Landing Squads’ AI-Native Head of Compliance Ahead of Enterprise Fintech GTM Push
Search Snapshot:
Seat open for 3 months. Then Bull Moose.
82 days, kickoff → signed
23 days, first call → signed offer
Squads Snapshot:
Industry: Crypto/Fintech
Stage: Series A
Funding: $42.9M total raised
HQ: Remote
Investors: Haun, Coinbase, Electric, Solana, Multicoin, Jump, others
“We spent months on Head of Compliance before Jake and Bull Moose. They cut the noise out entirely. Their process was the most rigorous we've seen. They represented the company as though they were on the team and consistently brought forward candidates that cleared our bar. Strongly recommend working with Jake and Bull Moose.” — Stepan Simkin, Founder & CEO, Squads
Overview
Founded in 2021, Squads is the canonical wallet infrastructure for Solana — powering 500+ businesses and $15B in volume. Industry veterans have described it as “too big to fail,” cementing it as a cornerstone of the ecosystem.
Now, Squads is building full-stack products on top of that infrastructure. Altitude, its latest product, is the financial operating system for businesses on the frontier — aimed at enterprises and institutions. Squads is backed by Haun Ventures alongside Coinbase Ventures, Electric Capital, Multicoin Capital, Solana Ventures, Jump Crypto, and others.
Challenge:
By the time Squads engaged Bull Moose in March 2026, the Head of Compliance seat had been open for months. Earlier attempts to land a winner had come close, but hadn’t stuck.
The stakes were compounding. Squads was going up-market into enterprise fintech and institutional partners, and compliance had become the bottleneck. Every enterprise deal in the pipeline needed a credible answer to “Who is your AMLO and what is your compliance program?” — and there wasn’t one.
The pool was small, and the bar was high: a crypto-native 0-to-1 compliance leader with the depth to build a program from scratch, the ability to straddle traditional fintech and crypto, and the credibility to unblock enterprise sales. Squads wasn’t looking for a traditional compliance hire; they wanted an ambitious builder who’d put AI at the core of the function from day one, running a modern hybrid program where human judgment and AI tooling scaled together.
“This was the single biggest bottleneck on our GTM. Partners need to see a credible program before they'll move quickly, and without one every customer conversation turns into a diligence exercise. Finding someone with the compliance depth, the crypto context, and the commercial judgment together was the hard part.” — Phil Jacobson, Chief Business Officer, Squads
Approach:
Rather than run a broad-net search, we tested archetypes — TradFi compliance leaders with 0-to-1 seniority, crypto-native operators from early-stage DeFi, and fintech-crypto hybrids who’d built at the seam.
The search was founder-led: Jake Kerr ran every recruiter screen personally, kept a high-touch cadence with the exec team, and pressure-tested each archetype against Squads’ actual go-to-market needs. Weekly updates, regular syncs with the team, and rigorous program management kept the search moving at a brisk clip.
Travis Freeman (Column) was archetype three: TradFi grounding (Citadel), crypto enterprise experience (Gemini, Coinbase), and fintech-crypto hybrid credibility (leading crypto at Column). He brought a program-builder background, but was eager for a hands-on role. He’s sharp, direct, low ego, hungry — the exact mix a growth-stage crypto-fintech needed. Travis also came in with a clear point of view on AI-native compliance and how to use tooling to compress the work that has historically required large teams, without giving up the human judgment the function demands.
Once identified, we moved fast. Recruiter screen to signed offer: 23 days.
Final round to offer extended: 24 hours.
At the finish line, Bull Moose pulled Chris Ahn — lead investor at Haun Ventures — into the interview loop to help evaluate and sell.
“Squads is a unique company for compliance — they need a first principles thinker on compliance, and Travis seems like that. I got a sense for his approach and told him about why we’re so excited to back the Squads team.”Chris Ahn, Investor, Haun Ventures
82 calendar days from search kickoff to signed offer. 23 days from first call to signed offer with the winning candidate.
Impact
For Squads, hiring Travis wasn’t just filling a compliance seat; it was turning compliance from a bottleneck into a growth lever, and giving the team a builder to scale the function as commercial adoption ramped.
This engagement exemplifies Bull Moose’s strength in:
Market density: Deep knowledge of the compliance and AML pool in crypto — the players, the archetypes, who’s actually available and open.
Founder-led execution: Jake ran every recruiter screen personally. No handoffs. No calibration drift.
Archetype-driven rigor: Tested three candidate profiles in parallel rather than pushing volume through a funnel.
Investor-network orchestration: Pulled Squads’ lead investor at Haun into the final round to help evaluate and close — a lever most search firms don’t have.
The Squads team had gotten close, but wasn’t able to land the elusive Head of Compliance before Bull Moose stepped in. Eighty-two days later, Squads had their AMLO and a growth unlock. That’s the kind of search Bull Moose is built for.
“I ignore most inbound. Jake's was specific enough that I answered it, and by the time I met Stepan I already understood what I was walking into and why the compliance seat mattered more here than it does at most companies. The process was fast without ever feeling loose.” — Travis Freeman, Head of Compliance, Squads
"We hired Travis, and compliance has gone from a constraint on our sales cycle to something we lead with in enterprise conversations. Partnering with Bull Moose helped Squads take the next step as a company.” — Stepan Simkin, Founder & CEO @ Squads
