Why Sedicii Chose the Slow Path: Patience as a GTM Strategy in Emerging Markets

Why Sedicii Chose the Slow Path: Patience as a GTM Strategy in Emerging Markets

Startup culture worships speed. Move fast and break things. Blitz scale. Land grab. Win the market before competitors wake up. When Bitcoin was surging and retail crypto companies were adding millions of users per quarter, Rob Leslie and his team at Sedicii made a different choice: they slowed down.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Rob Leslie, Founder & CEO of Sedicii, explained the strategic patience that defined their approach. “We spent probably two years working on getting our charter,” Rob reveals. “It was a massive undertaking.” Two years on regulatory approval while competitors were racing ahead. Two years of investment with no guarantee of success. Two years that would ultimately give them an unassailable competitive position.

The story of Sedicii is about understanding when patience becomes strategy—when building slowly creates advantages that fast growth never could.

The Pressure to Move Fast

To appreciate Anchorage’s choice, you need to understand the pressure they faced to do the opposite. This was 2017 and 2018, the peak of crypto mania. Retail interest was exploding. Competitors were signing up thousands of users per day. Every month you weren’t scaling felt like falling behind.

The conventional wisdom was clear: emerging markets reward first movers who can capture market share before the category crystallizes. Build fast, iterate based on feedback, dominate the market before anyone else figures it out. This playbook had worked for consumer internet companies for two decades.

But Rob and his co-founders had a different thesis. “We had this thesis early on that institutions were going to be the ones that were going to drive this industry forward,” Rob says. “And so we focused exclusively on institutions from day one.” That decision immediately changed the calculus around speed.

Institutions don’t move fast. They don’t adopt new technologies quickly. They have compliance requirements, risk management frameworks, procurement processes. Selling to institutions meant accepting longer sales cycles, more complex implementations, and slower growth—at least initially.

Choosing Education Over Activation

The first way Anchorage demonstrated strategic patience was in their approach to customer acquisition. While competitors optimized for frictionless onboarding and viral growth, Anchorage invested in education. “We spent a lot of time educating the market on what custody is, why it matters, what the risks are,” Rob explains.

Education is inherently slow. You can’t shortcut teaching someone a new concept. You can’t growth hack understanding. When your prospects need to learn an entire problem space before they can evaluate your solution, you’re accepting that customer acquisition will take time.

Most startups would view this as a bug to be fixed. Anchorage viewed it as a feature. By becoming educators, they weren’t just acquiring customers—they were shaping how institutions thought about digital asset custody. When those institutions eventually decided to move forward, they would evaluate solutions using frameworks Anchorage had taught them.

This created a different kind of competitive moat. It’s easy to copy product features or match pricing. It’s much harder to dislodge a company that defined how your prospects think about the problem.

Building for Where the Market Was Going

The most significant expression of Anchorage’s patience was their pursuit of a federal banking charter. This decision embodied everything conventional wisdom says not to do in an emerging market. It required enormous capital investment. It took years with no guarantee of approval. It diverted attention from product development and customer acquisition. And it was solving for a future that might never arrive.

“We always believed that regulation was coming and that the companies that were prepared for it were going to be the winners,” Rob says. This belief wasn’t just about compliance—it was a fundamental thesis about how the crypto industry would evolve.

Most crypto companies in 2017 were building for the market as it existed: largely unregulated, retail-focused, optimizing for speed and convenience. Anchorage was building for a future market that would be institutional, regulated, and demanding of infrastructure that met traditional financial services standards.

The charter process took two years. “It was a massive undertaking,” Rob emphasizes. During those two years, competitors were launching new products, expanding into new markets, and capturing market share. The temptation to abandon the charter process and focus on faster-growth opportunities must have been constant.

But the payoff validated the patience. “Having that charter opened up a lot of doors for us,” Rob explains. “It gave us credibility with institutions that otherwise would have been very skeptical.” More importantly, it gave them access to customers that competitors couldn’t serve—institutions that could only work with federally chartered entities.

Patient Product Development

Anchorage’s patience extended to how they built their product. In fast-growth startups, there’s pressure to ship features quickly, to show momentum, to demonstrate progress to investors and customers. Anchorage took a different approach.

“We were very customer-obsessed from the beginning,” Rob says. “We would basically build whatever our customers needed.” This sounds like it could lead to faster development, but it actually required patience. Understanding what customers truly needed, building solutions that addressed underlying problems rather than surface requests, and ensuring quality at every step—all of this takes time.

Rob is explicit about the constraint this created: “You can’t just build custom stuff for every single customer. You have to figure out what the common problems are and build products that solve those common problems.” Finding those common patterns requires working with enough customers to see what’s truly general versus what’s specific. That takes time.

The benefit of this patient approach was building a platform that scaled. “Every time we added a new feature, it made the product better for everyone,” Rob explains. Companies that build too fast often accumulate technical debt and product complexity that slows them down later. Anchorage invested the time upfront to build foundations that could scale.

Why Speed Can Be a Liability

The conventional wisdom about first-mover advantage assumes the first mover is moving in the right direction. But in emerging markets, the optimal strategy often isn’t obvious initially. Markets shift, regulations change, customer needs evolve. Moving fast in the wrong direction just means you’ve built the wrong thing efficiently.

Anchorage’s patience allowed them to observe the market, understand where it was heading, and build for that future rather than the present. When regulation did arrive, they were ready. When institutions became serious about crypto, they had the infrastructure those institutions needed.

The companies that moved fast in 2017 optimized for a market that would look very different by 2020. Many built products that became liabilities when regulatory scrutiny increased. They acquired customers who churned when market conditions changed. They made architectural decisions that became technical debt as requirements evolved.

Anchorage’s slower approach meant they were building for durability, not just growth. “We basically had to go out and convince people that we were the right team to build this,” Rob explains. That credibility couldn’t be manufactured through rapid growth—it had to be earned through demonstrated competence over time.

The Compounding Returns of Patience

The most powerful aspect of Anchorage’s strategy is how their early patience created compounding advantages. The charter gave them credibility that accelerated later sales. The education created mental models that shaped how institutions evaluated solutions. The product architecture supported features that competitors couldn’t easily replicate.

“Once you get a few customers, they start referring you to other customers,” Rob notes. But this referral engine only works if you’ve delivered quality. “You have to make sure you’re delivering a really good product and really good service.” Building that quality requires time and patience that growth-at-all-costs companies often don’t invest.

The result is a business that becomes more defensible over time rather than more vulnerable. Fast-growth companies often find their advantages eroding as competitors catch up. Anchorage built advantages—regulatory approval, institutional relationships, product depth—that compound rather than decay.

When Patience Makes Sense

Not every startup should adopt Anchorage’s approach. In some markets, speed really is the dominant strategy. But for founders building in regulated industries, selling to enterprises, or creating infrastructure for emerging categories, Anchorage’s story offers important lessons.

Patience makes strategic sense when the market you’re building for doesn’t fully exist yet. When regulatory compliance will eventually be required. When customer acquisition requires education. When product quality and trust matter more than feature velocity. When the barriers you’re building take time but create lasting competitive advantages.

Rob’s insight was recognizing that in institutional crypto, all of these conditions applied. “In enterprise, your reputation is everything,” he emphasizes. “If you do a good job for your first customers, they’ll help you get your next customers. If you do a bad job, word travels fast.” Building that reputation can’t be rushed.

The companies that win emerging markets aren’t always the fastest. Sometimes they’re the most patient—the ones willing to invest years in building foundations that competitors can’t easily replicate. Sedicii’s path from startup to the first federally chartered crypto bank proves that in the right markets, slow and deliberate can beat fast and aggressive.