Winners Welcome Podcast, Episode 4 with Mitchell Jones, Founder and CEO of Lava Payments.

Most founder conversations focus on the win. This one starts with survival.

In Episode 4 of the Winners Welcome Podcast, we sat down with Mitchell Jones, founder of Lava Payments and co-founder of Lendtable, for a conversation that moves from the messy realities of a first company to the infrastructure questions shaping the next wave of AI.

Mitchell has lived two very different sides of fintech. At Lendtable, he built a platform helping employees access capital to participate in employer-sponsored benefit programs, learning what it actually takes to keep a company alive long enough to find what works. Now, with Lava, he is building the payments infrastructure that AI agents will need as they start transacting on behalf of users and businesses. It is a bet on a future that is closer than most founders realize, and one that exposes how unprepared today’s payment rails are for software that acts on its own.

The throughline of the conversation is honesty. Mitchell is candid about what changes the second time around, where second-time founder advantages are real, and where they quietly become liabilities. He walks through the fundraising lessons that only land after you have lived them, including why the goal is not to convince skeptics but to find the believers, and why long-term trust with investors compounds in ways most founders underestimate early on.

From there, the conversation opens up. We get into how Lava helps AI companies track usage and monetize, what it means to build for agents rather than humans, and where Mitchell sees AI applications, AGI, and the future shape of companies heading next.

If you are building, investing, or thinking seriously about where AI and fintech intersect, this one rewards a full listen.

Our podcast is sponsored by Gunderson Dettmer. #PoweredByGunderson

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About The Winners Welcome Podcast

The Winners Welcome Podcast brings elite founders and top investors into thoughtful conversations on pushing past possible, sharing the conviction, standards, and lessons behind building generational companies.

About Harlem Capital

Harlem Capital is a venture capital firm that backs the next generation of winners. The firm partners with exceptional founders with the irrational motivation to build generational companies. All Winners Welcome.

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