in fact thought it was a bit made-up. Money movement was the most deterministic piece of the kinds of—otherwise agent-forward—software I worked on. Sure, agents would do the “before”, the “after”, and maybe some ops work in between. But the rails are the rails, and they already work in predictable (if varied) ways. Stablecoins were—are—also an important development; I knew firsthand from working on international payments and helping build stablecoin rails at my job. Sticking to common ground, Kahlil and I bonded over how much nuance is lost in dogmatism around particular rails and form factors.
We exchanged numbers. I sat down and watched the rest of the game with my colleague. I was still thinking about the conversation I’d just had.
I read every Natural blog post, and I followed progress intently. I couldn’t figure out if I thought the brand and voice—heady, abstract, obsessive—was extra and weird; or if it endowed right-sized gravity to the work. But I couldn’t stop following. Something about a team of payments people who liked to write, were obsessive about form, and weren’t sold on surface-level “memes” surrounding agents and payments scratched an itch, and felt like a mirror. I wondered if my critical squinting was the “narcissism of small differences.”
My day jobs in crypto and payments had already given me a heady view of money. I’d grown to think that paper checks were as magical as penciled seed-phrases. I wondered why every iconic payments company caused its founders to become obsessive over “progress”: Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Patrick Collison, Bryan Johnson, Dee Hock of Visa. Francisco D’Anconia’s monologue about money, in (the ever-polarizing) Atlas Shrugged, stuck with me and sits in my bookmarks. I was unreasonably tickled, back in 2020, to see my favorite label drop a mix called “Autonomous Money Organization.”
But I was still piecing together what I thought “agentic payments” could mean.
I asked a thousand questions of Kahlil, Walt, Eric, and everyone else during my work trial, hoping they’d forgive me for that intensity if and when I joined. It seemed like they’d already asked these sorts of questions of themselves, repeatedly, through the work, and had arrived at particular answers.
The teammates I met and worked with during that trial were the easiest part of saying yes: they were living in this future, and were a thoughtful group with whom I enjoyed spending time. A particularly sunny San Francisco, exceptionally beautiful office space coming together, and unusually health-minded company culture: all didn’t hurt.
Soon after, I landed at a crypto conference for work. Primed by convos from the previous week, my mind wandered. I kept thinking about how payments-adjacent businesses actually succeed based on their execution of the “befores” and “afters” of money movement. Different actors, policy, risk, disputes, compliance. Where all the variance lives. It started to come into focus. Money movement rails—virtual heavy machinery—are only safe to operate if integrated well enough with those chaotic systems. A lack of safety—and therefore of trust—doesn’t just mean things blowing up: it means transactions that will never be attempted, and counterparties who won’t bother participating. Humans already bring novelty and chaos; there’s a lot of work required to get them to transact with each other at scale. Agents would be a step-change increase. This, I realized, was the core insight at Natural, and I wanted to work on it.
I’m also not sure agents are really “agentic” without access to money as their claws into the real world. Much of my own ability to act in the real world, at a younger age, was contingent on it. I’d spent years in crypto hearing about the relationship between economic freedom and human flourishing. The company I’m coming from obsesses over producing general agency for entrepreneurs and businesses, vis-à-vis their financial lives.
When I saw a draft of Natalie’s post about the imperative mood, during my work trial, I was shocked to see this insight framed so lucidly.
A generation of agents is waking up, and will need the tools to go and do things for us in the real world. I’m incredibly excited to work on the solution at Natural.
Join us at /careers.
