cosentino.me

luca cosentino

new york, ny, usa

operator. gm & product.

practice spans multi-year p&l ownership and scale, product management, business-model repositioning, new-vertical buildout, ai-driven operating leverage. in complex and regulated industries.

currently general manager at cross river (a16z, kkr, t. rowe price), the fintech-infrastructure bank powering stripe, coinbase, revolut, and intuit, building its next-generation businesses: agentic banking, stablecoin payments, and the firm's shift toward ai-native fintech.

previously ran product through the firm's scale years: expanded the embedded-finance platform across payments, cards, lending and international payments, broadened the customer base from small fintechs into the fortune 500, integrated multiple acquisitions onto the platform, and shipped the firm's first enterprise ai platform.

before cross river, employee #1 at oasis labs (a16z, accel), privacy-preserving compute for ai, from seed to a ~$2b token-market valuation.

earlier: product roles at google, american express, p&g.

engineer by training, mba from uc berkeley. teaches agentic ai at mit pe. italian, based in new york.

writing

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projects

some things i believe

  • our role on this planet is to advance things
    • humans have evolved for 300k years—every step forward matters
    • whether for 5 or 5 billion, impact scales exponentially anyway
  • reality always wins
    • the game is about leveling up as fast as possible
    • learn by copying or feedback
    • the faster you collide with reality, the faster you learn
  • technology and knowledge drive evolution
    • experimentation, launching, and scaling are cheaper than ever
    • picking the right problem is probably very important
    • execution, not capital, is the limiting factor
  • quality of decisions matters
    • i graduated top of my class, but only after a failed startup
    • plan, team, execution: get one wrong, survive months; get all wrong, and you become obsessed with decision quality
  • objectives bring people together
    • truth-seeking conversations are easier said than done
    • life is a multivariate optimization problem - understanding motivations goes a long way, and it’s rarely about just finding the truth
    • learn to expand opportunities and find common ground early
  • rational optimism helps
    • enthusiasm for the challenge often drives the best work
    • optimism to start, realism during, optimism to finish
    • results come from effort and method, not genetics
  • connecting the dots, building, and selling are the skills of our generation
    • data and technology cut through noise
    • nothing is happening for the first time, but most things won’t be exactly the same
    • mission clarity, fluid tactics, critical path, focus: these win
    • the first 80% of a project is as important as the second 20% 80%
  • critical thinking empowers individuals
    • lack of expertise should rarely be a showstopper
    • adapting to change and controlling what you can tends to work better
    • i prefer thinking about the range of possibilities over what's conventional
    • feedback helps, but your barber will always say you need a haircut
  • objective alignment is critical
    • in small orgs, hyper focus
    • in large orgs, self-reinforcing systems
  • micromanagement is as harmful as misalignment
    • great managers define outcomes and obstacles early
    • the priority is to address obstacles before they become evident
    • cultures of approval kill accountability. let excellence lead
  • principles
    • accountability matters
    • family and close friends come first
    • play nice, but win
    • learn daily: 1.01^365 = 37