Luca. Building and scaling financial infrastructure businesses
I run the Digital Assets division at Cross River Bank, the fintech infrastructure company behind most of US embedded finance — backed by a16z, KKR, and T. Rowe Price. Full P&L. Payments, lending, and programmable capital markets infrastructure.
Before this, I was Chief Product Officer at Cross River through a period of hyper-growth — scaling revenue, building the enterprise GTM engine, re-engineering operations for profitability, integrating acquisitions, and launching the company’s AI platform. The job was replacing startup intuition with operating systems that compound.
Before Cross River, I was employee #1 at Oasis Labs (a16z, Accel). Built the company from scratch — fundraising, hiring, product, go-to-market — through to a major exit on the token market.
My training grounds were Google (enterprise data products), American Express (product and pricing for new customer segments), and P&G (consumer strategy). I bootstrapped a company to 23 people by age 22, learned a lot about what doesn’t work, and moved on.
I teach Agentic AI Transformation at MIT Professional Education. I invest in 20+ early-stage fintech infrastructure companies, where I work with founders navigating the same complexity I deal with daily.
Engineer by training. Berkeley MBA. Italian, living in New York with my wife and two daughters. Often in San Francisco and Sardinia.
I write here about building and scaling financial infrastructure businesses — the operations, the strategy, and the technology shifts that matter.
Let’s connect if I can help: luca.cosentino50 [at] gmail.com
SOME THINGS I BELIEVE
Our role on this planet is to advance things
Humans have evolved for 300K years—every step forward matters
Whether for 5 or 5 billion, impact scales exponentially anyway
Reality always wins
The game is about leveling up as fast as possible
Learn by copying or feedback
The faster you collide with reality, the faster you learn
Technology and knowledge drive evolution
Experimentation, launching, and scaling are cheaper than ever
Picking the right problem is probably very important
Execution, not capital, is the limiting factor
Quality of decisions matters
I graduated top of my class, but only after a failed startup
Plan, team, execution: get one wrong, survive months; get all wrong, and you become obsessed with decision quality
Objectives bring people together
Truth-seeking conversations are easier said than done
Life is a multivariate optimization problem - understanding motivations goes a long way, and it’s rarely about just finding the truth
Learn to expand opportunities and find common ground early
Rational optimism helps
Enthusiasm for the challenge often drives the best work
Optimism to start, realism during, optimism to finish
Results come from effort and method, not genetics
Connecting the dots, building, and selling are the skills of our generation
Data and technology cut through noise
Nothing is happening for the first time, but most things won’t be exactly the same
Mission clarity, fluid tactics, critical path, focus: these win
The first 80% of a project is as important as the second 20% 80%
Critical thinking empowers individuals
Lack of expertise should rarely be a showstopper
Adapting to change and controlling what you can tends to work better
I prefer thinking about the range of possibilities over what’s conventional
Feedback helps, but your barber will always say you need a haircut
Objective alignment is critical
In small orgs, hyper focus
In large orgs, self-reinforcing systems
Micromanagement is as harmful as misalignment
Great managers define outcomes and obstacles early
The priority is to address obstacles before they become evident
Cultures of approval kill accountability. Let excellence lead
Principles
Accountability matters
Family and close friends come first
Play nice, but win
Learn daily: 1.01^365 = 37
