 Hi everybody, thanks for joining us today and thanks for welcoming us to Helsinki and the lovely weather and temperature We were sharing the anecdote that I brought far more layers of clothing than Guillaume for this time around So I'm enjoying it the weather Guillaume may be a little less so so We have roughly 25 minutes and the objective of this is to make this a little bit conversational rather than an interview and to share really primarily Guillaume His story as well as the story of checkout and hopefully for the entrepreneurs in the in the room the founders in the room to learn a little bit About how Guillaume built checkout and maybe some lessons and learnings That he has first all So by way of quick background, my name is Tom Stafford. I'm managing partner of Investment firm called DST global and we have the honor of being investors and shareholders in checkout Having co-led a round of investment a number of years ago the first-ever round of investment the series a of checkout Guillaume is obviously the founder and CEO of checkout And why don't we start with the origin story as it were the story of checkout and The path through of the last few years. Sure. So thank you very much for having me here And I was a repeat founder. So fundamentally, this was like my third business I had two business before this one and both of them are in payments and by being in payments when you facilitate payments you have to work with banks historically and That whole model was mostly broken Simply because like banks do a lot of things and they were not pure play e-commerce, which was our focus and In 2009 when the payment service directive one appeared in Europe It gave the opportunity to fintech companies like ours to essentially disintermediate the whole value chain So instead of being forced to work with banks. We had the opportunity to basically become a bank or so become an acquiring bank That was a journey took a bit of time But essentially the moment we saw that opportunity it was the you know the idea behind checkout We have the opportunity to basically control that value chain control what we sell put the merchants directly to the payment methods instead of these like multiple layers of technology and you know Historical players who are there who are eating margin and not making a lot of sense And having a true tech first approach So the idea was really like based on the accumulated experience as a previous founder and employee also in the payment space since 2006 to do everything yourself And fundamentally It took you know seven years of bootstrapping until we had a product that we were really happy with And then you came into the story. I think that's a And and there's a kind of a two interesting parts of that one is The you ran the business profitably in order to be bootstrapped for that six seven plus years before we invested But also that you didn't go for investment until you had the product you were happy with Why did you wait for investment until that product you had that product you really were happy with so I think there's like a We have a very special story and we were actually very lucky because early in the journey So if I just rewrite history a little bit or I tell the story how it happened in 2012 we applied to the FCA which is the financial regulator of the UK at the end of 2012 They gave us the license and in 2013 we received what is called a principal membership of visa mastercard So at that point in time you're basically you have the right to connect directly to the schemes You're not going through Barclays, which was the historical provider. We were using and so fundamentally You know we had an early client who saw the the product because those licenses are public and they're like hey You have this and that merchant I mean still merchant today called deal extreme DX comm selling electronics all around the world And they created you know a Flow of revenue that allowed us to bootstrap intelligently the company and it didn't make us like rich in any way It was not a lot of capital and we were still in the early days where it was like, you know One higher per quarter and would make decisions as a team. Who is the person who we're hiring? But we were very methodical on how we build the business because to answer your question The time is so big in payments So the total addressable market what we go after that for us it was really a matter of building the product properly and There is a third step that quite often most people don't realize that when you have the gateway that connects the website or the Application to the bank when you have the bank you have a third piece of technology that is behind And that's what we call a payment processor and from 2013 to 2016 we build this Like you know heads down Not public but I gave up the CEO role for three years to be head of product because I was like That's how we create value over the long term and this is a life journey for me like like I said third company I'm gonna do this forever. I really enjoy what I'm doing. I enjoy building the company and The story goes that in 2016 we relaunched everything. We're now at that point in time in the UK You know with all the fun tech Blossoming and like the Revolut transfer wise transfer go as emo They all became her clients because they're themselves competing with the bank So seems kind of counterintuitive to go and work with a bank and then in 2018 we signed Netflix fair play For like a global deal and that's where we realized that you know We took the company really far on a bootstrapping perspective. We have nearly 300 employees But it's like I've never been to see of such a big business But I've never had that experience and I want to surround myself with like you know smarter people than me That are gonna help me build the global business that we have today essentially So so the catalyst then in sort of that 2018 time frame was sort of the the scaling the quality of customers You now succeeded in pulling which proved the product and you were at that point then an affliction point You then chose to take capital to take an external investment. Yeah, absolutely I mean so you know for one Netflix who tells you yes You usually have nine merchants who tell you hey You're not financially strong enough for us because ultimately your balance sheet was our retain earnings the money that we keep And we were not like immensely profitable We were a bit profitable, but we would try to reinvest as much as possible And I think like we when we set out to raise the series a I had what I call is my equation of value And I had like four things that were important. Have you copyrighted that the equation of value? Yeah, I probably should it's just like it's each time I raise capital I always try to say like what am I optimizing for it's like what am I looking what what is the investor gonna bring me and We were looking for four things We were looking for an operator somebody who had experience and go to market and building in scaling global businesses We were looking for somebody who had a very strong network and had you know Been part of some of the world's most meaningful tech companies and the Silicon Valley network and all the things We didn't have we're looking for somebody who had experience in fintech and like you know like because we believe that every fintech company is going to be a multi-product company so like you know who can see a lot of fintech and somebody in Asia and Who had that experience in Asia and the network in Asia and you know starting again from the bottom the Starting from the second one, which is the experience globally that was you I mean nobody is better than DST for like a global network being part of some of the most exceptional You know tech journeys that have been kind of written the number one was insight partner Who's been a very good firm to us also in terms of like helping us operate the business They're both on the very early stage and a true operator They buy businesses and operate those businesses and then Mickey from rivet capital for for the fintech piece and GIC for the Asia piece and You know that equation of value was like literally Britain. We were like that's what we want And we optimized from there going forward, you know, I think like and I was lucky that you give me a you know a chance I mean, maybe I should just return you the question is like why did you choose check out when you saw us across all these decks that you see? as an investor Well, I think Like you we have an equation It's not as copyrighted perhaps as your equation, but but our equation, you know has multiple factors But really you can distill tonight to three which is team TAM and traction and TAM is undeniable. It's so large We barely need to talk about the time of payments and indeed all the other things tangential the payments that you will touch Traction was incredible for a bootstrap company that no Capital base to work with essentially other than retained earnings to have won the merchants You'd won and to build a product you'd built to have the license You had and sort of Netflix as as one marquee client But many other clients that were very discerning clients and customers meant that traction was very very strong and Overall though we index almost all of our decision-making around the team and Really within team we index to the founder and so I Decided to invest within 25 30 minutes of meeting you in person That was in the days we used to meet in person does before before zoom or not before soon before we were doing deals over zoom and ultimately we we index ourselves to to to the human being right that's running the business because Like you're saying this is your your life's work, right? You're gonna run this for a long time the ultimate belief is that the founder embodies ownership both in terms of actual ownership of the shares and the company but also the ownership of the vision and as the only person therefore who can derive the ability and The credibility to deliver on the vision quarter in quarter out But also year in year out and decade in decade out and if we think about the big technology companies They're big because they compound they keep on taking risk and achieving a reward and we think founders can do that so to your question our equation is team time and traction and You check out and you hit all of those for us in a very meaningful way So then we have to go into battle mode and make sure we could win the deal, but ultimately You know the decision was made very quickly For the record and for the audience I never asked him this question So it's the first time he answers me so I'm completely leveraging being here and being able to ask questions in front of a lot of people Yeah, I mean the ultimate answer is that The asset of a great technology company. There's many assets There's licenses and customers and revenues and balance sheet But the biggest asset and the most important one is the team Because if you don't have the right team and you can't establish a team and keep it driving forward Particularly the founder the business and going to achieve. I think this is a good point So actually I could I could build on this There's a few things is like when we before when we were bootstrapping and you know I capitalizing on capital, which is here. There's we've done it in two different ways We've done it like when we had no capital at all And then it was mostly about selling a mission and vision to like, you know my colleagues and my partners at the time because we weren't playing the Traditional tech crunch game and raising a lot of money and our competitors were raising a lot of money And we were like heads down. Let's build the best product. We're the underdog It's like David versus Goliath and like we were like kind of, you know boosting our energy and around this like competitive spirit, which I think is still very much in the company and like Being frugal and smart on how we were using our resources So there's a huge amount of like resource allocation as a CEO is like, how do you make good decisions with what you have? But then we graduated with Sunday We have hundreds of million and I think we we have eight hundred million dollars or eight thirty that we have raised and Then it became a completely different ballgame because first of all The merchants who were telling us no because we didn't have enough balance sheet started keep telling us Yes, and you know think of Clarina Facebook like all these ones and then you have basically and you know the thing is growing so fast and And I think it was a good investment decision when we see how we're growing this year But I think like taking a step back if you want to build a meaningful company You're basically and I really mean like a really large one You're basically as a CEO designing an operating system for humans or a human operating system is like and people will call it like Processes and admin and things like this. I don't necessarily I think like you know processes like hinder innovation You need to be you need the right level of balance But getting all your teams to interact well properly and like creating velocity and product engineering and predictability All these things are super important And so the truth is when we raise the series a it was mostly the founding team like people who had been there Hey, they had grown through the ranks and across the last 24 months We have rebuilt the whole executive team and the founding team some and some of the founding team I like the people were there from the early days. They're still here many of them They were just like you know They agreed that they had taken the ship to like you know from zero to a thousand people and this year We hired like another thousand were at seventeen hundred and next year will hire fifteen hundred or two thousand and and the reality Is that you can only do this if you surround yourself with people who have the experience that you don't have and so We went through that whole exercise saying hey, we want people who've seen the movie before We did all these hires this year and like you know the CTO from Twilio the chief revenue officer from we were the CFO recently from Tiro price people who have seen scale who have you know seen the movie before and I think like that's a huge part of You know why I'm comfortable about where the company is going in terms of future because yes We have a ton of problems. We're growing super fast and you have all the high-growth problems still But I'm surrounded by people that I trust who I can delegate to these decisions entirely And I think a good this CEO should you know push decisions as much as possible away for him It's about pushing decisions down into the org But I wouldn't be able to do it if I hadn't had the right team So like huge amount of focus across like you know post fundraising was like building a team that can basically Execute at scale in terms of where we want to go But I think it's interesting. You said it's sort of post fundraising that happens. I think that's sort of almost Incorrect in some respects and that you're always building the team and ultimately building the best team Doesn't matter if you've raised money not raise money How much you've raised it comes from the vision that you can impart to people and the way in which you empower them to Help you build that vision. I think that's one of your strengths has been surround yourself with people That are very strong But who buy into your vision because you're very clearly communicating what the vision is and how it should work and I think what a One thing that that I've noticed over the last few years is as funny rounds. We got bigger and more sort of Glorified is people think that is the marker of success and how we win the team is because we've raised money Ultimately the best team come because they want to work with other great people around a vision They believe in and I think that's one of your strengths Actually imparting that vision imparting that desire that ambition and putting it all together to a team We have a lot of so we're very much on like simple formulas a check out and our three values are very basic It's like a spire excel and unite and as far as that you got a dream big and it's not a question of being ambitious It's just having a very big vision and wanting to go really far Excel is that there's no point in doing something if you don't do it right and unite because your decisions should unite people behind you So I think like the good leaders what they do is they attract people and if you're able to attract people It's a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy You're gonna be able to dream bigger and I you know today we're considering and we're actually executing on certain things We didn't even dream or possible like five years ago, but we have so much more people and we have I think like you know funny enough For like large founders today are large CEOs your attrition the amount of people you have in New York and how you are basically like You know how you're able to engage your employees and your colleagues is like super important because it creates your output as a company You know there is it's and so fundamentally people will bond will get excited for a mission that is meaningful And in a certain sense the mission here a checkout is to help businesses grow It's help businesses recover after COVID and like we are we're not a company that people see We are behind most of these very large companies But we help them basically grow go to new markets and in a way We have if we were I don't have the numbers But I'd look the amount of people that are here in this room today We're probably touching 70% or 75% not only because of Netflix and everyone having a Netflix description But I think it's a it's just nice to know that you have a role to play in society Now when you say you touch all these people That sort of belies the fact that actually you're in an incredibly complex industry and I'm behind sort of that simple front end That when we check out at the e-commerce store or we set up our subscription on Netflix It feels relatively simple to us because of the work you and others have done But behind that is a huge amount of complexity How do you tackle that complexity within both payments itself financial services and then all the multiple jurisdictions you work across? What's the way would you simplify it for yourselves in the organization? So I think like I'm gonna try not to bore the whole audience with like a lot of technical terms We work in a and like you said there's the financial regulation to start with there's the the fact of moving money And at this point it's like hundreds of billions of euro that you're actually moving every year And so that that alone and that is only getting more complex by the way It's like you know compliance is only going into one direction So it's like it's more compliance, but you have you know you have different payment methods by regions You have different regulations by regions not on the financial side typically here in Europe We have strong customer authentication. You're gonna have 3ds to 3ds one. What do issuers want? You're gonna have open banking that is coming in actually most of the merchants They would choose a company like ours because we're essentially future-proofing their payments It's this whole logic that you know, I cannot I I could certainly not tell you what the future is about Of course, I have an idea But I think like you know what we can do is that as the world of payments evolve as you have you know Like GDPR compliance added on top of it because you know there or like you know data sovereignty Which you see in India for instance where you need to have your service there We can help solve some of those those problems for like large merchants and more importantly Historically a large merchant he would have had a service, you know payment service provider one for Europe one for Australia one for Asia One for the US and having the licenses everywhere allows to people to say hey single API single regulation Reconciliation single flow of funds if you want to large merchants quite often have different revenue centers So they're gonna ask you to split the payments across different like revenue centers But it's basically having a counterpart who's supporting your business as you're growing and as you're attempting new things being it like By now pay later or crypto or you know a lot of the topical topics of the moment So we can't have you here on stage at slush and not talk about crypto because you're obviously quite bullish on crypto and and you have you have built and are building a lot of solutions for Crypto first companies both around payments and other things that you're doing. Can you share a little bit about? first of all why you're so bullish on crypto and second of all why you've made it a sort of a Key focus within checkout. So I think there is a Many ways you could actually answer this question I'm gonna start first like just late the intellectual curiosity, which is a I was telling you I started in payments in 2006 For nearly 10 years. It was mostly the same thing And that's means like visa mastercard a few APMs But I mean or maybe a hundred of APMs, but you're still like, you know the same kind of rails and here comes a technology that has completely different rails and Fundamentally when you look at it from just like, you know in the helicopter view It's able to move money instantly from one way. Let's not even say I think the word money for now is wrong We can get to this later. It's able to move value from one point to another for free Instantly with the ability to track Exactly how the money is moving for so you have complete visibility to To everyone on how the money is moving That's why people can go and say on Twitter that Somebody has an eight billion dollar position on Shiba Inu that he bought for eight thousand dollars like, you know a few years ago I don't know what's the amount, but I mean it was it was one of those sweater feeds that we saw And and so if you take this and you take the intellectual curiosity and you're working payments You're like by the finishing that is cool I think like that's the way to look at it Then I have 1700 people I check out who have similar ambitions of like, you know building cool technology for merchants So you have different ways to look at it You have the merchants who are asking you you have my intellectual curiosity Yeah, my engineers are like hey, we should you know in the innovation team We should look at this like very carefully and I think like what we did realize is that we tried To be part of that what was originally the lead when we tried we are part of the Libra project that then turn into dm Project, which was like, you know the Facebook endeavor I should not say Facebook endeavor a consortium of like global companies which out of which many are our clients Spotify Shopify Facebook, you know like Uber getting together To ultimately build a stable coin that would essentially solve the problems that I was you know raising before and that they could embed So for us again intellectual curiosity behind You have this opportunity to brainstorm with people that are incredibly smart that run very large businesses and seeing like how can we make you know Financial system or an OS for money that works at scale would like super smart people And that project did not went as well as we would had hoped it's well documented Journalists wrote plenty out of it, but the truth is in parallel of this. I mean stable coins went from like, you know Zero to you know hundreds of villains at this point across USDC and the other ones that are available back source coin and I think if I now you know thing in terms of where we are We tackle the crypto industry in two ways a we in we embedded early with like web three developers on ramps Exchanges so we process for most the world's the largest exchanges and The American ones like Coinbase the Asian was like Binance. I mean we love that space We like to see what's happening and it's again like in the best part of my job If I just take one step back is that I get to work with some of the world's most innovative companies see them in action And I think this is like kind of fascinating But then you like you said there is the world is moving so quickly because just in the last 12 months This thing like exploded totally And so fundamentally now there's real applications. There is merchants who are asking you to get the stable coin sediment Which is a big thing. I think we'll see a lot of it. I'm not talking about a roadmap I think like you know my marketing team is like we'll talk about this another time But I think like stable coins sediments are a big thing payments and stable coins or payments and crypto is another big thing There's three trillion dollars of crypto out there. That's value I think like and I think right now I was like I said it's not necessarily a currency yet because for currencies You need regulation and you need a lot of things that are kind on top of it But the value is stored the value is locked in the ledger and the blockchain and more importantly And I think just taking a step back because I was saying, you know how my team is pushing me to go there I see two things happening I see people like you very smart investors putting money into crypto like companies and there is a lot So there's more money in crypto than there has ever been and then I see a lot of very smart kids out of University that would have historically, you know MIT Harvard Stanford you you name it They would have become an investment banker or whatever do something and now they want to build like a web 3 application And they want to be part of DeFi or something like this and one thing you have seen across the last 15 years of you know This internet life of mine from 2006 to now is that when you have at the intersection of money and smart people Usually good things happen, you know, there's gonna be a lot of crappy projects I think there's more than 500 block chains at this point and they keep being added all the time You look on coin market cap you have new coins being added every single day But the truth is there will be good stuff happening And I think like you cannot be a global fintech company and not have teams that are actually part of that thinking and that are challenging Themselves if anything we love to brainstorm in this company like we challenge ourselves a lot. So naturally You know, we have the clients and now we're we've always that's another thing also just the last thing We've always built for our customers. So we build with our customers in mind We have a very humble kind of European approach unlike some of the American companies that tell you hey This is the way to go. We know better than you we tend to go with customers saying what are your problems? Let us, you know, solve let us build products that solve your problems and Crypto merchants have you know, like, you know are growing so fast that they care about building the web 3 They don't care about how to bring fiat on the web 3 or move fiat out And you know, those are the problems we're solving for them and it's working pretty well Let me ask you a very quick question before we get to our last question, which is We talked earlier by complexity of payments generally and that was mostly we talked about in the fiat world that the traditional world And now we just talked about the crypto world For you, is it more complex to build payments within crypto or to build payments within the fiat world? There's no good way to answer this question the only thing I can tell you is that The the opportunity in crypto is that it's highly dynamic and we really don't know what the future holds So I mean you still have a scenario where like, you know, China bands like stable coins And so does the US and the whole thing kind of disappears, which I think is very unlikely at this point But I think like you still have the traditional financial systems that feel kind of threatened by defy by yield products by staking By everything that's available out there. That's actually pretty powerful when you think about it. So I think like the Building technology is what we do solving payment problems is what we do and actually building crypto products is not harder than building Fiat products and though we have like, you know, I can say it now nearly 10-year experience in the fiat world But I think you know the best engineers at checkout are very keen on crypto So there's like I have really bright minds that are going against it The one thing I will say is that fiat gives me the certainty of revenue you process the big merchants The crypto world is just like you have it's not uncertainty of revenue It's just like we the future will be there so we don't know what it's gonna look like So it's harder for planning perspective So the in the last minute or so that we have here I think would be really interesting for you to share one or two or even three if you have time sort of pearls of your wisdom Experience whatever phrase you want to use for the sort of the aspiring founders and entrepreneurs that we have here About what you've learned to one of the one two three key lessons for you about about being an entrepreneur being a founder And so I'll start with one thing I always say this is You gather all the data and the information with your head, but you should make decision with the heart I think it's like quite often I see people over engineering decisions like it's very important to trust your instinct I think as a CEO, maybe it's a collection of experiences and things like this But like making decisions with the heart is a very important one And I think the second one I would say is that it's the amount of good decisions that you do that is important Not your ratio of good decisions So I think like make decisions quickly and working you know like getting making sure your work streams are going You know moving fast is what's most important because success comes out of velocity And if I'm able to like make a lot of good decisions even have to make a few wrong ones, I don't care I think at the end of the day Being able to iterate move fast make a lot of decisions is what creates success and never forget to use the heart to Make the decision. I think that's wonderful. By the way, the phrase success comes out of velocity I think is a wonderful phrase. So on that note, thank you Guillaume. Thanks everybody for listening to us Thank you everyone. Nice