Joshua Tate isn’t one to romanticize entrepreneurship. For the ForumPay co-founder and CEO, building a company was never about startup mythology or chasing the glossy image that often surrounds Silicon Valley success stories. If anything, Tate believes most people misunderstand what building a company actually feels like once you’re inside it. “Any entrepreneur basically comes from a position where they had a fully stable career and realized they wanted to do things differently”, he says.
Tate himself didn’t begin his career in technology or finance. After graduating from the University of Kansas School of Law in 2002, he spent several years practicing law, first as a law clerk and later as an attorney. It was a profession rooted in structure and precision: “What I liked about practicing law was problem solving,” Tate explains. “Someone comes to you with an issue and you’re trained in a certain way to help solve that issue within clearly defined systems.”
But in time, he found himself becoming less interested in resolving isolated issues and more interested in understanding the systems that had created them in the first place. That change in perspective eventually pushed him toward entrepreneurship. In 2010, Tate launched his own real estate firm before transitioning into technology and digital payments in 2017, a move that would ultimately lead to the founding of ForumPay.
“When I moved into entrepreneurship, it became more macro,” he says. “I could see problems that existed on a much larger scale for lots of people, and I felt I had a particular skill set that could help change those systems for the better.” This move changed the nature of Tate’s work. In his view, entrepreneurship is not simply about building products or scaling businesses, rather, it involves deciding that certain systems are flawed and having the conviction to rebuild them into something better.
What remains largely unappreciated at the start of that journey is the sheer uncertainty that typically accompanies such a pivot. “One of the funny realities of being a founder,” Tate says, “is that if you truly understood all the challenges and heartache it was going to take to get there, most people probably wouldn’t do it.”
Part of what allows entrepreneurs to move forward is precisely that lack of complete visibility. Founders operate largely on conviction long before they see a clear path. Decisions are made with incomplete information, and progress tends to arrive through a process of constant recalibration. And, mistakes are inevitable in that process. The difference, he believes, lies in how founders respond. “You’re always going to make mistakes,” he says. “It’s only natural. The important thing is recognizing them, owning them and figuring out how not to repeat them.”
That mindset becomes increasingly important as companies begin to grow. In the earliest stages of a business, founders are involved in nearly everything. They move constantly between roles, often acting as strategist, salesperson, operator and problem solver simultaneously. Those early years shape the mentality many carry into leadership later on.
That initial level of involvement creates a necessary intensity, but it can also create its own set of limitations. The very instincts that help founders build a company from the ground up can eventually become obstacles as the business begins to scale. Ultimately, growth requires founders to stop measuring success by the breadth of their personal control.
“The real transition is finding people who can do things exceptionally better than you ever could.” For many entrepreneurs, that can be an uncomfortable realization. It requires letting go of control and building teams capable of operating independently. Tate credits much of his perspective on leadership to mentors who have emphasized exactly that principle. “If I’m really good at one thing,” he recalls from a conversation with longtime mentor William Erby, “it’s finding people who can do things far better than I ever could have.”
It is an idea that now informs how he approaches leadership at ForumPay; long-term success depends on creating systems and teams capable of evolving beyond the founder themselves. The challenge today is learning how to balance long-term vision with the discipline required to execute consistently as the company scales. “My mentor always used to say, ‘Look afar to see the end from the beginning,’” he explains. “But at the same time, you have to operate with incredible discipline in the execution along the way.”
This philosophy has helped shape ForumPay's growth within an industry that is itself in a state of constant, rapid evolution. While the digital asset space has navigated years of volatility, skepticism, and structural uncertainty, Tate maintains that founders in emerging sectors cannot wait for the fog to lift before they begin the work of building.
"There is no industry where the future is completely certain," he observes. "What matters is believing that what you’re building genuinely improves systems and continuing to push forward with that vision." Under Tate’s direction, ForumPay has anchored itself to the conviction that digital assets and traditional finance are destined for deeper interconnection. In his view, the infrastructure capable of bridging these two worlds will serve as a critical catalyst as global adoption continues to advance.
For Tate, however, the deeper lesson behind entrepreneurship has little to do with startup culture, funding rounds or public perception. Building a company ultimately forces people to become comfortable operating without certainty while continuing to move forward anyway.
Eventually, successful founders stop attempting to eliminate uncertainty entirely and instead master the art of navigating it. The work becomes less about controlling every individual outcome and more about building something resilient enough to evolve on its own over time. It is rarely the version of entrepreneurship visible to the outside world. But for Tate, that very uncertainty is precisely where the substantive work of building something meaningful truly begins.
The cultural shorthand for entrepreneurship is a story of clean lines and grand successes. In the popular imagination, founders are often cast as visionaries of the digital age trailing multibillion-dollar valuations, while consumers are conditioned to look at the architecture of the finished product rather than the structural failures that almost brought it crashing down during construction.
Building a company is an act of exposure; a state of permanent precarity. Risk is not a hurdle to be cleared but the very atmosphere founders breathe. Stripped of its Silicon Valley gloss, being a founder is an exercise in surrendering stability. It’s a choice to trade a predictable career path for a high-stakes gamble on a very specific vision, with no assurance that the market, or culture, will offer a return on your investment.
Ultimately, the distinction is intent. Founders are not just optimizing systems or scaling operations; they are making a conviction-driven bet that the world would be a better place if certain aspects worked differently.
Stepping into entrepreneurship often means asking, is the goal solving a problem, or changing the system that creates it? My early career in law involved solving specific problems within an established structure, and operating inside the system, instead of against it. A client presented a case and my role was to apply a structured, precise skill set to resolve it. It was a framework with boundaries.
The limitation is that those boundaries rarely get questioned. The move toward entrepreneurship came from recognizing that big-issue problems weren’t isolated, they were systemic. Addressing one-off issues doesn’t create real change at scale. Addressing one-off issues doesn’t change much at scale. The real leverage comes from identifying patterns that affect large groups of people and figuring out how to approach them differently.
It’s more than a philosophical pivot; it completely changes the nature of the work. You’re no longer solving problems within a system. You’re questioning whether the system works at all, and if not, what it should look like instead.
One of the less discussed advantages founders have at the beginning is that they don’t fully understand what they’re getting themselves into. Not yet knowing what the next years or decades will involve, allows them to stay focused on their vision. I’m sure that if all of the setbacks and complications were clear from day one, most entrepreneurs probably wouldn’t move forward.
But founders operate on conviction. The journey reveals itself incrementally and progress is rarely linear, rather, it’s a craft of constant recalibration. Every decision is based on incomplete information, and inevitably, some of those choices will prove flawed. Far from proving failure, this fallibility is a natural and necessary part of the process. Eventually, a definitive pattern emerges. Founders who manage to sustain progress are not those who avoid error, which is impossible, but those who confront them head on in a bid to reach their end goal.
In the early stages of a startup, founders take on the role of designer, builder, and office manager, often all in one morning. It is this early involvement in the day-to-day details of the business that shapes how they lead the company later on. Companies led directly by their founders often have a unique energy. Because they have done every task themselves, founders know exactly how things should be done, which often means they have very little patience for poor performance.
But doing everything themselves eventually becomes a problem, and as the business expands, founders must change their mindset. The focus changes from doing the work to finding the right people, and oftentimes, hiring experts who can do the job better than they did. This requires letting go of control, setting aside one's ego, and building a culture where others can work independently. It’s the most critical point in a company's growth.
The founders who succeed in this transition are those who realize that the true success of an idea is its ability to thrive, even when they aren't there.
It’s easy to overlook infrastructure companies. The often unsung, often invisible systems beneath the flashy consumer apps and brands that capture all the attention. Few people consider the immense coordination required to move information, value, or assets from point A to point B. That tends to change once an industry starts evolving faster than the infrastructure built to support it. One thing I’ve learned through building ForumPay is that infrastructure companies often end up becoming more relevant than anyone originally expected, including the founders themselves. What starts as a solution to one problem can eventually find itself at the heart of a much broader structural transformation that reshapes an entire industry. You can see that happening now across artificial intelligence, cloud computing, semiconductors, payments, and digital finance. Regarding the latter, for example, I believe the future will be more focused on allowing different forms of value to move more fluidly across the same infrastructure, thereby connecting diverse financial systems in one network.
But as infrastructure companies go, they are often underestimated precisely because this expansion is gradual, and their potential is revealed over time. By that point, the infrastructure is, in many ways, setting a path for where the industry goes next.
Infrastructure has a habit of outgrowing its original purpose. What begins as a tool for one market often becomes the building blocks for something much larger once technology and user behavior catch up to it. Take Nvidia, for example. Nvidia started out as a company associated primarily with graphics processing and gaming hardware in the early 1990s.
Few would have predicted that the same chip architecture would mark a turning point in the history of computing, eventually becoming the basis for artificial intelligence, cloud computing and large-scale data processing. The infrastructure became drastically more valuable as different industries began depending on it in entirely new ways. In the words of Jensen Huang, “NVIDIA is no longer just a tech company. We are an essential infrastructure company.”
I see similar things happening with ForumPay. When we first launched, the focus was largely centered around crypto payments and connecting digital assets to existing payment systems. But I’m realizing that it is likely to become more about full interoperability between different forms of value.
Years ago, the idea that someone could use Bitcoin, stablecoins, digital dollars, or tokenized equities through connected transactional infrastructure was completely abstract. But it’s starting to look increasingly inevitable. Sometimes, you start solving one problem only to realize you’re building the bedrock for something else.
Financial systems have been layered together over decades in the same way as old cities: new roads built over older roads, temporary fixes becoming permanent, complexity accumulating faster than anyone intended. Most consumers never see that complexity because the front-end is designed to feel simple.
But behind even a standard credit card transaction sits an enormous amount of coordination between issuers, acquirers, processors, settlement networks, fraud systems, banks, and various third parties. Depending on how you measure it, there can be six to nine participants involved simply to get a merchant paid. It becomes stacks on stacks on stacks of infrastructure layered on top of earlier infrastructure.
The challenge is that these systems were built for a very different pace of commerce. Digital behavior is accelerating, and the infrastructure it’s built on is beginning to show its age. Companies operating in this space either continue evolving or eventually lose relevance to faster technology and more adaptive competitors.
That’s one of the reasons I became increasingly interested in infrastructure problems at the macro level. You start seeing how inefficiencies can be embedded across entire networks, not isolated within one product or company. Solving those kinds of problems requires rebuilding the underlying architecture itself.
Building infrastructure companies requires a different mindset from businesses driven by short-term visibility or consumer hype. Most infrastructure companies spend years operating in the shadows before the market fully understands their importance.
During that time, founders are often forced to develop an unusually deep operational understanding of the business because, in the early stages, they end up doing almost every job themselves. That becomes part of the culture of infrastructure companies. You understand the dependencies, the points of failure, the operational friction, and the consequences when systems break because you’ve spent time inside every layer of the process while building it.
At the same time, infrastructure forces a certain amount of humility onto founders whether they like it or not. The systems become too complex to scale without exceptional people around you, often people capable of doing certain parts of the business far better than you ever could. It also forces you to become comfortable with uncertainty.
There is no industry where the future is certain, particularly in emerging areas like digital assets and Fintech. Most of the time, you’re building long before markets fully understand why it matters. Mistakes are unavoidable in that environment. But the important thing is recognizing them early, adapting, and continuing without letting ego interfere with the process.
For much of its turbulent history, the crypto sector has been defined by uncertainty. Markets are prone to violent swings, regulation shifts with the whims of each political cycle, and projects that appear untouchable can disappear within a matter of months. It often seems as if instability were baked into its design. After years of developing payment infrastructure within the sector, it has become clear that crypto did not introduce uncertainty, so much as expose that already endemic to modern industries. The difference is that older, more established systems have simply had more time to normalize their structural inefficiencies and fragilities. There is no industry where the future is certain. There never has been. Technologies progress unevenly, consumer behavior changes faster than institutions expect, and systems that once appeared foundational can dissolve into irrelevance with startling speed.
Innovation is seldom the product of established consensus. It is forged in those volatile in-between moments when the path forward feels highly uncertain.
There is a tendency to confuse familiarity with durability. Systems that acquire legacy status often escape scrutiny, maintaining that status even as the underlying infrastructure grows increasingly cumbersome and convoluted. The financial sector has long profited from this perceived stability, projecting an aura of permanence simply because generations have adapted to navigating its friction.
The closer one gets to how money actually moves, however, the harder it becomes to ignore how much complexity has simply been absorbed into the system over time. A standard card transaction can involve a surprising number of intermediaries operating across layered settlement networks, each introducing additional cost, delay, and dependency into what consumers experience as a single moment. Emerging industries tend to attract scrutiny because their instability remains visible.
For modern industries, evolution is rarely linear. Progress is typically uneven, fractured by market volatility, political shifts, and periods where confidence seems to dissolve entirely. Over the last decade, the crypto sector has navigated these kinds of disruptions in a starkly public manner. In such volatile environments, the easiest decision is usually to wait: wait for new regulatory frameworks, institutional validation, or a border acceptance.
But infrastructure is rarely built after consensus arrives. More often, it is built during periods when conviction matters more than certainty. That became especially evident during the earlier years of ForumPay, when confidence in the sector came and went from one cycle to the next. Yet the underlying problems remained unchanged. Payment systems were still fragmented, settlement remained unnecessarily slow, and moving value across systems continued to involve layers of friction that made little sense in an increasingly digital economy.
That kind of environment forces companies to distinguish very quickly between conviction and recklessness. I believe there is an important distinction between the two. Conviction is grounded in understanding a problem deeply enough to continue building through volatility. Recklessness, by contrast, is simply ignoring reality.
Intellectual rigidity can be a liability in fast-moving industries. Assumptions that appear obvious one year can become irrelevant the next, particularly in sectors where both the underlying technology and its regulatory infrastructure are progressing unevenly. Adaptability is less about reacting and more about remaining intellectually open long after success begins reinforcing your existing worldview.
That is often challenging for founders. Companies tend to inherit the psychology of the people who build them, and there is always a temptation to overidentify with the decisions that worked previously. But the longer I’ve spent in this line of work, the more I’ve come to believe that good leadership depends heavily on surrounding yourself with exceptionally talented people and listening carefully to them.
Infrastructure businesses, by their very nature, tend to evolve in ways their founders do not initially anticipate. Markets have a way of uncovering applications for systems that were never fully obvious at the outset. In many cases, the industry itself gradually reveals where the infrastructure becomes most useful over time.
Industries mature for a far less dramatic reason than most people assume: the infrastructure improves. Systems become more interoperable, transactions become more reliable, and the underlying mechanics become less dependent on friction, delay, and unnecessary intermediaries. In time, we build trust, not through rhetoric, but through consistency.
That is ultimately what infrastructure companies contribute during uncertain periods. Not certainty in the abstract, but systems durable enough to function while the broader market is still deciding what the future should look like.
There is a tendency, particularly in modern business culture, to separate vision from execution, as though one belongs to the realm of ideas and the other to operations. But the longer you spend building companies, especially in industries defined by uncertainty and rapid technological change, the more artificial that distinction begins to feel. The founders who endure are rarely the ones with the grandest ambitions alone, nor are they simply the most operationally efficient. More often, they are the people capable of holding two competing realities at the same time: the necessity of thinking years ahead while remaining disciplined enough to execute relentlessly in the present. Vision without execution quickly becomes abstraction. Execution without vision eventually loses direction.
One piece of advice that has stayed with me throughout my career came from my longtime mentor, William “Bill” Erby, who once said: “Look afar to see the end from the beginning.” As my career has progressed, the more I’ve come to understand that leadership is ultimately the discipline of balancing those two responsibilities at once: keeping your eyes fixed on the horizon while remaining intensely focused on the execution required to reach it.
One of the more difficult realities of building companies in emerging industries is that conviction almost always has to arrive before certainty does. Markets rarely announce where they are headed in advance, and technological shifts (at least the meaningful ones) tend to appear speculative or even unserious until they become unavoidable. That has been especially true within digital assets and payments infrastructure, where much of the conversation over the past decade has oscillated between enthusiasm and skepticism, often depending less on the underlying technology itself than on the broader economic or political climate of the time.
I believe there is no industry where the future is certain. The question is not whether ambiguity exists (it always does) but whether you possess enough conviction in the problem you are solving to continue building while the rest of the market is still deciding what it believes. For us at ForumPay, that meant believing early that payments infrastructure would inevitably move toward more open, digital, and interoperable systems, even during periods when much of the industry itself remained fragmented or uncertain.
Vision, by itself, has never been enough. One of the easier mistakes leaders can make is confusing ambition with progress, particularly in industries where ideas tend to attract more attention than infrastructure. The reality is that enduring companies are usually built through operational discipline sustained over long periods of time. In payments infrastructure, much of that work is neither visible nor especially glamorous. It involves security, compliance, partnerships, scalability, and thousands of smaller decisions that determine whether a system can function reliably at scale.
That is why execution matters as much as vision itself. You have to operate with discipline and consistency along the way, because even the strongest long-term strategy means very little without the ability to repeatedly execute against it. At the same time, execution cannot become static. Fundamentals have to be sound first, but companies that fail to continue evolving eventually get lapped.
One of the more overlooked realities of leadership is that no company scales through the vision of a single individual alone. Founders may establish direction early, but enduring organizations are built by teams capable of evolving alongside the industries they operate within.
That becomes especially important in fast-moving sectors, where technologies and markets rarely remain static for very long. Companies that survive are not necessarily the ones that avoid mistakes altogether, but the ones capable of adapting quickly enough to learn from them before the market moves on.
For me, much of that comes down to surrounding yourself with exceptionally talented people and being willing to listen to them. Strong founders understand that growth eventually requires finding people who can do things exceptionally better than you can. At a certain point, adaptability stops being a competitive advantage and simply becomes a condition for survival.
