About

I'm Adam. I specialize in Stripe Connect and multi-party, B2B2C marketplace payments: how money moves between more than two parties, and how to build that so it keeps working.

I'm based in Los Angeles, California, USA.

What I do

I help teams design, build, and fix multi-party payment systems on Stripe Connect. Most teams underestimate how much complexity lives between more than two parties until it bites them: who owns a negative balance, what a refund does to a fee you already took, what happens to a payout when an account goes restricted mid-cycle. Those are architecture problems, and solving them is the work I do.

What I've built

I architected and shipped a full B2B2C healthcare marketplace from the ground up, end to end on Stripe Connect. That covered the parts that are genuinely hard to get right: connected accounts and onboarding, split payments, payouts, negative balances, disputes, transfers, and the ledger underneath. It's the kind of system other companies spend serious time and money getting to work reliably.

That's the flagship, not the whole of it. Most of my work has been with small and owner-operated businesses, where I'm usually the person who owns the payments problem end to end. I've also built inside private-equity-backed portfolio companies and public companies. The constraints differ; the problem doesn't.

I'd rather show it than oversell it, so I'm happy to walk through the details on a call.

Why work with me

I didn't come to Stripe Connect from the docs. I spent years consulting for a marketplace company, fighting money movement through custodial accounts and older processors like Authorize.Net, until I got tired of the workarounds and built the whole platform myself, partly out of frustration and partly to prove it could be done cleanly. It could, and it was more elegant than anything we'd patched together before.

What I bring: not someone who's memorized the Connect API, but someone who works out how the money should move and then builds it. I've worked under HIPAA, PCI DSS, and SOC 2, so if you have compliance requirements I'll design to them. That's table stakes, though, not the interesting part.

What the range is actually good for is knowing how much system you need. A two-person team that asks for a public company's payment architecture will pay for machinery nobody ever uses, and the reverse fails its first audit. Most of what I add early is telling you which one you are.

How I work

I care most about the unglamorous reliability work: idempotency, retries, scaling, and the edge cases nobody planned for. That's what separates a demo from a system you can put real money through. Every engagement starts with a free call to confirm it's a fit before anything is committed.

For build and advisory work I'd rather understand the problem first, then decide on a scope. If it's complex enough, we can work on a retainer. And for platforms that just want a fresh pair of eyes from someone who has built marketplaces, the Stripe Connect audit is comprehensive.

If you'd rather see how I think before we talk, I write about this: how money moves through Connect, and the edge cases that bite.

Work with me