Fast Money, Smart Data: Inside Wayflyer with Aidan Corbett

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of The Rhinatus Podcast. My name is Greg Deelger and I'm delighted to be joined today by Aiden Corbett, the CEO of Wayflar, one of the fastest-growing Fintech companies in the world. Founded by Aiden and Jack Pierce in 2019, Wayflar helps high-growth e-commerce brands to scale using data-driven revenue-based financing. In this podcast, we're going to talk about the founding story, how it all started, what exactly Wayflar does for its customers, the funding story, i.e. equity and debt, and how Aiden has managed the transition from startup to CEO of an international company with several hundred employees and professional VC investors. But before that, Aiden, you might spend a few minutes about yourself and where you grew up and where you're from and life before Wayflar. Born in Corbett in the early 80s, and went to primary school, secondary school in a server of a core city called Bishopstown, and then went to UCC and did electrical engineering never really worked in electrical engineering, and when I graduated, I actually moved to Dublin to become a civil servant. So my first job, I really at a university, was working in the Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources. Not the usual start, no entrepreneur, as you can imagine, but very interesting all the same. I think I was watching too much West Wing at the time, spent a summer in Washington DC as an intern, came back wanting to work in government, and so for about a year and a half, I worked in government before, decided to move to the private sector. Does it still stand to you, do you think that? I think it does. There's a couple of things that you learn in there that are not intuitive. So the first thing that you learn is that public policy and working in government is actually a lot more complex than the private sector. So for example, in the private sector, you're focused on profits, you're focused on revenues. If you're solving a problem like the children's hospital, you have so many different things to solve for, and so many different trade-offs to make. A lot of the problems that they're grappling with in the public sector are actually more challenging and more difficult. So you do learn a lot, you also learn in that department in particular, you learn how the private sector interacts with the public sector and government as well. It's a very policy-heavy department. That was really interesting to see, so you'd see, for example, some of the energy companies and how they would interact with the government, how legislation is processed. So I think I learned a ton, but after a year and a half, decided that probably wasn't where I wanted to spend my career and decided to move into the private sector. And how did that play out? What did you do? And I said to people, if I wanted to go on the fast track and learn about business, where do I go? And everyone said either management consulting or investment banking, so I did interviews with Morgan Stanley and Bane and McKinsey, and McKinsey headed up an office, and I wanted to stay here. So I joined them, I think, in 2008. That was just before the crash. So I think I joined in April, 2008, and then the crash happened. McKinsey aren't known for taking on stupid people, so you must have had a reasonable CV and reasonable interview with them. They're interview processes tough, I think we might have borrowed some of their processes, but it was a great place to work. I think it was there for about one and a half to two years before then jumping into a company called NTO, which is owned by the Roach family, and there I was really focused on working new renewables. So while I'm McKinsey, I pretty much worked entirely on energy renewables, NTO was a big investor in renewables at the time via electricity and then cemented about two years in NTO or kind of looking at some of their various investments before doing an MBA in London. So you went to your many years, I mean you always may be two years and nine to twenty eleven. Why did you leave and what was the next move? So the next move was actually an MBA in London. My girlfriend at the time, I think, was eager to move to London as well, lived in Quark and Dublin and never really lived outside of Ireland. We wanted to get that experience, and I also wanted to take a step back to figure out what I wanted to do next. The MBA was a nice way to do that, so I do describe the MBA as an expensive way of taking time off. I recommend it per se as a great option for everybody, but for me at the time, I think it did give me the chance to kind of take a step back and figure out what I want to do next. And that's where I really had the time to decide, oh, I'm going to become an entrepreneur. And I had no inclination up to that point. I mean, like you could have been an entrepreneur or anything, you didn't have a digital. No, not really. Not really at that stage. Not really, no. I think one of the things I noticed in NTO was that we backed a lot of entrepreneurs in the energy space, but it was so expensive to find out what you had. So we were launching a new solar technology or we're launching a new energy storage technology. You got to spend like 40, 50, 60 million to figure out what you actually have and whether it's economic or not. Whereas in software, you didn't need to spend anything, and you could launch a product to market. So I think. Was that essentially about sort of pushed you a little bit down that direction? The ease of access and the sort of the. Absolutely. Capital investment requirement. Absolutely. Most people, when they're looking at doing a startup today, they look at software first because it's ability to scale. You don't need much money to start off. It is very attractive. It's also very competitive, but it's very attractive if you want to go big. Okay, so what was your first adventure in that space? So my first startup was called Cubicle, which does data analytics and data science training for large corporates. And I started programming, learning how to program during the MBA. So I would attend the classes and then go home, forget about all of it. And I would essentially just spend my nights programming and learning how to code. Did you form a company at an early stage or did that come later? That took about. I think that took about a year, and then we moved back to Dublin after the MBA, and I formed the company here. But had you made any money on any revenues for any bit of advice or anything you were doing? No. No, as I. When we moved back to Dublin, because you have to keep paying the bills, I did start doing some consulting based off the management of consulting work I'd done previously. But then I spent my time ahead. I was trying to build out this new product, Cubicle. And I don't think we had a customer for about a year and a half, two years. So one of our first customers was actually a smurf at business school. Okay. And we started and we signed a contract with them to provide training to some of their students. And then anyway, second customer had been Bane, the consulting group. So that was an amazing win, where we had a great logo, with hundreds of users that really kind of allowed that company to scale. But it was never going to be a kind of a venture-backed company. Like it was really. The booth strapped it and that worked out quite well. We exited the company in 2020 and got a good return. But it never had that kind of hockey stick trajectory that I was reading about before these other companies. But I think any young leaving search people or college graduates who listen to this will be amazed at the randomness of it all. Like it sounds like you heard any great. I think most entrepreneurs end up launching. First of all, we all launch way more products than we disclose. We were very selective with the ones that we do disclose. And the thing to bear in mind is that we all launch products that fail. So even if you look at some Altman today with the CEO of OpenAI, his first startup loop was a huge failure. And I don't know if they even made it for the investors, absolutely. So I think almost all founders today have at least one skeleton than they. Absolutely. The disclose are not. Yeah, it's great to wear them, too, because it's unrealistic to think you've got it straight away. So you saw that did someone approach you or did you try to sell it or heard it? No, we tried to sell it. We went through a process. And we had a couple of buyers and we were. And the company's actually gone from strength to strength. So I'm still on the board. It's probably four or five X six we sold it. So the company's doing really well. It's based in Dublin. And they were global set of customers now. Current CEO is definitely scaling it better than I thought. From cubicle and obviously made a few Bob on that. What came next? No, we're still one stage away. And we're from Weithler. Yeah. So the next startup was called conjura. And we started conjura as kind of a data analytics consultancy, where we would work with companies on data analytics projects. And that had the nice side effect of actually giving you ideas for products that you might want to build. Conjura's product was. When I was running it, the time was a SaaS solution free commerce, a single source of truth for all the data that you would want in one single location if you're an e-commerce merchant. Okay. So e-commerce is a data game. Okay. You've data from Facebook. Presumably, you kind of had this idea a little bit when you were in cubicle and you took it with you and developed it more. No, actually we were doing a consulting project with an e-commerce company and said, "Actually, this is a problem that's repeatable that we could actually turn into a product rather than just being a project." A customer need. Exactly. I'm going to give you the. Okay. Exactly. So that really we spent about a year, two building conjura. And then in 2019, my co-founder and Weithler, who wasn't in conjura at the time, he came to it to me and said, "This is a great technology, but you shouldn't be using it for a SaaS solution. You should be using it as an underwriting engine because e-commerce companies need money much more than they need analytics." Had you ever thought of that yourself? No. Jack was working for Liam Casey at the time, thinking an accelerator. And so he had first-hand experience of that working capital chart. Okay. And for me at the time. Sir, did you know Jack from a previous. No, he had played golf with my co-founder as a very good golfer in conjura, and I think they both played him harmonics, so much better golfers than I would ever be. So that was the connection. I actually realized that, you know what, this was a painkiller, whereas I think analytics and some products are vitamins, they're nice to have. Money is a painkiller. That's the problem. The entrepreneur is awake at night, and that had the potential to have a much bigger impact. So we set up a new company called Wayflar, did an IP license agreement, gave all the employees in conjura stake in Wayflar, so they had two bites at the cherry, and then half the employees from conjura joined us in Wayflar, and we got going in September 2019. Raised a bit of money, because if you're going to be a lender, you're going to have to have a big balance sheet, then launched in April 2020. Was there. any fear during that phase that this isn't going to happen, you weren't going to get the money, were you? No, I think we actually had it early on. I think one of the skills that Jack and I both have is that we are good at raising money, and that is a skill, especially at the beginning, because you're setting a story, you're setting a dream. That's always the hardest one to sell it. And presumably you had a deck, some sort of a deck, it might be. We did, I suppose. It's sophisticated, as it would be now. But more speculative. Yeah, and it was a friend's and family around, essentially. There was actually more angels, so I think one of the things that we didn't do is we didn't bring a lot of family in to investment rounds, and I think that's probably a good thing because I think that can make the Christmas dinner a bit more awkward, especially if the company isn't going very well. I prefer to keep it to more angels and networks and some small funds, and we were able to raise it an amount of money pretty early on. We had a VC, we went through all their due diligence in March, and then when COVID hit, they kind of said, "Actually, we need to pause, but we couldn't pause because we had to keep going, because we were burning at that stage, because we had been launched." So we launched the next month, whatever money we had in the bank account, we gave out to the customers that were coming and looking for funding, and thankfully it all came back. And then we were able to raise a VC round in August, because it was a bit difficult. As a matter of interest, typically and traditionally, people would start with their home base, do something in Ireland or Dublin or take it from there and maybe go to the UK and go to the States or whatever, but you didn't have a set of an Irish kind of trial in Ireland. Where was your first customer from? The UK. The UK was month one and the US was month two, and I think Jack has spent a lot of time in the US. I think working with him. Okay. As well. I didn't sold cubicle. It's a customer is all over the world. And I think we knew that if you stayed in Ireland, there's two things that would happen. Number one, it's not actually a good test bed for a lot of markets. It's too small in the market. But also, we use the logic of, it's a good test bed, you can start here. Selling into Germany is very different, selling into Ireland, selling into the US is very different, selling into Ireland. So we said, why don't we just go after the main markets that we're going to go after ultimately? So they were the UK and the US, and even Australia, I think we launched a month fight. Okay. Well, I think of it like, there's a language dimension there with Germany and France, those European countries. How did you cope with that at a very early stage? Were you translating websites and things like that? We waited for a while. I think Spain and the Nordics, Netherlands, Belgium, we went there first. So one of the things that constrains us is regulation, it gets like France and Germany take a bit longer to enter than other markets. What kind of regulation now? Because you're not a bank, clearly. You don't have to deal with what they have to deal with. No. So sometimes our products are slightly different in different markets. So in certain markets, it's alone in another market, it's approachable. Okay. And depending on the local regulation, for example, in Germany, we would need to work with a partner bank in the Netherlands. We do. That's great. Now, just to go back a little bit, because you have your product now, in the plainness of plain English you can. I know there are different types of products. Tell me how you describe to your aunt. That exactly way flour does and how you get paid. Sure. And how the customer and where the money flows from. Yeah. Because it's not really alone, as I understand it. No, it's money. It's a bit different. But it's not alone. Let's assume Greg, you've come to me in the morning. You're running an e-commerce business and you're looking for $100,000. And you pass or underwriting, and I say, Greg, here's your offer. So $100,000, there is a 7% fee. And I'm going to charge you, I'm going to get paid back by taking 15% of your daily sales. That means you get $100,000 into your account the next day. You pay me back $107,000, but I'll take it by taking a percentage of daily sales. And it's not 7% per annum, it's 7% fee, so it's not cheap money. It's not cheap money, but they can't get it in the regular banks and it's also unsecured. So normally lots of companies that we fund already have bank debt, because we tend to understand e-commerce in a lot more detail. Yeah, access a lot more information, you can only get more money off us, and you'll get it faster. So our process by which you're being underwritten is to be a lot faster. And the offers tend to be a lot more ambitious for the ones we better work. Core proposition is that's well explained, I even get that. Yeah, again, in pretty simple terms, how do you find customers and how do they find you? What happens? Most of the time when we go to market, we're going and finding the customer. So we use a lot of direct outbound. So we have a sales team, probably about 100 people, they're based in Dublin, London, New York, and Sydney. And we're actively contacting customers through bone, LinkedIn, email, etc. As we go. And that really works for most of day one. We scale that and probably scale that with blinkers on. And what we should have done I think in hindsight is invested more in partnerships, invested more in marketing. While outbound is a great channel, there's limits to it, quite expensive. So right now, one of our big initiatives this year is reducing our alliance on outbound and hopefully bringing down the total percentage of leads coming in from maybe 85% down to 50. And that's one of our main initiatives right now. So historically, someone in my age, I associate selling with an element of personal relationship in it. But in this particular case, maybe at the outset, I can see how there were personal relationships when you were small, but as you get bigger, probably you probably don't speak to the customer that you're lending money to or do you? Well, we'll speak to them all right. We just may not know them. You may know them. Historically and financial services, there's a lot of referrals and a lot of businesses based on referrals. But if you want to scale very aggressively, you can't just be relying on referrals. And we do rely on referrals, but we also contact probably maybe a thousand companies per month that we've never spoken to before and we'd like to be outraged. And do they do they listen to you? Absolutely. And that's where the product actually helps a lot. We're solving the thing that gives you awake at night and as a consequence, we tend to get very good response rates on our own by messaging. It's also simple and so credible what you're doing. My grandmother can understand what I'm inclined. I'm always inclined to think, God, the banks have, you're the traditional source of funds really for businesses and small enterprises. They're always borrowed from banks. This is a different solution for people. And I think it presumably comes from like the banks probably aren't particularly interested in lending a lot of money into that segment anymore. It depends very much on the geography. So for example, in Spain, the banks are actually very active and most of our Spanish customers will have funding from banks as well. Okay. In the US, they won't. In the UK, they typically won't. Would the banks encourage, would the banks refer customers to you to compliment what they're doing with them? Has that happened? Some banks might do. Often as a turn down. But most of the time, what's interesting for us is that outside of Spain really, it's very rarely will we compete with banks, especially in the US and the UK. They have less and less appetite to fund small businesses. That's something we actually didn't realize when we started the business. We thought we would have customers graduating from us to banks at a certain size. And that does happen. But the size is a lot larger than what we thought. Okay. That doesn't surprise me. Although I can only imagine as well that banks have a massive regulatory burden to deal with and capital consequences to doing this. So I can see why they avoided. But it does open up a pretty rich space for you guys to play in. Oh, absolutely. And as of now, how many obvious competitors do you have? In the e-commerce space, we shopify, which is like a huge platform for e-commerce. They have their product called Shopify Capital. That's only a little piece of their overall. Exactly. That's definitely a small component of their total business. So they would be probably the biggest product in the market. And then outside of that, I would see us as probably the biggest independent operator in the markets that we're in. And by independent, I mean, we don't have another platform that we're leaning on. Do you ever use a market share? I mean, a sense of a market share. We don't because it's a little bit vague. Particularly when, as I said, in certain markets, you've banks and other markets that you don't. But we know the size of the various providers, and we know I think we're probably the biggest independent by a factor of two, at least. You obviously have a direct channel where you, you know, speak to be a business, but you've a direct selling proposition to customers, but you also have this indirect via the likes of Shopify, even though they compete with you, they also refer a business to you. Yeah. So we have some partnerships that we work with quite well, and that's beginning to scale. Ultimately, I think that will be a big growth for everybody to get to crack that. And in hindsight, again, we probably should have invested in it earlier, but we, our bond is working. We double down. Okay. We travel down. And really now is the first time we're really beginning to see a considerable amount of flow coming from outside of it. Okay. So those people who are using your services, taking advantage of it, many of them won't even know it's you. It's Wayflar. Will Wayflar be hidden in that? No, no. Wayflar. They'll always know it's Wayflar. Okay. You don't quite label it anywhere. We experimented with that before, but the challenge of quite labeling a lot of the time comes with the support. So let's say they contact one of our customer service reps or they contact one of our customer success team. And then you're almost pretending that you're working for somebody else rather than actually being Wayflar. So we decided actually let's do partnerships, but let's not do the Wayflable because it creates a lot of overhead on the back end. Also, I think rightly so, large companies are wary of their brand being represented by smaller startups like Wayflar. So that's just one change. That might change. It may change, but right now, I think there isn't a need to offer a white label. Is it a vulgar question to ask you, what's the biggest loan you've made or loan or to one outfit? I think the largest customer we have right now is probably about a 15 million outstanding bar. 15 million and the smallest 10k. 10k. Okay. So it's a whole range. Big range. Just going back to the data thing. This appears to be your kind of secret sauce as far as I'm concerned anyway. What sort of data are you looking at that allows you, you know, in the way that obviously banks do due diligence on a company, they see the cash flows and they make a recommendation, credit committees, all of that. What machinery do you have in and around giving money to a customer? So the main difference is operating data. So outside of the classic information that you would gather, for example, bank statements, financial accounts, bureau information, what we really look at is operating data. So for example, I will know how many sales did you make yesterday? How many returns did you have to process? Okay. What do you and discounts do you have existing customers or new customers? Are your marketing campaigns beginning to have a higher return or a return? All that operating data points to future performance. Yeah. That isn't necessarily captured in your bank account. Okay. And not captured in your financial statements. And can you get that easily? You can. Can they do the work for you in email passwords, two or three logins, it'll take like two or three minutes. They're happy to give that data away because they're okay. And only they'll have already connected different services to that data. Do you have a credit committee of sorts that would oversee when you get a bit bigger, I guess you do. So the way it works is the smaller advances or the smaller loans can be largely completed by a single underwriter. And then as the deal size is increased, you basically bring in more oversight. So one will need a four eye check with two people and then deals above a certain size, what we call enterprise deals, we'll go through a committee and you'll have a proposal and then you'll have a credit committee that review. So it steps up as the size is increased and that's the way you should have it. So for the smaller deals, you shouldn't be spending a lot of time on that. You'll have also got more data that you use in your underwriting, but in the larger ones, you do need to be going into every single risk for that. And do you, you know, when you go back to the fee as you get bigger and as you're dealing with bigger, does your fee vary a little bit or will it vary as you go forward and presumably it'll come lower? Typically larger companies have lower fees, but normally we just do it based on performance. So if it's an A-grade customer, it gets an A-grade price regardless of the size, but most of the larger customers that we have will be stronger businesses, they'll have more options so that the price will be lower. At some point here, I'm going to talk about the funding of the business because you've told me about the early stages and this more serious funding later on. But just before that, just a sense of the revenue growth, did you start off with a particular goal or has it just sort of worked your way along to see what you're discovering where it can take you? As far as it's five years old, the company knows, so can you publicly say where your revenue has got to? Is that okay to ask you that? Yeah, so I think last year, in 2024, your revenue was 100 million, so it's been very fast. I think the previous three years were roughly speaking 14 million, 70 million on. You know, again, for the traditional investors on profit immediately and of course it's not available in this type of business and then this goes back to some of your new funders coming in, but when do you think there will be sort of a clear profitability line that's growing? It'll probably be next quarter. Okay. So we're going to, I think last month and now we would have been even to positive, hey, our H2 is much bigger than our H1 because normally e-commerce merchants will order for a black Friday and Christmas. Those orders will be a lot bigger, but I imagine we'll be consistently profitable from next quarter onwards. That'd be a party that Friday and the head office, I'd say. You had your early stage funding, the gotcha going. Now you're growing fast, you need capital, you need debt to lend effects when you can explain the difference. It's two different bits of money and you need equity to raise more funds to do all you want to do, hire people. All of that. Tell us about the conditions that were there that made you go for the fundraising, how you did it and how much you raised at that time. Yes. So the first round we did, I think it the round might have been around eight or nine million. In all cases, we would have gone on the higher end of a typical round. And the reason was we would benefit massively from having a very strong balance sheet. If you want to bring on JP Morgan as a partner, if you want to bring on, I think it was Credit Swiss at the time as a partner. One of the things that they look for is the strength of your balance sheet. We did around in August of 2020, which is about 10 million. We did another round in April of 2021. I think it was around 70 million primary and then we did another round the following January of 150. Each time we were doing big rounds, we were being diluted obviously, but the reason we wanted to do the big rounds was we realized that unlike other startups, our business model demanded that our business model. We benefited enormously from having additional capital on the balance sheet, some of which we would never use, but actually having it was very beneficial. And then if we look at our fictitious $100,000 advance, I heard you earlier, where does that money come from? So 80 to 85% of that will come from a lender to Waifler, I'd say JP Morgan, 10 to 15% of it will come from one of our MES lenders. And then 5% of it will be Waifler's money. Okay. Yes. Some of our money. Okay. Exactly. And that can vary from facility to facility. But roughly speaking, those numbers are, that's where the money comes from. So that's where we raise debt and we raise equity because you need the equity to run the business, but you also need the equity to contribute into the, each advance, but the debts to vast majority. And obviously the business grows fast. You need to, you need to get finished. Exactly. So do you, do you come for more equity as well as more of the JP Morgan style debt at a later point? Yeah. But ideally what will happen is your profits will begin to accumulate. Okay. And the profits can be used. Okay. The larger fundraising there, the 150 million one, that kind of got you a bit more in the news and places than you had been. Tell me about the investors that came on board there that we've got a bigger animal coming into the company now. In terms of VC. Well, they were actually, were they in earlier? They were in earlier. Okay. So they're coming in for more of this. Yeah. Okay. We're, we're existing investors, but it's a good point that you make that as you get bigger, you're bringing in investors who know what the next couple of years look like. Yeah. So I think we're very lucky in that we have investors on our board and observers that know what the next two to three years look like. And that's really what you want. So the early investors money, yeah, it's not just money. And not in my case, anyway, I think we've benefited massively. Like, if you look at our portfolio of our investors, you'll have companies like Revolut, Clarna, new bank in Brazil, like some of the best performing fintechs over the last 20 years. And they have learned lots of lessons from those companies and then we get to tap in. So it's actually a, it's a great privilege to invest into those insights. They're represented on your board and they contribute to strategy and all that kind of thing. It's fantastic. I'm reasonably clear now on the, that stage of the company and I just a little bit about yourself. This company has changed from two people on the back of an envelope to now several hundred people, very sophisticated investors coming in who have very clear demands and goals for you, which is great because they help you a lot. But that skill set and range of abilities like it's beyond a lot of people who are great entrepreneurs, they launch a company, they founded and they just can't handle the detail and the bureaucracy and everything that goes with being CEO. Tell us a little bit about your, I hate the word journey, but your journey in that regard. And I'm hot. You found difficult and what you found relatively easy. So the, I'm spoken to a lot of founder CEOs at my stage about this and I think we all find the same thing, the hardest, which is basically dealing with hard conversations and making decisions as quickly as possible because there's so much to do and you're, you're balancing so much simultaneously. The only way really to get through it is to not put off hard conversations or hard decisions. And I think that's probably been the biggest learning I've had over the last four to five years. What kind of hard conversations are you talking about firing somebody basically or letting them go? Not, not, not just that. So the job of a CEO is very unnatural if you do it well. And, and I'm not naturally confrontational inside of work. But, but it's if you do it really well, and I'm in confrontation in the positive sense. I think there's a lot of conflict that's involved in the, in the role. And there's a joke that there is a CEO AI Bosch that you can install in a company that wanders into every meeting and asks two questions. Are we moving fast enough here? And are we thinking big enough and then they leave good and there's an element to truth to that. I have to constantly push. Are we hiring the right scale of people? Are we being ambitious enough almost in every meeting? That's really what it requires. So I think that's probably been the hardest thing for me. I do say that if your performance as a CEO is directly proportional to the number of hard decisions or hard conversations you're willing to have in a day and, and most of those decisions or the areas where I feel like I failed or I've done really well, it's been overcoming an emotional challenge than an intellectual one. Tell me, you're small enough at this stage. I presume you can gather everybody on a Zoom call or whatever medium use so you can have meetings with everybody. Yeah. So culturally, it's not that difficult to keep you all aligned right now. I think it is. I'm part of it is because we're not all in person in one office. Okay. So we've an office in Sydney. We've an office in London. Okay. We've an office in New York, an office in Dublin. Okay. I think when you've multiple offices, it's just different time zones and we also have a lot of people that work remotely. I think that's a lot harder to instill a culture that everybody's under the same roof. Now there's huge positives to it too, but one of the trade-offs that you make is definitely you don't have that cultural alignment that you do when everyone's on the same floor. What kind of culture, you know, there's culture is obviously moving kind of target. It's like, what is the culture and what would you like it to be? Where could it be better and where do you strive to the culture of the question? I think a lot of time thinking about this at the moment, we have a set of operating principles that I think every company has and we had a set of values when we started off in 2021 and I definitely didn't do enough, you've to constantly repeat them to the point of which you're so bored about. Yeah. And I definitely didn't do that. And I think at the end of the process, when we were looking at renewing them, not only us could even recite all the five values, I think that happens in a lot of companies, but we spend a lot of time thinking through the operating principles now that we have, I think from about January and I'll two or three kind of country intuitive ones that I'll run past you. So one is under promise and over deliver. If you under promise in an ambitious environment, you can't actually over deliver because you're not even going to try or attempt the things that you would need to do to over deliver. So the under promise and over deliver works really well in a big bureaucracy and people get the sense of you being reliable. If you under promise and wafer, I'll throw you out the door because we're not in the business of under promising because again, you won't even try, you won't even attempt the ambitious thing over deliver. So that's one that's a bit of a counterintuitive though. I think we didn't embrace initially. And then the second thing, I think that's resonating right now is kind over a nice and this comes back to having that kind of bit of confrontation. The kind person in the meeting, even though it doesn't feel like it points out the elephant in the room, flags the fact that actually we could be doing better here, the nice person doesn't do that. So you encourage that to call stuff that's below standard and at some day, you might be on the receiving end of some kind. If I'm not on the receiving end of it, then it's people get very cynically, very cynically. Do people give you gyp because you're too distant or you're not on top of things with them? No, people wouldn't hold back at all. Okay, that's good. Sorry, just come back to the culture thing. What would you like if you had a range of customers and they were all asked what you deal with Wayflare? Like, what are they like? What makes them go? Why do you deal with them? What kind of answers would you like to hear to that question? One of the benefits of having a single focus on a vertical is that we understand their business is incredibly well. So if I'm talking to an Amazon seller, I'm going to use a phrase like an ascent off the bat. And that's an Amazon specific phrase. But when you do that, they're like, oh, they know what an Amazon seller is. I'm not talking to my local Chase bank account. First thing is we understand their business is incredibly well. And the second thing I hope that they would say is that we're incredibly supportive even when we're turning them down or even when they fail in underwriting. And it's not just a computer says, no, it's what we need to see from you to get to the next stage would be a higher return and not spend on your Facebook campaigns or more efficient up X or something like that. So there would be the two things that I'd want the most today and what I'm going to want in the future is actually even more speed and automation for the customer where they're getting offers and they know how much money they get from the supplier at all periods of time. And I think that would improve the user experience a lot more. But today, the first two or what I guess the answer you really want from any customers, I really love dealing with them because they just solve problems for me rather than give me problems. Exactly. On that topic as well, over there, in terms of if people all over the world are trying to align them and to really high standards, do you have champions, your best people around the place who are the sort of the Jersey wears as it were in each location where they do things really well and they drag others up to their standard and are do you do it all centrally? Presumably, it's different locations. One of the reasons we have the office in London is because we had a lot of ours, she would have wanted to move to London and we said, well, that's a good way of giving them in the company. But also, there's a lot of skill sets in London that we don't have here. In the UK, we have a lot of our design team, we have a lot of our product managers, engineers, a lot of them are in the UK because we don't have that skill set in abundance in Ireland. Presum in Ireland, we have an abundance of sales, that's what the biggest advantage Dublin has in particular, we're almost on the other city in the world, it might have the highest concentration of SMB sales in the world. It depends on the skill set and then the second thing is, and I think we got this wrong the first time we went into the US, but we're definitely changing it now. When you are entering a new territory and bringing a sales team into that territory, the best way to do it is take a small number of people from your existing offices, put them into the new office, would make sure they're three or four the best because they're hitting target. And that's when you start hiring in that new area, a new person coming in is joining a team that's already high performing and they're going to learn from the best and they're going to scale. If you don't do that, you'll typically, if people joining a new office, they'll feel a little bit remote, they won't be in the head office, everything will be happening on Zoom. Even if everybody around them is missing target or struggling to equal, that'll just feed on it very quickly. Absolutely. The old, I got to remember her first heard using the term of the osmosis thing where the good people just pass the vibes to each others. And that's really important when you're opening up a new office because not everyone necessarily want to go and ironically, you have to put a really strong team in there so you've got that winning mentality. So you're getting bigger, all really good things around me are presumably have to hire a new talent for jobs that didn't exist before a new kind of job at what level do you get involved in that or do you have, obviously, a HR function and maybe run at the mill stuff you might not touch, but presumably, you like to see nearly if you could, everybody that comes into the company. I think right now I still do a lot of interviewing and maybe even more that I used to. So really, apart from maybe entry level roles, I think I probably interview almost every other every candidate coming through. That's great. It's time consuming. I can imagine. But at the biggest calls we make are all hiring calls. So everybody says hiring is the biggest priority to see you look at your calendar. None of us spend enough time doing it. So I do check my calendar every week to see how many hours I spend hiring last week. I think last week I was on seven, which is probably not enough. It's definitely a really good metric to make sure you actually spend time. I always think that, you know, in terms of talking about culture and all the sort of time we give that like one way to ensure that is to have somebody who's really at the top end of the culture looking and seeing the people that are coming in because there will be people that obviously won't fit. And you get used to that. The more experience you are, you'll see that they're maybe very good, but they're not going to work here. And if you can do that, it may be sort of a waste of time in one sense, but it's not a waste of time at all. If you can control that. I just have a few random ones here that I've kind of skipped a little bit. I have the Warren Buffett most concept where obviously everybody, every company likes to have a most protected business and differentiate itself and keep their profitability. You're a moat. Is that the data collection thing? It's data. It's also scale. If I left Wayflar in the morning, Greg, we set up a competitor. We'd probably be out of business by the end of July because Wayflar would be able to offer all the customers in the market more money at a lower price. So we would only be left with the customer's Wayflar doesn't want. Yeah. That's not a good business. The scale advantage that we have today is really, really big. So that's the main mode that we have. You can obviously replicate how we gather data. It'll take you a while to build up as bigger data set as we do. But even if you did that, you wouldn't have access to that facility if we have a scale that we have today. Yeah. And so it's really hard for a new entrant to come into this market. I'm going to have to mention the dreaded tariff thing. I really don't want to talk about that. It all upsets me. But just give me a couple of minutes on how the tariff thing affected you guys. Obviously it's on and off. It's very hard to plan with it. But give me some examples. If I think you told me about a prime thing before was just quite good. Tell me about that. Yeah. So interestingly on Liberation Day, actually, my daughter arrived. So I was in the delivery unit while Trump was doing his press conference with his tariffs. But I think at the beginning, we were, I was usually concerned because a lot of our customers import goods from Asia into the US. A little over time, especially when there were reciprocal tariffs proposed on countries apart from China, it did de-escalate quite quickly. Now, it's still having a big impact on the industry. But I think one of the things that I had actually underestimated is how resilient e-commerce founders are. I can actually, most of them had already diversified their supply chains away from being solely aligned on China. The first Trump presidency had already imposed a tariff. And then when he came back in the second time around, they had already imposed a defense on our tariff. So they knew this was coming. So lots of companies had already diversified away from China. And as a consequence, the impact was a lot more muted than we thought. The second thing is, I think I mentioned this to you before, most of our customers are not manufacturing iPhones. So apparel, toys, lots of these other verticals, they actually can be outsourced to other. They can be changed to other locations reasonably quickly, but you do have certain verticals that can't. So one of them, I think I might have mentioned was, was Prams. Prams, yeah. Yeah. Prams are China. Okay. A lot of specific types of electronics are in China. So you have a scenario where certain verticals, it's more charter to diversify. And in those markets, what's going to happen is the price is going to go up, okay, because there isn't a natural obvious attitude to a Pram. Asling isn't going to make the difference. So in certain markets, you're going to see those prices going up. But in most of the other markets, as I said, like apparel, health and beauty products, a lot of those products, it's not that hard to diversify into other markets. And as a consequence, we will see some inflation there, but it won't be anything like what it was expected at the beginning. Assume that the pause on, yeah, I assume that the, well, I assume it's in the, the reciprocal terms. Yeah. I'd come back in angelic. Given that you just had your baby daughter a few months ago, it must have been of great sadness to you. That particular issue, because you're going to need a new Pram presuming. Yeah. We actually have one. So we were lucky. I'm going to talk to you about your little, you're around to the month. It's not a really around, but I would best try to frame that this is that you were talking about this view that Dublin is quite taking advantage of. When I met you a few weeks ago, Aiden, you talked about Ireland has struck Dublin, not fulfilling its potential in a number of ways, I thought it was very interesting, could you share that with us? Sure. So when I started off as an entrepreneur in 2013, there was some natural barriers that made it very difficult to build a really big business in Ireland and really intercom, I think, was the one that my generation of founders all looked up to, because they had scaled the CEO and moved to the valley, and they had brought in all the best VCs in the world where we're funding intercom. So they were the first company to really do that scale we could relate to. One of the biggest benefits for the Irish startup system was actually COVID, because what happened during COVID was all the VCs learned how to work remotely. No language, you have to go to Santel Road in the valley and pitch them all in one day, and then probably move over there. The VCs learned how to work remotely, and they also learned how to basically invest in other markets as well. When people say to me today, Ireland needs a much more vibrant angel system, no it doesn't. The top angels and the top VCs are in Ireland regularly looking for companies to invest in. So the financing and the fundraising challenge that Irish companies had in the past is gone, and there is no excuse today for not being able to raise funds in Ireland. Every single VC in Europe and in the US is more than happy to invest in Ireland if they see the opportunity, and they're set up to work on it, and they've had good experiences. And they've had good experiences, and they know how to do it. So that negative is gone, and then on the positive side, as I mentioned earlier on, we probably have the highest concentration of SMB or SME sales talent in the world. Every single company in the US, whether they're based in Boston or San Francisco or New York, whenever they want to sell into Europe, overwhelmingly they come and they base themselves and they have from companies like Qualtrics, to HubSpot, to MongoDB, not just the Google Zeniths, but yeah, everybody else underneath, they're all here. And as a consequence, we have this incredible concentration of sales talent and go to market talent that startups should be benefiting from. And as a consequence, I think we should be in a position like a country like Sweden or like Israel where you again, a small population, but massively punching above their weight, just given natural advantages there. So in terms of, if you had a child old enough or you had a child in college or finished the leaving search, where would you be steering them to in the light of all of that, you know, and particularly again with your data, data seems to be just, what would you steer a young person towards career wise right now? Well, my kids are older. I'd probably want them to do something that they are very passionate about and that they have an interest in. So I'm not sure I'd necessarily steer them to becoming an entrepreneur. In terms of just the area you did your electric engineering and never worked on it, but for what? I did civil engineering and I never worked on that either. So in some ways, it's a waste of time and in other ways, it's not really learned plenty anyway. But in terms of just the sector that they should, you know, software is sort of programming and writing code, is that going to be less important in the light of AI, do you think? Well, I just saw an interesting stat today where graduates from computer science and engineering have a higher unemployment rate than most other disciplines, which is because of, because of AI. There is a big feeling out there right now that AI can replace a lot of junior programmers or junior engineers and that, I'm not sure that's true, by the way, but that's definitely a narrative out there. Yes. And that's really affecting the hiring market. And seeing as we're mentioning it, what will AI help you with and what will it hurt you with? So from our perspective, in Wayflar, AI helps us with a lot of the manual backend processes that banks and lenders typically do. Learning security, analyzing bank statement PDFs, a lot of the manual work can be automated away incredibly quickly. So most of our customers won't see the impact of AI when they log into our website. But what they will see it in is the speed at which we can generate offers and the quality of those offers. So it's all on the backend and removing all of that cost and all of that time. That's where the user is going to see it in our market first, before actually the user interface changes. I just wanted to thank you. You have a lot on your plate. I really appreciate that. I feel it's great to be here. If you take your time and I really, really appreciate and run out is really appreciated. That is as close to a masterclass, e-commerce and e-commerce funding that could have got. It's been really interesting and you've been really open with which you're views on things and it's just been a most enjoyable conversation. And I hope people get something from it and I'm sure quite a lot of young people will listen to this. There's a lot of interesting things in it for them. So on behalf of an artist, thank you very much and really appreciate it. Thanks Greg. (upbeat music)