 In his story, the mystery of Marie Roje, Edgar Allan Poe wrote, experience is shown, and a true philosophy will always show that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant. And so it is that I'm here today, not as a payment engineer, but as vice president of customer success at Clubhouse Software, to do my small part to lend another perspective, voice, and beating heart in the hope of unearthing the more truth around payment technology. While it may seem like we here don't share much with a 19th century poet and author, I'd like to tell you a story. In 1843, Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold Bug was published. It was to be his most popular and lucrative work released during his lifetime. Most of you have likely never heard of it. We know The Raven, Telltale Heart, but maybe not The Gold Bug. However, it was this story that won him a whopping $100 at the time, $100 being the equivalent of about $3,000 today. This was a total winnings from a short story contest held by The Dollar Paper, a Philadelphia-based publication of The Day. Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first American authors to actually attempt to make a living purely through writing. And as his blog post title shows, he wasn't very good at it. Poe was the son of two actors, one who, his father, who departed from their family slightly after he was born, and his mother who died tragically around the time he was a year old. An orphan, he was taken in by a wealthy merchant, one John Allan, who had young Edgar Poe baptized Edgar Allan Poe. While a student at the University of Virginia, Poe repeatedly gambled away money meant for tuition and school supplies, and eventually dropped out. This led to him becoming estranged from his foster father, Mr. Allan. Additional quarrels with Allan, who was rich and extremely adulterous, led Poe to become disowned by him and excluded from Allan's will. So no trust fund, no parents or foster parents to fall back on, Poe had just a pen, a vivid imagination, and dogged persistence. So the Telltale Heart was published before the Gold Bug in January of 1943, and Poe was reportedly paid $10 for it. His poem The Raven, published in 1845, came on the heels of his popularity from the Gold Bug. However, he was paid only $9 for it. It was the Gold Bug that drew standing room-only crowds to pose lectures, and gained him fans across the globe in places such as France, Russia, and Japan. In fact, he was actually paid twice for the story, first $52 by Graham's Magazine, a periodical for which he served as an editor. But then he heard about this $100 from the dollar paper, so he pulled back the Gold Bug from publication from Graham's Magazine, notably never returning that initial $52 to Mr. Graham. So we can bring the total winnings on this up to $152 to be more accurate. I don't begrudge you if you've never heard of the Gold Bug. To be honest, I never heard of it either until I actually sat down to write this talk. Having read it, can't necessarily recommend it. It's not that great of a story, and to put it bluntly, it's kind of racist. Without excusing racism, I do think the kernel of this story, and posed story more generally, is useful in illustrating a central point I'd like to make to the Gold Bug. In this story, an unnamed narrator travels to meet with an old friend, one William Legrand, who lives on an island near Charleston, South Carolina. Legrand is sort of an eccentric, prodigal sun type who is full of endless, fanciful, sort of get rich, quick schemes. So when our narrator arrives, Legrand and his companion, a freed, yet still-in-servitude black man called Jupiter, explain that while wandering through the woods that day, they come across a live beetle that they believed was somehow made of solid gold. Our narrator listens politely to the story and then slowly heads back home to Charleston, never actually laying eyes on this Gold Bug, they mentioned, since Legrand had curiously lent it out to a friend. Month later, Jupiter comes racing to the door of our narrator and beckons him to return to the island. Legrand, who is now sweatier and wilder than ever, informs the narrator that as it turns out, on that excursion a month ago where they'd come across the bug, which was now in his possession again, but dead anyway, they also came across a scrap of paper connected to Spanish treasure hidden by one long, dead pirate called Captain Kidd. With that paper, Legrand had been able to decipher the exact location back out in the woods where they'd be able to get their hands on the loop. Legrand says to our narrator, this bug is to make my fortune to reinstate me in my family possession. Is it any wonder then that I prize it? Since fortune has thought to bestow it upon me, I have only to use it properly, and I shall arrive at the gold of which it is the index. After some cajoling, Legrand convinces Jupiter and our narrator to head back out into the woods to a particular tree. From there, the directions are very specific. They are to tie the gold bug to a string, climb up the tree, dangle the gold bug on a string through first the right islobe, then the left islobe of a skull nailed to a branch at the top of the tree. Then Jupiter, who's doing all the work here, is to drop the bug and X marks the spot where they have to dig. The narrator, at this point, relates a certain amount of doubt to us saying something we all likely can relate to, especially those who report directly to founders. Upon the whole, I was sadly vexed and puzzled. But at length, I concluded to make a virtue of necessity, to dig with a good will, and thus the sooner to convince the visionary by ocular demonstration of the fallacy of the opinions he entertained. So spoiler alert, after quite a bit of digging and shouting and napping on the ground and then waking up and digging some more, they finally obtain the coveted treasure. When they've dragged it back to the shack, LeGrand explains to Jupiter and our dear narrator that he hadn't been crazy at all during that whole month. Instead, it turned out he'd been wound up in an elaborate cipher, which required quite a bit of code cracking and Sherlock Holmes-style detective work. In the end, Jupiter and our narrator are fascinated, and from what I could tell, highly relieved that their friend had finally gotten what he was looking for and would hopefully stop dragging them into the woods at night. Now LeGrand, with his righteous indignation about being due his fortune, is surely just a thinly veiled version of Poe. And in some ways, Poe is himself not so different from us in the startup field. Much like Poe, founders have a vision and some positive indicators in the market, and people seem enthusiastic about what they're doing. But how do they get the fortune they believe is their due? In Poe's day, he wrote on spec in the hope that he might win a contest or a small contract that he could go collect on. These days, tech founders throw together a pitch deck and a website and then try to set up a simple system for people to add their credit cards and pay them. So I shared the story with you because I think Poe's life and work offers a few key lessons for the modern startup. The first one is around iteration. So Edgar Allen Poe is known as the father of modern horror and in some other corners he's known as the father of science fiction and still also known as the father of cosmology and cryptography, the art of code tracking. Nearly 600 words or phrases were coined by Poe, some which we still use today like bugaboo and finicky and multicolor. This wasn't simply because he was a creative and divinely inspired human being. He was all those things to be sure but he was also scrambling for relevance and money. He was iterating and aiming to please. In 1839, before the publication of the Gold Bug, Poe published an article in Alexander's Weekly Messenger where he challenged the readers to send him coded messages to decipher. He received hundreds of messages so he knew the interest and audience was there for this kind of thing and that's what led him to write the Gold Bug. Poe wanted what we all want which is to deliver to customers and be paid for it. He was an artist to be sure but he was intensely concerned about being an entertainer and reaching what today in the startup world we might call product market fit. So me, as I mentioned before, I'm vice president of customer success at Clubhouse Software and this role I help customers find their way around our software and begin to master it. I also oversee our customer support team. So by show of hands, are there any people here who do direct support for customers? Hi Nicole. Great. Cheers for you. You're the heroes of the company. Support is responsible for being responsive to our customers. Support is also the frontline for filling any payments problems. Now I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember this and it also might be just an American thing but in the 80s there was a brand called Vidal Sassoon that had a tagline, if you don't look good, we don't look good. The idea there is that your appearance and success in using their products was a direct reflection on them. And this is true in all manner of customer facing work. Regardless of how chaotic or seemingly in flux the company is, the role of success and support is to make the company and product with pull together and sleep. We want our customers not only to choose us but feel encouraged by that choice, both in the product they receive and also in the ways that they interact with our company. As such, no matter how the product may change, we need the user experience to feel consistent from the initial marketing touch straight through to payment. When we can't explain customer invoices, we don't look so good. This is a whiteboarding exercise from a few weeks ago, you don't need to squint if you can't see all the details, they're not that important. But in this exercise, my colleague and customer success worked with one of our engineers to devise what would be the ideal invoice. Working backwards from a list of customer complaints about our confusing existing invoice. This is sad and frustrating. The invoice should just work so that we can work on providing a great experience to the customer. When we can't decipher mysterious bank codes like Alex talked about, but the customer insists that their form of payment is valid, we don't look so good. When we struggle to make refunds or rerun invoices or when we have to read through convoluted logs to understand that how and why of a user's billing history, we can start to lose customer confidence. Our payment system and the billing experience needs to look good and feel good or else our product and our company start to look downright bad in the eyes of the customer. The next area after iteration where I think Poe can shed some light is on innovation. Poe's gold bug arrived on the scene at a challenging but exciting time in this country. The American economy had just rebounded from the panic of 1837, a five year depression that many believed was caused by President Andrew Jackson's policies against the banks. At times during that depression, things got so bad that people were giving out this thing. It's called a hard times token. They gave it out in lieu of pennies. This is an abolitionist one and they came in many themes, some were humorous and poking fun at Andrew Jackson. But by 1843, the year the gold bug was published, we pulled out of that depression and a number of innovations were making publishing cheaper and easier than it had ever been before. These innovations include the rotary, the first lithographic rotary printing press, a press in which the type is placed on a revolving cylinder instead of a flatbed. This sped up the printing process considerably and a form of it is still used today. The inventor William Siemens of the same electronic company Siemens that exist today had also helped to roll out anesthetic printing, a process of printing on zinc plates that made the copying of prints, designs, and literature faster and cheaper. This is incidentally also the same time that Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage were pulling together their work on the analytical engine. Largely considered to be an example of some of the earliest computer programming. So 1843, lots of experimentation and innovation was going on, electricity was in the air. We are living in a similar period. Innovations like the introduction of protocols, the decreasing price of microprocessors and services like AWS enabled the rise of our current tech industry. However, as our poor unfortunate Mr. Poe discovered, there's quite a difference between riding a wave and being submerged by it. Well, as I mentioned, I'm not an engineer in the beginning at Clubhouse, we were a tiny team, there were five of us, and I worked very closely with the engineers to set up and maintain our billing system. And the process hit us rather hard. Enabling payments was one of the biggest hurdles to clear before we could formally launch our product. You see, like at many companies, our engineers were hired for their competency and the skills necessary for building our product. While we have to build or integrate and also maintain a payment system, that is not our product. As was mentioned many times today, we build and maintain a payment system so we can get paid for building our product. Now, the payment system is integrated in the backend and our backend developers work with a functional programming language called Closure and a database, Datomic. For those unfamiliar, Datomic is a system that is immutable. And this means that an entity holds onto values over time and as such you get some sort of fancy time travel features. For billing and more importantly for understanding a customer that is so valuable. For example, if someone was an active customer and then they left for a long stretch, it's useful to be able to trace back their actions and find out what may have led to them abandoning the product. As a customer success person, they can be really hard to understand reasons for churn. So looking into the system provides a lot of information. Being able to see this full picture of the past and the present is important to people who do any sort of account management. And if you're interested in this and learning more about Datomic, there's a really great talk called Four Datomic Superpowers from a previous Closure Conch that I encourage you to check out. There's really a lot of great functionality there. However, for us leveraging Datomic to get that full picture meant that we had to take on a large share of the complexity of the payment system and set up our own trialing and payment logic. Something that we weren't terribly thrilled to do. Taking on this complexity also means that we have a hard time using the out-of-the-box integrations with many analytics metrics and subscription management services. Most of the integrations tend to only work properly with the vanilla implementation of payment processing, not the sort of mixed up hybrid version that we've implemented. So at Clubhouse, we're still very much in the process of trying to find a middle way or we can leverage the cool innovations of the day like Datomic without losing the great functionality of the payment software and perhaps more importantly, the expertise of engineers who actually specialize in payment. The third area after iteration and innovation where Poe proves instructive is in internationalization. As I mentioned before, Poe's work, particularly the Gold Bug and later the Raven gained in popularity not just in the US, but also in Europe and even Asia. In fact, great French poet Charles Baudelaire spent some 17 years translating the works of Poe, often putting his own writing aside to do so. Unfortunately, all of this international fanfare proved of little monetary value to Poe. In Poe's day, there were no international copyright treaties. The absence of such treaties met two notable things. First, instead of paying American writers to produce new content, American publishers often simply copied the work of British writers and issued it from their presses and talked about the presses being faster and cheaper. So there was no author to pay and all the profits could be pocketed by the publisher. The second thing this absence of international copyright treaties meant is that Poe had no real way of brokering to get compensated if and when his work was issued across the pond. There was work undoubtedly circulated around the world as an American whose work had not gone through whatever arduous registration processes England or France or wherever required. He had no standing in court to make a claim on his works for their translation. While I personally consider myself more of a copyright minimalist, I do sympathize with Poe as he was faced with a significant obstacle to getting paid. So as we know, the primary convention for payment on SaaS, B2B SaaS, like Clubhouse is a major credit card. But that simply doesn't work for everyone who would like to use our software. And we also know that much of the rest of the free world has wisely rid themselves of checks. According to a 2012 World Bank report, at least 110 mobile money systems have been deployed with more than 40 million users. Some six years later, I can imagine it may likely be double that number. When credit cards don't work, but mobile payment systems are on the rise, payment system purveyors should more easily enable tech companies to hook into the ways people around the world can and do pay for things. When our products have avid fans all across the world, help us find more ways to let them pay. Clothes, I want to share one last nugget of wisdom from dear old Edgar Allan Poe. In a piece called The Philosophy of Composition, Poe explained why he wrote the Raven backwards, saying, there's a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a story. I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. My ask is that those of you who are payment systems providers in the room, work with the consideration of the effect on customer success and support people like me, on engineers like the ones at Clubhouse who are not payment specialists and don't plan on becoming, and most importantly on our end users. Help us iterate on our ideas while keeping the payment experience easy and constant for the user. Help us leverage innovation without losing functionality and enable us to cultivate an international user base that pays us in the ways that work for them. And maybe, just maybe, we'll all get a little closer to our fortune. That's my website. I think the whole talk should be up there right now with links to a lot of the things I mentioned and I don't use Twitter anymore, but I do use Macedon so you can tune at me or about me at that address. Thank you.