Joshua Tate isn’t one to romanticize entrepreneurship. For the ForumPay co-founder and CEO, building a company was never about startup mythology or chasing the glossy image that often surrounds Silicon Valley success stories. If anything, Tate believes most people misunderstand what building a company actually feels like once you’re inside it. “Any entrepreneur basically comes from a position where they had a fully stable career and realized they wanted to do things differently”, he says.
Tate himself didn’t begin his career in technology or finance. After graduating from the University of Kansas School of Law in 2002, he spent several years practicing law, first as a law clerk and later as an attorney. It was a profession rooted in structure and precision: “What I liked about practicing law was problem solving,” Tate explains. “Someone comes to you with an issue and you’re trained in a certain way to help solve that issue within clearly defined systems.”
But in time, he found himself becoming less interested in resolving isolated issues and more interested in understanding the systems that had created them in the first place. That change in perspective eventually pushed him toward entrepreneurship. In 2010, Tate launched his own real estate firm before transitioning into technology and digital payments in 2017, a move that would ultimately lead to the founding of ForumPay.
“When I moved into entrepreneurship, it became more macro,” he says. “I could see problems that existed on a much larger scale for lots of people, and I felt I had a particular skill set that could help change those systems for the better.” This move changed the nature of Tate’s work. In his view, entrepreneurship is not simply about building products or scaling businesses, rather, it involves deciding that certain systems are flawed and having the conviction to rebuild them into something better.
What remains largely unappreciated at the start of that journey is the sheer uncertainty that typically accompanies such a pivot. “One of the funny realities of being a founder,” Tate says, “is that if you truly understood all the challenges and heartache it was going to take to get there, most people probably wouldn’t do it.”
Part of what allows entrepreneurs to move forward is precisely that lack of complete visibility. Founders operate largely on conviction long before they see a clear path. Decisions are made with incomplete information, and progress tends to arrive through a process of constant recalibration. And, mistakes are inevitable in that process. The difference, he believes, lies in how founders respond. “You’re always going to make mistakes,” he says. “It’s only natural. The important thing is recognizing them, owning them and figuring out how not to repeat them.”
That mindset becomes increasingly important as companies begin to grow. In the earliest stages of a business, founders are involved in nearly everything. They move constantly between roles, often acting as strategist, salesperson, operator and problem solver simultaneously. Those early years shape the mentality many carry into leadership later on.
That initial level of involvement creates a necessary intensity, but it can also create its own set of limitations. The very instincts that help founders build a company from the ground up can eventually become obstacles as the business begins to scale. Ultimately, growth requires founders to stop measuring success by the breadth of their personal control.
“The real transition is finding people who can do things exceptionally better than you ever could.” For many entrepreneurs, that can be an uncomfortable realization. It requires letting go of control and building teams capable of operating independently. Tate credits much of his perspective on leadership to mentors who have emphasized exactly that principle. “If I’m really good at one thing,” he recalls from a conversation with longtime mentor William Erby, “it’s finding people who can do things far better than I ever could have.”
It is an idea that now informs how he approaches leadership at ForumPay; long-term success depends on creating systems and teams capable of evolving beyond the founder themselves. The challenge today is learning how to balance long-term vision with the discipline required to execute consistently as the company scales. “My mentor always used to say, ‘Look afar to see the end from the beginning,’” he explains. “But at the same time, you have to operate with incredible discipline in the execution along the way.”
This philosophy has helped shape ForumPay’s growth within an industry that is itself in a state of constant, rapid evolution. While the digital asset space has navigated years of volatility, skepticism, and structural uncertainty, Tate maintains that founders in emerging sectors cannot wait for the fog to lift before they begin the work of building.
“There is no industry where the future is completely certain,” he observes. “What matters is believing that what you’re building genuinely improves systems and continuing to push forward with that vision.” Under Tate’s direction, ForumPay has anchored itself to the conviction that digital assets and traditional finance are destined for deeper interconnection. In his view, the infrastructure capable of bridging these two worlds will serve as a critical catalyst as global adoption continues to advance.
For Tate, however, the deeper lesson behind entrepreneurship has little to do with startup culture, funding rounds or public perception. Building a company ultimately forces people to become comfortable operating without certainty while continuing to move forward anyway.
Eventually, successful founders stop attempting to eliminate uncertainty entirely and instead master the art of navigating it. The work becomes less about controlling every individual outcome and more about building something resilient enough to evolve on its own over time. It is rarely the version of entrepreneurship visible to the outside world. But for Tate, that very uncertainty is precisely where the substantive work of building something meaningful truly begins.
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