Co-Founding in the Age of AI
Two co-founders, one on product and one on compliance and legal, with their own AI. A compliance officer who is a co-founder, AI for the sweeping, and an independent reviewer.
Tim Parsa · Co-Founder & CCO, QvaPay · 8 October 2026 · 5 min read Subscribe
I have co-founded five companies. QvaPay is the first one built the way companies will be built from now on: two founders and AI. Erich builds the product. I run compliance and legal. AI does the work that used to take a building full of people.
Five companies, five eras
| Company | How it was built | What slowed it down |
|---|---|---|
| Uphold, 2013 | Co-founded with JP Thieriot. Venture capital, an engineering team, a compliance team, a stack of vendors. | Every feature waited on a hire, a vendor contract, or a handoff between them. |
| Airtm, 2015 | Three founders building on Uphold’s API. It grew to almost a hundred people maintaining one money bridge. | Vendors for identity, screening, and monitoring, and analysts reconciling what each one saw. |
| Slyk | A platform for entrepreneurs to run their own money networks, built by a large engineering team. | Slow iteration: every change went through specs, sprints, testing, and release cycles. |
| Cadoo | Fitness games that pay, built the same way: a big engineering team across apps, Firebase, Retool, and Webflow. | Slow iteration, long testing cycles, and delays between idea and release. |
| QvaPay, Inc., 2026 | Two co-founders, with their own AI. | How fast two people can decide. |
Why two founders and AI is the right shape
- No principal–agent problem. Every hire is an agent whose incentives drift from the owners’. With two founders and AI, the people deciding are the people who own the outcome.
- No translation layer. Erich ships product himself; that is where Bouncer, Sentinel, Crypto Teller, and SkyMind came from. I write the program, the filings, and the contracts myself. Nothing gets lost between a founder’s intent and an employee’s ticket.
- No hiring lag. When OFAC rewrote the Cuba rules on 30 September 2026, we changed the product, the program, the partner guide, and Techno-Cubanism Media in days, not quarters.
- A co-founder as compliance officer. The compliance officer is a co-founder who reports to the Board. AI does the sweeping, the screening, and the first draft; a human decides; an independent reviewer checks the work.
- No engineers to manage. Capital goes to customers and licenses, not headcount to coordinate headcount.
The split
Every company I helped build taught me something about the cost of coordination. At Airtm I watched three founders become nearly a hundred people. At QvaPay, two of us do more, faster, because coordination now runs on software. It is the most productive partnership I have had.
Cuban talent and U.S. technology, in a team of two. That’s Techno-Cubanism, applied to the company.
AI runs these flows end to end, which is why two co-founders can operate them with a co-founder as compliance officer and an independent reviewer.
| Flow | How we grow it | U.S. tech meets Cuban talent |
|---|---|---|
| Assisted purchases U.S. payer: §515.533 with SCP · from a Cuban balance: pending with OFAC | SkyMind completes card purchases on the customer’s behalf; more U.S. merchants, more categories. | Cuban buyers get U.S. goods and software without a card of their own. |
| Assisted vendor payments QvaPay's reading of §515.533/§515.421 · pending with OFAC | SkyMind will pay U.S. exporters by wire from QvaPay's U.S. bank; a Florida logistics hub shortens delivery. | U.S. exporters sell solar panels, tools, and machines to Cuban private businesses. |
| Assisted withdrawals Pending with OFAC · peer pays from own funds | SkyMind routes each withdrawal to a screened peer who pays from their own funds. | Dollars become pesos in hand from a peer's own funds; QvaPay never pays into a Cuban bank. |
| Crypto funding and withdrawals Own funds, screened addresses · withdrawals by persons in Cuba: pending with OFAC | USDC from and to screened wallets, settled by Crypto Teller. | Cubans hold dollars on a phone, the way the rest of the internet does. |
The potential. Remittances into Cuba run an estimated $1.1–2B a year (2024; estimates vary). At the Dominican Republic’s rate per person, Cuba would receive about $9.8B, five to nine times today. That is the market QvaPay is built to serve.
| Market | Cuba today | Cuba at the Dominican Republic’s rate per person |
|---|---|---|
| Remittances received | $1.1–2B 2024 est., estimates vary | $9.8B DR total $11.9B (2025) |
A scenario, not a forecast. The Dominican Republic received $11.9B in remittances in 2025 across 11.4 million people, about $1,040 a person; at that rate Cuba’s 9.43 million people would receive about $9.8B a year, five to nine times today. Method and sources.
Cuba’s private sector is neither a boom nor a mirage: a large, growing class of entrepreneurs operating outside the state, fragile but real, that U.S. policy should engage directly. On cubanew.com ↗
Sources
- Tim Parsa, "I Build Money Bridges", 16 March 2020 ↗
- Tim Parsa, "Scaling Stranger-to-Stranger Services", 27 November 2020 ↗
- Uphold ↗
- Airtm ↗
- QvaPay, AML/BSA program and transparency page ↗
- Erich García Cruz, Bachecubano (YouTube) ↗
- Periódico Cubano, Cuba’s private sector imported nearly $1.2 billion in the first half of 2025 ↗
If this was useful, pass it to someone building in Cuba.