Chip Mahan built one of the world's first internet banks in the 1990s after flying to meet Marc Andreessen and Jim Barksdale, and went on to found or co-found several banking companies himself, including Live Oak, nCino, Finxact, and Payrailz, often specializing in narrow industries like veterinarians and poultry farmers. Rather than working out of typical finance hubs, he built this cluster of banking and fintech companies in Wilmington, North Carolina, treating each bank he built as a starting point for the next piece of financial technology.