My guest this week is a Wyoming native with a passion for solving problems. Known by many in the tech scene as “the disruptive guy,” Nautical Commerce CEO Ryan Lee spent more than a decade operating at the intersection of commerce, fintech and logistics, only to bring us a platform capable of democratizing access to marketplace technology.

For those of you who may not know, Nautical Commerce is a multivendor platform with the elegance of Shopify and a scalability parallel to none. According to Ryan, they are a start-to-finish, soup-to-nuts platform with a toolset that enables turnkey efficiency for B2B or B2C multi-vendor commerce. If they had an ultimate (measurable) goal, it would be “to see the next Jeff Bezos launched from a Nautical company.” They specialize in high-transaction product and digital marketplaces and their competitive advantage lies in the fact that they are a commerce system – versus an app that sits on top of another commerce platform. Payments is the cornerstone capability of their platform and, according to Ryan, the foundation of any successful marketplace.

Tune in this week to hear about Ryan’s journey to CEO, including a self-taught coding proficiency in high school that landed him a certifiable “in” to the technology sector once he got to college. We talk about all things payments, commerce and what the industry looks like in the next 2 to 3 years as it relates to contactless, the proliferation of more payments orchestrators, and crypto as a solution desperately looking for a problem.