How Rain Turned Stablecoins Into Real-World Spend with Farooq Malik

We trace Rain’s path from a small fundraising tool to global spend infrastructure, built through a crypto winter by shipping fast, staying lean, and solving real customer pains. Farooq Malik, CEO and Founder of Rain,  shares lessons on timing, moats, and why the best financial technology disappears into the background.

• origin of Rain from a side project into spend rails
• first proof of concept and early customers’ pains
• surviving Terra and FTX with lean execution
• building a technology moat over vendor advantages
• simple mission framed without crypto jargon
• vision for invisible financial infrastructure
• founder advice on timing, team, and patience
• immigrant lens on identity and building a tribe
• stablecoins enabling access, speed, and new models
• global footprint across the US, LatAm, Caribbean, Asia, Africa
• rapid-fire favorites and closing links

Contact Bam Azizi: @bamazizimesh 
Contact Farooq Malik: @rooqster

Transcript

Bam Azizi 0:13

All right. Hi everyone. This is the first episode of CEO Beat with Bam Azizi . I have uh the legendary Farooq Malik on the call with me and we'll love to uh dig deeper. Farooq, welcome to the show.

Farooq 0:28

Thank you for having me. Great to be here, Bam.

Farooq’s Early Life And Roots

Bam Azizi 0:30

Yeah. First of all, congratulations on the massive, massive fundraise. And we'll get into that. But I will as well. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. And I know that you're just getting it started. There's a lot to talk about about Iran and the future of economy and your role that you guys are playing in it. But if you don't mind, let's take a step back. Tell me where you're born, your life story, whatever you are feeling comfortable to share.

Farooq 1:02

Yeah, yeah. I was born in Pakistan, um, moved to the US when I was five years old. Uh, grew up in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. And uh yeah, I've kind of done a lot of different things and and you know, traveled a bunch. And here we are. Uh yeah, I'm here at the Rain office in in New York City.

Why Rain Began And First Ventures

Bam Azizi 1:20

That's awesome. And and what's um why you started Rain? Um took us through the journey of like being an entrepreneur. Is this your first startup? Where were you working before before Rain?

From Side Project To Stablecoins

Farooq 1:34

Yeah, no, um, so I've been you know an entrepreneurial person for first in time. I mean, I I probably started my first business when I was uh like 14 or 15 years old uh making websites. And uh yeah, I've always been interested in uh you know entrepreneurship and trying to make things that I think should exist in the world. And uh I uh, you know, the Rain journey started um a few years ago. Uh I was in the process of wrapping up my last company, uh, was which was in the commercial real estate data space. And I met my co-founder now, Charles, uh, during the on deck founder fellowship. And we mostly connected about wanting to solve problems and building like side projects together and you know, micro-SaaS businesses. And um that really resonated with me just mostly because I was a little bit burned out from uh my last company and things didn't go well. We were in the commercial real estate space when the pandemic happened, and uh that was just a bad space to be in. Yeah, as yeah, you know, that timing. It was a it was a it was a look, it was good lessons to learn that uh sometimes you know you have to be cognizant of timing before um, you know, and to to really accelerate things, you have to really wait for the right time and the right opportunity. And um, when I met Charles, we decided to just start working together on on sort of low stakes uh things that we were interested in. And um we started with a side project called signandwire.com. And that was a fundraising automation tool. But now, you know, there's a lot of embedded safe note generators and you know money movement tools that exist. But this was 2021, and we were, I think, one of the, I mean, if not the first, one of the first uh for like embedded uh fundraising. And that's where we just you know shipped a product, and our goal was that you know we want to show people that we're able to ship things that people will use. And that that was it was it was as simple as that. And uh, and then one thing led to another, and we started chatting to customers that were using it, learning more about stable coins, adding support for stable coins, and then um yeah, just discovered that this industry was evolving very rapidly, and there was a lot of um idiosyncrasies about it because people were not able to use the tokens that they had and they were raising money in stable coins. So people thought about it as hey, this is real money, but they couldn't use it for anything. And so that's when we realized, hey, you know, maybe there should be a way for people to use this stuff.

Bam Azizi 4:08

Yeah. And what when what year was that that you started like talking about stable coin? Was it 2022?

First POC And The Chicken Tenders Test

Farooq 4:15

2021, 2021, 2021. Yeah. So that was um we started Rain. Um we started the company, the side project in May of 2021, and then uh we built the POC for Rain and uh for the you know hard connectivity to stable coin infrastructure um in October, early November 2021. Uh we did our first transaction on our POC, I think the day after Thanksgiving, and uh we we bought some chicken tenders. And uh yeah, and it was just it was very, it was very early, very hacky. We just you know trying to figure things out.

Bam Azizi 4:52

Nice. And then 2022 was an ugly year for crypto, for like anything. And FTX happened, everything was down, the entire market was down. Did that impact you in any ways or any sort from fundraising perspective, from customer perspective? How did you not give up?

Lean Team, Customer Pain, Product Fit

Farooq 5:11

Yeah, yeah, it was an interesting time, right, for us and for you know a lot of founders and I mean companies out there. And um we raised our seed round in uh January 2022. And you know, several months later, we kind of felt like we just had stuck in under the uh as the window was closing. Um and then later that year, I guess in that spring, there was the um the Terra Luna uh collapse, right? Which was a big stable coin. Yeah, yeah, it was a big stable coin that evaporated um over a short period of time. And then um we we had shipped our product, we had early customers, and we were thinking, oh, you know, in like in the previous paradigm, right, like 2021, 2020, those types of things would have been milestones to be able to raise the next round and do the next thing. And uh we were thinking, we were toying with the idea, oh, is it is uh should we do that now? And uh we were realizing that the world was changing, right? And uh that things were getting harder and like the narrative uh shift was taking place in the space where um, and you know, for a lot of good reasons, right? There was a lot of people that were extracting value from the community, um, really not spending time on figuring out like, you know, how does this industry become um the next phase of sort of global adoption? Uh and yeah, it was a very difficult kind of time. And you know, we were lucky that we were just getting started. Uh, we are pretty uh conservative around like how to how many people to hire, how many people does it take to do things. And so we were hyper focused on being lean and shipping as much as we could with a small team. And I think focusing on that and really spending a lot of time with our customers to learn more about their individual problems and starting to figure out, hey, these are the broader trends that our customers have. And then focusing on solving those things that we heard people complaining about over and over again really helped us narrow our focus and continue growing at a time of you know broader market uncertainty and regular uncertainty. And we you know just hunkered down and focused on what was ahead of us, and and luckily we got to the other side.

Bam Azizi 7:29

That's awesome. How did you land your first customer? Is there any anything funny about it or anything that that you want to highlight about it, or any of your customers that you wouldn't even imagine that closing this like customer, but you did it and you're proud of it. Like what were you can share?

Early Customers And Unexpected Logos

Farooq 7:47

Yeah, I mean, we we early customers for Rain were very interesting because some of them knew us from the sign and wire product, where they had used our product to raise stable coins for their company on like a safe note, right? And they came to us and said, Hey, I have these tokens, and how do I pay for a laptop or AWS or whatever it was? And when we started building the first POC, we went back to some of these guys and said, Hey, you know, is how real is this problem? And do you know other people that also have this problem that would validate that this is something that is annoying or difficult to do? And um we got connected to so many people that had this problem. Like we got connected to the mid-journey team, and we had no idea that the mid-journey team was using some amount of stable coins for their corporate activities. Um, but it was a lot of these larger teams that had, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars uh because they'd done an ICO round or whatever it was, and very limited capabilities on utilizing it. And we met a founder that was going through an audit because uh they were using their own like personal like exchange account to move money out and then pay their bills. And they got audited by the by the IRS because they were like, hey, you're moving all this money out. And he was like, This is not even these like reimbursements for payments I'm making. Um and we just learned a lot of these like pain points that existed in this industry because it was just A, so early, but also all of the activity had been spent on all the attention had been on bringing consumers in without any attention on like what happens when you actually succeed at that and you're making money now, and you have customers that are growing, and uh you know your revenue is growing, and now you need to actually pay for airplane tickets or you know, conferences.

Building A Durable Technology Moat

Bam Azizi 9:49

That's right. And I I remember uh old days in like all we days of 2022. I remember uh I met Zach, founder of Bridge, for the first time, and then we were like laughing about like you're the only the only two crazy people building in crypto in 2022. You're not alone, but I didn't know you back then. But I remember like we couldn't even use the word crypto on our website. We had to word like digital assets because we you were getting debanked if you used too much of crypto or you couldn't close some customers because they were risk averse. Uh I in my wildest dream, I couldn't imagine two years after that, or three years after that, we'll have Genius Act, we'll have banks issuing their own stable coin. Um so what like I know that like those days are the best day to build because like you like you you're alone or you there's just a few people are building, and one thing changes and and then there is a new new new wave, you can you're position yourself to write that wave uh and then become the the future of the basically future of this economy or the builder of this economy. So um for for Rain, how does all these movement? I know that it was a tailwind, but what was what was the most important factor for you guys for you to become this successful and raise it like almost two billion dollar valuation?

Explaining Rain Without Saying Crypto

Vision: Invisible Infrastructure Wins

Farooq 11:19

Yeah, look, I would love to pretend that um we were right and we knew it was gonna take this long and all this stuff, right? But uh ultimately uh we I mean if you really break it down, we were wrong about the timing of when to start. Right. I think the the positive side of that was that because we started when we did, and we our viewpoint was is that if this is going to be something, it's going to require uh all of that upgrade of financial infrastructure to make this a big thing. And so we spent a lot of our time solving the difficult problems and working on the hard things. And that's what ended up letting us have the opportunity to you know come out the other side with a technology moat around a lot of what we do. And that element of it has been, you know, something that we just continued building and iterating. And you know, the the magic of technology is that if you can use it for one thing, uh you can generally use it for more things because there's a lot of people that you know have the same characteristics. And one of the things that I think has made us successful is that hyper focus on our customers and hyper-focus on making sure that the technology works. Like we didn't spend a whole lot of time, you know, building a thin veneer on top of existing infrastructure, largely because our viewpoint was is if this is a large enough opportunity to go after, and the opportunity is meaningful enough, the technology is going to be the reason that we win and differentiate. If we go after something because we have a relationship with a financial services company or we have a relationship with an intermediary that gives us access to preferred pricing or whatever it is, that's not really a durable moat as you grow. Because as the market grows, as the appetite of institutional players grows, the pricing power that you have from like special arrangements diminishes, and you end up in a position where the only way that you were competing before is because you just had a proprietary stack and your vendors and partners also want to make more money, so they're gonna start selling that to others.

Bam Azizi 13:34

That's correct. Um, if you want to explain Rain to a five-year-old without using the word crypto in a stable coin, how would you explain it?

Farooq 13:44

I just would I try to explain to people that what Rain is, is a company that helps people spend money. Right. Um that's all we do. I mean, we've always thought about stable coins or CBDCs or tokens or whatever it is, is as just money. Like if people want it to be money or use it like money, it really is that, right? And uh what the primary use of money is, is to spend it. Uh that is the functional primary use of all money in the world, uh, even though a lot of people you know save it, but ultimately somebody spends it. And so like that's the the native state of money is it in in flight, right? It's in in being spent. And so I mean, for us, like we're we're uh we're a company that facilitates uh the commerce of the world.

Bam Azizi 14:34

That's awesome. Yeah, love it. Um yeah, the way to basically you're helping people to spend any money anywhere, anytime. Um that's great. And what's what's what's um your vision for the company?

Advice To Founders: Team And Timing

Farooq 14:47

Like if Rain is successful, how the war look like I think if Rain is successful, uh the average person won't really know that things have just gotten better. Like the every experience they have with a financial services product will just be better and they'll feel like it's better, but they won't quite know why or how it got better is kind of our approach. We just think that the best infrastructure solutions are invisible. And you can just upgrade the back-end infrastructure of financial services that drives massive cost savings to all of the participants in the economy without necessarily having to put yourself at the forefront and say, hey, we're doing this, we're doing this for you. Uh, you essentially unlock the opportunities for people to compete in a differentiated way with each other. And then ultimately the best products will win because the best products are the ones that customers like the most and the ones that have the low friction and the lowest cost of servicing, right? I mean, we we're seeing this with companies like New Bank. The cost of servicing an average customer annually for NewBank is a fraction of what it is for a lot of legacy financial players. And that's been a big secret to their success, right? If you can reduce the cost or the payback period on a customer by massive efficiency gains, the addressable universe of who you can target increases, right? And the people that you can target profitably increases, and that increases the addressable universe for your business opportunity.

Bam Azizi 16:20

So you're building an infrastructure that basically helping people to compete, and then at the end of the day, competition is good for consumers and end users because they get the best service with a cheaper or cheapest price.

Farooq 16:35

Yeah, and I think it's better for everybody, I mean, even the competitors, because you learn about you you have the opportunity to innovate, right? And innovation can help anybody, right? Innovation is great to have, and the first person to do something is uh usually inspiring others to do things if it's a good idea.

Immigrant Lessons: Identity And Tribe

Bam Azizi 16:55

Yeah. Um that that totally makes sense. And I want to go a little bit um tangential outside of the crypto industry. I want to kind of, because a lot of founders or first-time founders are going to watch this. I want to I want you to tell them like anything that you learn, any scores that you have in your back, anything, any advice that you will have for them. Uh if if someone is watching this and wants to start a company or they're already in the middle of like starting a company, what should they do to be Faro can raise a $2 billion valuation?

Farooq 17:29

Uh look, I I think the secret to that is make sure that you uh huh?

Bam Azizi 17:35

What's the silver bullet?

Farooq 17:37

Yeah, the silver bullet. Look, I ultimately like the key to success really is that you need to build a team that can take it the whole way, right? Like we're here because we have amazing people that work here. Uh we have you know amazing people on the team that have you know sacrificed their nights and weekends to make our customers feel special and build the products and services that our end users use today. And that's really you know been our secret. And the other side of it has been that you know, we've been very patient with the opportunity, right? I think there's I mean, when you're building especially a venture-backed business, there can be a lot of pressure to try to grow at all costs. But you really need to be expending the val like the energy when it's the right time to be expending the energy, right? Because if you're spending the energy at a time where the world is working against you, you're going to burn out and you're going to have a lot of challenges. But if you're expending the energy when the world is working for you, then you're going to go three times further with the same level of effort. And so a lot of times you have to conserve until you have the opportunity to expand.

Stablecoins As Global Access And Speed

Bam Azizi 18:47

Yeah. So basically you want people to not think about like they can get it right right away. So they need to be strategic. It's a it's a marathon, it's not a sprint, right? So you need to save your energy and you need to be persistent. And then uh sometimes you get it wrong the first 10 times. Uh, and then the 11th time it's it's going to be success. Uh so um my my personal advice is don't take things too personal. Like you get you hear a lot of notes from investors, from customers, from partners, from employees that you want to hire them initially. But I think um if you are persistent enough, you will you will crack through it and then uh you will be able to get on the other side of it successfully.

Farooq 19:32

Absolutely. And that's a that's a good lesson that you're teaching me, Bam.

Bam Azizi 19:37

No, I'm I'm following your footstep. Um another uh let's let's go back um to your background. Uh like like myself, you're an immigrant. Uh was there anything that as an immigrant help you to become a successful founder and entrepreneur?

Where Rain Operates And Scales

Farooq 19:55

I think part of being an immigrant really is about, you know, it's like a voyage of discovery, right? Like you are learning things, but you're also caught between two different cultures, right? Like there's the culture of the country that you're in that is now your home and is going to be your home, and it's going to be the home of your family and your kids and all that stuff. And then you have um elements of a culture that your parents are, you know, trying to help, you know, keep alive and instill in you. And part of that, like when you translate it to being a founder or an entrepreneur, is that you have to take the things that are good about both sides and then work forward with that. And then there's elements of that, those both cultures that potentially are bad. And you probably don't want to spend any time on that. And that's kind of like being a founder that has limited resources. You have to take product ideas that are good and then merge them with other ideas that are also good to then do the things that you have with limited resources. And the other, I mean, I think the other thing that I learned from, you know, just you know, navigating being a child in the US as an immigrant is that you really need to spend a lot of time figuring out who you are and your identity, right? Because it a lot of people probably don't spend that time kind of figuring out who they are and who they want to be, but it's really important to spend that time so that you can chart your own path and be thoughtful about that as you grow. And that's also the same journey of building a company or recruiting people. You have to build a tribe. And one of the magical things about immigrants or even people that move within a country, right? Like they go from a place where they grew up to a place where they didn't grow up. It's about building your tribe. You have to continue building your tribe over and over again. And it's not an ethnic thing, it's not a cultural thing, it's just a personality thing. And so you have to really figure out who you are so then you can start attracting the people that you want to surround yourself with. And I mean, most people spend, you know, at least a third of their lives, if not more, uh, at work. And so it's really important. To make sure that you work with the people that you admire that you want to have in your tribe.

Rapid Fire: Life And Favorites

Bam Azizi 22:07

Basically, as an immigrant, you have your lucky and privileged to have access to two sources of things that you can take the best of the best and best of both worlds, and then build build your identity and also your career on top of it. That's beautiful. One other thing that as could be related to basically the immigration is like, from my perspective, stablecoin is kind of leveling the field and giving access to anyone who has access to the internet. Many people from like the country I'm coming from, Iran, they don't have access to free financial world. And a stablecoin or blockchain for the first time in a century opens the door for a lot of these opportunities or a lot of these people to have access to the financial world. How do you think about the mission of a stable coin as a global phenomenon? And uh what are the areas and geolocations that you were seeing most activities on Ray?

Farooq 23:11

Yeah, I think look, stable coins are a really interesting tool for a variety of things, right? Like obviously financial access is one of them. Um speed of commerce is another one. The things that are really exciting to me about it is that because it's programmatic, because it's effectively internet money, if you think about all the things that we can do with the internet today that we couldn't do with the internet before, like even 10 years ago or 15 years ago, um that's the promise of the internet. Like the internet has created um billionaires in industries that didn't exist 15 years ago. Right. So if you think about it from that perspective, that's the promise of what stable coins can do. It's like with programmatic money, people are going to build solutions to problems that we don't know can be solved with programmatic money. Right. And the exciting part about being here today and being able to work with the, you know, the number of clients that we do that are working on so many interesting things on like agentic payments or cross-border payments or domestic payroll or payday, um, like you know, like streaming payroll in the domestic market, or lots of different cool things that our customers are building and doing. Um we have like a front row seat to some of this innovation that is going to come as like an inevitable outcome of this like new technology media, right? And aside from like the financial literacy, the financial freedom or the financial flexibility that stable coins give today, which is, I think, something that lots of people have talked about. The exciting part is like, hey, what's like the what's like the podcast equivalent of tokenized money movement? Right. Like, what is like a business that didn't exist before that you can not only build, but also become very successful at? And lots of people then can do and create economic outcomes that we haven't thought about yet, right? That's the that's the exciting stuff that I think about.

Bam Azizi 25:16

Yeah, that's that's the ward that the stablecoin is going to unlock for sure. Um what are the locations like are you do you see most of your activities in the US or like you see offshore like or other places in the world too on the on Rain side?

Farooq 25:30

Yeah, well, I mean we have um a lot of activity here in the domestic market. We also you know are active in in South America, I mean Caribbean, um, Central America, uh parts of Asia and Africa, where you know essentially one of the things that we focus on as a company, right, is we are a single integration partner for global businesses. So if you're a platform and you're servicing a global customer base, you come to Rain because we give you the largest footprint within that customer base that you can give stable coin-powered products to. And the result of that is that we've get to work with large, reputable companies that have been around for a long time that are very successful and have a lot of customers in a lot of markets. And when we start working with them, we just overnight get access to people in a variety of different markets, which is really exciting.

Bam Azizi 26:26

That's awesome. Uh let's do some quick fun questions as well. Uh, what's your favorite sport?

Farooq 26:34

Uh you know, I I I really enjoy polo.

Bam Azizi 26:38

Okay.

Farooq 26:39

You play yourself too? Yeah, well, not not so much anymore, but I used to play uh pretty regularly.

Bam Azizi 26:48

That's great. And favorite food?

Farooq 26:51

Oh, I I'm uh I'm a sucker for Pakistani food. I mean, I love uh the there's the dish called Nahari, and it's one of my favorite things.

Bam Azizi 26:58

Nice. That's great. So we should we should do that when I'm in New York.

Farooq 27:02

Is there any better there's a there's a better place in San Francisco, so we'll go there.

Bam Azizi 27:07

Yeah, sounds good. What's what's the name of the place?

Farooq 27:12

Which is in um you know in Palo Alto, I think.

Bam Azizi 27:16

That's awesome. Uh and what's your favorite tech company?

Farooq 27:21

Uh Mesh.

Bam Azizi 27:24

Outside of crypto.

Farooq 27:27

Uh look, I think um a lot of companies are doing really amazing things, right? Um one of my favorite companies is um, you know, uh Microsoft. I think that's a company that has built so many things that I've used as like a young kid and continue using today. Uh I know that they get a bad rap sometimes about like, you know, their office suite or things like that. But a lot of the products that they've built that have been around for a long time have reached that kind of perfect state where you really don't need to do much to it anymore because it just does the thing. And I think that that level of craftsmanship and software doesn't exist as it used to, right? Where you can continue using something without patching it or open up a computer from seven years ago, 10 years ago, open up Word and start using it and it works, right? I think that that type of like craftsmanship is actually something that we should celebrate. And I I think I really appreciate it. Awesome.

Bam Azizi 28:31

Yeah, no, I'm I'm a big fan of Microsoft as well. Uh Farooq, I really appreciate uh you joining us for the first episode of CEO Beat. Uh I really enjoyed the chat. Uh, where people can find you.

Farooq 28:44

Uh thank you, Bam. Appreciate it. Yeah, people can find me on uh Twitter. I'm at rooqster or uh you know at Rain.xyz.

Bam Azizi 28:52

Okay, awesome. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Have a good day.

Farooq 28:56

Thanks, Bam. Cheers.