Business Athletes: Maria Marti Garcia

Intensity With Humanity w/ Maria Marti Garcia, co-founder of Five

August 09, 2025

Hello and welcome to Business Athletes everyone 👋 

Each week, we’ll explore the athlete-like habits behind a different business leader and provide you with practical tactics that you can quickly apply in your day-to-day.⚡️

This week in Business Athletes, I sat down with Maria Martí García, the co-founder of Five, a startup building the future of identity-based authentication.

Five is one of the most exciting companies I’ve come across this year, and was so excited to have her on the newsletter. It has all the ingredients to be the next Revolut – a world-class founder, a disruptive product, an A+ team, and a massive market opportunity.

Maria and her team are building palm-based biometric authentication for payments, redefining how we access, pay for, and experience the world.

Before founding Five, Maria was part of the rocketships at Revolut and Wise, helping build two of the most intense, high-performance environments in European tech.

Maria operates with quiet intensity, but more impressive is how she approaches problems and her biggest challenges.

Fundraising didn’t come naturally to her, so she studied it, iterated, and succeeded. Today, she’s trying to nail marketing, opening herself up to community and looking to connect with people and learn from others.

That’s what high performers do…they figure it out. She’s a true Business Athlete: ambitious in her vision, clear in the mission, and relentless with her process.

Let’s get into it. ⚡️

Pre-Game Preparation

Daily Rhythm

My days begin early. I’m usually up by 6am (5:50am when I’m pushing), and I either go to the gym or head straight to the office. I’ll eat my breakfast there: toast and coffee, always. I’ve done it like this since my Revolut days.

But key here is that I plan both for myself and my team, weekly every weekend. I prioritise by theme – engineering, BD, marketing – asking myself, what’s the biggest risk to the company right now? 

I also take weekends to zoom out and to think through long-term vs. short-term, vision vs. urgency. That guides my weekly priorities, and I do the same for the team. It helps me avoid defaulting to areas I enjoy but aren’t urgent.

Overall, every day is pre-planned the night before. From 7am to 9:30am, I get a sacred block of alone time before the daily stand-up with the engineers. That’s when the rest of the day really kicks off, but by then I’m already deep in flow.

If something comes up mid-day, I note it as a to-do for tomorrow. I don’t break flow unless it’s truly urgent. That’s my key to staying productive: no constant context switching.

Most founders talk about prioritisation. Maria operates it. She doesn’t just plan her day; she scans the business for the highest-leverage threats. Most of us avoid what’s uncomfortable. Maria leans into it.

Focus is a Ritual

In terms of flow, I can enter deep work quickly, but only under the right conditions. 

I wear earplugs and noise-canceling headphones (but not the trendy ones, the construction ones!), so that I work in complete silence. 

Sometimes, I even like to work with the lights off, and often with just a candle lit in winter. If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend it. My co-founder is always like, “wow Maria, it’s impressive how much you manage to get done in that setting!”. 

The only thing I can’t have in the middle of this flow state is meetings. So the way I always organise my days is to try to bunch all my calls together or push them to the end of the day. If I have scattered calls, it ruins the whole rhythm.

I loved hearing that Maria also works in the dark! Maybe it sounds weird (and who knows, maybe it is a little…), but honestly, give it a try. Personally, I can’t believe my focus and how much I manage to get done when there are literally no distractions, including light, windows, street noise, etc. 

Powering Down

After 9pm, my brain starts giving me the signal to shift gears from building to resetting. No second wind. That’s why I train in the morning. If I leave it for the evening, it doesn’t happen.

Evenings are for unwinding. I just call my family while I walk home. It brings warmth and grounding after a long day. Or I listen to podcasts.

The Brain Diet

I love listening to Spanish-language interviews with singers, actors, TV hosts, psychologists, scientists. The more surreal or unexpected, the better. It takes me out of the startup bubble and into someone else’s world.

I try to avoid startup and tech podcasts on purpose. I don’t need more of the same. I need distance to stay fresh.

If I’m particularly tired, I’ll read some fiction. The more immersive and epic, the better. I recently finished Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros. It’s total escapism, like Game of Thrones meets a dopamine break.

Lessons From The Field

High-Performance, Human Style

At Revolut, I learned a few hard truths about high performance.

  1. Don’t wait for feedback cycles. If something’s not working, say it. Now. Politics waste time. Clarity creates momentum.

  2. Raise the talent bar, but mean it. Mediocrity compounds in the wrong direction. If someone’s not right for the team, it shows fast. And we move fast. That said, I also believe in leading with care. If someone’s not feeling 100%, I’ll say: take the day off. Not as a holiday, just as recovery. We work at 200%, but we’re still human.

  3. Own it. If something breaks, even in another function, it's still your product. Go figure it out. Raise the flag.

  4. Bias to action. If you do a lot, things will go wrong. If you do nothing, nothing will go wrong, but also, nothing will move. I prefer speed (with logic ofc). Make mistakes, fix fast, iterate. That’s the rhythm.

Building a Company With Heart

What I took from Revolut, and what I’m building at Five, is intensity with humanity.

Yes, we perform at 200% every day. But if someone’s not themselves one day, I’ll tell them to take a break – not as a holiday, just as a reset. That balance matters. You can’t scale a team without empathy.

We keep the talent bar high. If it’s not a fit, we move fast. But we also celebrate the ones who make a big impact. That kind of clarity and respect cuts both ways.

Ownership is everything. If something’s broken – even if it’s not “your area of ownership” – it’s your product. Raise it. Fix it.

And speed matters. I’d rather do something and be wrong than sit on the sidelines and be safe. Action beats perfection, always! As long as you know how to measure outcomes and course-correct.

Chatting to Maria, you can feel the Revolut DNA. Big ambition, massive impact, deep trust in herself and her team, and a growth mindset anchored in ownership of problems.

But there’s some nuance here. If you’ve read about Revolut before, you might have also gotten the sense that accountability and empathy could sometimes be at odds in an environment like that.

For Maria and her co-founder, they’re part of the same playbook. That’s how they make sure they not only attract, but also retain, the A+ players they’ll need to build Five into a payments revolution. 

 

The Championships

The Early Challenge: Fundraising Without the Lingo

In the beginning, the hardest part was fundraising. My co-founder and I had zero experience. And I really mean, zero experience! We came from technical, product backgrounds…and that showed. We spoke like operators, not like founders raising capital.

After a few rejections, we paused. Reflected. Realised we weren’t speaking the language VCs expect. 

So we reworked the narrative. Not what we were building, but how we were communicating. That shift made the difference. We closed our round. 

The Current Challenge: Marketing With Soul

Today, the challenge isn’t technical, it’s creative. 

How do we grow fast while staying lean? How do we build a brand that feels premium and trusted without burning all our cash?

We don’t have natural marketing instincts. We’re not sales people; we’re product builders. And we don’t want to fail. We’re now approaching this challenge like we approach any product problem: with curiosity, humility, and community.

We’re learning from what others are doing, especially those who turn marketing into storytelling. We’re experimenting. We’re staying close to people who’ve done it well. And we’ll solve it. Because every hard thing we’ve solved so far has made us better founders.

The Vision at Five

Long-term, we’re building an authentication layer for the internet. Today it’s about payment. Tomorrow, it’s about access. 

Imagine walking into Tesco and buying a bottle of wine without needing your ID or card. Just your verified identity from your bank. 

That’s the future we’re building. A network of identity-based interchange. It doesn’t exist yet. But we’re building it.

Maria embodies a growth mindset. She calls her weaknesses head-on, and is willing to reframe, iterate, improve and retry.

She’s also not afraid to ask. Just as Steve Jobs once said, most people never ask. Maria does. She’s inviting her network (and even our Business Athletes community), opening up about the areas where her team isn’t A+ (yet!), and figuring out how to change that.

These are two key traits that separate the good founders from the greats.

The Business Athlete Ethos

Founder as an Athlete

I connected with Business Athletes because running a startup really is a sport. 

You don’t always feel like showing up, but you still do. You’re always pushing your limits.

And you never win alone. Even in “solo” sports, your team makes the difference.

Quickfire

  • Process or Outcome? 
    Outcome, but never at the expense of people

  • Mind or Body? 
    I’m body. My co-founder is mind. 

  • What does winning the day mean to you? 
    Progress. Every single day. Even if it’s the tiniest thing.

  • What re-centers you when things don’t go as planned? 
    A good book. A good laugh. A quick cry. Then I continue.

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