🧾 Liam Brennan-Burke: From Lawn-Mowing to Crypto-Invoicing

The Paysail co-founder who is shaking up the invoicing and payments scene

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Liam is a recent grad of Claremont McKenna College and the co-founder/CEO of Paysail. Paysail leverages stablecoins to enable instant, global B2B invoicing and payments. Liam had early insight into the inefficiencies and inaccuracy of fragmented invoicing and payments at 11 years old when he started his first business. Now, he and the Paysail team are on a mission to enable borderless invoice payments! Liam took a quick break from their current fundraise and shared some thoughts on his journey with the BTL community.

I know you turned down a return offer at BlackRock to found Paysail. What was the moment you knew you were going to go all-in on the company?

I think we knew early on that the idea behind Paysail was technologically an interesting concept, and there were certainly robust market trends that supported our underlying premise. While I really loved my time at BlackRock, I think there were enough early signals to encourage going all-in on Paysail and seeing where things went! I think for me and my co-founder, Nicole, it was all about incrementally de-risking the opportunity. We knew the pains of peer-to-peer payments and had seen first-hand the inefficiency of international payments, but the more we talked to businesses, we saw just how pervasive the problem itself was. This encouraged us that there was certainly an opportunity to build and scale Paysail and that the timing seemed to be right!

Anecdotally at least, it seems more typical for businesses founded by young founders to be D2C rather than B2B. Tell us about how you uncovered the market need for Paysail.

There is a lot of attention given to younger founders working on D2C solutions due to its conspicuous nature; however, tons of founders are also working on B2B solutions. In my case, I had an introduction to invoicing at age 11 when I founded a lawn business. I needed a way to keep track of payments, so I learned some basic Excel and began creating and mailing invoices, accepting checks in return. While this obviously was not the most efficient approach, it was more than adequate for a business founded by an 11-year-old, and I figured that more established companies probably relied on more sophisticated invoicing and payment processes. As I interned at other companies throughout high school and college, it became apparent that this was not necessarily the case.

Despite improvements in invoice management, many companies still rely on legacy payment infrastructure to send and receive payments — which is the point of most friction in the invoicing process. Invoicing and invoice payments are fragmented, inefficient, and expensive. Legacy payment infrastructure has largely reached the upper limit of how fast and cheap cross-border payments can be. However, blockchain technology has provided an opportunity to technological leapfrog and effectively disintermediate prevailing banking infrastructure. With the development of layer one technology, the speed and costs of payments have dropped precipitously. Now, the task is to formalize and legitimize the ecosystem. In recent years, we’ve seen massive strides in the P2P space, but the enterprise solution segment is largely untapped and unbuilt. We saw an opportunity to leverage web3 technology to disintermediate business payments. Paysail is now on a mission to leverage the underlying utility of blockchain/stablecoin technology while building an enterprise platform that can abstract away the complexity and error-prone nature of cryptocurrency payments and provide a full suite solution.

So much young talent has turned their attention to innovations that can be built on the blockchain, and Paysail leverages asset-backed stablecoins to offer a new product. It’s so important to consider not just where the puck is, but where the puck is heading as young people chart their careers. If a young person asked you how to get started in the blockchain ecosystem, where would you point them?

I fundamentally believe blockchain-based solutions and stablecoins will fuel the next generation of technological innovation. I think cryptocurrencies’ innate utility is not necessarily as a store of value but as a medium of exchange, enabling low-cost, near-instantaneous transactions globally. In terms of resources, I recommend Celo and Bitcoin’s whitepapers as good overviews. I know Coinbase also has a pretty robust incentivized educational platform and if you want to start really young, B is for Bitcoin is a great children’s book! If people are interested more in the origins, David Chaum’s 1982 Berkley dissertation titled Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups is fascinating and one of the earliest conceptualizations of blockchains I have found.

You spent almost two years of your time at Claremont in Zoom-University. Hit us with your favorite memory from both being on campus as well as remote.

Now you’re asking the tough questions, Josh! While there isn’t a singular moment that I can pinpoint, my experience at Claremont, both virtual and in-person, have been shaped by the various extracurricular communities I’ve been a part of, from time in the Student Investment Fund to the Graphite Group, from being part of the campus tour guide community to innertube water polo. When classes became remote, it was challenging to regain that sense of community that is so integral to the CMC experience. However, I was fortunate to spend my senior fall with five friends living in rural Rhode Island. It was surreal to be taking class away from campus since so much of the CMC experience revolves around community. However, despite being across the country from 888 N Columbia Ave, the six of us had so much fun taking classes together, cooking, hiking, playing board games, and exploring! We were incredibly grateful to be together during such a challenging and isolating time. It was very different from time on campus, but the time in Rhode Island added a new dimension to my Claremont experience in a really special way.

You were a recipient of the Wagener Family Global Scholarship which required some traveling during your time at Claremont, and I think you spent some time abroad. Where did you get to travel to during your college years and what was the single most influential learning you took from it?

With the Wagener Scholarship, recipients are generously provided resources to spend their freshman summer and sophomore spring abroad. Through the scholarship, I spent my freshman summer in Kampala, Uganda interning at SafeBoda — a motorcycle ride-hailing app. During the following school year, I studied in Granada, Spain, where I was able to take classes in Spanish on EU politics, and economics. I think the thing that most stuck with me was the value of iteration and improvisation. At SafeBoda in Uganda, I was responsible for restructuring the week-long driving training program to scale from training 80 drivers per week to 600. We hired 25 interns, built an internal CRM, spent hundreds of hours setting up drivers’ new smartphones, and printed thousands of customized driver reflector vests. With so many moving parts, we quickly learned the value of integrating feedback, adapting our processes, and improvising when things went awry.

What is the best way for the community to be in touch and follow the work you do at Paysail?

My email is always open! Please feel free to reach to learn more about Paysail or just to chat! I always love talking about anything crypto as well.

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