Bo Jiang is the CEO and co-founder of Lithic. We talked to Bo because Lithic sits at the center of two increasingly important trends: 1) the bifurcation of fintech infrastructure into point solutions and platforms like BaaS, and 2) the rise of "DeFi mullets" and other kinds of novel consumer fintech experiences enabled by providers built on composable primitives.

1. What is Lithic and what is the key problem you’re solving?

2. Can you talk about who Lithic's customers are and how they use the product?

3. How do you understand Lithic in terms of the landscape of companies that came before as well as big companies existing now, like Fiserv, FIS, and Marqeta?

4. I’d love to hear more about the primitives aspect of it. What are the key primitives in Lithic, and how is that an important part of this evolution from Gen 2.5 to Gen 3—from Marqeta to some new format that drastically expands the space of what’s possible?

5. Could you talk more about the key thing that you need discipline for when solving for this tension of self-serve?

6. How do you think about this idea that bigger customers might end up doing all this in-house? Does that factor into your thinking?

7. The flip side of concentration risk is that, for bigger customers looking at companies like Fiserv and Marqeta, there’s a lot of proof points out there that they can handle something like Cash App. As a fledgling startup, how do you show potential prospects that you can scale as a partner?

8. On the topic of privacy.com, as a founder of two companies, logistically how do you think about running two businesses and keeping your attention from being divided between the two?

9. You alluded to there being a lot of noise in the space and a lot of companies raising money. How do you think about this land grab and winning card issuing in the short term versus long-term building a sustainable business?

10. I’d love to talk about the idea of the DeFi mullet. How do you think about the potential upside of these DeFi/TradFi hybrid products, and how does Lithic facilitate them?

11. You mentioned customers for whom it might make more sense to use banking-as-a-service versus Lithic or Marqeta. From your experience, what are break points where people will switch from BaaS to Lithic? Are they trying to do something that they can’t do with BaaS, or does it have to do more with scale?

12. What are the merits of having a BaaS completely mediate the relationship with a sponsor bank? Is it just speed to market?

13. You mentioned earlier that Lithic might potentially move beyond card issuing. To the extent you can talk about it, what other primitives are interesting to you, or do you think have the biggest potential?

14. To the extent that there is some rebundling, like with your partner program, how much of an end-to-end experience is it? Is it like putting together a platform that people can use instead of having to stitch together all of these different services manually?