Perka and similar alternative payments/loyalty startups always bring up a feeling of complexity because this space can be extremely challenging to get right. Trying to think through some factors that are crucial
- Geography which immediately implies the need for a sales force that needs to engage merchants across many diverse cities and markets.
- Which immediately makes scaling a factor of complexity
- Assuming you have a driven & creative sales force and an awesome loyalty product that somehow gains traction with some critical number of merchants in various industries, to make money you need to build into and integrate into the larger alternative payments ecosystem.
- Which means that at some point you have to deal with and integrate into financial institutions, merchant networks and the likes.
Towards dealing with and planning for this complexity, I would love to work for two types of companies in my future – alternative payment/loyalty companies and large scale computing companies. Both roles are towards preparing for complexity – one more engineering focused and the other more entrepreneurship focused. But both problems of architecture.