Yoseph West

For the 3rd year in a row, @relayfinancial is named a @Deloitte Technology Fast 50 winner. We’re #13! ⚡ I’m proud to see us make the list again; it reflects our *lasting* commitment to the 150,000+ self-made entrepreneurs we serve.

As I’ve said before, we’re building Relay for the 99% of businesses, a.k.a. small businesses, which make up the majority of all companies. These are the mom and pop shops and independent contractors who account for almost half of U.S. GDP. Collectively, they have the most impact on local communities, but often get the least support or tools to help them succeed. They need cash flow clarity, control over their money, and access to capital if we want them to thrive.

Hence Relay’s mission: to make every business great with money.

That’s why so far in 2026 we launched Relay Capital, introduced AI-enabled cashflow insights, redesigned Relay’s AP approval experience, gave small business teams granular control over roles and permissions inside Relay, unveiled customizable invoices… and rolled out countless other improvements to serve Relay users.

We still have so much more to come, this year and into 2027, and I can’t wait to show you what we're building next.

Thank you to the Relayers who work hard to deliver for our customers every day. 💚

Onward. 🚀

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Relay is a financial technology company and is not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Thread Bank, Member FDIC.

Relay Term Loans are provided through Fundbox, an external third-party provider, or its bank partner, Lead Bank.

We are *doubling down* on new grad and co-op hiring at @relayfinancial, because this is the first fully AI-native generation. And some of our most exciting work right now comes from pairing that AI instinct with experienced leadership.

So my advice to new grads and anyone early in their career: ignore the fearmongers telling you AI will destroy jobs.

Every industrial revolution in history has tried to solve a major problem. Each one disrupted industries, and in the process we redirected, retooled, and retrained human effort toward solving new problems.

That’s exactly what is happening with new grads and AI.

You are learning to think with and use these tools the same way that previous generations learned to think with a search engine.

Over the past 2 years at Relay, we’ve seen juniors ramp up faster than ever. Co-ops and new grads ship meaningful work within weeks of starting (unheard of in the past), and they want in on the biggest, most ambitious problems we’re solving for our customers.

So if you're early in your career and have AI projects to talk about, we want to hear from you.

Come build with us. 🚀

“Clear is kind.” This is a principle coined by @BreneBrown that I come back to a lot. The idea that being direct with people, no matter how hard it is, is always better than tip-toeing around a problem. And while I wholeheartedly believe the principle, it took me A WHILE to get it right.

When I first started leading people, I was zeroed in on the outcome. Meaning I was fast, direct, and with no time wasted. Eventually, someone had to pull me aside. They told me I was getting my point across, but it was direct in a way that didn’t really account for how I made people feel.

I was grateful to get the feedback, but I also ended up *overcorrecting.* I started softening everything. Worrying so much about how something would come across that I started avoiding tough conversations. In the time I’d spend circling the problem, my team carried the weight of it.

The hard chat you’re avoiding is almost always the one that needs to happen most. Your team can’t fix a problem they don’t know exists, and the longer that sits, the more damage it does.

Finding balance came slowly, but I got there. Clarity, delivered kindly, is an exercise in trust. Discussing hard things head on is trusting your team as professionals that can handle feedback. That helps *everyone* level up.

So say the damn thing!

If you get a hire right on skills but wrong on values, it’s the same as getting a hire wrong.

So if your hiring process screens harder for skills than for values, you’re jeopardizing your company in the long run.

To put it simply, skills are WHAT you do and values are HOW and WHY you do it. Assessing skills will tell you whether or not someone can actually do the job, while values will determine if a person will take ownership, how they’ll handle feedback, and how they’ll show up every day when nobody is looking. And values will show up in everything that a candidate does, even as their skillset grows and evolves.

This is why every candidate at Relay goes through a values interview with someone from the leadership team. Personally, I always try to understand a candidate’s:

1. Level of ownership
2. Growth mindset
3. Intensity

And values go beyond the individual, because everyone’s collective values will define your team’s culture. What’s the team’s default behaviour when projects go sideways? How ambitious are we as a collective? Where do we refuse to compromise?

These things are a lot harder to train for once they are ingrained. Which is why you want to make sure you’re getting the values right in every hire.

I was in San Francisco a while back, having coffee with @joeythecat. A national Skee-Ball champion, arcade and amusements operator, and one of the most interesting Relay customers I know.

He told me his story of coming to San Francisco for a tech job and instead rediscovering a childhood love for Skee-Ball. He started playing and then renting machines, won 3 national championships, and even met his wife playing Skee-Ball.

After renting a machine to Airbnb's second anniversary party in 2010, his business exploded. Today, he runs Joey the Cat's Mission Arcade, a full event space in the Mission District, as well as Sure Fun Amusements, a business of 200+ arcade and photobooth units deployed all over the city.

Joey might be one of the most passionate people I’ve talked to in a long time. What got me was that his passion never dims. He’s always chasing what he’s most excited about. He’s as enthusiastic about his Skee-Ball empire as he was when he rented his very first machine, if not more.

We spent a good chunk of our time talking about the complexity of running two businesses at the scale he’s at. With two entities, multiple revenue sources, and a handful of payment processors he spends every morning gathering data from multiple apps to get a picture of what happened the day before. That’s a problem I’m excited to solve.

I left that coffee shop as energized as Joey gets talking about his machines. That feeling, of having a real problem to solve for someone with Joey’s passion for what he does, is genuinely what keeps me excited for everything we’re building at Relay.