Kurt Lin Found a Business in the Way of His Business

Kurt Lin and his co-founders had a product to build. Instead, they kept building the things required to make the product work. A customer would arrive with a payroll system the team did not support. Another connection would need writing. The engineering hours disappeared into integrations, while the original app waited its turn. Eventually, the interruption became difficult to ignore. Other businesses needed those connections too. The founders closed the app and made the machinery behind it their business.

This is an awkward sort of discovery. You set out to make something people will use, then find yourself selling the part you had hoped somebody else had already invented. It requires admitting that the plan has changed before the work has become any easier. For Lin, it became the organizing decision behind Pinwheel, the payroll connectivity company he co-founded with Curtis Lee and Anish Basu in 2018.

Years later, remembering a 2019 planning session, he placed the three of them in a windowless room at Grand Central Tech, drawing a payroll ecosystem on a whiteboard. The setting is pleasantly uncinematic. No panoramic view. No revelation on a mountaintop. Just three people trying to draw a workable route through somebody else’s software.

A bicycle, a parking space, a paycheck

Lin’s first attempt at entrepreneurship involved a more visible problem: stolen bicycles. While at UCLA, he started a venture making hardware intended to prevent bike theft. He has described the experience with little ceremony. Owning a company was the attraction; knowing how to run it was the missing qualification. The venture did not go far, but it persuaded him to keep starting things.

He jokes that he is “constitutionally unemployable.” It is an economical line for someone whose career has included quite a lot of employment. His route took him through business development and partnerships at design firm Idean, then growth and operations at Luxe, the on-demand parking company. At Luxe he met Lee, its founder. Volvo acquired the business in 2017. A working relationship became the basis for another company.

There was an earlier apprenticeship in exchange. As a child, Lin traded Pokémon cards, working toward a holographic Charizard. The detail is worth keeping at its proper scale. A playground card trade is a playground card trade. Still, it is a more recognizable beginning than the tidy childhood prophecy that gets attached to successful founders. He wanted something, had limited resources, and tried to work his way toward it.

Growing up with two immigrant parents also informed how he thought about access to affordable financial products. At Pinwheel, that concern became attached to an unusually specific piece of infrastructure. The distance between someone earning money and a financial institution understanding those earnings offered plenty of work.

Seventy-two hours changed the question

Pinwheel emerged publicly in June 2020. Lin later recalled asking for a launch article because the company needed leads. The response was concrete: 133 inbound inquiries in the first 72 hours. He named large banks and fintech companies among those reaching out. For a team still explaining what its connections could do, the range of interest was a lesson in how other people understood the product.

The founders had been looking at income and employment verification. Now they could see a wider collection of possible uses. A connection to payroll could help confirm earnings, move a direct deposit, or support another financial product. The same underlying work could matter to companies with very different roadmaps.

The response mattered because infrastructure is a difficult thing to demonstrate through appearance. It does its work inside another product. Customers supply much of the evidence of what it might become: the bank with an onboarding problem, the lender needing better information, the builder unable to finish an idea without access. A busy inbox can be useful research when its questions keep extending the same premise.

Capital followed the developing business. Pinwheel raised a $20 million Series A in 2021 and a $50 million Series B in January 2022. GGV Capital led the latter round, with investors including AMEX Ventures, Indeed and Franklin Templeton. A card company, a job platform and an investment manager had reasons to be interested in the same payroll connection.

The paycheck has to get through

To understand Lin’s interest in this corner of finance, start with a mundane task: changing where a paycheck lands. Opening a new account does not automatically move a direct deposit. The customer still has to complete that step. Every extra form or unfamiliar portal gives a person another reason to postpone the change.

Lin has repeatedly returned to that gap between an available financial product and an actual working relationship. A bank wants the deposit because it anchors regular activity. The customer wants the account to work without an administrative project. Pinwheel gives financial companies a way to put the switch inside their own experience, with the consumer’s permission.

The detail beneath that promise gets complicated quickly. A salary and a gig payment do not arrive as identical kinds of information. Making a connection is only part of making the result useful. The information also needs enough consistency for the next company to understand it. Otherwise, complexity has merely changed desks.

Lin’s ambition has been to give financial companies a fuller view of a person’s earnings so they can offer more useful products. That is an aspiration with a practical dependency: the data has to get to the place where a decision is made. Much of Pinwheel’s work sits inside that dependency, far from the part of an app that gets admired in a screenshot.

Eighty interviews before the first few hires

The engineering problem also shaped Lin’s account of recruitment. Pinwheel interviewed more than 80 engineers before making its first few hires. Technical strength alone did not settle the question. He wanted people who could approach the customer with empathy. The requirement makes sense for a business selling relief from complexity: someone has to notice which difficulties the user should never have to encounter.

His recurring test for a product is direct: “How essential are we to the customer?” It removes a fair amount of room for congratulating yourself. A product can be interesting in a meeting and dispensable on Monday morning. The question asks what happens when a customer tries to do the work without it.

“How essential are we to the customer?”

Kurt Lin · on finding product-market fit

Lin has also argued for designing a company’s operating habits early. Decide who owns a project. Make the ownership visible. Choose check-in intervals that fit the pace you want. State the priorities clearly enough that people can make decisions without repeatedly asking what matters. Culture, in this telling, has an appointment in the calendar and a name beside the task.

That approach gives his otherwise abstract language about usefulness some texture. A team is asked to make life easier for customers, then needs working habits that help it do so. Hiring, product design and management become related choices. An infrastructure business cannot afford to keep empathy in a separate department.

Growth added another layer of coordination. In an April 2022 conversation, the company was described as having expanded from four employees before the pandemic to almost 90. A small founding group can carry a great deal in conversation. A larger remote team needs ways to pass decisions around without requiring everyone to have been present at the beginning. Lin’s attention to operating habits had an increasingly practical audience.

Leaving the chair, keeping the company

On July 23, 2025, Pinwheel announced that Lin would become executive chairman and that its CFO, Jaimeson Rice, would take over as CEO. Rice had spent three years working alongside him. Lin said he felt confident in the team assembled to lead the company forward. He would remain on the board and support the business, while stepping away from daily management.

Rice supplied a revealing detail about their relationship. When he joined, Lin told him that the people were what made him proudest of building Pinwheel. Coming after years of advice about recruitment, that recollection gives the succession a certain continuity. A founder who talks about choosing people carefully eventually has to trust someone else with the decisions.

Lin also left a less ceremonial assessment of the incoming chief executive: “I can bench press more than him.” Succession announcements rarely improve when they become longer. This one benefited from a small scoreboard.

The business had moved a considerable distance from the app held up by its own integrations. Pinwheel’s 2023 rollout of a login-free deposit-switching experience had pursued the same original aim: hide more of the difficult work from the person trying to finish a simple task. Lin’s later conversations about bank onboarding kept returning to that concern.

By May 2025, he was discussing digital loyalty alongside Zach Eychaner of ELGA Credit Union. The subjects included onboarding and personalization: the everyday experience of arriving at a financial institution and finding a reason to keep using it. That is a useful place to follow the founder’s attention. The payroll connection has consequences beyond the successful transfer of information. Someone still has to finish opening the account and find it worth returning to.

Even the name carried the intention. He has explained that a pinwheel suggested something positive and simple, something that works without elaborate setup. It is a modest object to choose for a complicated company. It also sets a fairly unforgiving standard. The customer should be able to get on with things. The machinery is the builder’s problem.