🔌 The API is the Product (You Just Haven’t Been Sending an Invoice)

How 433 Investors Unlocked 400X Return Potential

Institutional investors back startups to unlock outsized returns. Regular investors have to wait. But not anymore. Thanks to regulatory updates, some companies are doing things differently.

Take Revolut. In 2016, 433 regular people invested an average of $2,730. Today? They got a 400X buyout offer from the company, as Revolut’s valuation increased 89,900% in the same timeframe.

No wonder 10K+ everyday people are taking the chance on Pacaso.

Founded by a former Zillow exec, Pacaso’s co-ownership tech reshapes the $1.3T vacation home market. They’ve earned $110M+ in gross profit to date, including 41% YoY growth in 2024 alone. They even reserved the Nasdaq ticker PCSO.

The same institutional investors behind Uber, Venmo, and eBay backed Pacaso. And you can join them. But not for long. Pacaso’s investment opportunity ends September 18.

Invest While You Still Can

_{Paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com. Reserving a ticker symbol is not a guarantee that the company will go public. Listing on the NASDAQ is subject to approvals.}

Featured Job Listings

🏆 Top Picks of the Week (Hand-Picked, High-Impact Roles)

🔹 Sr. Director of Change Management
Company: Solventum (formerly 3M Health Care)
Location: Maplewood, MN
Apply: Apply here

Solventum, a newly independent spinout from 3M Health Care, is reshaping how care is delivered across the globe. As Sr. Director of Change Management, you’ll drive complex enterprise transformations—coaching execs, shaping readiness strategies, and building capability frameworks to support large-scale shifts in process, culture, and technology. The role blends classic change enablement with hands-on delivery oversight across a Fortune 500-caliber org finding its new footing. With the company’s rebrand officially launching in Q2 2024 and ambitions to modernize everything from surgical solutions to health IT, this is a pivotal role for a strategic leader who can turn ambiguity into traction.

Recruiter Contact: Sandhya

🔹 Director / Sr. Director of Project & Portfolio Management (PPM)
Company: Outpace Bio
Location: Seattle, WA (likely hybrid)
Apply: Apply here

Outpace Bio is on a mission to radically redesign cell therapies using AI and synthetic biology—and they're hiring a PPM leader to steer this moonshot. You’ll run high-stakes R&D program delivery, drive operational excellence, and partner with senior scientists and platform leads to shepherd therapies toward clinical success. This is not your average biotech PMO role—it’s deeply embedded in the future of programmable immunotherapy. Outpace closed a $144M Series B in August 2024 to accelerate clinical readiness for its modular CAR-T platform and co-leads OpenFold, the open-source AI protein modeling consortium. This role gives you a front-row seat to cutting-edge science—with a real shot at human impact.

Recruiter Contact: Bianca

🔹 Director of Delivery
Company: CNX (Concentrix)
Location: Remote (USA)
Apply: Apply here

CNX is the rebranded identity of Concentrix + Webhelp, a global CX leader with over 2,000 clients and 440K employees worldwide. As Director of Delivery, you’ll lead enterprise client programs end-to-end—ensuring scalable operations, revenue growth, and white-glove service across verticals like tech, finance, and healthcare. The role blends delivery rigor with a commercial mindset, managing distributed teams and leveraging automation to improve performance. CNX went public in 2023 after a multibillion-dollar merger, and this role sits at the intersection of execution and expansion in a company reinventing experience outsourcing.

Recruiter Contact: Bill

🔹 Chief of Staff
Company: Vetcove
Location: Remote (USA)
Apply: Apply here

Vetcove is quietly transforming how veterinary clinics procure supplies—think Amazon meets SaaS for pet hospitals. As Chief of Staff, you’ll partner with the co-founders and exec team to align cross-functional initiatives, run point on strategic projects, and unblock ops across teams. This isn’t just calendar-wrangling; it’s a fast-track role for someone who wants to build the operating cadence of a rising B2B marketplace. With tens of thousands of vet clinics on the platform and a lean, mission-driven team, you’ll have high ownership and visibility in a company solving real pain points in a surprisingly tech-starved industry.

Recruiter Contact: Laura

🔹 Chief of Staff to the Founder & CEO
Company: Tiny Spoon Chef
Location: (Likely hybrid, flexible)
Apply: Apply here

Tiny Spoon Chef is more than a meal prep startup—it’s a deeply personal culinary brand bringing high-end, macro-based dining to busy professionals and wellness-focused families. As Chief of Staff to founder Janice Carte, you’ll partner on everything from ops and fundraising to brand growth and internal systems. The company has garnered loyal fans through its tailored approach to food-as-lifestyle, and with expansion underway, this is your chance to help shape a female-founded brand from the inside. Ideal for someone who thrives in fast-paced, values-driven environments and wants to flex across strategy, execution, and storytelling.

Hiring Manager: Janice

🔹 VP, Technology Project Management Office (PMO)
Company: Cushman & Wakefield
Location: Remote (USA)
Apply: Apply here

Cushman & Wakefield isn’t just in real estate—it’s in transformation. As VP of the Technology PMO, you’ll lead global project governance and delivery for high-impact tech initiatives across a $10B+ enterprise. From data modernization to proptech rollouts, your team will anchor the execution layer of digital strategy. Reporting into senior tech leadership, you’ll shape standards, scale agile best practices, and ensure portfolio alignment across a sprawling matrix org. With CRE at an inflection point (AI, hybrid work, smart buildings), this role holds both urgency and influence—perfect for a seasoned PMO leader who can translate ambition into outcomes.

Recruiter: Erica

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Bots Take the Wheel

🤖 Triage Project Requests Before They Wreck Your Roadmap

Pain Point: Your team is drowning in "quick requests" from a dozen different channels, and there’s no single source of truth to evaluate what’s important versus what’s just loud.

Solution: Create an automated intake and triage system using a simple form and a tool like Make.com to ensure every request is captured, categorized, and routed for strategic review.

• Use Case 1: Centralize All Intake.

  • Logic: Create a single intake form (Google Forms, Jotform). When a new form is submitted, a Make.com scenario triggers, creating a new task in an "Intake" project in Asana or Jira. It then posts a notification in a dedicated Slack channel (#new-requests) with a link to the task, so nothing gets lost.

• Use Case 2: Auto-Prioritize Based on Impact.

  • Logic: Add a field to your intake form for "Business Impact" (e.g., Revenue, Cost Savings, User Experience). In your Make.com scenario, use a Router to create conditional paths. If Impact is "Revenue," automatically tag the Jira ticket with a "High-Priority" label and assign it to the product ops lead. If "User Experience," assign it to the design lead for initial review.

• Use Case 3: Automate Stakeholder Communication.

  • Logic: Once the request is logged in Jira, the automation sends a confirmation email to the original requester. "Thanks for your request! We've logged it as [JIRA-TICKET-ID]. You can track its status here. Our team will review and provide an initial assessment within 2 business days." This sets expectations and reduces follow-up emails asking "what happened to my request?"

Visionary Voices 

📝 Guillaume Poncin - The Engineer Who Helped Build Google Street View and Now Leads Web3 Infrastructure

Why he matters: Guillaume Poncin has spent two decades at the intersection of groundbreaking technology and user experience, from helping create Google Street View in its earliest days to leading Stripe's entry into Web3. His career represents a unique blend of large-scale infrastructure expertise and product vision that bridges traditional tech and the decentralized future.

What makes him unique:

• Early Web3 Infrastructure Pioneer: At Stripe, Guillaume didn't just build crypto features—he architected the bridge between traditional finance and blockchain technology, launching fiat-to-crypto onramps and cross-border stablecoin payments that serve millions.

• Proven Scale Operator: From serving 500+ million users at Google to processing billions of dollars in transactions at Stripe, Guillaume has demonstrated the rare ability to build systems that work at internet scale.

• Vision-to-Reality Execution: Whether transforming academic research into Google Street View or turning Web3 complexity into simple developer tools, he consistently turns ambitious visions into products people actually use.

The Journey: From Street View to Crypto Streets

Guillaume's path through tech reads like a master class in being at the right place with the right skills. After earning his engineering degree from École Polytechnique and a Master's in Computer Science from Stanford, he began a career that would touch some of the internet's most transformative technologies.

The Google Years (2004-2016): As a research assistant at Stanford, Guillaume contributed to the Stanford CityBlock Project—work that would eventually become Google Street View. At Google, he spent 12 years as a principal engineer, leading infrastructure projects including Stratus, a system for handling user data at massive scale, and working on Google Books and Google Cloud.

The Stripe Transformation (2020-2023): Guillaume joined Stripe initially as Head of Engineering for Banking & Financial Products before moving to lead the company's Web3 initiatives. Here, he identified a critical gap: the user experience for getting people "on-chain" was terrible. His solution? Build the infrastructure to make it invisible.

Current Mission at Alchemy (2023-present): Now as Head of Engineering at Alchemy, Guillaume is working to make blockchain development as accessible as traditional web development, removing the complexity that keeps developers and users away from Web3 applications.

The Philosophy: Infrastructure as User Experience

Guillaume's approach to building technology centers on a core insight: the best infrastructure is the kind users never have to think about. Whether it's Street View seamlessly integrating millions of photos or a crypto onramp that makes blockchain complexity disappear, his work consistently focuses on making powerful technology feel simple.

"I'm thrilled about the promise that blockchains hold as they become the foundation for value exchange—fast, inexpensive, programmable," Guillaume shared in a recent interview. "The applications I'm most excited about are 'inside applications' that aim to simplify the user experience by hiding the complexities and leveraging blockchain technology behind the scenes."

This philosophy shaped his work at Stripe, where his team built tools that eliminated the traditional multi-step process of funding crypto wallets. Instead of forcing users to create wallets, find exchanges, complete KYC processes, and transfer funds, Guillaume's fiat-to-crypto onramp let developers embed the entire flow directly into their applications.

What Delivery Leaders Can Learn

Guillaume's career offers several key insights for anyone building complex technical products:

Start with the user problem, not the technology: At Stripe Crypto, Guillaume's team was motivated by user demand—people wanted to use crypto products but the onboarding process was broken. The solution wasn't better blockchain technology; it was better bridges between traditional and crypto finance.

Build platforms, not just products: Whether at Google or Stripe, Guillaume consistently worked on infrastructure that enabled thousands of other applications. His Google infrastructure served 500+ million users across multiple products. His Stripe crypto tools enabled platforms like Braintrust to pay contractors worldwide in USDC.

Timing matters, but preparation matters more: Guillaume's career shows the value of deep technical expertise applied at inflection points. He was ready when Street View needed infrastructure expertise, when Stripe needed crypto leadership, and when Alchemy needed someone who understood both traditional scale and Web3 complexity.

The Road Ahead

At Alchemy, Guillaume is tackling what many consider Web3's biggest challenge: making blockchain development accessible to mainstream developers. Just as Stripe made payments simple for developers by handling complexity behind clean APIs, Alchemy aims to do the same for blockchain infrastructure.

The parallel isn't accidental. Guillaume sees Web3 in 2024 much like payments in the early 2000s—full of potential but held back by poor developer experience. His mission is to abstract away the complexity of nodes, gas fees, and cross-chain interactions so developers can focus on building great products.

The Lesson for Leaders

Guillaume Poncin's career demonstrates that visionary leadership often means seeing not just what technology can do, but what it should feel like to use. Whether you're building APIs, managing infrastructure, or creating new product categories, the principles remain the same: great technology disappears into great experiences.

The most successful products don't just solve technical problems—they eliminate entire categories of user friction. That's the thread connecting Google Street View to Stripe's crypto onramps to Alchemy's developer platform: making the impossible feel inevitable.

Want to learn more about Guillaume's approach to Web3 infrastructure? Follow his work at Alchemy or check out his insights on building developer-first blockchain products.

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Professional Development

📚 API Monetization 101 - Why Every Delivery Leader Should Care

The Hidden Revenue Stream in Your Roadmap Most delivery professionals see APIs as technical plumbing—necessary infrastructure that connects systems and enables features. But here's what the smartest leaders have figured out: APIs aren't just technical assets, they're business assets. And in many cases, they're untapped revenue streams hiding in plain sight.

Direct Monetization: When the API IS the Product Think of Twilio. Every text message your Uber driver sends you? That's a Twilio API call, and Twilio charges about $0.0083 per SMS. , Stripe processed $1.4 trillion in total payment volume in 2024, taking a small percentage of each transaction through their payment APIs. Google Maps charges based on usage—every time you check directions in a rideshare app, that's revenue for Google. (Note: Maps Embed API is actually free to use with unlimited requests

These companies turned their APIs into direct revenue streams through three main models:

• Pay-as-you-go: Like Twilio's per-message pricing

• Subscription tiers: Monthly or annual plans with usage limits

• Transaction-based: Like Stripe's percentage per payment processed

Indirect Monetization: The Trojan Horse Strategy But not all API value shows up on the invoice. Some of the most successful API strategies use "free" access to drive adoption of paid products. Salesforce offers free APIs to developers, knowing that successful integrations lead to larger enterprise deals. Amazon's AWS started by giving away basic APIs, then upselling infrastructure services.

Why This Matters for Delivery Leaders When you're planning your next technical project, ask these questions:

• Could this integration become a revenue stream?

• Are we building something other companies would pay to access?

• How might this technical capability drive adoption of our core product?

The Documentation-to-Revenue Pipeline Here's something most delivery teams miss: great API documentation isn't just a nice-to-have, it's a conversion tool. Stripe's documentation is legendary because it turns curious developers into paying customers. When you're scoping API projects, budget for developer experience the same way you'd budget for user experience.

Measuring What Matters Traditional delivery metrics (on-time, on-budget) don't capture API success. Start tracking:

• Developer adoption rates

• Time-to-first-successful-call

• Monthly active integrations

• Revenue per API endpoint

TL;DR: APIs aren't just technical infrastructure—they're business opportunities. Whether through direct monetization (charging for usage) or indirect value (driving product adoption), the technical projects you're delivering today could be tomorrow's revenue streams. Start thinking like a product manager, not just a project manager.

How I can Help

Wanna chat IRL? Connect with me on LinkedIn and we can set up some time.

The Delivery Career Decoder shows why you’re already qualified for more—and how to prove it.

I love feedback. If you have topics you want to see? Or thoughts or ideas on how to serve the community better, please hit reply or email [email protected].

Until next time,

The Business of Delivery

Quiet moves. Bold Careers.