 I'm Guillaume Poussa, so I'm the CEO of Checkout.com. Today, it's not about me, it's about my friend Victoria. She is one of the most amazing founders that I know. And by the way, to my daughter who's probably watching and live streaming Marlowe, who's 13, pay attention because it's worth listening. But it's one of the most amazing bootstrapping stories in our industry in Fintech. And Victoria, happy to have you here with me. Thank you. Thank you for the incredibly kind words. I think everyone can agree this is almost a bit of a comical setup where I told my colleague yesterday that I was being interviewed by you and he was rolling on the floor laughing. He was like, surely it should be the other way around. But in any case, aside from amusing my colleagues, I'm very happy and very honored to be here with you. So, lendable, incredible story. We'll talk about it a bit after the bootstrapping aspect, but I think it's important for the audience and for everyone that we just maybe stick to the origin story. What's the product? What you're doing? How you got there? I mean, you're the co-founder. Yes. So the idea came from seeing that there were a lot of people in the UK who were looking to borrow small amounts of money between 1,000 and 30,000 pounds, but we're finding it either very difficult, it would take them several weeks, or very expensive to do so. And so we thought if we can build technology to completely automate the consumer lending process, we would be able to set up a platform and offer really attractive rates to consumers and great yields to investors. And so we built this AI platform for consumer finance, starting with the product of personal loans and then over time adding credit cards, auto loans, we're now shortly going to launch, buy now, pay later. And the next step for the business is that we are expanding all of that in the US. Okay. Exciting journey. I think, wow, we have a sound issue, but the thing is we, you did this all of it with a 4 million pound seed. So that's actually, I think we need to pause here for the audience. Quite often we hear all the stories of people who raise like a lot of money. 4 million pound seed, now it's a billion dollar business. Oh, you want to give me a mic? I can do a mic. No problem. Okay. It's working? Okay. And so 4 million pound seed, you, was it always the strategy to bootstrap from the beginning? Was it a consequence? So how did you get there? Yes. Look, I think it would be really easy for me to sit here and say, oh, you know, it was always a strategy. We knew it from the get go. I guess first of all, you know, seed rounds back in the day, actually our seed round was something like 750K, which back in the day was quite a cool seed round. Obviously today it's very different market. But I think that in retrospect, we realize that having very little capital to play with has allowed us to stay really focused on our mission, which was to build a true fintech, so really a technology led company. Today you see a lot of businesses in the market that calls themselves fintech, but they're really very big finance businesses with a website. From the get go, we had this obsession with automation. And we wanted to build technology and leverage technology in every piece of the value chain so that we could build the most efficient business in this space. And of course, you know, it's very tempting along the way to hire loads of money and take shortcuts and, you know, hire loads of people and throw money at a bunch of problems that arise. But the reality is you end up building a company on very weak foundations. And, you know, in the future you have a huge cost base and you never really managed to reach profitability. So I think that it was a blessing that we raised so little money. And in fact, you know, we turned profitable quite early on, like sort of breaking even after a couple of years and profitable after the third one. And then over time, you know, if you do much larger fund raises or growth round, you can really be in a much stronger position to negotiate and bring on the investors that you really want to work with and, you know, take your time and choose who's the right strategic partner. So it wasn't it wasn't the strategy from day one, but we realize over time that it is probably the best way to build the business. I guess you did a very similar strategy yourself, so I don't know whether you had planned it that way. This sounds almost like my playbook of a frugality to ultimately have the ability to cut a good deal when you do a series A. But I think if we go back on the frugality, which is probably one of the key things when you are like starved in cash. And if we zoom in on people, which for most tech companies is still like the main part of your OPEX, I always said that a checkout, you know, being really having limited funding forced us to make decisions as a team where, you know, every quarter we'd make like one hire in the early days and we'd make the decision together on like what was the right hire. And then as we start scaling, it would go to like one a month and then two a month. Can you tell us maybe a bit on your side, you know, like how you operated with your co-founders? Did everyone kind of agree on the like, you know, no foreboots trapping, no fundraising? How did you make your first hires and how you run through all of this? Yes. So we had like a one in one out policy. So no, we, yeah, we it's exactly what you said. You know, we we did not just go and try and hire, you know, people who had huge experience in that industry who were extremely expensive. We, you know, we hired few people that we thought were very smart and could look at problems in different ways. And we we took a long time to hire those people. You know, we had conversations at length and debates because we had little capital to play with. So it was it was, yeah, it's exactly how you, I guess, did it. For the audience, how many people do you have today at Lender Ball? So today we have something like 120 people. And do you think that if you actually, you know, were to raise a big round in the future, would you change your strategy? Or do you think that this, like, you know, embedded frugality? And I think, like, you know, if I say, I check out, we did, like, we had seven years of, like, being bootstrapped. And this, like, really kind of created a DNA in the company of, like, spending every dollar, like, if it's your last. And obviously, we're hiring a lot of people right now. So I think maybe people would challenge me on that. But do you think it's going to change in the future? It's something that is now part of the culture of your company? No, I think it is very much part of the culture and the DNA and, you know, the plans that we have potentially to raise additional capital in the future are not around suddenly hiring, you know, huge teams to figure out things. We still very much have this obsession on trying to automate everything and build a completely, you know, automated product for our customers. And so, yeah, the capital wouldn't be derived to that. And we love this idea of being very frugal even to this day. So one of the direct kind of consequences in Coroller of being frugal is usually you're profitable. I am not going to put you here on the stand and ask you how much in front of everyone. But I think, like, do you think that, you know, as a profitable is a good thing for a fintech, should we reinvest profitability? Or again, it's something you're going to keep over the long run because we always hear these, you know, investors and other models where people, you know, spend everything, you know, either be loss making, it be tazir, what's your strategy over the long run? And, you know, how profitable and the ball really is. I mean, that is very true. Investors do hate it. We we get always told, you know, why are you profitable? Like, why are you profitable? Surely you're not growing fast enough, you know. But I think the reality is if you're profitable and you're not growing fast, then maybe it's a problem. But in our case, I think we are quite uniquely, meaningfully profitable, but also growing over 100% year on year and also at scale, which we have been told is a quite a cool combination to have. So we, yeah, we intend on staying very much profitable. There is an investor, which I'm going to, you know, shy the name who told me it's like unusual to see these type of numbers. So I think like you're definitely doing a good job. I'll just go and say one thing now. Is like, do we do we need capital today to start a company? So if we go back for the audience that is here, when you have your seed or, you know, your friends and family, you, I mean, I read the same news and you do people who, you know, raise giant seeds and raise a lot of money. In your opinion, you know, do you think it's the right thing? Is the industry going to the right direction? Or is it something you would would be your advice to founders towards like the use of capital in the early days? Yeah, so I think obviously it's, you know, it's nonsense to assume that you always need loads of capital to build a big business. And I guess we are life examples that that is not true. I'm not saying that, you know, it's the same for all sectors, you know, companies like, I don't know, Uber is obviously will have needed a lot of capital to to become big. But in general, if you think about what it means to, you know, to build a business today and the difference with what it would have meant for our parents generation, you know, if they wanted to build a business, they would have to before starting anything, you know, spending 200 K on servers and then, you know, put it in the dock lands. And today you've got things like, you know, Amazon Web Services, which will give you a free year on which you can build anything. And it's amazing. It's super cheap. The second thing is obviously nowadays you've got, you know, with the rise of APIs, a landscape in fintech, which is basically loads of interconnected communities. And you will have, you know, revolute for your debit account and then transfer wise for your effects and then, you know, check out for payment processing. And so if you can identify a niche which allows you to use all of these different companies that have been built before you, you don't need very much money. And this is the case of Landable, right? We are integrating with checkouts to do payment processing. And so we don't have to worry about that whole part. And I think those are the sort of businesses that are particularly interesting because you can build them on very little money. Aside from that, there are so many other things, other tools available to entrepreneurs like, you know, think about it, LinkedIn, right? Recruitment is super cheap. You can just write to anyone. Our parents would have had to have all sorts of pre-existing social connections. You have like open source software. You've got free learning from the Internet. It's the most exciting and the cheapest time, even though there is so much capital in the market. It is actually the best time to start a business. OK, I have to ask this question because I was going to ask another question, but like, are you still cold calling people on LinkedIn to join the company to this level of scrappiness? I mean, we used to do this for many years. I mean, absolutely. This is the whole fragility, you know, paying for recruitment firms. That's a real luxury, which we will only, you know, only really do when we can't get someone. But I have this trick where, you know, some of my colleagues, they all have my LinkedIn passwords. And so it looks better if, you know, someone is a senior in the company tries to recruit you. So they use my account as a result. OK, so that's no longer you cold calling people, but it's OK. It kind of looks like me. Yeah, the one thing I'll say, and maybe it's an advice for the audience here just in general, because we've been through that journey yourself, is that the more genuine you can be, and if you show to the people that you target, that you truly care about them, and that they have a role to play in your company, be it five, ten, you know, 200 employees, it goes a long way. So I think, like, I use a ton of recruiters, I think 30 people recruiting team just on the recruiting site today. But, you know, like, taking the time to craft a good cold call email to somebody that you target is definitely a plus. No, no, of course, absolutely. And I think also, you know, everyone who works at Lenderball has equity and, you know, incentivizing and making people feel a part of the team, and especially if you can manage to build a big company while retaining a small team, there's a real, you know, I guess, family feeling around the company. And that's a big plus. What was the take of the investors on the whole frugality? And like you said, they want you to go and spend money, but like, there is still like quite some time that has been, you know, elapsed between your, you know, your four million pound last round and what might come next. So is it something that when you're at the board meetings, they're telling you, hey, Vic, go and raise a ton of money. The business is performing awesome. Is it something like, you know, they understand your DNA. I was with Tom Stafford just like an hour ago on another scene here and he was raising or like highlighting that he liked the frugality approach, which is unusual for their portfolio. What's the take of your investors and without pointing anyone to the general scent? Yeah, well, I guess, I guess it depends whether for your specific type of business, the bottleneck is capital and whether you could do, you know, much better things and faster if you had access to money and that was the case, you know, we would just, we would just raise loads of capital and spend it where we could. But because we are a lending business and we are originating assets over numerous years, there is no real way to accelerate that without jeopardizing, you know, the portfolio quality. And so you can't really fast forward time. And, you know, even if you were to raise loads and loads of money, you can't just decide to suddenly offer loans to the entire market without, you know, basically relaxing your credit rules just to increase fees and your revenue. So I guess that, you know, they're fine with it because it's simply not a good strategy for the business that we are. And in fact, most of the investors that we have brought on, you know, between the first year of our business and the start of this year have been strictly on a secondary basis because we had no need for capital. We were meaningfully profitable and so, you know, we, yeah. And so like, okay, you didn't need the need for capital, but I want it now still in terms of helping the audience here and being, you know, creating valuable content. If we think about a go-to-market, and like, so you build an incredible product that is in the daily lives of millions in the UK, and you know how to originate loans and do it efficiently, how was your go-to-market? Basically, can you run a little bit what is a scrappy go-to-market strategy? And I want to say one thing, by the way, scrappy is a compliment. You know, it's something at ShakeOut we take very seriously. I think quite often if you embed fragility early on, you see people taking a lot of money to do certain things that you can just be a bit smarter to do them and I'll put this, it's a true compliment. So like that's if we double down on kind of go-to-market a little bit. Yeah, again, it's so product specific. So if you think about the Neobanks, for example, you know, when they go to market, they have to spend millions, sometimes hundreds of millions in acquiring customers that will end up on their app and potentially be unprofitable to them because they just use their service without, you know, using the service on that bank account that makes the Neobank money. In our case, if you think about the concept of taking out a loan, it has little advantage to try and spend or splurge money on direct marketing because, you know, when you take out a loan, you have to have a reason for it and you start paying interest, you know, the day you do on a monthly basis and so you wouldn't really, you know, take it out without an idea of why. And so the way that you distribute a product like that in the market is very different and it's specifically sort of a pool marketing strategy where you integrate via aggregator websites. And in our case, we were actually the player in the market that moved those distribution channels towards full integration. So now in the UK, if you want to take out a loan and you go to these, you know, big channels where the majority of the traffic online goes, customers will give like very basic data and we've built technology to give them an instant decision. So in one click, we can say, hey, Guillaume, you want to loan this is your rate and then in a few minutes, you've got the money in your account. And so we know that we will only ever pay those partners when we complete a loan. And so the distribution is very frugal in a sense because you already know before starting what your unit economics are and that you're going to write a profitable loan. So that is basically because of the nature on our product. Now we've got credit cards, that's a bit different because a credit card you can take without knowing what you're going to spend it on. And so there we are starting to see the, I guess the benefits of direct marketing which is a bit more costly and you need a bit more capital to play with. What's interesting is that if I just like, from a reference from a checkout standpoint, we ended up doing like only enterprises because we didn't have marketing money. And we always say that our go-to market almost was organic. We had all the licenses, we had all the technology and we had a product that educated buyers would understand versus an emotional buyer and like big payments teams and the world's largest companies, they understand this. And so what's interesting when I hear you is that it's almost a B to B to C in a sense of like you disintermediate yourself a little bit from the end consumer but you don't have the cost. Yeah, and I guess in our case, another thing is that you wanna avoid adverse selection as much as you can if you're trying to write the best loans in the market. And so if you're gonna splurge money on, putting your brand on every London bus, you might attract consumers who have worse credit features than others because someone who by definition is a good borrower is gonna go online and see what are the offers in the market and I wanna take the most attractive one because I take care of my finances and again so these are the things that we have to consider when we do marketing at scale. Okay, now switching gears a little bit, let's maybe talk about the founders. What are the traits of characters that you find in a good founder and as we said, we talked about a bit of a different model that you and I will agree on that is actually possible, the bootstrapping approach. What are the traits of character do you think are valuable? Look, I think that successful entrepreneurship requires being slightly naive. When we started out, we had zero experience in consumer credit. Nobody had worked at a big consumer lending firm and so we were incredibly confident. We thought, super simple, we're gonna build technology, it's gonna be all automated, we're gonna keep costs low and make a super profitable business. Obviously, the reality is you run into so many challenges along the way but because you approach everything with naivety, you've got this sort of beginner's mind idea and you do things completely differently and that is very useful when you build a business. So it is not a coincidence that it was Elon Musk that built Tesla and not someone who spent 20 years at Volkswagen. Apparently someone told me when they were working on the Model 3, they spent three years working on just the tires and then suspension and then the chassis. Like three years just to find the right kind of rubber that would have been crazy for someone who worked in the traditional car manufacturing industry. So I think, yeah, being slightly naive, approaching things with a beginner mind is probably key to successful entrepreneurship. I don't know what you think. I was laughing because the naive comment is something that I say to my kids, that I say to my company, I always joke that if people were entering into relationships, into discussion, trusting the other straight away as opposed to trying to challenge the content, the world would probably be a better place. So I think it's the first time I hear this one and it's a good thing. But I think if you're a founder and you're not dreaming big or you're not aspiring, I mean, I think you should do more. I mean, there's sky's the limit. Like you say, we need to keep pushing and I had an advice when it was told to me by an investor, which I really like. He always told me the best entrepreneurs are the ones who think in 10 year increments. So it's not about what you do today, it's where the world is going. And he was like, if you're able to project yourself this far, and you need to be naive to believe that comment altogether, but I think we've tried to do this from the early days at checkout, we underwrite the fact that there's a rate of change, that businesses are changing, that there is the vaults of the world, vault in this region, like you. There is a real sense that if you don't know about the institutional complexity of a company like ours, then you will be very enthusiastic about building it and over time you see that it's highly complex. But when you start out, you see everything as extremely simple and straightforward. And I don't know whether you have that same feeling that after eight years and seeing all of the things that we didn't know about that we had to deal with, I would never do it again. And I guess I'm now very excited that I always feel that we have now figured it out and the next 10 years are gonna be probably very straightforward, super simple, what we need to do. And it's always like that, you then look back and you're like, oh my God, it was nothing like I thought. Do you have a similar feeling? I love how genuine you are. I'm not sure I'd go and say that I wouldn't do it again. I love my company, I'd do it forever, but dealing in 19 countries and licenses from Mexico to Brazil to Japan, yeah, definitely there's a lot of complexity to deal with. About future countries and expansions, can you tell me a bit more about where Lendabo is going? What do you have in stock for what's coming? Yeah, so we have very exciting plans. We're going to the US, which is obviously for what we do at Market 10X, the size of the UK. And in many ways, in our view, it resembles the UK market. You've got the same data providers, you've got the same asset buyers, the same distribution channels are actually the same companies in both countries. So we have a very clear view on how we are going to enter that market. Now, obviously in the details, everything is different and so we are working on that and building that right now. But we think that we will be live writing loans and offering the whole suite of products in the US next year. So that's very exciting. Are you moving to the US? I would like to move to the US. I'm going to initially travel back and forth quite a lot, but probably not move full-time. But yeah, it's obviously a super exciting place to be. We have a little office in New York. Biggest market and a very cool place to do business. Okay, a few maybe words of wisdom. I mean, like I said, you're one of the most incredible founders I know and I think we have to highlight this again. The female leader in Fintech, Bootstrap, the company, super nice, always there for her friends. I mean, lots of compliments that could keep going. And I think, you know, there's definitely like founders here which would love to hear a bit of your wisdom, so. Oh dear. You did not worry me about this question. A word of wisdom. Look, I think what's the most important thing is you just got to enjoy what you do. You know, I was fortunate to start this company with incredible co-founders who are still today, my best friends, and that's just been incredibly exciting. And so still today, we go to the office and we have a great time. And I think that's probably priority number one, especially if you give so much to your work. Yeah, surround yourself by the right people and have a good time. Okay, thank you very much. This was like very insightful. And like I said, I hope for everyone that you enjoyed this and good luck to Lendable. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.