🌴 4x Revenue Growth

👋 I’m Justin. I run The LA Grind and The SF Grind, host the Ambition Podcast, and scout for Headline.

Happy Friday! We’re less than 5 weeks away from the Ambition Summit on September 24th and over the next few weeks, I’m going to share more about our speakers, the summit itself, and even the attendees.

A heads up on tickets: current pricing holds through September 8th. Starting September 9th, Standard moves from $499 to $599 and Service Provider from $699 to $799 (Limited to 15 tickets). Apply to join today to save $100.

Let’s get to it.

4x revenue growth year-over year.

Number 43 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 list.

Named to the Forbes Fintech 50.

Backed by QED Investors, Fika Ventures, TTV Capital, and Bling Capital.

This is Payabli, the leading embedded payments and fintech infrastructure company.

And on September 24th, Jo Phillips, Co-Founder of Payabli, is speaking at the Ambition Summit in Santa Monica.

Jo has spent his career helping scale early-stage technology companies. He was an early team member at Seamless.com, where he led National Sales through its merger with Grubhub and eventual IPO.

He later joined ServiceTitan, the category-leading vertical software platform for the Home Services industry, as the founding Head of Sales.

There, he built and scaled a high-performing sales organization that grew revenue 10x in just two years before transitioning into a Business Development leadership role.

It was during his time at ServiceTitan that Jo, together with William Corbera, played a key role in shaping the company’s payments strategy.

Their experience navigating the challenges of embedded payments in vertical SaaS inspired them to launch Payabli, with a mission to make it easier for software platforms to build, manage, and monetize payments infrastructure.

I’m so excited to have Jo with us for the Ambition Summit!

Jo joins our other incredible speakers:

• Mehul Nariyawala: Co-Founder, Matic Robots. Mehul previously co-founded Flutter, which Google acquired for $40M, and went on to work on Nest. In January 2026, Matic raised a $60M Series C to scale their home robotics platform, a product that earned a 10/10 from WIRED (the reviewer's first 10/10 in over a decade of reviews) and a 9/10 from The Verge.

• Dee Murthy, Co-Founder of Ghost, an AI-native distribution platform for the best brands in the world, that has raised $95M, most recently a $40M Series C.

• Jessica Chang, Co-Founder of Upwards, the largest childcare network in the US, and a company that raised $43.3M, most recently a $21M Series B.

• Shamin Walsh, Managing Director at BAM Ventures. Prior to joining BAM Ventures as a managing director, she was a consumer-focused partner at an early-stage generalist firm with tangible assets in 3PL/fulfillment, cold storage/co-packing, and manufacturing, giving her a holistic perspective through which to evaluate emerging consumer businesses.

• ​Jo Phillips, Co-Founder of Payabli, the intelligent fintech operating system for software platforms, that most recently raised a $28M Series B led by Fika Ventures and QED Investors.

• ​Dara Ladjevardian, Founder & CEO of Delphi, the platform that turns a person's knowledge, thinking, and voice into a digital mind others can talk to. Backed by Sequoia, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and the founders of YouTube, Zoom, Lyft, and DoorDash.

Apply to join the Ambition Summit.

See you next week,

Justin

P.S. I’m hosting poker tonight for The LA Grind and have a few spots available. Join us.

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