In this interview, Hunter Monk, the Founder at Laso Finance shares his insights on building a finance startup. From his first Lightning virtual cards to a broad platform, the interview is packed with valuable lessons.
Follow Hunter on X @huntermmonk
What emerging technology are you most excited about for Laso Finance’s industry?
Agentic harnesses are being embedded into every surface. Instinct and Muse are revolutionizing the capabilities of a personal agent.
In addition, founders are using agents to deploy new businesses that either wouldn’t, or couldn’t be made from human labor alone. 
How does Laso Finance handle custom integration requests from large clients?
We make our API as flexible as possible from an API and agentic perspective. To move quickly, we don’t customize integration requests. Instead, we let our customers drive the API shape and feature set that all of our customers share.
What leadership lesson did you learn the hard way while building Laso Finance?
You need redundancy in vendors. If a vendor goes down, from the user’s (correct) perspective, it’s your fault.
About 6 months into building Laso Finance, we lost our only card issuer. We dropped from half a million dollars a month in volume to zero overnight. To get a replacement vendor, I made a list of 200 possible companies, and started contacting every one. We ended up getting our replacement issuer on meeting #92.
Now, Laso has redundant vendors at each mission critical step.
What impact do you want Laso Finance to have on the world?
It supplies the financial layer that agent-led businesses are built in. Our next goal is to get our first company at $100M market cap built on Laso financial tooling.
Hunter, what’s the hardest decision you’ve had to make as a leader at Laso Finance?
Continuing to work on Laso through those 200 meetings when it was unclear if it was even possible.
This interview was conducted via Lightning.news
