How Cyclops uses regulatory clarity — the Genius Act and MiCA — to shorten the education phase of enterprise sales | Alex Wilson

Alex Wilson has done this before. He co-founded The Giving Block in 2018, built it into the defining platform for crypto philanthropy, and sold it to Shift4. Four years inside one of the world's largest payment processors — leading crypto and stablecoin product — revealed that nearly all crypto infrastructure is built for trading and on/off ramping, not money movement. Cyclops fills that gap, exclusively for payments companies. In this episode: selling into a 100-200 company market, how Stripe's acquisitions created urgency he pitches against, and what he got wrong about team-building the first time. Topics Discussed: The product gap Alex found building stablecoin solutions at Shift4

Why Cyclops has a hard ICP boundary and turns away companies outside it

Navigating multi-stakeholder buying at large payments companies

GTM playbook for a market of ~100-200 total prospects

How Stripe's acquisitions of Bridge and Privy created urgency Cyclops pitches against

Regulatory clarity (Genius Act, MiCA) shifting sales conversations

Hiring by function — and why AI keeps the marketing headcount small

GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: The ICP boundary is the product strategy. Cyclops works only with processors, PSPs, acquirers, gateways, and orchestrators — and turns away everyone else. "The product wouldn't work very well for them." Competitors list payments alongside nine other verticals and ship the same product to all. A hard ICP isn't a constraint — it's how you build something specific enough to become the obvious choice.

In a 100-200 company market, pipeline is a relationship graph. "We'd be happy to sign a handful of those customers a year." That math eliminates ad spend — it's direct outreach and flying somewhere for an in-person whiteboarding session. If your addressable universe is this concentrated, relationship infrastructure is your GTM.

Map the buying coalition before your first call. At large payments companies, "it tends to be a mix of the strategy and sometimes even the corp dev team... but then you've got to get aligned with the product team as well, because they're actually the ones that are going to help you get it on the roadmap." Know the blocker before you walk in.

Turn the category leader's moves into urgency. Stripe's acquisitions of Bridge and Privy put every major incumbent on notice. Alex pitches into that anxiety: get stablecoin-capable without becoming a crypto company, and without a billion-dollar acquisition. Find who's scaring your ICP and position as the faster, lower-risk path.

Hire for network in sales, knowledge in engineering, and let AI compress marketing. Payments-networked people into sales and BD. Crypto/fintech backgrounds into engineering. Marketing: "We expect to only have a couple people in the marketing team for a while."

Design org structure for three to six months out. At The Giving Block, when business boomed, the instinct was to "throw bodies at things... rather than stepping back and thinking, is the team actually set up in the right way to scale?" At Cyclops, every hire gets pressure-tested against what the team needs in three to six months.

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