This was the first episode I’ve listened to of Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s new podcast “Business Breakdowns”. He and Alex Rampell dive deep on the history of Visa and its unique business model. Alex saw Visa’s business first-hand after his company TrialPay was acquired in 2015.

So much good background here on how it started as a local credit card program in Fresno and evolved into the network backbone between banks.

They also mentioned a book on the history of the credit card (and other financial innovations of the same era) called A Piece of the Action, which sounds super interesting.