Bo Jiang is co-founder and chief executive of Lithic, the New York City company whose software lets fintechs and other businesses issue their own debit and credit cards. He grew up in Kansas, started his first company as a teenager with the same friends he still works with, and in 2014 co-founded Privacy, the virtual card service whose home-built card processor later became Lithic.
Teenage Founders in Kansas
He says he was "tricked into the world of startups." Around 2005 and 2006, as a high school student in Kansas, he began building websites with Jason Kruse, who grew up down the street, and David Nichols, a boy in the UK they had met in an internet chat room when they were about 13 and 14, through an introduction brokered by a 12-year-old. The three built an early cloud file hosting service, a competitor to Box when Box was still a consumer product, and it took off. They sold it before going to college. "We were like, gee, like startups are like really easy," he has said. "Like you just build it and people come."
MIT and the Hatch Incubator
He studied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, choosing it because it was the most flexible major. After graduating he was unsure what to do until a college friend in New York pointed him to Hatch Labs, an incubator inside the internet group IAC. Hatch started eight to ten companies while he was there, and nearly all of them died except one, Tinder. Watching repeat founders up close taught him how early companies are built, and how rarely they succeed.
Founding Privacy
Fintech had interested him since his own bad experiences with PayPal, and he found it strange that people still typed 16 static digits from a piece of plastic into what were effectively supercomputers. In July 2014 he, Kruse and Nichols incorporated Privacy, a browser extension that creates a new virtual card at any checkout, like a password manager for card numbers. Privacy became one of the leading consumer virtual card providers in the United States.
Building Lithic
Privacy launched on an older card processing platform, and over two or three years the team kept running into problems with it: launching took far too long and cost too much, reconciliation broke, transactions failed when the processor went down, and its APIs changed without warning. So they built their own processor. Some customers started reverse engineering Privacy's mobile APIs to use its card technology, which showed the team there was demand. They opened the processor to other companies around 2018 and 2019, and it took off in 2020 as Lithic.
He compares Lithic's job to what Stripe, Adyen and Square did for accepting card payments: make card issuing easy for developers, and the market grows. "You effectively become this sort of bet on developer creativity or human ingenuity," he has said. The company grew from about 20 people at Privacy to about 130 by 2023, and it has raised about $115 million. He works to keep a high-trust culture as it grows, and he feels the weight of running critical infrastructure: "When we go down, like transactions stop getting processed." Outside work he has taken up running.
As teenagers in Kansas he and his friends decided startups were easy: you build it and people come. Twenty years on, the same three friends run a card processor that other companies build on, and the part he worries about now comes after the people arrive, when every one of their transactions has to go through.
