May 09, 2025

Burning Cash and Poor Risk Management: The Silent Startup Killers

59 minutes

Lovely listener, share with us your thoughts!

Burning cash, poor risk management, and weak strategies around enterprise risk management - they're the real reasons why so many promising startups fail quietly. In the NEW season of The Curiosity Code from London, we speak with fintech board advisor Stephane Malrait (ex-JPMorgan, ING, SocGen) to expose overconfidence, cash burn, and poor risk handling.

You'll hear hard-earned lessons from inside the boardrooms and trenches on how calculating cash burn wrong can destroy momentum, why risk mgmt is more than compliance, and how to scale fintech without losing your edge. Stephane shares thoughtful stories of costly product failures, misaligned teams, and how founders underestimate the complexity of risk and management in scaling environments.

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00:00 – Intro
02:11 – Meet Stephane: Fintech Insider & Risk Expert
03:33 – Why Great Ideas Fail Without Execution
05:56 – Risk Management Starts with Execution
11:06 – Burning Cash Too Fast? Here’s What Happens Next
13:28 – Scaling Chaos: Risk Handling Mistakes That Break Startups
17:25 – The Lonely CEO: When Risk Becomes Personal
23:22 – A $2M Mistake in Enterprise Risk Management
29:52 – Failing Fast vs Failing Late: The Real Startup Choice
34:00 – Why Digital Transformations Really Fail (and How to Fix Them)
42:42 –Why Nimble Fintechs Beat Slow Giants
51:08 – GenAI Blind Spots in Enterprise Risk Management
54:40 – Data Overload = Risk? The Fintech Data Trap
56:47 – Wrap-up: Key Lessons in Risk, Scale & Strategy

What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken in your startup — and did it pay off or burn out?
Drop your story in the comments!