Week 52: Mickey Costa, Atlas
A year ago, I was home for Thanksgiving talking to my older brother Mickey Costa about an idea I had for a weekly podcast series with entrepreneurs. The central idea was that all of the entrepreneurs in my life had wildly different personalities and backgrounds, yet somehow they all found themselves on a similar journey. One where they saw an opportunity that others didn’t, either born from their own personal pains or from insider knowledge of markets that the majority missed. Like so many other pivotal moments of my life, I turned to Mickey to see what he thought while also confiding in him my worries for the project. How would I find entrepreneurs to interview? More importantly, why would they bother talking to me, a second year MBA student with a newly minted microphone?
I won’t pretend that he assuaged my fears entirely; rather he pushed me to have confidence that I would figure it out, using the old adage, “what’s the worst that could happen?” While I know that I’m far too close to this week’s subject to be unbiased, I will simply say that Mickey is someone who believes in the good in people. He sees me more clearly than I see myself, and sees the world in a way that most others do not, self included at times. I’ve watched him grow as an entrepreneur over the past few years, first with dreams of disrupting politics to give the underdogs a fair shot at the fight, to later seeing the potential that a decentralized system could have in emerging economies. The latter became Atlas, a decentralized banking network that’s built on a blockchain (ICYMI, I did an earlier piece on Atlas with Mickey’s cofounder James Schuler). I’ve watched him endure failures, celebrated as Atlas made strides in Ghana and Senegal, and listened as he told me just how hard and lonely being a founder can be.
I also won’t pretend that there isn’t already a plethora of content about entrepreneurship. It’s never been easier to learn about how to start a company, though in practice the reality is much harder (and to those who say they know it will be hard, pretty much every founder I’ve spoken to says they never knew just how hard). Yet what I wanted to do with this show was paint a more vivid picture of the people behind these companies. So much of the available content put successful founders on a pedestal to the point where they became surreal, talking about the professional path that led them to the top. But if we paused and took a deeper look into the early experiences that shaped them, what would we find? Next week I’ll be sharing the insights I gleaned over the course of the past year, but for now, to end the series, I’m simply excited for you all to learn more about the person who shaped my early experiences, and who became the inspiration for this show.
Stage 👉 Seed
Location 👉 NYC, Ghana, and Senegal
Industry 👉 Fintech & Blockchain
“You build up grit if you really care about what you are doing. If you take that entrepreneurial leap, you just find a way to keep going.”
In this episode, you’ll hear about:
- How Atlas operates on the ground, and how Mickey, who’s from New York, discovered this opportunity halfway across the globe
- The challenges to building a company in West Africa, and why it was critical that the team lived there when they first were getting started
- Mickey’s childhood growing up in Westchester, and why he originally aspired to become a marine biologist
- His earlier forays into entrepreneurship, including a TV show entitled The Candidate, and why Mickey ultimately decided to attend law school
- The evolution of Mickey’s founder journey, starting from attending monthly NYC Tech Meetups to meeting with the investment team of Alibaba, and how grit played an integral role in the process
- What’s been the most surprising part of entrepreneurship thus far, and why the benefits ultimately come down to the people you work with and create products for
Check out the end of the (final!) episode, where Mickey shares the best piece of advice he’s ever received, in addition to the startup he loves and the founder he’d most want to interview.
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Enjoyed the intro music? Check out Broke for Free to hear more.
