Profile
The Community Builder Who Became a VC
Rex Salisbury runs one of fintech's most trusted early-stage funds without having started from a hedge fund pedigree or a Stanford CS degree. What he started with was a Merrill Lynch job he knew wasn't right for him, a Dev Bootcamp certificate, and a profound conviction that financial services - 7% of US GDP, dominated by firms founded before electricity - was about to get rebuilt from scratch.
That conviction turned into Cambrian, first as a free monthly meetup in a borrowed San Francisco venue, then as a Substack newsletter that grew to 20,000 readers before a single dollar of fund capital existed. By the time Rex raised Cambrian Ventures Fund I in 2022 - $20 million, solo GP - he already had something most first-time fund managers dream about: a community that trusted him, a track record at a16z (where he helped back Deel at seed, watching it grow to $10B+), and a founder-only Slack channel with 1,100+ operators who chose signal over noise.
Fund I closed its books with roughly 50% of 33 portfolio companies reaching Series A. The industry average sits around 15.4%. Rex raised Fund II - another $20 million - in July 2025, during what multiple observers called a decade-low environment for emerging VC managers. He did it on AngelList, with institutional LPs including a bank and a life insurance company. This is not an accident.
"Financial services is about 7% of GDP - and a lot of the institutions doing most of the revenue were founded in the 1800s. We've seen very little change in a huge enduring part of the economy. And now it is time for things to start changing."
- Rex Salisbury
What makes Rex unusual inside venture capital is the sequence he followed. Most VCs arrive via finance or founder-operator paths. Rex did both - deliberately, in the order that made no conventional sense. He left Merrill Lynch, taught himself to code at Dev Bootcamp, then took a job as a software engineer at Sindeo, a mortgage startup where the CTO was Andy Carra (who later co-founded SoFi). Building the backend for an automated mortgage pre-approval system in Ruby wasn't a lateral move - it was a full reset, and it worked. Rex got bitten by the fintech bug at the engineering level, not the analyst level.
He launched Cambrian as a community in 2016 - well before he had any institutional backing or fund mandate. Monthly meetups in San Francisco, free admission, good people. Four thousand total attendees later, the community had its own gravity. By the time Rex joined a16z as the founding member of their fintech practice, he was already the person that fintech founders wanted to know.
At a16z, Rex helped build what became one of the most influential fintech VC programs in the world. He backed Deel - a global payroll and HR platform - when it was small. Deel is now worth over $10 billion. He also backed Tally, a debt management app, and wrote extensively for a16z.com, Forbes, EdSurge, and RealClear Markets about the structural opportunity in fintech. Then, around 2021, he left to go solo.
"My goal is to be the most helpful investor through the first 24 months of a company's history."
- Rex Salisbury, Tearsheet Interview
Going solo was a deliberate choice, not a fallback. Rex frames it as speed and accountability - no committee, no consensus, no one to blame when you're wrong. He writes non-lead checks of roughly $250K-$1M, positioning Cambrian as the investor that complements great lead VCs rather than competing with them. His LPs in Fund II include operators from NerdWallet, Plaid, Betterment, Melio, and SoFi - the exact people who understand what a fintech founder needs in months one through twenty-four.
The newsletter - "Rex Salisbury's Fintech Stuff" on Substack - runs on a simple format: three fintech links per week, every week. It's not a think piece platform or a podcast companion. It's a curated signal feed for busy operators who want to stay current without drowning. Twenty thousand people subscribe to it. The format is almost aggressively unshowy, which is probably why it works.
Rex also hosts the Cambrian Fintech podcast, where he talks to founders, operators, and investors about the future of financial services. His take on AI in fintech is characteristically direct: the biggest thing AI enables is building multi-product companies from day one. Not better chatbots - structural changes in how fintech companies are architectured and staffed from the first line of code.
In the investment world, people frequently confuse community building with marketing. Rex's career is a useful counter-example. The community came first, not as a growth hack, but because he genuinely wanted to spend time with fintech founders before he had anything to sell them. That sequencing - trust first, transaction second - is what produces a 50% Series A rate in a market where the base rate is 15.4%.
"The biggest thing AI lets you do is build multi-product companies from day one."
- Rex Salisbury, on Cambrian Fund II raise, 2025
Rex talks openly about the lesson he draws from his own career: quitting can be a skill. Staying at Merrill Lynch past its useful date wasn't noble endurance - it was a delayed decision. The self-awareness he shows about his own past pivots shows up in how he evaluates founders, too. He wants to see people who know when to hold and when to fold, not people who mistake persistence for judgment.
He sees fintech as a global phenomenon, not a San Francisco niche. His community spans both coasts and multiple countries. Fund II LPs include institutional players from outside the typical VC circuit. The investment thesis is deliberately broad within fintech: product innovation matters, but so does business model innovation. Rex is as interested in the pricing and distribution architecture of a new financial product as he is in the underlying technology.
His portfolio reflects this. Every, an all-in-one banking, accounting, and HR platform for small businesses, crossed $1M ARR under his watch. Keep, a Canadian credit card and payments platform, is building in a market Rex sees as structurally underserved. Simple Closures is attacking the unsexy, massive problem of business wind-downs. These are not companies chasing the same hot trend - they're each attacking a durable structural inefficiency in financial services that a century of incumbents haven't solved.
Rex Salisbury's bet is simple, even if the execution is not: financial services is the last great industry waiting to be rebuilt, and the founders who will rebuild it deserve an investor who has been in the same room as them - not just reviewing their decks, but showing up to free meetups in borrowed spaces long before there was any deal to be done.
