Blog
A Crash Course in Startup Speed
By Teasha Cable
How Extend's CRO David Blaha, a 25-year Amex vet, built a fintech by arming banks instead of competing with neobanks like Ramp and Brex.
Almost every founder I've met eventually faces the same question: Do I build for the customer directly, or do I build for the institution that already owns that customer?
David Blaha, Chief Revenue Officer at Extend, chose the "Door #2", and it's the reason his company is quietly powering virtual card programs at some of the largest banks in the world, instead of racing against the neobanks for market share.
Blaha spent over 25 years at American Express, eventually running a large commercial client group with a multibillion dollar book of business. Nine years ago he left to chase something large corporations rarely offer: the chance to build something that hadn't existed yet.
He spent a year advising Extend's founders before joining full time as CRO, and he's spent the four and a half years since scaling a platform that now spans virtual cards, mobile wallets, expense management, and AP audit.
His path from Amex veteran to startup executive is a case study in three decisions that matter for anyone scaling a business in a regulated, relationship driven industry.
Unlearning the Support System
At Amex, Blaha had an efficient team, a well equipped office, and all the infrastructure built to remove friction from his day. Need a document formatted, a trip booked, a deck built? Someone handled it. At a startup, none of that exists by default. (Don't I know it...)
"You have to unlearn the 'I have people to do things for me' and get back into the weeds of, 'I gotta do stuff myself'." In other words, he had to book his own travel, get his own documents together, and rethink how to get things done without the massive AmEx support structure he once enjoyed.
What's changed since he made that transition is the tooling available to close the gap. Blaha now runs agentic processes using multiple AI platforms to replace some of the administrative lift a large team once provided.
The resource gap between startups and incumbents is shrinking, not because startups are hiring faster, but because the tools compensating for smaller teams have gotten dramatically more capable. The bigger shift, though, was cultural. At a company the size of American Express, every decision runs through layers of process built to protect a 150 year old institution. At Extend, Blaha, the CEO, the COO, and the head of finance can look at data and make a call the same day.
"If we want to do something, we just do it." That speed is precisely what large organizations structurally cannot replicate, no matter how talented their teams are.
Arming Banks Instead of Competing With Them The more consequential decision was strategic. Extend could have built a direct to business product and gone head to head with neobanks like Ramp and Brex. Instead, it built the infrastructure banks need to compete with those same neobanks, and sells it through the banks themselves.
"The big, name brand banks you've heard of every day are tremendous institutions with all kinds of great resources and compliance and risk management support," Blaha said. "But the capabilities around modern payments, expense management, virtual cards, mobile wallets, and digitization, those are things these legacy institutions struggle to bring to market."
Extend has built that capability, and the bank sells it, services it, and owns the client relationship.
This is a bet that trust and distribution, not just better technology, are the scarce resource in financial services.
Banks already have the relationships with law firms, construction companies, and accounting firms. What they lack is the ability to ship modern payments capability at startup speed.
Extend fills that gap rather than trying to out compete the institutions that already own the customer.
It also explains why Extend's sales cycle looks nothing like a typical B2B motion. Closing a partnership with one of the ten largest banks in the world, or a network like Visa or Mastercard, can take years.
There is no walk in the door, close a deal. There's earning the right for the next step, the next advance.
His years managing Amex's largest partner relationships turned out to be direct preparation for this exact kind of long horizon enterprise selling.
The Gap That Trips Up Technical Founders
Outside of his day job at Extend, Blaha also acts as an advisor to early stage founders, with a particular focus on underrepresented founders (which I completely appreciate), those who have strong products but no easy path into enterprise rooms.
The pattern he sees most often isn't a product problem.
They understand the market is there. They have the ability to fix it through engineering or a software capability. But the 'go to market' strategy is where the struggle live.
Founders who have never navigated an RFP or formal due diligence process are unprepared for how differently enterprise buyers move, and getting a seat at the table often comes down to a relationship or connection they don't yet have.
My Learnings
Whether you're scaling a fintech or any business that sells into large, risk averse institutions, Blaha's experience points to the same conclusion:
Speed and trust aren't opposites, they're sequential.
You earn the right to move fast by first proving you understand how the institution you're selling to actually makes decisions. Skip that step, and even the best product in the market will struggle to get in the room.
Listen to our lively conversation for a masterclass in why startup speed and decades of Big Bank experience equal a winning combo.