Why I Joined Method

Hello! I’m Elana. Last month I graduated business school, retired from my brief stint in VC, and joined Method. The following is a readable version of a memo I sketched out to myself before joining.

An $18T market with few good existing options

There’s this myth in startup-land that figuring out whether a company will succeed is a complete gamble. People refer to equity as “lottery tickets” and “monopoly money”. This characterization is far from true. If it were, there would be no such thing as a good VC. There are reliable ways to tell whether a startup is more likely to succeed, and the reason I joined Method is because it checked every single box.

When I was Managing Partner at Dorm Room Fund and a scout for Also Capital, a key thing we looked for was market: is this a massive, underserved market with clear structural problems?

These are rarer than you might think. And Method’s market, consumer credit, is desperate for solutions:

• $18.2T in total consumer US debt as of Q1 2025.

• $105,056 average household debt, up 13% since 2020.

• $1.18T in credit card debt alone, with average APRs at 21.91% (!)

• 81.5% growth since 2003, far outpacing inflation.

Traditional financial institutions in the space are slow; they take months to ship features that the team at Method could ship in a week. They work with stale credit report data that misses real-time payment behavior, up-to-date balances, and recently opened lines of credit. And account connection is extremely manual, which is partly why such a large percentage of connections fail.

Meanwhile, 49M Americans lack access to traditional credit because lenders cannot get a complete picture of their financial health. 

So: (1) huge market, (2) no great players, (3) no obvious solutions. Lots of green flags.

A really, really great product with real traction

If a startup has a great market, that means there is potential. To figure out if Method was the company that could realize that potential, I looked at their product and early traction.

The basic situation today is that it’s way harder than it should be for companies (SoFi, Bilt, Credit Karma) to connect to consumers’ liability accounts (like their credit cards or student loans). This is bad for companies, who are bottlenecked by access to data and payments. And it’s bad for their users, who would benefit from having more visibility and ways to manage their debt. 

Existing products tend to cobble together all a bunch of clunky, outdated solutions and slap a pretty interface on top. Method, by contrast, has built a net-new product.

Method unlocks instant connection to all consumer liabilities using just identity and consent. Usually, all someone has to provide is a phone number. And they have built-in payment rails so, for example, SoFi could use Method to schedule an external credit card or loan payment for a user. 

(If you want to learn more about how this works, exactly, go read Why Method.)

Method has found product-market fit and is working with companies like SoFi, Happy Money, Credit Karma, and Figure, who have all seen results (e.g. conversion rate improvements, decreases in charge-offs, etc.) and faster, cheaper payment processing with Method’s APIs.

A team of exceptional, humble people

Exceptional people build exceptional products. So I wasn’t surprised to learn that Method’s team is as good as it gets. Founders José, Marco, and Mit are humble, hungry, and have deep technical ability. Their vision to become a foundational layer in finance, a layer that unlocks trillions of dollars worth of value in the long-run, is the sort of grand mission I was searching for.

And the team is, frankly, stacked: engineers who were early at Replit, Affirm, and Stir, growth people who helped scale Marqeta and Haven. Method did not appear to be an easy place to work, but a rewarding one. I knew that being around people like this would push me to do my best work.

Deciding to join

Joining a startup is not like purchasing a lottery ticket. If you were friends with a partner at Emergence Ventures or a16z and asked them where to work, they would be able to guide you to companies that check all of the boxes: high-growth startups with top 1% teams, huge markets, and product-market fit. 

If you asked them, in fact, they might tell you to consider joining Method. At least I certainly would.