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Founding Partner

James Varga

Helps founders sharpen the commercial story and build companies that can actually scale.

James Varga Headshot Closing Foundry Founding Partner.

Off the clock

Confession

I am quite good at spotting difficult problems. I am still working on choosing easier ones.

Loves

  • Founders taking on hard problems without enough support
  • Anything food related
  • Helping other startups scale

On repeat

  • Black Sheep, Peter Sims. "The black sheep sees the future before the rest of the room has language for it."

James founded DirectID and spent more than a decade in open banking, back when most of the people he pitched to had never heard the phrase. He was right, and he was early, and early is its own problem: the clever idea only becomes a business when the buyer is ready to act.

That decade taught him something he didn't especially want to learn. Technology is almost never the hard part. Getting someone to trust a new thing, is. Buyers hesitated, but the platform was right enough that it later connected to 13,000+ banks across 45+ countries. You can be right and still have to survive long enough for the market to catch up.

He's been the person spending his energy educating a market instead of scaling in it, and he'll tell you, fairly quickly, which one you're actually doing. These days he works with founders on the messy, commercially unclear problems, the ones without enough honest feedback around them.

Meet the rest of the team