Few people in South Florida have helped grow multiple tech companies to valuations topping $1 billion each. Harrison Mann, a top executive at OpenFX, is on his way to helping build his third unicorn.
A former U.S. Army officer with a systems engineering degree from West Point Academy, Mann held key positions at crypto brokerage FalconX and fintech Affirm in Silicon Valley. He now leads Go-to-Market efforts for OpenFX, a cross-border money-transfer company, with a hub in Miami. He holds a master’s in business administration from the University of California-Berkeley.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Mann shares his experiences in growing tech ventures into unicorns, and also, plans for OpenFX, which is expanding staff in downtown Miami.
The interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.
Q. What are some lessons on how to turn startups into unicorns?
Lesson One: Follow through on your brand promise.
At Affirm, where I was for three years through a $25 billion Initial Public Offering, what stood out was the commitment to customers.
I worked with Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal and then founded Slide, which was acquired by Google. Max’s idea for Affirm was a buy-now, pay-later product, with no late fees. Affirm underwrote the customer, and if the buyer didn’t pay, it was our problem. That’s different than a credit card, which wants the customer not to pay and to collect fees.
Affirm’s brand promise was “Honest Financial Products.” That drove the technology. Our tech allowed sophisticated credit-risk decisions at the point-of-sale. With that tech, we were able to sign big merchants like Walmart, Shopify and Amazon and tell them, “You can grow sales with installment-plan customers.” We had to deeply understand our customer to make sure we didn’t end up paying the customer’s bill.
I tell my people at OpenFX now: Our product has to match our brand promise. That’s easy to say but hard to do, because sometimes there are competing priorities within a company – in sales or in engineering.
Lesson Two: In a fast-growing market, find your niche, and get the job done for that specific customer.
I was at crypto brokerage FalconX for two and a half years through a Series D investment that valued the company at $8 billion. I started as employee 30, and when I left, we were over 300 employees.
Our customer for crypto trades were institutions, like hedge funds. They wanted trades done differently than retail customers, because their large volumes could move markets.
Using the “Jobs to be done” framework, we focused on those outcomes the customer really finds value in. In this case, the institutions wanted to execute large trades fast near the price expected, and not pay tens of thousands of dollars more. They weren’t interested in hearing all about the deep machine-learning algorithm we developed for the job. You know that saying: No one wants to buy a drill; they want to buy a quarter-inch hole in the wall.
Q. So, do you think too many startups get wrapped up in tech and don’t focus enough on the customer?
A. Yes. The important thing is to get the job done for your customer. Look at the iPhone. Apple really hasn’t changed the tech much. What they keep adding is cameras, because customers value better cameras. So, don’t build what you think is cool; solve a real problem.
Q. What’s happening at OpenFX, and what lessons are you applying?
A. I joined in January 2025 as employee 15. We just announced our Series A funding at $94 million. In two years, we have just crossed $60 billion in annualized transaction payment volume. The plan is to be a unicorn next year.
Lesson Three: Bring on the right team early and build a strong, customer-focused culture.
Of the 90 fulltime people we have now, almost everyone has been a referral from our internal network. Personally, I have a strong bias toward operators – people with a growth mindset, who are curious, willing to go in, pick up any problem, and won’t say “this isn’t in my direct domain.”
I think some startups don’t grow, because they don’t solve the right customer problem. I always ask at conferences: Who is your customer? And some people struggle to answer that. At OpenFX, for example, we’re clear: We serve fintech 2.0 startups, in Series C and D funding, who understand stable coins natively, and who create new fintech experiences through that. The truth is: if you don’t know your customer, then you don’t know what job you are trying to do and don’t know how to talk about it to potential customers, and then, you can’t follow through on your brand promise.
Q. Tell me more about OpenFX in Miami.
A. We just set up in a 3,500 square-foot office in Brickell City Tower, with 15 employees. Miami serves as our US headquarters. We picked Miami, because it easily serves North America and also, serves Latin America, which now gets about one-third of our volume, especially transactions in Mexican, Colombian and Argentine pesos and in Brazilian reis.
We disqualified San Francisco as a hub because of its time zone. We have five regional hubs globally: Miami for the Americas, London for Europe, Dubai for the Middle East-North Africa, Singapore for Asia, and also, India. Our core team grew remote, but as we hire more junior talent, it’s important for them to be in office to understand and to blend the different domains we work in: payments, stable coins, and banking.
Our ambitious goal is to be at $1 trillion in annualized transaction payment volume by 2028.
We’ll have more hires in Miami. It’s in my expectation document for new employees: Always come with a positive mental attitude. I tell my team: There will be moments that are rough. Let’s label that emotion, feel it, and get through it together.
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
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