Speaker 1i'm putting the mortgage on the line here one paycheck and three hungry mouths at home that had found three amazon prime subscriptions literally i was paying um for that for what turned out in one case to be 18 months people download a document stick it into the good old open ai and say hey i told them i earned a hundred thousand a year update my bank statement to make it look like that right getting into startups particularly tech startups is generally a 6 a.m to 4 a.m gig if you're not planning on to do those kind of hours you're going to find it very difficult i say i i don't have a personality anymore i have a startup i can't i haven't had time to come back to reality for those kind of pieces i'd invest now but you're not asking for enough just come back to me when you want 10 million
Speaker 2us you you said that 87 percent of individuals can be re-identified using just three points their data yeah that's that's terrifying
Speaker 1nobody's going to pay five dollars per per account essentially to access status
Speaker 3you just go and do it and see what happens ideas are worth like jack shit absolute jack shit like if you can't execute there's
Speaker 1nothing just take that initiative to actually take whatever crazy ideas that they might have and just try to see what comes of it don't be afraid of ambition chase it love it wrap your arms around it and and say it out loud new zealanders don't know any better they will just get up and give it a shot that's why we were first to get to the top of mount everest go to dream that ultimate dream like what is it that you ultimately want to do and it's all achievable it's the only way to get to the top of mount everest is the only way to get to
Speaker 4the top of mount everest jermot welcome to techmates thank you you built the first version of which while your twin daughters were napping and you were the primary caretaker while your partner still had to go back to work and you were running out of money at the same time so most people in that position i guess would look for a job but you decided to press ahead why did you
Speaker 1do that well let's say the way i described it was double down i knew that i was going to be in the top of mount everest but i knew the gap existed what really mattered was how to communicate it to our customers right that was the that was the early challenge that we had with which trying to talk about or sell the idea of apis is a bloody difficult one when people can't visualize what it is that actually means and so i kind of had to do three different kind of streams there was an education stream to bring customers on a journey then there was a kind of a technical stream which was building a product that you could open banking so that you could demonstrate it there was no way to go into a room and say you can do all these cool things that are apis here's the thing and then everybody sit there and say can i see an example of one of those pieces so the idea was how to build out that piece to the front and the second piece was how to then uh try and monetize that as a as a stream that would come off it and that was kind of the you know pay bills sell product and at the same time bring customers on the journey to get there so they kind of overlapped in a way i thought it was working i think if you can see a piece of paper on the wall uh as a as a founder he got advice very early on about having a six monthly check-in whatever frequency you wanted but six monthly was what we were told you know check-in is it working for you is it working um you know as a business and then is it the right to to keep going or or to not and i kind of kept that cadence and so at the six month mark i'd ask myself the questions you know has this changed since the last time is this going in the right way or not and i actually won a pitch breakfast um not long after uh startup and that was the piece where a particular bank said do you know what we actually like this idea and i was like okay that's it somebody now understands so i've got my first piece of traction and that was kind of the the momentum giver and i think anybody who's gone through this journey will know that there are little points of momentum which bursts you forward and gives you that extra boost and so that was that was one of those and i think that's the piece where i was like okay i'm going to do this that was the one that meant the kind of it was time to
Speaker 2double down germa the irish insights profile caused your founding journey one feck it decision at a time was there one specific fuck it moment that started everything or was it a pattern of small surrenders to
Speaker 1the idea well i suppose the idea i had before before i came to stay at home dad and so i i was working in a business i was doing pieces and i'd done a piece of work and i'd realized that it didn't have to be as hard as that was and so when anya was going back to work and i'd agreed to take the second year off that was the piece she'd do the first year i'd do the second year it was all kind of in the back of my mind and it was really that feck it moment came at the end of my year so the kids were two years old now and it was really just that moment of saying i want to stay doing this and so i was really the moment was was that kind of point saying actually i'm not going to go back to work we're going to stay single income for another year and and at the end of that year we'll make a decision and that was really the piece of saying we're going to put everything into this literally when i say everything i mean i've been in startups i sold all those shares i cleared savings i literally when we say bootstrapped there was what can i do to fund this and get this over the line bearing in mind that this is compliance software so you can't mvp compliance you're either compliant or you're not and so a big piece of what we did was get into that position and so it was a it was a hefty old moment of saying in a way i'm putting the mortgage on the line here but i have that kind of sense of conviction that this is the right thing to do so and here we are with seven almost eight years later you
Speaker 2tested a prototype on your own household finances and found 1200 an annual savings you didn't know existed your actual reaction was we shied this works take us back to that moment and what did you do next what did you tell your wife that night
Speaker 1well that was kind of that that was the piece right so um i'd say i'm not going to go back you know i think i'll stay off i'll give i'll give the company a go but in reality uh that means you know back to that staying single income it or i think i described at the time was um one paycheck and three hungry mouths at home you know so every time you come back you see people going you know we're feed us and the idea being that there was a lot of pressure going to go on to own you my partner right and it was a case of look uh there the reason i think this is going to work is because of that so what i'd done is sat down with our data our own financial data the stuff that was available in open banking and pumped it into my my play app and it popped up with with savings and some what i thought were bugs there's a bug uh because i had found three amazon prime subscriptions i was like well you know something doesn't work i'll have to go and check that out and then as i dug in there yeah there was three amazon prime subscriptions and the thing about it is if anybody remembers eight years ago amazon prime wasn't a tv service available in new zealand and they didn't do next door next day deliveries uh literally i was paying um for that for what turned out in one case to be 18 months i think and it was just bought stuff on amazon and it auto ticks that little box for you and i missed that and it just subscribed me each month and i'd done that on my card on the joint account card on the you know credit card those kind of pieces and so i had these these little little amounts that were streaming out every month in different places and i was like oh okay and then putting our phones and our internet together uh brought in another bunch of savings and i kind of had that moment where i set back and went okay if if i can find a thousand dollars in savings and we can do that for everyone in new zealand you know that's you know five billion hey that's gdp impacting i'll take that we can make this work and i think that was really that piece where i was like right i'm in let's do this and that was scary because it really is as i said you know putting the putting the house on the line then you're you're kind of saying i i'm going to commit everything to making this this
Speaker 4go yeah for someone who's never heard the phrase open banking can you explain in i guess easy language what you're building and why it matters to the average consumer
Speaker 1yeah so um open banking is a concept right it's the easiest way of putting it it's the idea that your financial data is yours that's the crux of it that's the underlying piece but it's driven by government regulation the idea is back in 2016 global financial crisis occurred banks started getting wobbly everywhere people's money were stuck in places and they couldn't move it around and so the european government stepped in and said actually going forward you don't get to lock a customer in they need to have the opportunity to move and move their data with them because at the end of the day the reason people stick with banks is because it's bloody difficult to move right you can't easily decide i want to swap to this other bank because you get paid into that bank and you've got bills that are going out of that other bank and essentially it becomes a core part of your your kind of financial life and so it's not easy so the eu came up with what they called a psd2 payment service directive and it came under that way to also allow customers other opportunities to move their money so think about it the only other way to move your money is to do internet banking or mobile banking do an account to account transfer or pay with a payment card right and so that was your visas or master cards you know you can go tap a card and away you go or in those days swipe and stick a chip in that means customers were again locked into those services right that was owned by the bank and owned by the card rails and and those kind of pieces so the idea was actually we're going to break apart this and we're going to let customers do what they want to move things as they need which was kind of innovative at the time the uk was part of the eu at the time they adopted it as well they took on a different approach to the eu mandated a particular standard and a way of doing it and and defined it from an api perspective whereas the rest of europe said go sort it out yourselves it's up to you and that started this revolution in new innovative ways of interacting with data. And so instead of screen scraping, which was the old way to get access to data, that's where you gave somebody your internet banking username and password, which sounds crazy as an idea, but I mean, it still happens today, right? You give them your username and password, they log into your internet banking and they download all your history and then they'll give you a mortgage, right? That could stop. Straight away, you could actually go and consent to it. And anybody who's logged in with Apple ID or logged in with Google into something, you go to Netflix and it's like, create a Netflix account or log in with your Google account. That is the exact same process for open banking. And so when you go there, it says select your bank. And that's the same as finding Google on the consent list. You go there and Google pops up and says, hey, do you know you're logging into Netflix? And they're going to see your email, your name and address. And you say, yep, I'm okay with that. And away you go. Open banking is the same. You don't actually have to put in your Google credentials to log into Netflix. It takes you to Google. Google says, do you know what you're doing here? This is who, and this is what's happening. And you say, yep, and away you go. It's the exact same now with your bank. You get sent to your bank and your bank goes, hey, by the way, this mortgage service is asking for this data for this period of time so it can achieve whatever outcome you're looking for. Is that what you're agreeing to? You click yes and away you go. And the joy is that's all accredited. So random hacker X can't turn up tomorrow and accidentally request your data. Because that system that is set up because it's government driven means that everybody has a license. It's not going to allow you to interact with your data. And so from a regular person, you should never have to know what open banking is. That's the important key piece, right? In the same way, we don't necessarily know how banks move money between each other when we do account to account payments or how, when you tap your card at a terminal to purchase your coffee, you don't know how that works. Open banking is similar to those pieces in the background. It's what's enabling cool things to happen. But the idea is at its core, your information is yours and you own it You own your accounts, you own your money and you own access to them. And now you can decide who has access and who you share that information. So it's really, it's really empowering.
Speaker 4And what's the role that which is playing in that?
Speaker 1So we are the pipes, the connection, the infrastructure as such that this sits under. So in the simplest sense, if you think of banks as reservoirs where all of this information and money and all those things sit, and you think of those mortgage brokers or personal financial management apps or another bank on the other side, that's trying to offer a service to the bank. You as a consumer would go to that other provider and you would click buttons there and they would use our pipes, our connections, our secure end to end flow to make that happen. And the idea being there is they don't need to be experts in these technologies. They don't need to be experts in security and governance and all those pieces to be able to offer you services. We take away that burden from them and we ensure it's secure end to end. And that way we become that core system over which these things operate. Right. And why are the banks not innovating on that side as fast? I mean, they could use that
Speaker 4opportunity of the regulation for open banking and go and build this kind of, you know, log in with your bank themselves, right? What's keeping them from doing that?
Speaker 1They're designed to keep things inside, not let things out, right? They've got a vault mentality, right? And so they don't iterate fast. They can't respond to markets the same way as smaller, more agile organizations or just organizations who are technology companies first, right? Banks are financial institutions first, and they use technology to enable that. And so technology is a cost for them rather than providers like us who are technology companies. Whereas technology is the product as such. And so it's very difficult for them to be innovative in that space. And we saw this coming out of Europe initially and out of the UK before the Australian regime started. And it was very similar. What happened was startups came, they did really cool, really innovative stuff, and they got between the bank and the customer. And then the bank panicked, right? Because from their perspective, that's a risk. So the first lot of banks tried to gobble up as many of those startups as they could, but that stopped the innovation, right? It killed it down the tracks, because that startup could then only serve that bank's customers. And let's be honest, that bank has had that information for 100 years, if not more, and hasn't been able to do anything innovative with it, right? So the challenge was, now they had a tool that required connecting to all banks, but was now limited to one. And so that was the first lot. That was the kind of the panic purchase, protect our market position approach of banks. Since then, the second wave came through. And that's the really smart stuff that's now come out. That's where banks realize, actually, their core product is financial services. That's deposits or lending or those kind of pieces. And owning all the way to the customer is expensive, and it doesn't allow them to change very often, right? Imagine you have a large bank and your cohort of customers tends to be older people, you've got more retirements, more savings. It's very difficult to change your brand to say, we're now cool and hip, and we want young people, right? So how do you do that? Well, what you do is you step back and you let another service deliver that all the way to the customer. And so the way I look at it is Spark has the Spark brand. That's about telco. They're selling phones. That's your incumbent service provider. And then they started their Skinny brand. And Skinny was different cost base, different customer targets, different product offerings. And so it didn't dilute their existing customers. They weren't targeting their same customer base. And so people could feel their same brand alignment, but now they were able to do it. So banks start doing the same pieces, right? And you can see this in Australia. There's Bank of Queensland invested in a number of technology companies and neobank style pieces, right? The idea of saying, hey, look, we have our core brand, we have our core services, and we can actually now leverage those and ring fence the thing that we call core banking and core financial, and then use tools and services to target new customers and markets and deliver differential services to the rest out there. And that's one of the big things that open banking gives, right? The original thought from the regulators was very simple. Customers will move. We're going to see a shift in the percentage of market share. What they didn't anticipate was that that isn't how it was really going to work. Customers did move, but they didn't move all of their banking. They moved services. And so what it meant was actually customers became multi-banked, right? I can get my best mortgage from here, my personal loan from there, my credit card from here, because they've got air points. That's good for me, you know? And so, those kind of pieces meant people were actually able to pick and choose the services they want from the providers that were best for them. And so, it becomes way more empowering to the consumer. And whether that's an individual or a business, for example, the consumers in this is generally anybody who has a bank account. And so, that enables those to pick and choose the services from the providers. And what it actually means from a financial institution perspective is their risk is also spread, right? Rather than being locked into their 12.7% market share, they have the opportunity to grow aspects of their business and to be able to turn dials up and down as they need them. So, it's a case of we'd love to grow deposits right now. We can use open banking and a service like which we can go and draw deposits because we can interact with customers looking for those types of services. And then once they've grown deposits, they could say, hey, look, we're going to pull that back because we really want to do that home loans now. We want to drive out those pieces. And so, you can do targeted pieces that make sense at such a point in time, which is great for things like mutuals and credit unions and other financial institutions that aren't the big guys, right? Because the big guys can sell everything to everyone at all the time. They got more money than they can give away at any time, whereas smaller institutions need to be smart. They need to be more agile with that. And it's a case of actually to be able to lend more, we need a higher deposit rate. So, we're going to target that type of piece. And you can now then go out and acquire customers in areas that you wouldn't normally have done with targeted products. And in a way, deliver a new service to customers that wasn't available before. And so, it becomes really innovative. Interesting. And
Speaker 2you said the ultimate loser in the current system is the customer who can't benefit from better choices. And in the current system, who's winning? Is anyone winning in the current broken system? Or is it more just the momentum of the current system is just kind of driving it forward and no one's really winning?
Speaker 1Yeah. Well, there's inertia. Nobody's winning, right? Because it's static. And that's the result. And let's be clear, that inertia is built in. So, historically, those financial institutions would rather stay where they are and have their 12.5% or whatever it is, market share, than risk pushing too hard to try and get to 14 and end up with 11. You know what your revenue is, you know what your growth numbers are, and you can just kind of stay and do it. And because they generally generate hundreds of millions, if not billions, is it worth risking that for an extra half a percent, you know? And so, for them, the inertia is built in. They want it to be as static as possible. And I mean that in a general sense. Obviously, you talk to the people in the banks, they want the best outcome for their customers, right? They are literally looking to do those pieces, but you're trying to move a colossal financial institution, and that's not easy to do on a person-by-person basis, right? So, that's the piece. So, there isn't a winner in the existing system. There's lots of losers, though. That is, all of the customers who aren't getting the best potential service or who are locked into a service which is not right for them, but the cost of moving. It used to be called a lazy tax, which was kind of a semi-insulting way of talking about your customers, right? You know, it's a case of customers could be saving if they'd only bothered to try and find a better service. But that ignored the fact that the burden was on the customer to do that. The burden was on to be able to go through the process. And I say that as a person who recently took out a loan that took, must be four months to get through the bank's process, right? And that was with the existing organization, right? I already had accounts with them and it took four months. That is not a reasonable expectation. Imagine having to do that and say, right, I'm going to start, it's January, I'm going to start and I'm going to move my banking. You're still at that in September, you know, you're still finding bills that are pointed to the wrong account and you're doing that. That is a big risk to people. It's time consuming. And at the end of the day, they said, and all I got was an extra, you know, 0.2% of my mortgage. You know what? In the end, it's cost me more time and energy and stress than to do that. And so in that way, the customer is, it's punished for loyalty rather than being rewarded as part of being able to move. And open banking changes that. It unlocks that. It provides the ability for other partners to come into the ecosystem and really drive change. And you'll see that there's already a big, in New Zealand, for example, following the Australian piece, there's these neobanks coming in, right? These are targeting customers, offering them unique services. And by unique, I mean, it is for that customer. It isn't a generic product. It is a case of, I've got an offer that you, and they're able to do that, even though they're running sometimes on the same core systems as existing banking services, but they're able to be innovative. They're able to talk to customers in different cohorts of customers using those pieces. And again, they utilize services like ours to be able to move those, that data and that money around.
Speaker 2Right now, when somebody applies for a mortgage, or like you said, a loan, they print bank statements, scan them, email them, wait for days, weeks, months, I don't know, maybe years. KiwiBank, introduced which. What changes? Walk me through that process from applying for a KiwiBank mortgage.
Speaker 1Yeah. So with KiwiBank, it's an interesting one because they're using two sides of our product, right? The first side is actually the compliance side about sharing data, right? So when I talked about the banks having mandated that they need to share, that means that they have to go into those core systems where data has been ring fenced and secured for against all sorts of threat actors that might be out there to try and hack it. And then they need to make it available through a government system. And then they need to make it available through a mandated standard to other apps out there. And they can start to build those things themselves. But in reality, as we've said before, that requires standards, understanding, more security people, more developers, more engineering capabilities about doing those pieces, and then securing that and auditing it and doing all those pieces. So they use our service to wrap around their existing capabilities because they already expose that information through things like mobile banking or internet banking, right? So we enable them to do that in a secure way and transfer that out into the space. And so that's the first bit, right? So that means they can now share data with everybody else. The second part is they can start to consume that data. And when you talk about that, they've got a bunch of initiatives that they're going to run on, but things that would look like would be, you know, a single pane of glass style piece, which is a nice way of saying all your finances in one place. And that means all of those pieces can come in, they can look and they can see those pieces. And that means as a customer who has got things in different banks, you can look in that one place. And so that's a great way of being able to show customers pieces. Other than that, there is a range of pieces. I can't talk about KiwiBank ones specifically because obviously they've got their own kind of drivers and initiatives. But the idea is if you were, for example, a red bank in New Zealand, you could consume information from a blue bank and a yellow bank and bring that information in and show that to your customers in one place, allow them to apply for a loan and bring that information in without requiring them to manually reenter it or to download and upload it. And we've seen this, right? So I think the numbers for 2024 and 2025 were 40 billion US globally moving to 60 billion global, don't quote me on those numbers, in document fraud, which is where people download a document, stick it into the good old, you know, open AI chat GPT style piece and say, hey, I told them I earned 100,000 a year, update my bank statement to make it look like that, right? And so your bank statement gets updated and you're like, great, update my transaction history to look like that too. And you get the same document back out. It's just the numbers now look better. And then they can upload those pieces and they can get a loan or a credit card or whatever it is they're applying for. But it's not based on real numbers. It's based on the fact that we can now, with relative ease, a person with no technical skills can forge documents and push those pieces forward. And so that meant that relying on documents now is a massive risk. Relying on things that somebody downloads and uploads is crazy. And so the only thing that they could fall back on was give us your username and password to your internet banking. Now, you know, as well as I do, that the banks are always sending the pieces, don't share these credentials with anybody else. And then the first thing they do as part of your mortgage application is say, now, please share the other ones, though, you know, don't share our ones, but you should definitely share those ones with us so that we can see those pieces, right? And so in their terms of service, if you've done that, you can lose access to your accounts or more importantly, if something was to happen to your information or data, they are essentially absolved of all responsibility and accountability because you gave away your credentials, right? And so that's an important, important piece. So what do they do? They have no other option and they're stuck in the space of either get credentials or take these pieces. And that's where open banking comes in. It's a guaranteed rail. It's a secure connection between point A and point B. Nobody else can interact with it. And your data is going to be taken away from you. And that's where data flows securely. And you get to click decline. You get to click stop. You get to click revoke whenever you choose. And so it means that you don't have to give it away forever, which is kind of the current approach.
Speaker 4David, I want to pivot a little bit and talk about how you ended up in New Zealand. Proud Irishman. You grew up in Ireland. You studied in Ireland. I think you started your career in Ireland as well. Yeah. What's the background? How did you end up in New Zealand? Yeah. Give us give us the real story, not the not the LinkedIn story, I guess.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, yeah. So years and years ago, I studied in the University of Limerick. I studied information technology and telecommunications. That's hardware, software and all the bits that make them communicate between each other. It was a great generalist course. It wasn't very targeted in one area and it was allowed me to kind of have cross industry skills. As part of my internship, I got a job in Intel in their R&D site in Ireland, where I was working and testing on fabricated pieces, right. So somebody else is doing fabrication and we were trying to break them. It was a nice way to do it. And I discovered a huge amount while I was there. Intel ran multiple teams on the same projects, for example. So I was working on it with a team from Ireland and India. There was a team then working in Ireland with Ireland and the U.S. on those pieces. And then there was another team between the U.S. and India, essentially. And we were all working. One of us was going to succeed. The other two teams were going to fail, you know, that kind of way. So who was going to get there first? And this meant that they didn't have all their eggs in one basket. They had a chance to having groups of intelligent people working together. Right. It was a case of and also having that little bit of competition between them. Right. Who's going to get there? Who's going to be the one to succeed? That was an amazing experience. Right. It was a huge learning curve for me to go into the space and be surrounded by brilliant people trying to come up with ways to outcompete and outwork even within the space. And so what I would describe is that had a real startup style feel. Even though it was a ginormous piece, because you were working together tightly and you knew somebody else was coming along at your heels. And so you had to be innovative. You had to be thinking. You had to be working ways to move forward. And when I finished my internship, I got a job in consulting, technology consulting. So I traveled the U.K. and Ireland mostly, going to banks, government, large enterprise, really going in and doing massive scale projects and delivering those pieces. And at the same time, my partner, she was traveling the world. She got, let's say, Barbados. I got Birmingham. And so after a while, I was kind of feeling a little bit jealous. Yeah. Feeling a little bit jealous that she was getting to sunny places and I was getting to places that were wetter than the west coast of Ireland, which is where I was from, you know. So it was a case of maybe it's time for a bit of a bit of a break. So and at that stage, we were kind of we're renting a house in Ireland, which was effectively describe it was it was a wardrobe because the only thing that stayed there was our clothes. And we'd fly back from work wherever we worked would swap over. I'd swap over my suits into the new bag and back out the next day. So, you know, you're short lived over interactions and those kind of pieces. So we bought one way ticket to Mexico, travel through Central and South America, learn Spanish, did all of the fun stuff you do there and then arrived in Australia. And Australia has rules around visas. You know, you can do certain types of work, but then you have to spend six months on a farm and those kind of pieces. And it didn't really fit with our career kind of growth pieces. And so we looked at that as being a short holiday in Australia. Then we popped across to New Zealand and I got a job. I mean, inside three weeks, I was working in, I think, a Sky TV and I was doing, you know, cool things, working with nice people, doing fun stuff. Right. Then all of a sudden you're like, this isn't bad. And then the jobs kept coming. And it was startup enterprise, startup enterprise. And my mentor, I will say, back in Ireland all those years ago, I handed him my notice from the consultancy. They immediately, you know, their hand was on the phone to say, am I walking? you out of the building? Are you going to a competitor? You know, how, before I touched the button, where are you going? And I said. said, I'm going traveling. They were like, okay. And the phone was going down, but it wasn't all the way down. I was like, I'm going to New Zealand. They put the phone down. He said, great. Okay. So this is what you're going to do. You're going to go work. You're going to find a financial institution. You're going to work in payments. You're going to find a startup and you're going to work in UI pieces. You're going to find an infrastructure company and you're going to work on hardware pieces. And he literally talked through and he's like, this is what you're going to do. And by the end of that, you will have identified an area after working through all those pieces that has a problem that you can solve. And that's where you're going to pick your piece and you'll start your business and you'll solve that piece. And I thought you'd look at him at the time in my early twenties going, nah, that's not for me. I like to get paid. I don't really like the idea of the risk of going out and doing that. But as I went through those pieces, I found a job came up and I'd say, look, I'm not really keen on that one. And then somebody called me and say, Hey, I've got a problem over here. And I go, actually, that does align. That is an infrastructure piece. That is a, you know, hardware component. That does align with what he told me that I'm going to learn something new here. And I took on those pieces. And so we'll say 10 years later in New Zealand, I had a large network of technology people that I knew I'd worked in a number of different industries. And I had, as he had pointed out, found a piece. And back all those years ago, before big data was big data, I'd been doing one of my last projects was a so-called big data project. And so the last one I was doing was a big data project. And so it was that kind of joined between those two pieces of saying I've come full circle. I've now gone into a place that is doing those pieces and I can see an opportunity and I can see something that is painful for both the financial institution, but also the customer on the other end and the business trying to offer them a service. And so I can solve for that. And not only can I, I know how to do that. That is the skills that I built up over those years. And so that's pretty much what I did. I built the first version and then New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York, New York. So it was there to be the leader fast following the UK. It had a really smart and a kind of, let's say almost aggressive approach to it. The banks had said, we can do this. And so the regulator looked away and then the bank said, nah, maybe not. Then if the regulator isn't going to look, how are we going to get a budget? And so it never happened. And so I built this thing. And as I say, those moments of checkpoints of saying within the business, what do we do? And I was looking, kind of going, all of our competitors, that had started at the same time were disappearing. They were all, I've seen the messages on LinkedIn. It was a good start. We tried everything. Sorry, we tried talking to investors and investors were like, we're not putting a dollar near that because New Zealand's not happening. And then the Australian government, the ACCC, I think tweeted back then, we're looking for a test partner for the Australian standards. So I replied, happy to help. And they called me on the Friday and they said, right, this is what we'd be looking for. This is the things we'd need. And I was like, can I get back to you on this? And they said, yeah, you can. And I was like, I'm going to do this on Monday. I just need to make some decisions about how we do this. And then on the Saturday and the Sunday, I was frantically on the keys so that on Monday, I had converted the entire platform over to using the Australian standards. And then it was on Monday, I picked up the phone and said, yes, I can do that. I can do this. And we can make that happen. And so it wasn't me alone. At that stage, there was one and a half people in the business. And so it was myself and my kind of first teammate, Alan, who was kind of what was a employee number one. And so he was there to help drive all those pieces. And we delivered that. And then we did that for four months or more at the end of which the Australian government said, you know, when could you or are you interested in getting your own accreditation? And it hadn't even occurred to me. I was thinking one and a half people were way too small. But they sent me a lovely email, which said, you know, you're very helpful. You're very flexible. You know, it was amazing to be able to work with you guys because we were able to do things very swiftly. And so we did. That was that checkpoint. You know, that moment of going, there's the first one is, should we be going? Australian government says they've got demand. Let's give it a go. And then six months later, getting that feedback to say you should get an accreditation was a case of there's another boost. Okay, let's go through it. And we did. I think at the time, we were the smallest entity accredited on the Australian ecosystem. We had a full, let's say, bank grade license with one and a half people. And we were able to do that because we automated everything from start to finish. Before the world of agentic AI, our view was we need to remove people from practically everything so that we can scale. Because the only way you can do things with one and a half people is if the system does all the work. And so we had to make it really cost effective to run, remove all of the risk, all of the pieces, and then be able to go through and essentially get ourselves what was at the time an ASA 3150 industry standard piece to say we do all of the government levels. And we grew that out into a SOC 2 compliance, showing that we could actually do it in international standards and those kind of pieces. So really kind of checkpoint driven. Have we done it? Yes. We said we're going to achieve this. We have achieved it. Now, what's the next piece? And that milestone approach and that reflection point really helped make sure that we were always on track.
Speaker 4We read somewhere that you had 680 investors in your CRM. How many of those said no?
Speaker 1Post pre-seed, pre-seed, if that makes sense. We had done a friends and family round to get our SOC 2 compliance. Essentially, that was about 300,000 to 500,000 in build. And so we had to go and raise some capital for that and then secure some customers. But that meant we were not the right size at any time for going out to talk to investors. We were too small for the seed round. And then by the time we were ready to do a seed round, we were going to be able to do it. We were almost beyond seed, but not quite series A. And so, you know, when you're talking to people, you're saying, look, we're looking for a $500,000 check. They go, oh, really? We see you in the $100,000 checkbook. And you're like, look, to be honest with you, I've signed a customer who pays me $100,000. So that doesn't help. I'm looking to try and accelerate. And then the next time we went out, it was a case of, hey, look, you know, we're looking for 1.5 million. And they're like, oh, you know, I see you in the $750,000 check. Again, I've just signed a $6 million deal. You know, it's the size of our business didn't necessarily align with investor expectations and those kind of things. So it had been a very difficult kind of process to go through. And you're always trying to have the right conversation at the right time as such. And we met some fantastic investors. We had some great feedback as well. You know, how to better pitch, how to align our numbers better. How to communicate the story effectively. And so even though it was, you know, hundreds, and I really do mean hundreds of calls and meetings and sit downs to get through those pieces, what we eventually found was we realized how, in a way, investors are another customer. Pieces that were of interest to them. What were the pieces that weren't? But we hadn't worked out how to communicate those kind of pieces effectively to investors in the same way. And so that meant that we were having to adjust. And so we did. I mean, late last year, we closed around our first, we'll say, proper big piece. And that set us up for an amazing year. We finished 2025 ahead of where we had anticipated. And 2026 has taken off gangbusters. And so even as we say those pieces, we're still looking at these pieces about saying, how do we continue to accelerate? How do we continue to grow to do those pieces? And so from the early days of bootstrapping, and by bootstrapping, I do mean I worked a full day in which, and I ran two other contracts at one point in time. So I was working three roles so that I could pay other people to work in which. And so I did two other jobs and still made my daytime meetings with which and all those pieces. We say as startup world goes, try to explain to people that getting into startups, particularly tech startups, I don't know about anything else, but it's generally a 6am to 4am gig. That's kind of how I put it. If you're not planning on to do those kind of hours, you're going to find it very difficult. And I know you hear people say it all the time, you know, work life balance and all those pieces. I've yet to work out how you do that and still grow and scale because realistically, I didn't get paid. I hadn't taken salary from which for that entire time, because my view was anytime I was doing this, do I pay another person to take away a task from me? And maybe I can finish at 3.30am? Or do I pay myself and do those pieces? My view was always grow the business, right? Grow. And I can do more with more hands. And so that was always the view. And so it meant that there's a lot of late nights, a lot of early mornings, burning candle at both ends and those kind of pieces. And now as we're approaching eight, I think, the conversations around work-life balance can maybe start to come in, you know, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't say to anybody, take this on and do this type of thing lightly. It is, it is an all-encompassing kind of role to do these pieces.
Speaker 2Jeremy, when you, when you finally did raise the 1.5 million from us at NCVC and the Fintech Fund and Booster late last year, after seven years of bootstrapping, did it, did it feel like vindication or did it feel like you'd already kind of proved that you didn't really need the money? And also what did that seven years cost you personally? Not the business, but.
Speaker 1Well, you can see the gray hairs. So I'll tell you, it cost me gray hairs and I won't be winning Young New Zealander of the Year awards. I'll tell you that much. It's a, it's a lot, but I mean, it will start in the first piece. Cost was time. In a way I say, I don't have a personality anymore. I have a startup. I can't have a general conversation with people. I don't know. I don't know what's happening in the world. I can't, have a chat about football or the rugby because quite literally, I don't have time. I haven't had time to come back to reality for those kinds of pieces. And so somebody sits down and says, do you see the match at the weekend? And I say, no, but I did sign two contracts. So, you know, how was your weekend? It's a case of you become, it's all encompassing. It becomes part of, part of your personality. But it did also put a lot of pressure on. I found those years where, were a lot of physical and mental strain. So this body, I now have a lot of physical and mental strain. I now have what I call startup body. That's a body designed to sit in a chair for large periods of time. So you don't, you don't have time for exercise. You don't have time for those kind of care pieces. And so you need to be very much willing to, as I say, put your body on the line to be able to get those pieces of the line. So I'd say those costs lead to kind of a burnout, which I did, you know, around COVID time, we had gotten a big customer, got a thing on a, on a wall, the certificate, things. Things are going well, we're going to win. And then of course everything stops. And that is, that was a huge strain. That was, you know, all of this piece that you are personally pulling and pushing into the world essentially stopped all around. And so I found that that was a very hard time. But on the other side, you sign another one and that little spark, you're like, yeah, okay, it's in. And then you sign another one and you're like, okay, we have momentum. And so by the time we, by the time we closed the round, realistically, the conversation, the conversation was starting on when are we starting our next one? Because we have already got demand, which exceeds our abilities of the last round. And so in a way it was more a case of great, that does the pieces we were talking about, but I need to plan because it takes nine bloody months to get people from hello to let's be friends, right? Because realistically, you're talking about people going in and saying, Hey, we want to have a long-term relationship with you. This is how it's going to be. You're going to need to trust me. You need to understand what we do. And so I think that's a big part of it. And I think that's a big part of it. You're going to need to understand the vagaries of what we do and understand that it might take six months to sign that customer, but when that customer signs, they're going to sign for 10 years. And so, you know, come on the journey with me and that kind of piece. And that takes a long time. So coming out of the back of that, it was like, we know, we know exactly what the next 18 months looks like, but we're already planning how that has to start nine months later to say, we need to go because we want to be bigger. And for that, I mean, securing New Zealand market and securing the Australian market. And then, you know, I think that's a big part of it. What's your next market, right? Because we want, we want this to be a global piece. There's no reason this needs to be a, an Australia, New Zealand only piece. What we have are solutions to problems that exist in all of the open banking industries. And I think at last count, it was over 70 countries have an open banking initiative of some variety and some of them, even more than open banking, what we'll call open data. So that's open energy as well. And soon to be open insurance or open finance, which includes non-bank lending and buy now, pay later and all of those types of pieces, right? So how do you continue that momentum and to do it in a way that, you know, in my view, conquers, conquers the world.
Speaker 2It was your wife who I think told you not to quit when COVID hit, right? She said, don't quit on a bad day.
Speaker 1Don't quit on a bad day. Yeah. Yeah. That was one of those ones where, you know, I just slumped down and was like, this is too hard sometimes. And she was like, well, look, you know, it's very easy to quit on a bad day, right? It's easy. I mean, you know, the page is written for you. You'd sign on the bottom, yeah, done. She was like that. It's not, it's not a good, it's not a good time to make those types of decisions. It's a say, go, you know, get to a good day and then make that kind of decision about how you want it to be. Is this right? And I think that's a good thing about having those six monthly check-ins, you know, with myself essentially, and with the business to say, is the business moving in the direction that it's supposed to be going? Is it still working for me? Is it still working for the business? Is it still working for those pieces? And what I've found is got clearer as I understood what it meant to be. And as the business accelerated, it was easier to have those pieces. I knew I was getting, you know, more from it. And it's, it's a give and take with this, with the wonderful world of startups. So it drives faster, it drives harder, but it also takes more. So we grew to 22 people in 2025, you know, that requires more time than it did when we were 12. And so it's about continuing that structure of saying, right, it's working, but it's taking more from me. So how do we restructure the business to be better and to accommodate and grow and be more secure in those kind of pieces? So that's kind of been the big piece and having that checkpoint and having somebody who backs you. I think having Onya there to back me on each one of those pieces to say, you know, we're doing this together. So, you know, that's, that's an important space to be.
Speaker 4Yeah. And let's talk a little bit about what's ahead for you. You mentioned that you're going to be doing a lot of work on your own. So what's the opportunity? The opportunity is much bigger than just New Zealand and Australia. Looking at the competitive landscape, you've played for a $6.1 billion valuation. Inc. was acquired by Visa for $2.1 billion. You're a startup with, you know, 10, 20 people, $1.5 million raise. Are you a little bit crazy or do you see an opportunity there?
Speaker 1I mean, quite literally, if you look at what's happening right now, UK is moving towards open finance. Canada is moving towards open banking. So that's, that's another piece. We have a very particular plan about how we want to grow. What is the best alignment of pieces? And going back to the original piece, I'm Irish. That means I grew up in a country which is dual lingual. So we know how to, and I said that we, I know how to build for multi-language countries. I know how to build and deliver platforms and services that can be accommodated among the pieces. So something as simple as going into Canada means we have to be able to accommodate two jurisdictions of languages and be able to, to manage those within the same piece. And so we've built and baked those kinds of capabilities in from day one. So, you know, somebody who would necessarily have started in Australia was going to find that more challenging because they have a single language country and a single language product. We have the ability to do those pieces. And I just use that generally. But the idea is joining those pieces. I think very easily the growth trajectory is mapped by, if you see the numbers coming out, for, as you said, for the acquisitions that sit on these pieces, it's about showing and demonstrating your value to those organizations, being able to do it. And there's maybe two conversations a year we have with very large organizations who see us in that same way of saying, this is a way for us to deliver value to our existing customers and to grow our other customers and how we deliver to them. So, you know, if we talk about exit, there's always acquisition at the end of that. But equally, given the scale of the market, there is the ability to grow to that point of maybe being the acquirer rather than the acquiree, if that makes sense, and being able to essentially dominate the market. Good old-fashioned IPO-style exit.
Speaker 2That's great. Dermot, you mentioned being from Ireland, like giving you advantages. Ireland has a very thriving fintech sector and Stripe is founded by Irish founders. Why not build this in
Speaker 1Ireland? In the simplest sense, I was here. It's about time and right time, right place and those kind of I could have done this in Ireland. It probably could have been easier at the start as well. I would have been closer to family. I would have had my network to call on, whereas being in New Zealand meant that I was, you know, myself as a family, we were alone in two ways. We didn't have a family support network, but equally, we didn't have a family support network for connections to people or my business network or any of those pieces. I was essentially, you know, Irish person in New Zealand. And so I had to rely on different pieces. And to be honest with you, they, each time we reached out, I often call it the Irish mafia, reaching out to the Irish network to say, hey, look, this is a problem I'm having, or this is an area I need advice in and those kind of pieces. And you seeing the Irish community come out or opening a door to somebody else to say, hey, by the way, I don't have the answer to that, but I do know this person and they work here. Can I get, can I get them in? All of a sudden you have pieces to play with. And as I said, I had a huge tech kind of network to play on, didn't have a huge business network to play on. So when I talked about those early days and having skills and those kind of pieces, a lot of the skills at my disposal were overlapping. In the old Venn diagram, everybody fell into the same side. So, you know, everybody turning up with a shovel and you're like, okay, great, but we still need a person to hold the post. Do we have any post holders here? And it's like, no, no, we've just got a load of people who can dig holes. It's like, okay, so we need to expand. We need to grow those pieces. It could have been easier. If I'd done in Ireland and to be honest with you, I think the, the startup ecosystem system is probably a little bit more mature on the Irish side. There's a lot of technology companies, a lot of pieces. New Zealand is still very small in that space. And as we talked about trying to raise capital earlier, what I found was that there are big gaps in the investment market in New Zealand. You know, it's, let's say, easier to get a $10,000 check. It's harder to get a $50,000 check. From there, you might get a $100,000 check, but you won't get a million dollar check. And so what you have to do is you have to kind of aggregate a lot of smaller checks together to make those same milestones. And the same goes, you know, in those early days, in those almost 700, 800 investors on the piece, the amount of times I met with investors who said, oh, I love it. To be honest with you, I'd invest now, but you're not asking for enough, right? I was like, look, what number would I need to ask for? We can work this any way you want. You know, we can, we can do it in installments, tranches. How do you want this to work? Well, I'll ask for any number. And as they came back and said, it's not that, it's that being a New Zealand-based startup, you're going to be a rounding error on our balance sheet. And so unless you're asking me for 10 million US, you're kind of not, you're going to cost us money to maintain as a piece. And I love what you're doing. Just come back to me when you want 10 million US. And I, you know, I have to turn around and look at the New Zealand economy and look at the Australian economy and say, holy shit, that's a big time. That's a large growth. That's a large piece. And that means I need acceleration now to be able to get to there. So what do I need right now that would allow us to get that right uptake? And so you kind of have to plot your way back, you know, that kind of piece, whereas it would be potentially much easier within Ireland having access to Europe as well and the UK's financial markets to be able to say, hey, look, I just want to raise a million Euro and I want to get going. Whereas saying I want to raise a million New Zealand dollars, I want to get going, even though, you know, dollar for dollar, it's 500,000. Euro, it's still, it's still a bigger ask of this market. And so you have to try and balance those pieces. How do you do those bits? How do you do this? And just not get, get trapped because of the vagaries of, of where you started, right? Because you say potentially started anywhere, but now you're kind of locked into the growth trajectory based on a New Zealand piece or based on an Australian piece. So yeah, but to be honest with you, I'm fortunate that I did it here because I'm not going to do it again. I'm not going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. Because I got to work and have had work with some amazing people. And I wouldn't have had those people if I was in Ireland, I would have had other people. And these ones have allowed us to do what we've done. They've supported us. I've got to meet you guys. I've got to really build what, what I find is a really strong support structure. And I probably wouldn't have leaned as heavily on that because I would have had other things to lean on in Ireland.
Speaker 4And talking about the future of FinTech in New Zealand and how open banking is going to play out in the next 12, 24 months, you're working with Kiwi Bank. They have pledged fee-free access to the API. They really tried to work with FinTech companies and use that in a way as a weapon to compete with the other banks. At the same time, the Commerce Commission is saying that some of the other banks are delaying open banking to lock in their market share. How do you think it's going to play out over the next 12, 24, 36 months?
Speaker 1We've got kind of two key markets to look at as examples. What's going to happen now in New Zealand and what's going to happen in the next 12, 35 months. There's going to be a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen next. There's going to be a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen in the next 12, 35 months. There's going to be a lot of uncertainty about I realized it's the best thing that could ever happen is a financial institution, a big bank investing in one of our competitors. Our competitor gets a huge influx of cash right now, but essentially they go stale in 18 months. They become locked as an outsourced developer essentially for that financial institution. So that has a benefit. And our independence means that we can work with anybody. And so trying to grow those pieces. So you will see that a few of those will slowly disappear from the market or their branding will become bank aligned and they will slowly get absorbed. And then it's the second wave where the real innovation comes, right? That is those who have been able to demonstrate that this is survivable. These are the pieces that are out there. Then there's appetite within the investor market to be able to say, hey, look, we can see demand. We can see pieces. And if nothing else, we know we can do better than what was done because we've learned those lessons. And so you start to get that second one. So I'm saying in the next 12 months, we will see the real second wave come out. And really start to do cool things for Kiwis. And that's going to be the real strong uptake on the piece. Between now and then though, the banks, the first ones, the big four are live. Kiwi Bank is going to go live. And then the remaining banks inside there are going to be at a disadvantage, right? So right now they're being told they don't have to. And that's smart. They're smaller. They've got a higher cost to serve. You don't have to come in yet, but it's at their cost realistically. So whether they put a technology solution in and do this or don't, they're customers who are going to be the ones that are suffering. And so you're going to see customers start to migrate to those who do offer these services. And you do have those capabilities. And so we'll be looking to support as many of those to come in and on as fast as possible to be able to say, hey, look, there's no sense in losing out. It doesn't have to be, I think there's numbers quoted for Westpac Australia whenever they did theirs, you know, a hundred million Australian to go live. It doesn't have to be anything like that. When you use a SaaS-based provider like us, we can remove a lot of those pieces. So it'll be about helping those in because open banking succeeds when all of the financial institutions are there. It cannot succeed when some of them are there because you still don't have your financial life in one place. And what ends up happening is something like screen scraping will live forever because these other providers can't come online. And what we really should be doing is looking to ensure that it is appropriate and effective for them to be able to participate because it's like, it's not collecting anything. Your collection isn't really worth it until you have them all. And that really has to be, has to be the view on it. And that would be the big difference. So we've seen it. I mean, there's 140 financial institutions on the Australian side and they're about to bring in non-bank lenders, which means, you know, your payday lenders, buy now, pay later, your cue card style lending pieces, all of those coming together as a cohort, you're going to bring in 500 or so more institutions or brands at least into that piece. That is going to be hugely vibrant within the Australian space. And so New Zealand needs to keep that pace. And we've seen the uptake of that demand on the Australian side. And now we're seeing the demand on the New Zealand side. So we can see where that kind of hockey stick goes.
Speaker 2Interesting. Dermot, you said that 87% of individuals can be re-identified using just three points of their data. That's terrifying. You know, separately, you pointed out that AI models don't forget data once it's been used for trading, right? The right to be forgotten is essentially impossible, the current kind of architecture. And you're building data infrastructure. How do you think about what your responsibility is? And are you making the problem worse, better? How do your consumers think about this?
Speaker 1Yeah. So the way we look at it is back to the original description. I describe it as pipes, all right? We're like the water pipes that run from the reservoir to wherever the tap is. Your pipes run best when nothing gets stuck in them, all right? And so it should be as straight through as possible. That removes the risk of data. The second part is when it gets to the other end, if you keep a whole tank of water, that goes stagnant too. And so really the best way for an open data ecosystem to run is to leave the water in the reservoirs until you need it, right? And so as a service provider, if you need data from Westpac, for example, then call for it from Westpac. Don't pull it down, stick it in your warehouse and expect it to be useful for the rest of eternity. So the idea is it becomes a real-time data interaction across the ecosystem. That reduces the risk on that business that's offering a services side. That reduces the risk on Westpac's side for the data sharing because they know it's been read out, it's been used, and it's been forgotten. Now there's scenarios where you do need to keep it. If you lend to somebody, you need to hold it for seven years to prove that you did your due diligence and all those pieces. But that's a legitimate use case where it goes into a system for maintenance. Generally speaking, if you're doing somebody's personal financial management, every hour and forget what you had before and still be really responsive to the user's interaction. So those are the kind of pieces. The other side of it obviously then means that a customer can choose to revoke their access and that PFM's data disappears, right? Because it's gone out the other side. They don't have a warehouse. There's nothing to lose if you don't have it. That's the way I like to look at this. If you had a vault and you were trying to protect it, it's easier just not to have a vault with things to protect than it is to have a vault that needs to be protected, right? And so the financial institutions, the banks and all those are already building big infrastructure to do those pieces. The rest of us should be really smart and rely on them having done it. And now something, as we mentioned before, Kiwi bank, for example, coming out and saying they're not going to charge for access to API calls and payment initiation puts pressure on the other banks because it goes back to that core piece of it's your information. Why are they charging for access to it? They don't charge you for mobile app. They don't charge you for internet banking. Why do they charge when it comes over an API, right? Paul: Right. And so that's a real kind of driver driven by a competitive advantage. And I'd hope that competitive advantage is because they picked us as a platform. And so their cost to serve is better. And so that the other banks look at that in the same light and say, maybe there's a better way to in a way that isn't going to be so costly that requires us to charge what they originally planned five dollars per user per month right that is colossal now nobody nobody's going to pay five dollars per per account essentially to access data right um those kind of pieces are are going to be a big change for customers
Speaker 2yeah and maybe pivoting into kind of like the personal the personal side you know you mentioned that you've done this for seven eight years now and you've gotten the startup body and you've gone through the highs and the lows and you know exactly what this what this is about and that story that you mentioned when australia called you and you coded the thing over the weekend a lot of times you have to do that or you have to sort of just figure it out on the spot and then maybe can you have something when you don't fully have it where do you feel like a fraud maybe is there a part of this where you look at the kiwi bank partnership and the funding round and think they're going to figure out figure out that i'm making this up as
Speaker 1i go it's we'll say i am a tech founder i am what i like to think of as a cave dweller right that's it's where i'm most comfortable right leave me alone in the back with the code i'll make it work always where i feel we say like the fraud is that kind of out on front the face this this um conversations the the sales pieces that i i never feel comfortable i i always talk about putting on my mask i'm going to go put on my mask and go do those pieces you know getting up on stage you know doing that is is a big is is a big change for me that is putting myself in front of a lot of people i always say i i i'm not even an expert on myself let alone anything else so you know when people start asking me questions it's like you know this is my opinion you know i i want to be very clear don't quote me on this don't buy stock don't do anything this is not financial advice you know it's a case of uh i want to make sure that um people understand that you know i i am still growing in this space so i've found um i didn't i have enjoyed sales i've enjoyed getting on stage i've enjoyed doing podcasts and talking to people that is actually um a surprise for me given how much i love the tech side but i think the difference is the tech side for me is semi-immediate reward right something doesn't work then it does you can go okay i've done something meaningful whereas when you go in and you go into a sales conversation you're not going and six months later you're still talking about contracts from a tech perspective that could feel like the words haven't changed literally we we've just moved bullet point four to bullet point three we should be good we should be we should be okay here why haven't we signed this right so um there is that that kind of piece where you don't have that same immediate uh responsiveness on it that that's kind of piece and so i'm still learning i say it i you know i'm learning and i have a marketing and sales and all those pieces that's where i feel like uh i'm turning up these pieces going i'm just gonna have to see how this goes because i i i still don't know where's the tech you describe it to me i can see it in my head i can fix it in my head and then i touch the keys twice and away it's working you know it's a tap tap tap tap that's done i can walk away and i still even now um in my say ceo role i still when i feel overwhelmed or stressed i'll go find a bug i'll go fix it i'll send it people say done they will send me back a message stop writing code and then i will still feel happy that i accomplished something and say that's what we're here for you go make sure we get paid but it's just like i needed that today i needed that kind of piece to be able to say hey look you know the almost tactile interaction with with the pieces we've continued to grow so because of the the round last year i've been able to put in place managers and by that i mean we've got a general manager who started with us now we've got a an engineering manager so rather than 22 people reporting to me i now have a senior leadership which is way better way more um organized and it reduces the risk on me like like anybody you know i am a single point of failure when it comes to businesses and those companies you want to remove those so i i've been able to start to delegate actions i've been able to step more into my role as ceo which is both terrifying and exciting because as i see this the ceo role is about vision right it's about driving the business to a location and it's doing it differently and it's doing it differently and it's doing it differently to driving it to the pieces being the driver when i'm in the code i actually i'm doing it whereas when you're in the ceo role you're trying to communicate that effectively outside and effectively inside and so that that's been a a real a real big kind of change i've loved it but equally am i am i the best at it time will tell but i what i wanted one piece of say is what i don't want this to be is a business of personality that's that's the one thing i don't want this to be and i can't even remember his name open ai you know where people aren't talking about the product or the service they're talking about me that's if we're doing that then i'm doing something wrong the idea is our product is what the focus on this is what we're building this is what we're growing and so i'm just a means to an end in that space whereas um you know sometimes when you're you're doing those pieces you find that a startup is built around a person and around a person's personality i want to try and avoid
Speaker 4that makes sense we got three rapid fire questions for you to wrap up still all right okay great number one is what do you do when you're doing a startup who is tom red
Speaker 1that's dermot spelled backwards so that is kind of my pen name tom red is my so when i when i uh do and have done um publishing before you know for articles and and web and those kind of pieces i did in the name of uh tom red dermot butterfield is a bloody long name and and i will guarantee you nobody spells it right so it's much easier to uh to flip it over and and make it tom red comes from primary school i had a friend who spoke backwards and i was like oh for a long time and he called me tom red
Speaker 4that's cool what does which stand
Speaker 1for which is kind of a reference to an alternative which doctor the kind of alternative to what's out there which was a bunch of static on-prem solutions and all of those types of pieces screen scraping i wanted to say look that's the existing piece there is an alternative come to come to the dark side as such and the second part was around the idea of which hazel which is about flexibility right that idea something that can be used and molded and manipulated into a form and that's what what i wanted to build a company around the idea that our apis solve many problems from one place and we can enable those pieces in a single spot so about flexibility do you
Speaker 4still talk to your mentor
Speaker 1in ireland not for 17 years and that's how long i've been out of the country when i left it was fully cut off disconnected in fairness in those days i had a nokia smartphone which required you to stand on the top of buildings to send messages so as smart as things were all those years ago there wasn't there wasn't much in that space so once we left ireland and got into central and south america anyway there was very little true internet coverage and once i got here it was a case of well i have a plan let's do it
Speaker 2dermot one last question what do you know now that you wish you'd known when you were coding while the twins napped and honestly would you have listened to your yourself if you'd known that
Speaker 1i'd have given myself a stern talking to right this in the easiest way putting it has been exhausting i knew this was going to be a lot of effort i did not realize just how much a lot of effort really was going to be at the same time as as being a parent and starting all those pieces so i would i'd give myself a real stern talking to explain that enterprise sales does not happen overnight that would have helped with my would say resilience early on i am a go go go go go kind of person and our customers are a sure almost there kind of organizations and so i would have paced myself a little better i would have made sure that i was really thinking about the customer's journey for this as opposed to my drive for this because the customers have always been eager they've always been engaged the challenge was trying to move a large beast is not something you can do alone and i definitely tried to do that awesome
Speaker 4thank you dermot um this was such a great conversation thank you for going so deep where can people follow you find you and what should they be watching out for um on may 30th and
Speaker 1after yeah so you can find me on linkedin dermot butterfield you can find which on which.it otherwise i don't do the socials you can you can follow us there i do post on linkedin quite regularly and you can keep up to date with what's happening that's a that's a really a good spot for us sharing updates around industry and
Speaker 3pieces like
Speaker 4that amazing thanks so much no worries
Speaker 3thank you very much guys i do thank you for tuning in to tech mates if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe to our channel and hit the bell button if you enjoyed this episode be sure to subscribe leave a review and share it with friends we'll be back soon with more stories of kiwi and aussie founders reshaping the future and disrupting down under until next time keep dreaming big and daring to disrupt
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