Tip of the Spear: Joseph Galante, Head of Revenue at Bridge

November 20, 2025

By The Artemis Fund
The Artemis Fund believes technology can create prosperity for all. With offices in New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Nevada, Artemis leads seed rounds for companies creating resilient families, individuals, and businesses across the US.
Tip of the Spear is an interview series highlighting The Artemis Fund’s expert network. In this edition, we sat down with Joseph Galante, Head of Revenue at Bridge.

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Q: You began your career as a reporter. What drew you into fintech, and how did that transition happen?
A: Great question. Honestly, I fell into fintech by accident. I always loved writing and was broadly interested in business, so I went into business journalism. I started at Bloomberg in New York covering financial markets, then moved to San Francisco when they asked me to.
When I first moved, I worked the graveyard shift, coming in as everyone else was leaving and monitoring the wires overnight. This was in 2008, during the financial crisis, so what’s normally a quiet period became incredibly active. I was essentially on the front line as news broke — the government forcing the sale of Bear Stearns, Bank of America buying Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers collapsing. Those announcements often came during my shift.
It was a crash course in being fast, accurate, and responsive under pressure. That served me well later when I started covering Silicon Valley. But after a while, I realized I was constantly meeting fascinating people doing fascinating things, and I wanted to do those things myself, not just write about them.
I decided to go to business school to make a career shift, and around that time I had a conversation with Keith Rabois, who I knew through my reporting. He’d just teamed up with Jack Dorsey to start this little company called Square.
Keith said, “We’re about a hundred people, we’re building this credit card dongle that plugs into your phone, and we need someone to help with our website copy. You’ll learn more here than in business school, and we’ll pay you.”
So that’s how it started. I joined Square writing marketing copy, eventually moved into business development, and later joined a small team focused on taking Square upmarket and selling to larger companies.
Q: When Square started expanding into enterprise with clients like Uniqlo and Burberry, what did that teach you about taking a product upmarket?
A: Square had this advantage of being the “hot company” at the time. There was huge demand — Starbucks even approached us about powering payments across all 7,000 of their stores when we were only two years old. So we were being pulled upmarket.
But we quickly learned that a product designed for small businesses doesn’t automatically scale to enterprise. For example, Square’s POS was built for a coffee shop. You enter a few menu items on an iPad and you’re good. Burberry, by contrast, had 300,000 SKUs. You can’t manually load that, and even if you could, the app couldn’t handle it.
The sales motion also changed. Enterprise customers expect solutions engineers to join sales calls, professional services teams to be onsite during integration, and formal service-level agreements with penalties if you don’t meet uptime commitments. None of that exists in SMB sales.
And finally, enterprise selling requires stakeholder alignment. There are multiple decision-makers who often don’t agree with each other. You have to learn to identify champions, manage internal politics, and de-risk deals. It’s a completely different operating model from selling to small businesses.
Q: How do you think about managing a revenue motion for an API-driven platform that serves a global customer base?
A: My mental model always starts with the customer: understanding their journey from first touchpoint to long-term success, and building the organization around that.
In Bridge’s early days, almost all our customers were crypto-native companies, builders who understood the blockchain and just needed a partner to move money in and out. We were selling directly to engineering founders, so what mattered was technical fluency and responsiveness, not a huge sales organization.
Then we evolved. In our second year, fintech companies — neobanks, payroll platforms, remittance providers — started coming onboard. These were larger, global, and regulated. They needed teams who understood compliance and risk, who could design solutions in partnership with them.
Since the Genius Act became law, we’re seeing yet another shift. Fortune 2000 companies are getting off the sidelines. These conversations are about treasury operations, branded stablecoins, and liquidity management. That means more executive-to-executive relationships, ROI-based selling, and tighter value articulation.
As the customer base evolves, the organization has to evolve to meet buyers where they are and sell the way they want to buy.
Q: What do you think people misunderstand most about how stablecoins are being used today?
A: The biggest misunderstanding — and I was guilty of this too before joining Bridge — is how widespread stablecoin adoption already is in real-world use cases.
A couple of years ago, people doubted financial services would touch stablecoins. Now they’re used by neobanks, remittance companies, creator platforms, marketplaces, and treasury teams, including publicly traded firms. Remitly even issued a press release about working with us.
We’ve moved far beyond NFTs and meme coins. There are hundreds of billions of dollars in stablecoins in circulation today, used for cross-border payments, supplier transactions, and even consumer spending via Visa-linked wallets.
Why? Because they’re instant, programmable, cheap, global, interoperable with traditional systems — and stable. If you were to design modern money from scratch, you’d build something that looks a lot like a stablecoin.
Q: What’s stayed constant and what’s changed about great go-to-market in fintech since you started?
A: The ecosystem has become deeply interconnected and more complex. The same company can be your customer, your partner, and your competitor, and sometimes all at once.
That’s largely because fintech has been built on APIs and composability. Every company can embed payments, compliance, or treasury functionality, which blurs the lines between competition and collaboration.
So go-to-market leaders have to ask: Who do I sell to? Who do I sell with? Who do I sell through? The distribution model has shifted from purely outbound to selling into the ecosystem.
Stripe is a great example. They started selling to developers, many of whom built platforms like Shopify, embedding Stripe directly. That ecosystem model gave Stripe exponential growth. Plaid’s the same. It’s everywhere because it’s embedded everywhere. Distribution through partnerships and integrations is the new moat in fintech.
Q: What’s a common mistake you see in how early-stage founders approach revenue, and what makes a great first sales hire?
A: The founder has to be the first salesperson, and they should never stop selling.
At Bridge, our founder, Zach Abrams, spends more time with customers than any executive I’ve ever seen. It’s the same trait John Chambers was famous for at Cisco. Founders need that tight feedback loop between what customers want and what they’re building.
As for the first sales hire: don’t do it before you’ve found product–market fit. Sales is about generating predictable revenue. You can’t build predictability without knowing who your customers are, why they buy, and how to repeat it.
I’ve seen companies panic and hire salespeople prematurely, thinking it’ll fix revenue problems. It rarely works. If you don’t have product–market fit, sales hires can’t create it for you.
Q: What trends or companies are exciting you right now?
I’m fascinated by what’s happening in AI. Thinking Machines Lab is doing really interesting work. Anthropic and OpenAI are both pushing deeper into enterprise, but they face the challenge that their agents often lack business-specific context.
Some companies are addressing that with verticalized solutions, like Harvey for law, Cursor for engineering, AlphaSense for finance. Thinking Machines Lab takes a different approach, letting companies fine-tune their scripts without heavy computational overhead. Companies can deploy it cheaply in their environment and pay per token. I think that’s smart.
Another company I admire is Gong. I use it as a sales leader, and I thought LLMs would make it obsolete, but instead they’ve integrated AI beautifully. For example, we use the MEDDIC sales framework, and Gong now auto-generates a risk assessment by analyzing calls and emails. It tells us, “You haven’t identified the decision-maker. What’s your plan?” It saves an incredible amount of time and improves execution.
A: We’re doing more fintech investing at Artemis, but the regulatory environment has made things tricky. Anything that touches a bank moves slowly, and compliance kills deals. How do you think stablecoins and AI will affect traditional fintech? Is it dead?
Definitely not dead. But stablecoins are changing the economics. They’re reducing fees and removing correspondent banks in certain money flows. The big banks’ fears aren’t really about blockchain risk — it’s about deposit flight. Every stablecoin minted takes a fiat dollar out of a bank account, where it was earning interest and being lent out. That’s a direct threat to their core business.
Still, traditional systems aren’t going away and there are a ton of ways that banks can benefit from stablecoins. For example, banks can let stablecoins handle fast, short-term movement of money while they continue to hold the long-term deposits and handle final settlement. In that model, stablecoins can actually bring more funds into banks instead of pulling them out, and it allows banks to be a core part of this new infrastructure.
The thesis behind Bridge is that we’re building an interoperability layer by bridging the new on-chain world with existing financial infrastructure. Another example of this is in Latin America. Lots of people hold stablecoins, but merchants don’t accept them. So we partnered with Visa to issue cards linked to stablecoin balances. Now people can buy stuff at the local bodega with their stablecoins just by tapping a Visa card at the point of sale.
Stablecoins aren’t a perfect solution for every corridor. Moving money between Europe and the U.S. in big batches, for instance, is already cheap and efficient. But for corridors like Argentina to Nigeria, where you need speed and cost efficiency, stablecoins are transformative.
Q: That’s such a good point. And what about AI?
A: It’s earlier days. There’s experimentation, but adoption in financial services will take time. It’s about trust and compliance. Agentic commerce, where AI completes transactions for you, is promising but still clunky. OpenAI and Stripe are working on it, though, and if that takes off, it could be huge.
Q: What’s your favorite productivity hack that actually works?
A: I have a really simple practice to keep me on track every week. It’s a to-do list, but a cool one. I use a 4-quadrant to-do list that sorts my tasks on two axes — urgency and importance. I work methodically through the quadrants to make sure I’m prioritizing my time appropriately to make the most impact throughout the week.
Funny enough, for a while I actually thought that I designed this method perfectly tailored to my needs. I was showing it to one of my previous teams at Stripe when someone said, “Dude, that’s the Eisenhower matrix. It was named after a U.S. president. It’s very famous.” I guess I’ll withdraw my patent application.
Q: If you weren’t doing what you do now, what problem would you still be obsessed with solving?
A: I’ve always been obsessed with how people learn. I’ve got three kids under ten, and it blows my mind how differently they each approach problems and everyday challenges. Yet, we expect their education to be highly standardized. I’m not saying something new here, but we haven’t seen material progress in this field. It’s about to become even more problematic as we move to a world where the utility of rote memorization and “knowing things” diminishes dramatically with AI. We haven’t even addressed the age-old issue that everyone learns differently and that our brains are not homogenous, and now we’re about to leapfrog into a yet another new paradigm. It feels like current educational practices are two evolutionary steps behind the science and technology.
Q: What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?
A: When I was the technical advisor to Stripe’s CRO, Mike Clayville, I was thinking about my next move and bombarding him with questions — Should I be a manager? Move into another function? Relocate? He said, “Follow your curiosity.”
He meant: don’t get caught up in the ladder or in what looks good on LinkedIn. Just go where you’ll be genuinely engaged and interested, because that’s when you’ll do your best work. The rest will take care of itself.
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