We grew up in a small town in Michigan where ambition had a fairly predictable shape. Do well in school. Go somewhere respectable. Get a good job. Be smart with your money. Don’t do anything stupid. It is good advice if what you want is a good life. We wanted more than that.
For as long as we have known each other, both of us have had this almost unreasonable conviction that we were supposed to build something important. We want to build a company people know, use, and trust.
Piro is the first company we have found where that ambition feels proportional to the problem.
Money is one of the most important systems in a person’s life, and somehow moving it still feels ancient.
You can send a video from Detroit to London before the other person can put their phone down. You can play a game with somebody in Tokyo in real time. You can broadcast yourself to ten million people from your bedroom. Then you try to move your own money and suddenly everybody wants a fee, a business day, a cutoff time, a routing number, or an explanation for why “instant” costs extra. We think that is insane.
Piro is being built around one expectation: if you send someone money, it should be there.
If they want it back in their bank, they should be able to get it. If the transaction has to travel through stablecoins, real-time payment networks, a bank rail, or something that has not been invented yet, that is our problem. The user should never have to care.
We want the college kid splitting dinner. The contractor getting paid. The person sending money home. The friend asking for $17.43. The creator getting paid by a brand. The person who has never opened Coinbase and never intends to. We want “Piro me” to sound normal.
There is no version of this where the technology itself is enough. Stablecoins are available to everyone. Banks will get faster. Competitors will copy features. Our job is to build the product people choose to use.
We need people to trust us enough that Piro becomes where the payment starts.
We are two completely different kinds of founder.
Rocco went down the path you would expect from the kid who finished first in his class. He became valedictorian, went to Michigan to study business and mathematics through Ross, and spent his time building financial software through Provarion. He is the person who will stare at a system until three in the morning because there is one state transition he does not trust.
Jon went in almost the opposite direction. He figured out the internet. He built an audience of more than two million people by understanding something most founders outsource to a marketing team: why one thing spreads and another disappears. He understands attention at the level of instinct.
Rocco wants to make the thing undeniable. Jon wants to make sure the world knows it exists.
We grew up together. We know how the other thinks. We know what each other is good at. We know where each other is full of shit.
We came from a place where nobody was walking around telling eighteen-year-olds that they should start global financial networks. We never learned to think that somebody else had already been chosen to build them.
There is a certain kind of small-town logic we both rejected early: be realistic, protect the downside, don’t get ahead of yourself. We are very interested in getting ahead of ourselves.
Nobody sensible looks at Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, banks, Visa, Coinbase, Tether, and hundreds of billions of dollars of existing infrastructure and concludes, two guys from Michigan should go compete with all of that. We do.
Stablecoins made money programmable and always on. Real-time banking rails are expanding. Identity, account connectivity, custody, and settlement can increasingly be assembled in software. But the consumer products still carry the assumptions of the old system. That gap will close. We intend to be one of the companies that closes it.
We are already building the difficult parts. The ledger exists. Authentication exists. Recovery exists. Bank connectivity is being built. We are wiring the system carefully because the first time somebody trusts Piro with $100, we inherit an obligation that is completely different from shipping another social app.
Every payment has to arrive correctly, and every balance has to be accounted for.
We are still pre-launch. We have to earn trust and repeat use, and prove that free payments can support a lasting business.
We know exactly what has to happen next. People need to put money in. They need to send it. It needs to arrive immediately. They need to withdraw it without wondering where it went. Then they need to come back and do it again.
A large payment network controls flow. It develops liquidity. It learns routes. It aggregates balances. It gains negotiating power with the infrastructure beneath it. And eventually other businesses want access to the same machinery.
We want free payments between friends to become the start of a much larger payment network.
We are early, young, under-resourced, and competing in one of the most regulated and entrenched industries in the world. There is nowhere we would rather be.
We did not leave the safe path to build something forgettable. We intend to win.