Farooq Malik is the co-founder and CEO of Rain, a financial infrastructure company powered by stablecoins. Growing up in an immigrant family, Farooq saw firsthand the friction involved in moving money across borders. Alongside co-founder Charles Yoo-Naut, Farooq spent years building infrastructure before stablecoins became mainstream, betting that tokenized money would eventually become a foundational layer of the global financial system. Today, Rain powers card issuance, payments, and other financial products built on stablecoin rails, helping companies move money faster and operate across markets.

In our conversation, we explore:

• How stablecoins combine the advantages of cash and electronic money
• The barriers that still make moving money across borders expensive and inefficient
• The parallels between being an immigrant and being an entrepreneur
• How Farooq and Charles met through On Deck and decided to build together
• What Rain gained by building before the market was ready
• How Rain earned the trust of early partners who later became customers
• What The Art of War taught Farooq about patience
• The misconception that stablecoins are only for emerging markets
• Why the payments market is big enough for multiple winners
• Why he believes Rain’s infrastructure is well positioned for a future shaped by AI agents

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Thank you to the partners who make this possible

Brex: The intelligent finance platform.

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(02:46) An overview of Rain and global-first financial infrastructure

(06:57) The barriers to moving money and how technology can reduce them

(15:34) How stablecoins behave like cash

(18:46) The economic opportunity of a more efficient monetary system

(22:06) How Farooq’s childhood as an immigrant shaped him

(26:00) Farooq’s first entrepreneurial venture

(29:11) Lessons from Farooq’s career before founding Rain

(36:09) Connecting with Charles through On Deck

(39:51) From Sign and Wire to Rain

(42:18) Why Rain bet on stablecoins

(47:25) How a Rain card works

(49:15) How Rain thinks about its business

(51:12) Lessons from The Art of War

(54:30) Rain’s approach to hiring and management

(55:47) Why the US is a stablecoin hub

(59:10) Why there’s room for more than Stripe

(1:03:39)How Farooq and Charles stay aligned with limited meetings

(1:05:54) Rain’s most critical mantras

(1:08:56) Why Rain is ready for AI agents

(1:12:30) Final meditations

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Follow Farooq Malik

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fhmalik

X: https://x.com/rooqster

Website: https://fhmalik.com

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Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/38x-in-ten-months-inside-one-of-fintechs

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.

Yash Patil is the 23-year-old founder and CEO of Applied Compute, a $1.3 billion company helping businesses train custom AI models on their own data: smaller, cheaper, and purpose-built for the work they actually do. Before founding the company, Yash dropped out of Stanford and spent two years at OpenAI working on post-training infrastructure and Codex. He left with one core conviction: every company that runs its critical workflows on someone else’s model is building on shifting sand. Applied Compute is his answer to that problem, already serving customers including DoorDash, Cognition, and Mercor.

In our conversation, we explore:

• Why “own or be owned” is becoming existential for any company that relies on frontier AI models
• What it was like inside OpenAI the weekend the board fired, and then reinstated, its CEO
• Why post-training is where competitive advantage is now being built, and what reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards actually is
• Why evals have become the new production environment, and why companies will never share them with frontier providers
• How a specialized model built for DoorDash outperformed frontier models on a narrow, high-value task
• Why cost, not capability, is now the primary driver pushing companies toward custom models
• Why Yash believes AI’s transformation of the economy will unfold over decades, and why near-term fears about mass job displacement are misplaced

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Thank you to the partners who make this possible

Brex: The intelligent finance platform.

Guru: The AI source of truth for work.

Persona: Trusted identity verification for any use case.

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Transcript: https://www.generalist.com/p/own-or-be-owned-why-every-company

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Timestamps

(00:00) Introduction

(03:50) Fable 5 and the case for owning your own models

(09:22) Why Applied Compute is betting on custom AI models

(12:30) Yash's early influences and first projects

(17:42) His brief time building at Stanford

(19:29) Leaving Stanford for OpenAI

(25:58) Inside OpenAI during Sam Altman's firing

(28:18) What Yash admires about Sam Altman

(29:43) Teaching models to reason

(35:39) The core insight behind Applied Compute

(39:40) How Applied Compute works with its customers

(45:55) Why model training never ends

(48:56) Why not every task needs a frontier model

(51:25) The culture and people of Applied Compute

(54:50) Applied Compute's training infrastructure

(58:43) The coming compute crunch and other predictions

(1:03:48) Final meditations

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Follow Yash Patil

X: https://x.com/ypatil125

Website: https://yashpatil.me

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yash-s-patil

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Resources and episode mentions: https://www.generalist.com/p/own-or-be-owned-why-every-company⁠

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Production and marketing by penname.co. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email jordan@penname.co.