Ascend: Stories of Scale

Building the Operating System for Global Work: Ontop CEO on Payroll, Compliance & Scale

• Season 1 • Episode 6

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On this episode of Ascend: Stories of Scale, Angelique sits down with Julian Torres Gomez, CEO of Ontop, to explore what it takes to build the backbone of global work in a world without borders.

From early investor advice that reshaped his approach to compliance, to the realities of operating across 150+ countries, Julian shares what it means to build where regulation, trust, and execution intersect.


Julian Torres Gomez

CEO & Co-Founder, Ontop

Julian Torres Gomez is the CEO & Co-Founder of Ontop, where he is building the financial infrastructure for the global workforce. 

Prior to Ontop, he founded Fitpal, one of Latin America’s leading fitness and wellness apps, and was part of the 500 Startups Miami 2018 cohort. He is also an author published by Penguin Random House, with works including La Estupidez Colectiva (2019) and Hábitos Poderosos (2022), with a third book in progress inspired by Wu Wei.

Julian has served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at InQlab, lived in China, and studied Business at Universidad de los Andes.

Thank you for listening! This podcast is a passion project of AScaleX. Know more about us through the links below:

SPEAKER_02

As an investor of mine told me, hey, we're not in Kansas anymore. This is not easy. This is not starting a fitness company. This is things that you go to jail for. So you need to take money, yes. Off compliance, KYC, KYB, AML, all of these strange names that were unknown to me. I had to become an expert on it and take it seriously.

SPEAKER_01

What does it look like to build a backbone for a workforce that spans 150 countries? Julian Torres Gomez, CEO and co-founder of OnTop, has the front row seat to the future of global work. Julian is also a Y combinator, alum, and Endeavor entrepreneur joining me to share his lessons on scaling, leadership, and why the old rules about borders and talent just don't apply anymore. Welcome, Julian. Thanks for joining me.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you for the invitation. It's a pleasure here to share my perspectives and hopefully give you some insights on the future of work.

SPEAKER_01

Let's talk about the FITA. Maybe walk us through what that startup was.

SPEAKER_02

That's where I'm from, and failed miserably. So from the get-go, every company I started failed. But that set me up, I think, with a lot of resiliency. And then I ended up working at a VC fund in Bogota. And that's where I started FitPal, which is a platform that gives you access to thousands of gyms and spas and fitness centers for one single membership. I started that in 2015 actually, raised 4.5 million dollars, was able to scale it to 1,000 gyms in the whole country and thousands and thousands of users. And that eventually led me to what uh today we know as the future of work on top.

SPEAKER_01

Awesome. What was the thought process there? What was the scenario that made you think, like, you know what, I want to build something else. I want to actually build on top.

SPEAKER_02

Well, it was the middle of COVID, so August 2020, remote work was taking off. You know, when you can't get that gut feeling that opportunities are just there and they're just right there up for grabs? Yeah. That's the feeling I got. Al also, while scaling Fitpal, I wanted to expand to Mexico. And I faced the difficulties behind that expansion. So setting up an entity in Mexico, hiring local employees, all the overhead costs that implied. And then moving money from Colombia to Mexico was a very difficult task, plus very inefficient. And that that's when it hit me with my co-founder, Santiago. We said this is an opportunity, remote work is taking off. The movement of money makes no sense, it's not optimal. There's something we can do here to change that. And that's why we decided to build on top. And what we essentially do is build out infrastructure for the future of work.

SPEAKER_01

500 startup Miami and Y Combinator. Can you walk us through like what you learned during those accelerators and what's the difference between the two?

SPEAKER_02

500 startups with FitPal, actually.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

It was it was a cool experience because it's actually also a very renowned acceleration program. I did it in Miami, but did that for a couple of months. Was an amazing experience actually knowing how to hack our way into growth. I think that that was the main takeaway. So it was a pretty expedite program, so just a couple of weeks in person in Miami. Right. Then I had the experience with OnTop to go to Y Combinator. Literal sense, since it was COVID and we did it remote. So we did a winter 2021 program. Okay. Fully remote. It was kind of a unique setup, but a very special one because you get to focus actually on building and really getting to it. So Y Combinator is a really prestigious prestigious place where you can get a lot of insight from world-class builders and get insights into how to really scale a company from zero to one and actually start thinking globally. And I think that set us up very well for what was to come, fundraising, putting us on the map in the US ecosystem since we're from Latin America. Well, it was not easy coming to a new country and getting yourself to be known here by investors, by people, and Y Combinator really helped around that. And that led us to raise our seed round with one of the world's most renowned funds, 0.72, that actually has headquarters here in New York. And we raised our series seed of 4.5 million dollars. So it was a very enriching experience at say, where you get to learn the tactical things, but actually then learn to fundraise, which is not something that it that comes very naturally to it's not easy. It's not easy, it's very difficult. And then I think YC really sets you up for success on clarity, just cutting through the BS, you know, and just explaining clearly what you're doing, and that clarity really gives you a North Star on where to where to go and how to build it.

SPEAKER_01

Awesome. Let's talk about on top. What problem does on top actually solve?

SPEAKER_02

And this is how I explain it to my family and my parents. Moving money across borders sucks. Right? The old system, banks are not efficient moving that money. Wire transfers, we've all felt that pain. Now imagine having to do that for hundreds of employees that you might have overseas. It becomes a burden. You need at least 20 administrative people just sending out wires and moving money and figuring out how to contract them, what to sign, what documents to collect. It becomes a huge overhead. That's what we detected when we saw the opportunity while we were in lockdown during COVID. So what we built is actually very easy. We help companies hire and pay anywhere in the world, just as if you were paying someone here locally where you set up your office. And that eliminates the borders and the restrictions that we previously had on how to expand internationally, for instance. What talent to access. In essence, we discovered a new way of moving money, getting people paid, and that led us to become a very unique kind of fintech where people can hold their money in dollars, can access a card, can access financial services, and then take that account wherever they go, wherever they decide to work. That's the concept of freedom.

SPEAKER_01

What were the challenges of you as a founder, like um establishing on top in those much countries and what work needs to be done for that to happen?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you know, Angelique, how they say that ignorance is bliss?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

That's so true. If I would have known what I noted today about compliance, contracts, money movements, I would have never started this business. So actually, the hardest thing was actually putting myself in the shoes of the user. How does this really work? What does it look like to have a very smooth global transactional system? And then from that ignorance of not knowing what we were doing, actually try to piece in together the different aspects to it because when you operate in 150 countries, one of the hardest things is compliance. Each country has different regulations, requires different documents for people to get contracted. Then let's talk about money movement. How do you move money from the US to more than 150 countries and make it a seamless experience? If you try to do it via the banking system, well, it might as well take one month to do so. Yeah. And the challenge was how do we move money in minutes, not days, not months? In minutes so that people can get paid in a very easy way. So piecing that together, plus all the compliance needed around any money movement system is paramount. As an investor of mine told me, he told me, he told me, hey, we're not in Kansas anymore. This is not easy. This is not starting a fitness company. This is things that you go to jail for. So you need to take money off compliance, KYC, KYB, AML, all of these strange names that were unknown to me, I had to become an expert on it and take it seriously. So those were the challenges. How to build something that scales fast, but without doing anything that's stupid that compromises my employees, my investors, and myself.

SPEAKER_01

And some of the establishments and corporations around here still believe in the old ways of like, hey, you have to be in the office nine to five. In terms of your shoes as a founder, you've worked with your employees, they're all remote. What's the result you're seeing? Is there a big difference from I'm sure you also have experience of working with folks in office? Is there a big difference in terms of performance that you've been seeing?

SPEAKER_02

Big difference. When you give people back their time, it's incredible how much more productive and creative they get. When you limit people and make them go to an office just because you have this very fancy office with new furniture, they still feel start feeling trapped. That's not the world we live in right now, especially for women. Women were getting penalized in the old system. Because what does that mean when you have a family, when you need to take care of your household, of your kids, and but then they make you go to an office just because? Right now, with this new system, we're actually empowering a whole new workforce of people to be able to meet the needs of their families but also hold high-performing jobs. And that's really inspiring because, in a sense, it's giving back the power to people that didn't have that uh opportunity before, and now they can it can make ends meet in the correct way without having to sacrifice their life. That in itself is the most amazing benefit that you can give someone. And when you treat your team right, they're happy, they're at peace of mind. Well, that makes you very productive. People start loving the company because it's actually not at battle with their life. And that's truly where inspiration, where creativity are fostered and can really come through, and that benefits everyone. And of course, let's not even go to the cost savings that you might have while having people work remotely. When you don't need to invest in fancy coffee machines and office furniture that no one uses and all the little added things, saving costs, making people more efficient, and the company as a whole more well-rounded. Because when you have people from different parts of the world, well, the culture flourishes. It's amazing to have that clo cross-pollination of ideas and that global mindset. That's something that's really powerful.

SPEAKER_01

Amazing. Let's talk about your go-to-market strategy and growing um on top. How difficult it is to sell on top in those types of markets.

SPEAKER_02

Do you want to move money easily at better fees? Do you want to hire people outside your local talent pool? When you start answering those questions, the answer is an obvious yes. How do I sign up for this? Especially because the selling point is very strong when you realize this is not an HR problem. It's a money movement problem. And actually, people p care about their paycheck, how fast it gets to you, how you can use it.

SPEAKER_03

Right?

SPEAKER_02

And this is true for uh remote workers in emerging economies that don't or were not able to hold US dollar accounts, for instance, or an international card. When you add up all of those points, the go-to-market becomes really easy because we're actually telling you, do you want to optimize your operations, not have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars a month in administrative staff and wire fees and uh contract revision? Do you want to do everything automatically and you can basically cover the whole world? You could have people in Argentina, in Colombia, and Spain, and make your company much more efficient, go around the clock, and you won't even have to think about how to do that because our system, using AI, using all of our compliance systems, uh, will figure it out for you. You just have to press a button, you'll get everyone paid, people will have amazing benefits, and they will love working for you.

SPEAKER_01

In terms of go to market, what was the biggest contributor of your pipeline today?

SPEAKER_02

We started out with a very strong pipeline around partnerships. Okay. So staffing companies, recruiting agencies, I mean, everyone in the HR business that had built the EHR stack but didn't have the payments resolved. We really went deep into the fintech aspect to it because, as I said, this is not an HR problem, it's a money movement problem. And we solved that first. So by building that infrastructure, we can connect it to virtually anyone that is in the same kind of business. And they use it very gladly because it works. It's the most advanced pay orchestrator in the world. And now our second motion in our go-to-market is how to turn that into an engine that attracts the global workforce. So we're launching the global account, and that is a unique kind of account that you can have from anywhere in the world. You can open and set up in minutes. It's an account set up in dollars, very soon in euros. You can have a card, a non-top Visa card. It's a platinum card, beautiful card that has tons of benefits. And then you can set up a fund where you can plan for retirement. You can access different financial services. Plus, that makes it super easy for people to request payments from new employers, new clients. Where we're giving people anywhere in the world the option to have a very, very work-friendly account that they can take anywhere, either if it's uh their day job, standard job, or they're doing mini jobs or side gigs, they can use it in a very versatile way. And that in itself is giving people freedom. Yeah, it's giving them power to take that account anywhere in the world. So if you move to Mexico tomorrow, you don't even have to worry about setting up a bank account there because you take your on-top level account with you and you can just get paid and transact from there.

SPEAKER_01

I like that. So you can literally travel the world and then just have on top with you and you have a and not have to worry about that, which is so difficult.

SPEAKER_02

When I when I moved to this country, one of the most difficult things that I had was opening a bank account, getting a credit card, oh, the credit score, we won't give you anything. So it's really difficult. If you think about how contractors have been treated as second-class citizens, it actually makes no sense. Yeah, and a contractor is a job, you know. Why should we treat them in the banking system as a second-class citizen? And contractors are the future of the world. If you think about where people are working, how they're working, what it actually makes no sense that banks are not paying attention to this. It makes no sense that you can't get credit, you can't get a mortgage if you're a contractor. So that's what's about to change, and that's the thing in the market that we're capitalizing on. It's a a systemic failure in the market that we decided to cut through.

SPEAKER_01

The peril space in general is, you know, there's a lot of competition there. You have deal, you have remote rippling, and all that. How do you compare on top and what's the main differentiator of on top versus those competition out there?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, basically they went deep into HR. They are giving a vote of confidence to something called EOR, employer of record, so traditional employment. The difference is we went deep into fintech, moving the money, understanding the financial services around the new workforce, which we consider to be contractors. So we decided to venture out of EOR, full-time employment. We're not building for that because we understood, and what we're seeing is that the world is going contractor. EOR is a thing of the past. EOR is a tax on your company. If you're paying $10,000 a year per employee, that's way too much when you have this sophisticated contractor agreement where it's easy to transact, it's clear for both parties, you can bake in IP things, you can just customize it in such a way that it becomes fair for both parties and then m the money move moves in a smooth fashion.

SPEAKER_01

What was the biggest pushback you've gotten whenever you pitch on top? I'm I'm curious about this. I think your take on remote work is very timely. But have you encountered any circumstances wherein you're pitching or you're talking to you know an establishment and they're like, they're not ready for this, or there's pushback that you've been receiving? Maybe walk us through that.

SPEAKER_02

Well, the first thing is there's many believers, there's many non-believers in remote work. Yeah. Right? They're still skeptical, and that's the older generation because they haven't set up the correct framework on how to work remote. So whenever they're they've tried it, it doesn't work. Have you seen people that just take calls and don't have their camera on and they don't have proper systems in place, they don't teach people how to communicate remote, they don't set up proper goals. So, in a system where you don't have the framework, remote work falls apart. So there's non-believers, people that are confusing, I would say, the map for the territory. So they're stuck in this concept of what work means, what an office means, what hard work means, and they see it as okay, no, remote work uh actually doesn't help you achieve your goals as fast. I strongly disagree. And then the other challenges is okay, why don't you grow faster? And this is where it gets tricky because we've had to compromise speed, I would say, to be able to take care of compliance in the correct way. We have very consolidated partners that we operate with that require us to handle things in a very orderly way. We can't mess it up, we can't do crazy things and just go and move fast and break things because when you break things, you might end up in jail or you might end up in trouble. And you don't mess with people's paycheck. So we take that very seriously, and we've spent our fair share of time building and really consolidating that infrastructure so it's safe, so that it works, that's efficient, and that it's on the latest technologies. For instance, we're now incorporating stable coins. How to make that safe enough, how to make that understandable, because there's people that still don't understand how stable coins work. And it's part of that uh where we get challenged uh on speed, on growth rates, but I'd rather not grow that fast and keep everything very well built because I'm like we're building a company for the next 30 years, not for the next two years. We are already profitable and growing, and that's very important, and keeping our team engaged, living and drinking our own Kool-Aid. So we are 185 people in 20 different countries, and it operates beautifully because when some of us sleep, others are working, and it's yeah, so it's a non-stop operation.

SPEAKER_01

What's next for on top? What should we look out for in the next six to twelve months?

SPEAKER_02

So, what you're gonna see is a very strong go-to-market around the global account. Now we're really stepping in and consolidating that concept where you can have fiat, stable coins, where you can have an investment fund where you can access credit. Yeah, we call it paycheck advance, right? So advancing the invoice contractors are sending their clients. You can advance that paycheck at any moment in time. We're launching our full suite of financial services for this new workforce. Okay. And going straight to the worker, saying you can open this up, set it up in minutes, and then just start requesting get paid. So I would say in the next 12 months, you're gonna see really what hypergrowth looks like. Now that we have everything ready, it's time to present the accelerator.

SPEAKER_01

Your three books move from exposing collective stupidity around success to building powerful habits to exploring woo-bei and effortless action. How those ideas taken together shape the way you build on top and the kind of global remote work culture you're trying to create.

SPEAKER_02

I became an author by accident. But the reason I decided to write three books and the third one is not out yet. The reason is I kind of sensed it as the movements in a symphony. So the first book exposes collective stupidity, which is what is stopping us, each and every one of us, of just building things and getting out there. There's a lot of myths around what starting up means, how to start a company, what success means. So that book eliminated that. Powerful habits gives you a strong foundation around discipline, habits, stoicism, how to handle difficulty and embrace it, which is what you need when you start a business. And then once you have that clear, strong foundation foundation, it's time to let go. Wu Wei is the concept of effortless action from Taoism. Right? And then you soon start realizing that when you have a strong foundation, you've started our company, our discipline, you need to start letting things go. And that doesn't mean giving up, but actually being able to delegate, trusting people, not forcing things. When you start micromanaging people and everything, that's when things go south, people get burnt out. I kind of sense that in those are the three components, and I I I like to think about my books in that way, anyone that reads them, the three components to being able to start a company and not die trying, or eliminate the barriers, the mental barriers, and the beliefs and the myths, then just build a set of habits and discipline that sets you up for success.

SPEAKER_01

Great. For those folks who are actually interested, where they can find you.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, just go to getontop.com. You can find us there on our webpage. On social media, we're pretty active. LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok. Um, just reach out. We're pretty responsive. We take that seriously. And of course, I'm always there, open up for a good chat. Search me up in Link on LinkedIn. I answer all of my messages. I'm not like those founders that never answer the message. I I always answer back. Amazing. And I take that seriously. So honestly, reach out. We'll be happy to help you out, scale your operations, figure out how to hire globally. If you still haven't gotten into it, try it out with us. Start with one or two contractors and you'll see how your life changes.

SPEAKER_01

Let's do hot takes. I have four questions. Yes, no, maybe, or if you want to pass.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

The next generation of unicorns will be built entirely by distributed teams. No headquarters, no office, no exemptions.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

The 9 to 5 workday is functionally dead, and any company still enforcing it, quietly losing the best people.

SPEAKER_02

Hell yes.

SPEAKER_01

Remote work has done more to close the global wealth gap than any government aid program in the last decade.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

The first trillion dollar HR company will never sign a lease. Its only office will be a login screen.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

Amazing. Thank you so much, Julian, for joining us. This has been great.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you very much, Angelica, for the invitation.