Ep. 34 - The Good Guys in a Not So Great Industry

In this episode, Fahd sits down with Nic Beique, founder and CEO of Helcim, to explore his journey from self-taught programmer to building one of Canada's leading fintech companies. Nic shares how a commitment to solving real problems for small businesses led him to challenge the traditional payments industry with a transparent, people-first approach.

From bootstrapping a startup to scaling a technology company in a highly competitive market, Nic discusses the importance of long-term thinking, staying true to your values, and building products that put customers before profits. He also shares insights on leadership, innovation, and what it takes to create a business that earns trust and stands the test of time.

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:01

Maybe we can be the good guys in a not so great industry.

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 0:05

I think like customers will find a way if they think your business is unfair, they will find the way to make to create fairness.

SPEAKER_05 0:13

Ultimately, serve there's really like one thing driving us, which is ultimately like be the world's most loved payments company and serve small business customers that are being taken advantage of or not being well serviced like every day.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

All right, let me get this story started. So, so on paper, the story doesn't make sense. In 2007, a 23-year-old web designer from Calgary looked at one of the most conservative bank-dominated industries in the world and decided that he wanted to enter the payments space. Now there's phases to this because there's there's company one and there's company two. We're gonna talk about the evolution of that, but no finance degree, no venture capital, no Silicon Valley swagger, just the stubborn conviction that small businesses were getting ripped off and someone needed to fix it. I love the the the the the the the vigor of that step. So Nick Beak, Nick Beak, French back, French background, you know, French heritage, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:06

Grew up in Quebec.

SPEAKER_02 1:07

You grew up in Quebec. Where in Quebec?

SPEAKER_05 1:09

Um, so Montreal Island, West Island.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

Montreal Island, West Island. That's awesome. I love I love Montreal. Honestly, if there's any city I would live in aside from where I'm living in, that would be Montreal.

SPEAKER_05 1:18

Except for the winters, the Montreal winters are it says the Calgarian now. Oh no, Montreal's much worse.

SPEAKER_02 1:23

It's it the ice, the iciness of Montreal.

SPEAKER_05 1:26

It's just heavy, heavy snow and it never lets up.

SPEAKER_02 1:28

It never lets up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so you founded Hellsom, a company that would spend, I mean, two phases. Phase phase one lasted how many years?

SPEAKER_05 1:39

So that was like from 2009 to 2020 or 19. Not yeah. And then we reinvented ourselves and relaunched a business in 2020.

SPEAKER_02 1:46

Okay, so so Hellsom 2.0 is about five years. Yep. And Hellsom 1.0 It's kind of 11 years prior to that. 11 years. Um, and you you you had this mission around building an ethical alternative to these payment goliaths that existed. Because when you really look into this payment, everyone just takes their piece. If the small business owner is working hard to try and make ends meet, and in that transaction of a customer actually going to buy something, there are so many little pieces taken away. Um, and that that uh is is interesting. Now there's a few Goliaths in this story, right? The one that comes to mind in 2020 is sort of stripe and square, the the sort of new fintech goliaths. But early days, that's not the fintech goliath. It's sort of Moneris? It's sort of like where where where what who are the competitors? Who are the big Goliaths when you first get started?

SPEAKER_05 2:44

Yeah, it was the bank-owned processor kind of legacy processors. So you had Moneris and TD and Global Payments, and you know, those kind of like old school processors that um dominated the market, um, still dominate, you know, they're still giant companies to this day. The interesting part about payments is that nobody likes their payments company, but number everybody needs to accept payments. Like it's it's a little bit like you know, the the you know, the telephone companies where it's like everybody needs a phone, but not everybody's in love with their their telephone companies. And um we th we thought, hey, maybe there's maybe we can be the good guys in a not so great industry.

SPEAKER_02 3:23

Maybe we can be the good guys in a not so great industry. I love that. I I love that you you know that well because I've I've heard you say that before. So we're gonna quote you on that. But let's be the good guys in the not so great industry. I think one of the interesting things that we've learned in a lot of these David versus Goliath stories as we've done this research is that whenever there is excess fat that an industry is sitting on, the consumer will will and and and the the competition will find a way to eat away at it. Yeah, right. It's so it's sort of like blockbuster having you know taken advantage of the the late fees. Yeah, the late fees. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_05 4:00

Like I mean, there's that there's that quote from Bezos, which is like, your margin is my opportunity, um, which is like, I mean, he comes at it much more aggressively from like a logistics and like massive cost reduction standpoint. But yeah, I mean, if whenever you have a service that everybody needs, yet there's all these, you know, excessive billing and excessive charges and like hidden fees and everything like that, you have to ask yourself, like, why why is that happening and why how is the what's the option in a market if customers are like letting that happen to them?

SPEAKER_02 4:30

Yeah. And and you like you came to a really interesting, I think, insight, your sort of slingshot as as David. One of your strategic insights was that radical transparency of fee structure was more important than simplifying maybe the the pricing page or the the fee structure. That if I'm more transparent and give my buyer options, then it's better than just like simplifying it because then they can actually have more ownership, more agency over what they want to spend.

SPEAKER_05 5:01

Yeah, it's it's it's weird that um it's a little like counterintuitive because you would think that there's kind of two ways to go about it. You can have the kind of Silicon Valley way, which is very much like make things very simple, which it can be very effective, but it doesn't mean it's actually like affordable. Yeah right. Like the simplicity can actually be even more expensive, right? Um, or you have the other way, which is how much do you actually trust your customer? How much do you trust that the average small business owner is actually um you know sophisticated enough to be able to kind of look at that, cut through that, and go like, no, no, no, how much am I actually paying? And can you put a more complicated rate structure in front of them if it's um more affordable, which is what's me, what we did, right? Which is like a cost plus structure. We said, like, here's the the raw, true wholesale cost with Visa Mask card. We're just gonna show it to you. They're very complicated, show it to you. And then we're just gonna charge you a kind of negotiated margin on top, the way that like the big enterprise companies operate. And they it works in their favor as a big enterprise. They use that model because it's it's what makes sense to them or what reduces their costs. But then everybody assumes, well, SMBs are too, they're they're not smart enough to um to go for that model. They'll just want a 2.9% flattened to worry about. And it's like, I don't know, this this really hits their margin. This really matters. I think you're underestimating the average like SMB operator. Yeah. And like, yeah, they will do their if it if it's costing them an extra like 10,000 bucks a year, whatever, they will do their homework.

SPEAKER_02 6:31

People do their homework.

SPEAKER_05 6:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:32

I it's you know, again, I think I think this is the insight. So it's sort of the two pieces that I really like. It's the consumer is smarter, and I'm gonna treat them like that they're smarter. I'm gonna give them that radical transparency, and your margins are my opportunity. Like I think those three together. It reminds me of a like a funny little story I had the other. I was a couple a couple weeks, a couple months ago, a couple months ago now. I was in I was in New York. Uh, we I was doing a I was doing a fun gig for Chick-fil-A, the speaking thing. Yeah, it's kind of funny thing. I was with my wife, we went down, we're having fun. We we went to this little chapter, this is indigo chapters right before the the day before, and um shopping around for books, and then I had to go use the washroom. So I go to use the washroom, and there's a sign on the washroom door, and it says, um only customers allowed if you've paid, like if you've paid. And and there's a code, and you need to have a receipt for the code. And I was like, I just gotta use the washroom. Like, I'm gonna buy something. I've been in your store for 20 minutes. I look over and there's like a little pile of receipts. Customers were leaving their receipts next to the washroom door because they felt like that policy was unfair to the and I love that. Yeah, I think like customers will find a way if they think your business is unfair, they will find the way to make to create fairness. They go, let people use the washroom. I literally picked up the receipt, I plugged it in, put the receipt back for the next person to use it. I was like, that's so you know, like, and I'm sure the staff like come and clean that up every day, a few times a day when they see it happening. But I I like this because this is where this episode is going. We're gonna get into how you how you had the conviction to start a company like this because you are a tiny little David in Canada, Calgary, to try to take on this massive industry. You were 23 years old when you first started the first business. Obviously, you you matured in grade for the second, for the second business, learned some good lessons along the way. I want to kind of know the lessons of how David approaches the fight, you know, day one versus how David approaches the second fight. Like I think that's an interesting piece. And then how how some grows from this scrappy Calgary startup culture, too. I'm I'm interested in in how startups survive in the cold, the the cold and maybe not as as money available, you know, uh cities like Calgary versus right where everyone thinks like New York or Toronto or the Valley, right? Like where there's easier to to raise capital. So that's where the that's where the story is gonna go. That's where we're gonna really look into it. So take me to 2007 and what is the insight that actually drives this? What's the moment? Is there a moment? What's the friend that you decide I'm gonna do this with? Take me back to this this beginning, the beginning origins.

SPEAKER_05 9:23

Yeah. So um I started out as a geeky kid in the 90s that was really into computers and what you you know in the late 90s, early 2000s, what do you do with that if you're good with computers and you're that kid? You you build websites, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:36

So, like I was on Microsoft Paint.

SPEAKER_05 9:38

Yeah, there you go, right? Um, and you you build websites for people, you you know, and I would I was a teenager and I would go to my barber and the local gym and different small businesses and just say, like, I'd love to build you a website, and here's the work I've done. And a lot of times they would say yes, and sometimes they'll just write me a check on the spot and be like, How much do you want? And I'd be like, I don't know 500 bucks, 700 bucks, whatever. And they would do it. And that taught me a few things. Um, I fell in love with small business in those moments where it's like small business owners are like literally, there's no reason to like write a check to a teenager that walks in your door that says gonna build you something, but there's like a camaraderie that immediately built, which is like these people are risk takers and they believe in like supporting each other, and there's like a kindred spirit. And so I fell in love with with small business right there. And that journey evolved into we started building more and more websites and we started coding e-commerce websites. This was kind of before the Shopify days.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who were what were you building on?

SPEAKER_05 10:34

No, it was uh uh like you would you'd find like and you you'd host it yourself, so you'd like rack servers and like I mean it's the old school days, right? And then we started coding e-commerce websites, and then it led into well, we got to plug in payments to those websites, and that was like, so I'm in my my mid-20ness now, and we kept seeing that, and there wasn't much, there was like PayPal and Meneris.

SPEAKER_04 10:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 10:55

Um, and it was awful. Every time we tried to pass a business, they would like, you know, PayPal's just PayPal's had a terrible reputation for like 25 years, right? And even the banks, like, you know, you'd you'd have to go this convoluted process. They wanted even I wanted to accept payments for my own business so I can accept credit cards for the the work we were doing. And they wanted a $5,000 GIC and money down, and like it was just this like, this is awful every time maybe there's an opportunity. And so we got in our heads, and we're like, no idea. And this was me and and a co-founder at the time, and like we we we're like, okay, we're gonna start a payments company. The idea originally was like, we're gonna start we're gonna mix our e-commerce with the payments, a little bit like Shopify, right? So it was like we're gonna build e-commerce websites, but then we're gonna pair them with payments. And now we don't know the terminology, we don't even know what to ask for. We're calling up literally calling a bank's cold and going, like, I'd like to sell payments, please.

SPEAKER_02 11:52

And like, I'd like to plug you into our website.

SPEAKER_05 11:55

Yeah, it just did not like you know, so it was it was a tough go, and it actually took two years of just trying to call banks to do this.

SPEAKER_02 12:05

That's really interesting. Oh, it was just like isn't that the story? Like for so many founders, it took two years of just calling. Yeah, just like I we don't even know what to call it, we don't know what it is, I don't know how to Google it, I don't know how to search it, I don't know how to talk about it. But through enough conversations with bankers, yeah, the most conservative of the bunch.

SPEAKER_05 12:23

And ironically, so we're you know, we're we're we're Calgary kids trying to figure this thing out, and it was actually an American bank that was expanding into Canada that said, Hey, we have this this kind of reseller program, you can sell payments, um, you know, you can you'll have some control over it, and you can kind of build it into your your your thing, or you, you know, and we got introduced somehow, and and they said, Yeah, well, we'll they I think they were desperate to grow into the Canadian market, and something clicked, and it was the first one to say yes, and we just said like yes on the spot. Like my first yes, yeah, and and ironically, it came from a an American partner, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

Um, that was willing that it shows you how conservative the Canadian banks are, which is interesting because wouldn't you what like I would argue that the Canadian banks adopted digital faster than some of the American banks. That is that an accurate.

SPEAKER_05 13:15

Yeah, but they're so monopolistic that they they don't want to leave, they won't they don't want to let anyone in. So like it's kind of like even if you were to start a telephone company in Canada versus the US, like it's gonna be easier there. And and I'm obviously like I'm I'm a patriot, I'm super bullish about Canadian and everything that's happening right now.

SPEAKER_02 13:32

We have some real log oligopolies here in Canada. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 13:35

Banking and telephone, like it's just like you can't get media, media, banking, telephone, right?

SPEAKER_02 13:40

Like it's it's it is controlled and it's they're the Goliaths of these industries. They are and they play defense, they actually play defense aggressively. Yes, yeah, it's aggressive defense, aggressive defense, full court press is what they're doing. Okay, so so you get your you get a first like uh opportunity to resell this payment service from an American bank that you could plug into your website. Do they have plugins? Are they like what are they do they have any of the like tech to actually be the website? No, no, no.

SPEAKER_05 14:10

You're just like you're ever you're coding everything from scratch, um, it's super manual. But then so we built um, so we're about to launch the first payments company with the e-commerce piece, and we uh we we decided to build a bunch of infrastructure that we needed to plug in the payments to the e-commerce, right? And like payment gateways and virtual terminals and things like that. And then so we launch and we got 49 clients in the first year, and we're really happy. And but then the feedback from the clients was like, yeah, your software is fine. We really like the payments piece. And the payments piece is actually a little bit more of the afterthought. It was like the two are coming together, but we had built a lot of these tools just to support the the e-commerce. They're like, Yeah, uh, the e-commerce, I don't know if I'll use it or not, but like, can I keep the payments? Can I use more of the payments? And it was this realization.

SPEAKER_02 14:56

Were you charging for the e-commerce? Or were you charging for the payments?

SPEAKER_05 14:59

We're charging for both. Okay, yeah. And um, it was this realization it's like, hey, maybe we're better at payments. Maybe maybe this is like what we'd be uh good at. So we decided to to to shift our focus and be like, let's let's do that. And that's how that was like the start of the first payments company.

unknown 15:14

Cool.

SPEAKER_02 15:15

And and and that's an interesting insight because you you're you you hear it from your customers, you hear it from the first ones. They go, This is what we like as part of your product, this is what we enjoy. What did they say they liked about it? What was it? Just like this was easy, I have no other solution because there wasn't any, was there a lot of things?

SPEAKER_05 15:32

No, like I mean so this is like 2019, 2000 or sorry, 2009, 2010. Stripe came out, 2011. It was still like like the early days of that world, right? So we created something that was like super simple. And then when it came to the our pricing approach, even that early in that came from inside, which was like we want to be the good guys in a not so great industry. So we're like, let's make it transparent, let's make it honest. Now it was there from like they won. Yes, and I think they resonated with that because the industry was nothing but right.

SPEAKER_02 16:03

And so initially, I guess you got this funded and started because you were building websites and e-commerce stores. That was your initial capital. You were fee for service, you're just professional services, and then you build this tool, and now you're like, okay, maybe we can just now are you selling it as a initially as like a SaaS membership license, or were you always you know taking a portion of transactions?

SPEAKER_05 16:24

Always a portion of transactions. There was a basic kind of monthly fee. And so we shifted to that, and um the the there's no funding, there's no capital. There's I didn't know what the word VC was. Yeah, yeah. I'm a Calgary. I didn't even know what the word startup was. I'm just a Calgary tech business owner, and you know, we're gonna go and have to like funding.

SPEAKER_02 16:43

Like I have to sell something to get money.

SPEAKER_05 16:44

Yeah, they that's and then it was so it was get, you know, get two classes, get four, get eight, you know, get 16, and like, you know, keep growing as slowly and get to the point where like it the first few years were slow. Like we were it took a few years for us to be able to like give ourselves a basic salary, and we're just kind of grinding it away. But we were building a small business and building a reputation locally as like good payments guys.

SPEAKER_02 17:06

I mean, that's the beauty of starting in your early 20s. You don't need much, right? You're like, what? I don't I don't even need that much. What's a you know a basic salary? I don't even know.

SPEAKER_05 17:13

I'm super thankful for my wife because she's carried me for a long time. She carried me for a long time.

SPEAKER_02 17:16

So we have a I have a term, we have a term for it. We call it uh uh the founder founders, partners who who carry. They're the steady Freddies. Yeah, like that's awesome. So shout shout out to your wife. What's your wife's name? Leslie. Leslie. Thank you, Leslie, for giving us giving us Nick, you know? So, so okay, you have this moment where you realize this is this is the opportunity. You start building towards it. It takes three years before you're you're making enough revenue to pay yourself. What what is what is the three, four year, what does that look like? Uh uh at five years. Um, what do you have? Is it a few staff? Is it you and the founders? How many how many clients?

SPEAKER_05 17:56

Yeah, so we got to about like uh three three staff and two two founders. Um, and then uh there's uh uh my co-founder left. Um, so then it was like me and the business, right? Um and it wasn't like at the time, it was just like it was just a small business, you know, you buy yourself a job, exactly, right? And it's like, okay, you know, been doing that for with me for for four or five years, and it's like, okay, we got at this point, but you know, like you know, change change of heart kind of thing, right? Yeah, and um we this is so I go to I so this is like 2014 or so, and I still have it for me. I'm like, no, no, no, I think I think I can get this to a bigger, yeah, bigger stage, and um, but we're still a reseller of the bank. So we're still like you know still skimming on top of the skim. Like it's yeah, and and and and you're still like we're controlling, we have great customer service, we have good reputation, we're trying to be honest with pricing, but when I say trying to be honest with pricing, because you're still navigating the bank. Yes, and they're you know, you're you're saying, No, no, no, I don't think we should charge these fees. The bank's like, well, that's what we charge. And then so then you're like you're trying to make up for it with even better customer service and even you know better tools to kind of make up for that. So you always feel like you're in the shadow. And that was really tough. And I I saw what was happening.

SPEAKER_02 19:15

How can you do good when you are strapped to the Goliath, to the person doing bad? Like exactly. I'm just the other side of their coin.

SPEAKER_05 19:24

And uh the best analogy I have is like if you're uh an insurance broker, so it's kind of like you could have right insurance brokers with like fantastic reputations, they could take their custom they could take care of their customers, people refer to them like he should you know find my my you know, use my friend, but ultimately you're still at the mercy of like the insurance companies, yeah, and whether they actually want to pay out or yeah, exactly, and how they ultimately achieve customers and how they ultimately price policies and everything. So that's probably like the closest analogy where like we were building a really good reputation, but still under the limits of being in the shadow of a bigger um kind of bank, right?

SPEAKER_02 20:03

Well, and the regulations here in Canada, like how like you know, one of the the pieces that one of the when when when studying wealth simple story, for example, that I that I learned that what they they actually uh early on acquired an existing uh small kind of player bank that already had their licensing because it would have taken too long to get the licensing to actually move forward. Yeah, like they but they have to have the pockets to do that. And they were raising yeah, yeah, they they had the pockets different. But it was interesting, like the regulation here in Canada. So were you facing any regulation issues? That's why you sort of had to stick with the bank for a while.

SPEAKER_05 20:37

It's not really regulation as much as like obviously we have regulations, we have like uh thing frameworks we have to operate under, but the main thing is just like a bank has to open a door for you, period. You cannot ask you cannot act access Visa Master to interact in those networks, you just can't access them without a bank connecting you to them. Yeah, so now okay, we're mid-2010s, the business is starting to accelerate. Um, still the the the kind of reselling business but organic growth, reputation, starting to get better at marketing and everything, right? So starting to grow and it grew pretty well. So, like in the next five years, all the way 2019, we grew to about 40 people. So we're like 40 staff, 6,000 customers. This thing's becoming a real thing. Um, again, it's all bootstrapped.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

All bootstrapped 40 staff, yeah, 6,000 customers. That's huge, that's that's amazing. That's an amazing small, medium-sized business.

SPEAKER_05 21:22

Like, that's it's it's but you know, you're then I'm starting to see what's happening in the market. So I'm seeing like, oh, Square is starting to really like grow and Stripe is starting to become dominant, and like, and they have different licenses than I do because I'm just a reseller under the bank's shadow, and they were giving a license to essentially operate and kind of be their own payments company, their own processor, right? Yeah, and I'm so they were their relationship directly with Visa MasterCard and yeah, and you still it's funny because you're still even in that world of payments, you're still got a bank kind of backstopping you, but they are being giving very different licenses to kind of do it on their own, right? So seeing what's happening, so the the the the the bootstrap business starting to grow. Um Um starting to be more meaningful. I'm starting this this this bank relationship uh that we have down in the US. Um I'm starting to, you know, it's a it's a good relationship that I'm building and they're trusting me more and more, and the business is becoming more significant. And I go to them and I go, like, this has served us both well. Yeah, but I need to move away from your shadow, and I want to go on my own and and do this, right?

SPEAKER_02 22:23

How do they feel about that?

SPEAKER_05 22:24

Um, I think that banks, regardless of the great partnership or not, like nobody wants to wholesale their business, nobody wants to like create competitors out of nowhere. Um, but we grew to a certain size where uh we said, look, we're I'm gonna I'm gonna get back on the phone for two years and I'm gonna find a new way to do this. Yes. And I would love for you to be that partner, but you're gonna have to make a a call, right? And um they finally said yes. And you know, they but they said, you know, first one through the door gets bloody, and like it's gonna be, and so we got the yes in 2017.

SPEAKER_02 23:01

And from and and they what was the what the yes was like we want you they're gonna give us this license to go on our own, okay, right?

SPEAKER_05 23:09

So essentially to be our own payments company where we are in charge of everything A to Z.

SPEAKER_02 23:13

That's it.

SPEAKER_05 23:14

But also also the rest of the city.

SPEAKER_02 23:15

And you're paying for that license.

SPEAKER_05 23:16

Yeah, exactly. Right. So um, and you know, everything is your responsibility, like risk, moving the money, all like technology, hardware, it doesn't matter. Like it's all yours. If you want the keys, fine, we'll give you the keys.

SPEAKER_02 23:28

But like uh yeah, we're washing our hands of this exactly, right?

SPEAKER_05 23:32

And um, so we go, okay, great, like this is gonna be the this is the chance to kind of reinvent ourselves and ultimately it's it's about our small business customers, like really like fell in love with those original small business owners and wanting to like be able to like fully actualize that mission that I had in my head, which is like to be the world's most left payments company, which is an oxymoron. Um, but I'm like, we're never gonna do it under the shadow of a bank, we're gonna have to go on our own and ultimately like bring this to the market the way that like we think it like even with Square Even a Stripe, even with everybody in the market, like they weren't doing it the way I think it should have been done for the small businesses. Yeah, and the only way for us to do it is to go on our own and try to do that.

SPEAKER_02 24:14

So what do you do? What do you do now with this new is this this is this is so the new license is the birth of Hellsome 2.0.

SPEAKER_05 24:22

Yeah. So get this license 2007, or get sorry, get the thumbs up that we're gonna get this license in 2007.

SPEAKER_02 24:27

Okay, yeah, there's some time between the thumbs up and the execution.

SPEAKER_05 24:30

In my mind, I'm like, okay, I've got this business, it's profitable, it's bootstrapped, right? I want to do this giant, giant pivot to essentially be reinvent ourselves as a company. Um, this the my bank partner's telling me it's gonna give me this license, yeah, but I gotta convince their, and this is like kind of the first one through the door gets bloody. So it's like I gotta convince their compliance officers, they're legal, get everything in place, get everybody happy and and and regulations and everything, right? And we're still just a small Calgary bootstrap company. Yeah, yeah. Um, and we still gotta like, yeah, we have a basic outline of a payment service, but like we're about to take on everything ourselves. So we gotta go build a ton of stuff, and I gotta find a manufacturer for my hardware. I gotta build like a ton of systems.

SPEAKER_02 25:10

Well, you're not just building a software company. No, you're it's it's making hardware.

SPEAKER_05 25:16

Like somebody from Calgary with like a small little business is no business trying to make a competitor to like. Maybe that's why they agreed.

SPEAKER_02 25:22

You know, that's like go get your ear, try it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 25:28

So in my mind, I'm like, okay, so what I I mean, the hurdle is huge. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:32

I think there's a there is, there's, there's who said it? I think it was it was um um CEO of Nvidia Jensen there. He goes, If I if I truly knew and understood what it would have taken, I would have never done it.

SPEAKER_05 25:44

Yeah. I remember seeing that quote. You have to be, I mean, there's certain industries, I'm sure like building chips is definitely one of those, right? Where it's like you kind of have to be like a is the term masochist? Like you just like you just have to like enjoy pain somehow at some deep level. Yeah. Um, so yeah, we we bid off way more than we could chew, but we're like, we are doggily determined to prove the market that we could do this.

SPEAKER_02 26:08

And are you aware of your how aware are you of the competitors, like of Goliath? I find sometimes some people are like, you know what, we weren't even really aware of our competitors. We were sort of just doing our own thing, want to solve this problem.

SPEAKER_05 26:20

We looked at the market differently. So, like you had Square, you know, uh, but Square is really focused on like restaurants, and that's where people kind of see it, right? Stripe and both have done fantastically well, but Stripe is more like tech companies, and they want to find the Shopify's and the Uber.

SPEAKER_02 26:36

They wanted to find, yeah, exactly. They didn't want to be the front line.

SPEAKER_05 26:39

Yeah, and then for us, we like call it like real main street business. So like we wanted to help dentists and vets and auto mechanics and wholesalers and accountants, and like they're not, you know, those those those small businesses were still not being like um serviced by the new no by by those new processors, they're still stuck with the bank.

SPEAKER_02 26:59

All the old POS systems, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 27:01

And there's a lot of them. It's a giant to give you a sense of the market. Square, which is like fantastically big, right? Like $50 billion market cap has two percent of the market.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

Oh, I didn't know that. That's that's interesting.

SPEAKER_05 27:12

Stripe is five percent, JP Morgan Chase, which is largest. Shopify.

SPEAKER_02 27:19

Shopify, yeah, which is the quarter of their business. Yeah, which is their quarter of their business.

SPEAKER_05 27:23

And then wow. And then JP Morgan is nine percent of the business. So it gives you this sense of like it's immense, it's infinite TAM. Um, but it's also massive barriers to entry.

SPEAKER_04 27:33

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 27:33

So we go, okay, we want to do this. And you know, to go back to your question, like, no, we I don't think we I don't think I was realizing how much I was buying at all. It was like, I'll be fine.

SPEAKER_02 27:43

Um the naivity of David is what allows him to be just illusional enough. Yeah, because you wouldn't start it. You want to start it. Like I think that, but I also think that's why often you see startups happen with people in their youth, in the younger because it again, the naivety of I can do that, I can pull that off. We could, you know, like totally.

SPEAKER_05 28:06

And so we we're in this point, so we do a couple of things. So we think it's gonna take this, we think it's like this is gonna take 12 months. It did not take 12 months, it took three years. Um, so this is like the 2000. So we we we launched Hellsome 2.0, like reinvented ourselves in 2020 essentially as a new company. What happens between then those three years is a couple of things. It took us three years to actually convince the banks and the regulators to let us do this. Yeah, so it it it took a long time and a whole lot of work to do that, right? Um, it took us three years to uh code and build the hardware and like so the the technology was differ but it's brand new.

SPEAKER_02 28:43

Yeah, you you essentially did not have the technology before. Yeah, we only have we have 10% of it. You get 10% of it, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 28:49

And you know, finding manifests. Both hardware and software, yeah. So like so it took us three years, and and we're like, how do we fund this thing? Yeah, we have a small boost.

SPEAKER_02 28:57

What about the customers? Were you able to keep the same customer?

SPEAKER_05 28:59

Only a small portion of it. Okay. And I was part of negotiations and everything. And we looked at like when we launched the service 2020, there was a lot of things that we didn't have that the bank used to have, right?

SPEAKER_02 29:10

Um, so we actually So you had a uh a shittier product to a smaller market with no capital and uh and less technology built up. But we were on our own. But but you were unshackled, yes. And so that is really interesting because so you you were no longer capped, but you had bigger barriers. Yes.

SPEAKER_05 29:34

That's exactly it. And we so what we did is that we the old, you know, like a certain like a big portion of our book of business, the bank bought from us and that gave us some cash. So we kind of became our own kind of seed investor.

SPEAKER_02 29:46

Okay, yeah, you got your initial initial capital injection.

SPEAKER_05 29:50

And and so the old kind of we kind of the cannibalized the old business. Are you comfortable sharing it? Like, was there what was the initial capital injection? A couple million bucks. Yeah, nothing too big, right? And um, and then for a business I had built 10 years prior building, and then you're like, I'm gambling it all, I'm putting all on the line, I've taken no money from myself, and I'm starting back at zero. And man, I hope this works because the first 10 years was literally, you know, there's nothing being taken out for yourself. It's purely just like a a something that's about to be cannibalized to restart from scratch, but to be on your own. And I hope it works out. Yeah, the risk level, like hindsight, I'm like, oh man, like you took it all.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

You took it all, you didn't like and put it back in. Like that is, that is, you know, there's a there's a um, I say, like you, you know, you want to you make you want to make hundreds of thousands, you gotta gamble tens of thousands. You want to make millions, you gotta gamble hundreds of thousands. You want to make tens of millions, you gotta gamble millions.

SPEAKER_05 30:46

Yeah. And um, so and then we hired a bunch of junior developers out of like local Calgary junior developers. We hired 15 of them. And so I'm a self-top coder, so we just coded for three years straight. Millions of lines of code, just like day and night, with all these junior devs out of college, and and just like but no vibe coding. No, yeah, no way, no vibe coding. You know, what's funny on the you know, now we have a good mixture of like different senior and experienced developers that help our juniors and everything like that. In hindsight, again, I don't know if we would have taken on the challenge. We could have brought in a couple like experienced like Shop 5 folks and be like, there's no way.

SPEAKER_02 31:22

Like it's just like this, this is the it's too insurmountable.

SPEAKER_05 31:25

Because we coded this with like 15 junior coders, and we just kind of went like but but nobody could tell us your tech debt must still be a little bit it's honestly it's a whole lot better than you think it would be, but I think we made some good decisions early. So we got lucky. But the yeah, so we we went through this process and in 2020, we're like, holy crap, I think it's it's it's ready. Um, and it better be because we are now burning our own cash, that's seed money. Um, we've just sold most of our customers back to the bank. We're back, we're essentially we have no investors. We're we're burning our own cash, and like we're back at almost zero revenue. Like, this better work.

unknown 32:09

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 32:09

Um in those three years, in that three years, that's where it, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 32:12

Yeah, and then so now it's 2020, the pandemic starts, and we're going, we're ready to launch.

SPEAKER_02 32:18

That's a good that's a good wave, is it? Is it's a medium for us because like dentists and doctors and like there's the all of the front, okay, all of the yes, all the brick and mortar is down, online on payments move online.

SPEAKER_05 32:31

So I think call it like a neutral mix. Yes, yeah, for us.

SPEAKER_02 32:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. How does your team how does your team react to that moment? What is the what what's the feeling? I mean, there's the you know, feeling that we all had of like what is going on? Is it just two weeks? It's four weeks, it's six weeks, okay. What you know, is life ending? Like there's there's a few existential feelings, I'm sure, but what is the feeling in the team in that moment from a business perspective?

SPEAKER_05 32:55

I think it's excitement because I think that the some of the OGs that were with us like knew knew the frustrations of being under the shadow of a big bank. Yeah and you know, we were all really eager to go out on our own and prove to the world that we're like we could do it on our own. Um also daunting. I think that like I remember that like we we created this like war room with the deaths, um where um when new merchants signed up, like this is like the first data, first month of launch and everything for the new service. Like all of a sudden we're responsible for risk and fraud and everything. Like we've licked, we took on everything. Yeah, so we just to like kind of create that that that that safety and the group feeling. Um, you know, we have our our head of risk. It's like we've been preparing and we have policies, we have processes, but it's like this is never like happened on our own, right? It's very different than when you're you're being shadowed by a bank versus doing it on your own. So for the first month, we literally had this like big table, and everybody sat like the executive, my CFO, my CO, everybody like we're just sitting around this table and we're just making approval and decline decisions together as a group. Uh, just to like, yeah, we have our process, we have our systems, but just to like part of the reason I I did that was to try to like make it feel less scary. Yes, because everybody was like scared to death. Yes, right? Yes. So it was just like, hey, look, this this this accountant signed up. How do we feel? Okay, let's go through the data, let's go through the credit. This feels good. Okay, yes, we're good. Everybody's good. This is not as scary. Let's approve it. Next one. And we start we start just kind of like building that muscle.

SPEAKER_02 34:33

Little momentum, little muscle, little feeling of here, we got this. One just stacking one after another. You're you're in Hellsom 2.0, the pandemic hits, you're almost out of capital. What is what does the first early customers look like? Do you start gathering some momentum? Do you how quickly do you recover some of that gap in burn? Like, what do you have to make in that first year to not freak out from a cash perspective?

SPEAKER_05 35:00

So we uh we were lucky that like the signups started coming in pretty quickly. Okay, good.

SPEAKER_02 35:05

Um and that's because if some exist like a little bit of brand reputation, a little network.

SPEAKER_05 35:10

Because we really essentially it's a new company. Do we rename it? Do we go, or do we go, do we leverage some of the five stars and the reputation we had built already and just clarify the market like this is a new service? And we decided the latter, and I think that served us well because there was already there's already a group of customers that that like knew about us and you know. You leveraged the brand. We were the good guys in the not so great industry, right?

SPEAKER_02 35:33

Um, and now we made it easier to sign up and and the fact that you could still use the brand, because I guess you sold when you sold, you sold the parts, you didn't really exactly we sold the customer base, but we didn't sell the honestly. That's that's huge. I think that's a that's a huge advantage that you had in those early days, right? That you had an existing base of people who knew and recognized the brand that you could take to that next that next level.

SPEAKER_05 35:55

And that's what we did. And like so then the business started growing quickly. We realized that there's a lot of stuff that we needed to fix. So we had we had bidden off a lot and we had to chew through it all, right? So, you know, our mission um is to be to be the world's most loved payments company, and our customers were like, We love the mission, we want you to deliver on it, but it's everything's a little bit on fire, kind of thing, right? We want you to be lovable, but uh your product needs to work. But customers were amazing in giving us the patience through it because I think they knew that our heart was in the right place, and like we were honest about the pricing and the way we delivered the service and like how we built it.

SPEAKER_02 36:33

You know, even as I think about how you did the the pricing, like we're talking about transparency and honest, but also one of the themes that we we see for the Davids versus Goliaths is like the Davids choose hard.

SPEAKER_05 36:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:42

The David the Davids choose, we say like when Goliath is chasing after you, you run up the stairs, not down. A hundred percent. Because Goliath can't run up the stairs.

SPEAKER_05 36:50

And and I think that if anything, anything that is worth doing should be hard, because then the this you know the the reward on the yes side would be better. So one of we have four core values, and one of those is we choose the harder path. Um again, and it's like we always ask ourselves, are we taking the easy decision or are we taking the hard decision? Because odds are the hard decision will have a better payoff and a and a stronger foundation. And we are always trying to train ourselves and our team, like I do the harder decision. That doesn't always line up because like it's sometimes it's it's you're so tempted to cut corners.

SPEAKER_02 37:21

Yes, yes, or like this this shorter decision will get me to the next one. Like you kind of convince yourself it's the right short term.

SPEAKER_05 37:28

And you you have to you know, there's still a part of it where you have to balance it because you know, as a startup, you know, if you have just six months to live or whatever it is, is like especially in the early days, right? Yeah, like sometimes you're like, okay, I'm gonna have to figure out but I but I think the decision applies especially to like decisions that impact our brand and how we're perceived in the market and like our core values, that is non-questionable. Like you got to you you just you gotta take the harder path. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 37:55

You mentioned you mentioned the the the focus of your customers. I think it's really interesting because you sort of called them before you've got the forgotten middle. Sort of this, this, this. And I think this is interesting because again, I see it in the other David versus Goliath stories. So one of the stories that we like to tell is is Jesse Cole's Savannah Bananas sort of you know, craze that's happening. They're obviously not a software or tech, but it's like this little collegiate baseball team out of Savannah, Georgia manages to essentially sell out more than some MLB teams, right? And how do they how do they do that? And Jesse talks about a little bit of the forgotten middle. He goes, most people think you're supposed to build the best baseball team, but that's only the people who the diehard baseball fans who want better baseball. Well, if they want better baseball, they're not coming to the collegiate baseball league. They get right like you want better players and better baseball. It was like, no, actually, it's the families and the kids who are just coming for entertainment. Yeah. And if I served them fun, I can get more people to show up. And so it was this, you know, like sometimes, I mean, it's it's the innovator's dilemma, right? It's it's Clay Christians who says when you chase the best customers constantly, they want bigger and bigger mainframes. So IBM builds bigger and bigger mainframes, and then Apple goes and makes a shittier computer for a smaller market. Yeah. Right. And so you sort of go, we're gonna make transparent but complex pricing for this forgotten middle.

SPEAKER_05 39:22

I think what's interesting is that you have all these startups that talk about small business, but I don't think I think a lot of times um they haven't spent enough time with what small business is.

SPEAKER_01 39:32

It starts a small business until like you get big business. That's what it is. You know, it's like wait, small business and then move up market.

SPEAKER_05 39:38

Or if you think about like what's a small business. So like we get that with when we're educating like investors and about our market and everything like that, we're like, what is small business to you? Yeah. And people say, oh, like the the the the corner store or the the little restaurant or whatever, and it's kind of like, and it's like, what is big business to you? And it's like, well, you know, McDonald's and Fortune 500, whatever. And it's like there is a giant, giant, giant, enormous world in between that nobody seems to like pay attention to, where it's like um the best, you know, I like to say the law firms, the consulting firms, the dentists, or or the like the wholesalers in that industrial part of town that are selling like aviation parts and plumbing. Yeah, we might think about the plumber. That plumber is going to another business and buying their parts from, and that there's a whole supply chain. And there's like this giant, like when you're flying over, you know, like fly over city, it's kind of like you can think about like, you know, the restaurant and the retail shops or at you know at the mall or whatever's the case, right? But it's like, you know, a third of that town is just industrial, and it's just like super interesting. I think they're super interesting. Um, you know, like call them like you know, we like to say like we love unsexy businesses because they're the best, like a Thailand stone distributor, an aviation parts, like specialty manufacturer, like a medical supply wholesaler. Like those are like those are great businesses and they can make like, but they're still in the world of the banks and the world of whatever, they're still small business. Yes, but they're not a coffee shop.

SPEAKER_02 41:07

No.

SPEAKER_05 41:08

And and I think that's what people like that. I think that was our insight. Was that I think in the world of even with like Silicon Valley investors and everything like that, it's like it's either like, well, you're making you're either making widgets for coffee shops or you're making widgets for McDonald's, and there's nothing in between. It's like you are so wrong. Yeah, yeah. Um, but but and we're like, okay, fine. They're the the forgotten middle, it's a pretty giant middle. Um, then that's where we're gonna go.

SPEAKER_02 41:34

Now, there's no startup story without a lot of pain, a lot of suffering. You get you you get you get you get some momentum, you start to get some customers, but this period of 2000 2020, you know, 2021, um and then in between between where you are then and today, what are some of the most kind of painful and difficult parts of trying to build this business of tackling on the Goliath? Because now you officially are playing in their space. Yeah, you're no longer a reseller, you have enough of a product that you're making a dent, you've got a brand, and you're going to this forgotten middle. They've been collecting payments. Yeah. So I can just switch over. You're not gonna just be like, okay, here's our service. Like, take I'm already with the service, I'm already here. Like, I don't know, I'm gonna switch it over. Switching costs with this kind of stuff feels annoying, right? Like, what are the difficult moments of getting these customers, the difficult moments of product, the difficult moments in your leadership with your team? Like, you are now at the like, you're no longer the fun stage of building something new and exciting. You have some customers, but your product's not good enough, your team is likely not good enough, and you don't have enough capital, and your brand's not good enough. Nothing's good enough.

SPEAKER_05 42:47

You just bring back all the pain. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 42:49

Yeah, what what what give me some of those moments? What's what's happening?

SPEAKER_05 42:52

Yeah, so um a couple things. So we we see a lot of growth at first, which is which is great, like initial growth, which is wonderful. Um, but everything feels on fire. Yeah. So um I say the first two years, everything was just like finishing, chewing through everything we had bitten off. So, like you want to get into all these like new features and new products, and you're like, we cannot. Yeah, like we just have to like ultimately like deliver on what we're doing. Um, my my CFO Marge, who's wonderful, comes into my office in late 21 and says, This business is growing quite a lot, which is good. We need to find investors like yesterday. And I didn't know what a VC was. It was that investors. And then on top of that, um, we start we launched with like this little hardware. It was like a little calculator, like a little card reader for the chip and pin and everything. And um, this is kind of back to the original of like when we moved away from the shadow to bank, we didn't have as much as data because they had like much more equipment and offerings that we did. So we had kind of we went back to just like this is the only thing square reader. Exactly. That's the only thing we could bring to the market. And the customers are telling us we love the payments, but the hardware it's kind of not what. What like I need, right? I need like a real smart terminal. I need this, I need that, whatever, right? So we are um we had found this manufacturer in Hong Kong that that was helping us build these things, and we were working with them to uh launch a new unit that was more robust and everything like that. And um they I'll get into the story, but essentially, like they uh they ghost us, we don't know what's happening, we're about to run a big manufacturing run. It turns out that Stripe bought them because Stripe was also using them to build their hardware. And uh day one, they tell us, yeah, you you can't use this manufacturer anymore.

SPEAKER_02 44:37

Talk about Goliath Goliath showing up and saying, I'm gonna buy the supply chain.

SPEAKER_05 44:43

Yeah, literally. Yeah. And there's not many of these manufacturers in the world. You can't compete with us.

SPEAKER_02 44:49

That's that's some good defense. Okay. So we uh did you lose did you guys lose you guys lost some money on? I mean, you lost time and resources on that, but the contract, or guess, I guess I don't know.

SPEAKER_05 45:01

It's more um bring a piece of hardware, like this gets to regulation and compliance and security. It you can bring a piece of hardware to market can take about two years, and so it's a whole lot of like investment and stuff like that, right? So we've got an inventory, enough inventory to carry us for a little bit, but now and um through um I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but like we had just raised capital for the first time.

SPEAKER_02 45:23

Yeah, in 2020.

SPEAKER_05 45:24

This is 2022. Okay, right. So we raised our series A, we brought in great investment partners. They saw it's funny because when we were talking, when we were pitching investors, we thought we're like, hey, like we're growing really well, massive market. Um, you know, we we have the bootstrapping experience, like we're just gonna be easy. First of all, fundraising is never easy, or at least for most, uh, it's not. And um, and it's funny because the the most pushback we got from investors, like, oh, there's already like there's square and stripe, no, in the market, like Shopify. Like, you're not, you know, why bother?

SPEAKER_02 45:57

It was literally like there literally, there are there are new age Goliaths and there's old age Goliath. Yeah, there's the banking of the mirror, and there's these huge guys in tech. What are you doing? Yeah, and who are you?

SPEAKER_05 46:08

And it took and and it took um some courageous investors that that saw what we're doing, um, and said, you know what? Yeah, these guys are definitely choosing the harder path. And you know, they they they still have told us like, you know, you guys chose a really hard business to get into, but if it works out, we're gonna see something really big, right? And you so you have to find investors that match those values that like believed in the harder path, right? So yeah, we we have we have new investors. We're we we just lost our manufacturer. Um, everything still feels on fire, starting to get better, but there's growth. So it's like as long as there's growth, you can make it work in a startup world.

SPEAKER_02 46:50

You lost your manufacturer, you got some investment. What do you do when you lose your manufacturer? You just start shopping around.

SPEAKER_05 46:56

You you start flying around the world.

SPEAKER_02 46:57

You just start flying around the world. Yeah, and like you've never done manufacturing. So are you just like I'm flying into Hong Kong?

SPEAKER_05 47:03

Like, I'm yeah, like what you're trying to find, you know, spending time in Taiwan, spending time in other places, going like who can do this for us? And you're yeah, you're just pulling on all the connections that you've made in the payments world, going like, hey, who who manufactures uh PayPal's hardware? Yeah, who's manufacturing squares? Who what about clover? What about toast? Like who's behind who kind of thing? Yeah. And you're trying to get introduced, you're trying to get there.

SPEAKER_02 47:25

And you're trying to find the two or three factories that make everyone else's things, like because we found it.

SPEAKER_05 47:31

Yes. And we found a great partner in the end. And we learned some lessons too, which is um, you know, when it comes to manufacturing, I mean, realistically, you're never like if electronics, you're not gonna manufacture it in North America. You have to find a partner in Asia that's gonna manufacture like there's no one manufacturing. Yeah, exactly. Um, but there's some key lessons there, which is um, from a contractual basis, make sure that like you have better structure in place so that if you know they have an exit or whatever kind of thing, like you have some, some, some, some protection there, right? Um, and then but more importantly, build a great relationship. And that's something that we've invested heavily with with our new partners. Um, they are uh invested in our business, like okay. So like we've learned that lesson.

SPEAKER_02 48:14

That's a really interesting theme. I'm sort of finding in a lot of these David Risk Life stories also. It's like your key institutional partners, you almost you want to increase their skin in the game.

SPEAKER_05 48:24

Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Because you want them to, like, you need you you you need somebody that can you know support you in pack a punch if you're gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_02 48:31

It's like you're I I also need you to know that my success is your success. Like I need you to here, you know, take a p take a piece of this, right? Like and and help us. And that's sort of this, this like David building his army. Yeah, this is like, okay, right, I'm gonna collect a few uh, you know, lieutenants, I'm gonna collect a few people in order to be able to like effectively take on this battle.

SPEAKER_05 48:52

And it's thinking about like when you say building that army, it's also thinking about like who, yeah, when there's giant, giant competitors or giant, giant Goliaths in the world that are like dominating the market, who is not getting to participate?

SPEAKER_02 49:06

Who are they blind to?

SPEAKER_05 49:07

Yeah, yeah, and and and who is not um who is not part of that, you know, is is being excluded from that success.

SPEAKER_02 49:14

Okay, okay, that's indifferent.

SPEAKER_05 49:16

Yeah, who's who is being so who is being excluded from the So there's a couple ones. So um obviously from our like most importantly from our customers, right? Like we felt like we were targeting a portion of market that was not being served well and um was being neglected, right? So it's like you know, they have a skin in the game. And we've actually gotten every time we've done a round of financing, um, we've actually gotten some some customers, some key customers in there to invest into our business. And like just not not a on a on a on a big scale, but like we love having like a key customer come into a round with us and be part of that story. Um, you have so even on the bank side, because you still as a fintech, as a financial you know, technology company, you still need bank partners, right? So it's it's yeah, if you have like Stripe or Square or others, right? Some of they have their own bank partners and they're happy to be there. Well, who's missing out? And maybe they want to be your friend, right? And that's how we've we've continued to kind of partner in that way, right? And same thing on the manufacturing task. It's like you can you can rally a coalition of people that would also be part of that next wave of success that are being excluded from the missed out from the first round or the second round.

SPEAKER_02 50:30

It's also a good invest a way of fundraising. Yeah. Who felt like they missed out, right?

SPEAKER_05 50:35

Like who's who's well, we we part of our so we did a series B in 2024. Um, and uh so we we we we 5x'd our business from the A to the B, and that was great. And um part of our pitch was um if you look at if you go to to NerdWallet or Forbes or whatever, and you look for top payment companies, right? We're usually in a top three, and we we would tell investors like two out of those three of those companies are worth $50 billion, and one of those is raising a series B.

SPEAKER_02 51:05

So like So do you want a discount at what the future is exactly, right?

SPEAKER_05 51:10

Like, do you want to come in because you kind of missed out on the other ones, but we're making this happen again, right?

SPEAKER_02 51:14

Yeah, I'm I'll write you my check later. Um so so you okay, so you mentioned this. So there's obviously these low moments of like difficulty of manufacturing, difficulty of just like keeping up with the product, the products on fire. There's so much everything's on fire. But then, you know, you raise your you raise your series A, and between your A and your B, 5x growth. So clearly there's there's some momentum and you're really building on this. Talk to me about what's working. What are some of the pieces that you're like, team is starting to work, strategies moving, brand is moving. What are the pieces that are clicking that you start to double down on? It's no longer just putting out fires, but here are leverages that we now start taking advantages of.

SPEAKER_05 51:54

I think that we I think we knew from the start, I think that insight paid off in terms of like uh the our perspective on the market and who was being underserved and that they needed something else. I think we have so that's one thing. Um I do I do think that all of the success is always a mixture of like strategy, serendipity, serendipity.

SPEAKER_02 52:14

Well, okay, so so I mean, yeah, that's what we say. It's like right, do you do you ride the wave when it comes or do you fight the wave?

SPEAKER_03 52:21

Right.

SPEAKER_02 52:21

Like is your surfboard ready? And like we say, the the Goliaths are sort of sitting and standing on top of the water, and the water is crashing into them while the rest of us are on surfboards that we've either learned to surf or we're drowning. Exactly. So so you're you're you're paddling because you're on the surfboard, you haven't learned to surf for those first few years, you're paddling, but but then you start to learn to surf. Like that, so what is what is that serendipity as this tidal wave of shift in payments? Because there is a there is a wave of shift in the payments industry that you didn't have anything to do with. It's just the reality of the shift in technology.

SPEAKER_05 52:56

And are we a part of that right wave, which we we which I think we got lucky that we are, because you know, those legacy providers like the Menerases of the world, like the TDE of the world, um, are really starting to kind of spin their wheels and um not keep up from an innovation standpoint. Yeah. And I think customers are starting to really realize it's like when you're thinking about maybe you were with the bank, you know, three years ago, five years ago when you signed up for your bank account and they gave you a machine, whatever, right? But if you're thinking about changing that, you're no longer considering, even considering them as part of the the mix, right? No. So now you're comparing Hellsom with the few kind of new modern ones in the market and seeing who's who's better fit for you. So I think we've been lucky to be able to like obviously it took a lot of work and a lot of risk, but you know, to be on the right side of that, that what's happening in in the market. Um, I think that we are the other thing that's changing in terms of like our business is like we start bringing in uh in the past few years, like some more experienced people. So I think we were we were really dogged about this like bottom up, everybody's gotta be a junior, everybody's gotta be green. And like that came from the right place. I think that came from that like that that defiance, and like we can we can build it right here. We want to be the rebels. We want to be the rebels. We want to be the rebels.

SPEAKER_02 54:09

We're gonna arm the rebels with the financial tools, you know.

SPEAKER_05 54:12

But I think that's like me learning as a leader, going, like, yeah, you know what? You don't need to relearn every lesson from scratch. Like, you know, like what if we still have that attitude, but then we also can bring in some people that says, like, hey, like, don't waste your time for six months like learning this lesson. I'm just gonna tell you this lesson. Why don't we go try this instead, right? Um, so we start bringing in some more, uh, especially at like the leadership level, right? Like, I love the mixture of we try to have this three to one ratio at the office, which is um three juniors for every senior. So it's kind of like you have these like really wonderfully driven young people that like want a shot, yeah, but then you have somebody that like been there, done that, that can like be like, hey, don't step on this landmine. Why don't we just walk around this one and like kind of help us accelerate? Um, it took us a while to like really learn that lesson, but in the past few years, we've really kind of started bringing that ratio.

SPEAKER_02 55:03

I mean, you think about the best sports teams, right? You've got these energetic, brilliant young athletes who need a coach. Yeah, who's just a bit older, a bit of done that, okay, let's do this, let's just focus the team. Come on, guys, right?

SPEAKER_05 55:18

Like, say, hockey or whatever it's like, the captain is usually a little bit more like you know, a little bit more, more maybe not grays, but a little more experienced. That is like who is setting the tone and helping the team focus, right?

SPEAKER_02 55:29

So now I love this point selfishly, because we got to work with you guys on leadership development. We got to work with your leaders, we got to help, you know, help them level up, help coach them, help put them through a program, you know, a lot of learning and development there. But I gotta say, like even when we first engaged, I and I think I said this to you, was like, I was really impressed with the intention around culture, the intention around values, the intention around we want to use culture as a differentiator in the in the team that we attract. We want we want to invest in our juniors to help them grow because you were investing in leadership development, you're investing in skill development. And so talk to me about that. Talk to me about this. Where does this um where does this philosophy come from? What is the philosophy around culture that you've held? And where have you seen it pay off? And where have you seen some of it fall short and and and and some difficult moments as you corrected that culture? Because I think the analogy we use for culture is like culture should be like black licorice. Some people love it and some people hate it, right? Like it's it's not for everyone as you start to define what it is.

SPEAKER_05 56:38

100%. I I like to compare culture with like uh flavors of ice cream, and like every company is a flavor, and that doesn't mean it's your favorite flavor, but like for the people that love, you know, I don't know, mango peach or whatever, like they're gonna click with you. And what we try to do, and that was our mindset from from early on was let's just make so we made our culture book public. And we we did that four and a bit years ago. So kind of like around the time we relaunched our business. So it's hellsome.com slash the way. So it's the way of the hellsome. And um the way of the hellsome.

SPEAKER_02 57:08

That's uh that's what we got here. That's what we got here. We got another show.

SPEAKER_05 57:12

Zoom in on that. So the the the idea though was really around like we knew pretty early on who we wanted to be and who we didn't want to be. Part of it is because we're trying to be, you know, like I said, the good guys in the not so great industry, like we knew that values and how we made decisions needed to be set like really early on because we were an industry where you could lose that very quickly. And um, the other part why we we did that was around, and I say we, it's like our our our leadership team was around um because we were so junior focused, you had all the entire team was just these like green first job professionals. And we felt like we just had to like give them a guide on how to like operate and like how to like better make decisions. So that kind of forced us to like you know, if we had hired all these super experienced people, I don't know if we would have like this need to like set culture, then it kind of bites you on the other side because you didn't think about it enough. But for us, it came from like you know, we need to give them a handbook, like they're so green, right? Um, that was wonderful because it it kind of really might if we we force ourselves to go through this exercise for a long period of time of like who we are, what do we actually care about? And um, while the culture book has had a couple different iterations, it's actually still pretty um similar to the to the original. Yeah. Um, when we uh after we did our series A, which is in 2022, after you know, you have to you only celebrate like two days after the check cleared, and like you just like um in the bank again. When everything is like solidified and it's real, I actually went to one of our uh our co-leading investors in the series A, who's a longtime uh Rob at Information Venture Partners, IVP in Toronto, who's like an old school VC that's been around the block a a few times and like really knows the space well. And I asked him straight up, why did you invest? Now that the check is clear, now that we're gonna feed back, why did you invest? Right. And like outside of like, you know, the the the market potential and the company, like you know, and um he shared that we were uh really intentful. He saw that we were really intentful um in our culture, and in his experience as a venture capitalist, is companies that are very intentful with their culture have has given them alpha and like disproportionate returns, right? Um, where it's like companies that like they're not just trying to follow like the typical kind of cookbook, they're actually trying to like really be meaningful in like how they want to operate as a company and what makes them unique and everything like that. And I think that just made us kind of double down on like, oh, this actually matters, and it matters to a certain type of investors. And that was, I think, really reaffirming that like we're on the right path.

SPEAKER_02 59:51

Yeah, I like that. I mean, it it impacted the investors' decision. You you gave your team a set of values that become decision-making parameters. Yeah, and then through this sort of culture building, you built this culture of leadership where this this responsibility for all people to take on the culture. This this sort of leadership is not um a position and you don't wait for permission that everyone owns a part of it. And I think what what I saw in your culture and in your team is is this real sense of empowerment, of giving people the the ability, the ownership of owning their teams, of owning their decisions, of owning a big a part uh quite a bit of that. Talk to me about that. How how what's the what's but like what's the transformation for you as a founder to be able to create this culture that allows for fluidity and leadership, where it's not always just you know, my way or the highway, but there are leaders that are being developed across the organization to to run with things.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:56

Yeah, I think if you look at if you're uh I mean you have because you you went through the training with us. When you sit down with our our leadership team and my like my executive team, they're actually really different personalities, like really different personalities. Um and the fact that we're able to like have that, but then still be very value aligned, um, I think is a testament to like just being really straightforward about who we are, who we're not, and where um like our other and and where is there a lot of give, right? So like our our fourth core value. So I'll give you the four core values, right? We are builders, and that's really about that like that that that building coding, everything, building kind of mindset of like we build things and we build things well, and and we invent our way of problems, that's all part of it, right? Uh we choose the the harder path. Um, and we've talked a lot about that. Uh, we are trustworthy. And you know, there's a line in there that says, like, you know, trust isn't yeah, trust is um uh hard to gain, easy to lose, and continuously tested.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:58

Right.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:59

And that's with our customers, that's with each other, that's everything, right? And then the fourth c the fourth value is like we are a company of many. And that's like about um being mindful that we even say like the most important thing is to us is is our people and then our customers and then our and not because we don't think our customers are like we we live and breathe our mission to be the world's most loved uh payments company, but if you don't treat your people and with the way that you you that you should, they won't take care of your customer. And that's the problem with some of these companies that are like, you know, cus they say they're customer obsessed, and like say Amazon or whatever, right? But if they treat their people like shit, then it's gonna cascade down to the customer. Yeah. Like you see it in customer service, so you see everywhere, right? So you really have to like so the fourth, the fourth core value is we are we are a company of many, and that's really about like acknowledging the fact that's not just about there's a there's a diversity component to that, but there's also like a a a company is just a bunch of people, you know, taking away the titles and the the the walls and everything like that. We're just a bunch of people on a couple floors of a downtown building to try to build something really exciting together. And we have to acknowledge that like it takes a whole lot of humans to like working together and to make that happen.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:10

What are some of the best or uh ones that you reflect on? The best sort of cultural people decisions that you've made. And not people decisions in terms of like key hires, but about the culture. So like you made a decision to codify the culture, yeah. That had its its implication and and it helped uh you know civic significantly the team. You say one of the codifications of that culture is you know, really we are a company of many of this idea of taking care of the people. What did some of those stri those decisions look like? What would what did you have to invest in? What did what was some of the trade-offs that you had to that you had to make in order for that value to come to life?

SPEAKER_05 1:03:47

There's so obviously publishing a culture book early, which was really like nerve-wracking. We did it originally, was one of the best decisions that we made because it um people to filter out amazingly, and and that people like it's so common that people sit down and interview with us. Like, I read the culture book, I read the Well Hellsome, oh my god, here's what I clicked with, whatever. And like it, it's just such a wonderful like filtering process and and to get the people excited. I think it also helps us attract really talented, great people because they get a you know, they have one opportunity, they know nothing about what that flavor of ice cream is, and then they see our mango peach and they read in depth about it, and they're like, you know what, I like this flavor and I want to work there. And I think that probably gives us access to like better talent because it's gonna filter, but it's also gonna get people more excited about our opportunity, right? Yeah, um, we do a couple things where um I still meet with everybody, and I I I I hired a company with over 2,000 staff that still does this with their CEO. And I'm like, if that company can do it, I can do it. Where I meet with everybody that's new. So like we've now we now lump it every couple weeks where it's like anybody that's new in the room, and I sit down for an hour and I chat with them, and I kind of go through high-level expectations. And one of the early things I talk about is like it's a little bit of like a no assholes policy, which is pretty common, but I it's common stated, it's not common practice, practice, yeah. Yeah, um, and one of the ways that we explain that is we go, my expectation of you, you're new today. There's gonna be somebody new next to you in a you know a week, a month or whatever, right? Um, and every single person has heard me say this as this company, and now you are hearing me say this, which is my expectation is that we should be able to take any person of any background, any technical background, any experience, it doesn't matter. And we should be able to like drop them into a team, and the gut reaction of that team has to be spin their chair, how can I help you? How can I make you successful? And if you don't experience that, please let me know immediately. And then my expectation of you is that you carry that tradition because there's gonna be a new person next to you soon, and then you better spin your chair and be like, How can I help you? How can I make you successful? And the fact that they hear that from the CEO, you know, day one or week one or month one, whatever, right? I think is like just setting that ground early. My other executives do. Um They go through core values together. We love a book, um, uh Five Dysfunctions as a team. Everybody gets that book day one. And then at month one, um, the executives will sit down and like go through the book, like do a little book club with them, be like, what did you learn? What are the keep takeaways?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:14

So I think we're just eventually the David versus Goliath book is gonna be the the next one on their on their list, right? Like I agree. I agree.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:21

So um, and then you what the the main thing though is that like we are being purposeful in establishing it almost like obviously what you say matters, but more importantly, you are making a point that this is real, culture matters, our decision making matters, and um we are setting that tone day one. Yeah, and I think we're setting a clear tone that like this isn't just posters on the wall with slogans or whatever. It's like we live and breathe this stuff, and it and and this ethical and and kind of like character, call it character like matters day one.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:56

Yeah. The intentionality, how you bring it to life, how you speak about it, how you teach it, how you bring it out. Um has there been a moment where you feel you faltered on it?

SPEAKER_05 1:07:07

Yeah, I mean many. Um it's you know, nobody, nobody's nobody's perfect. I think that we had a really we we evolved our culture. Um, and this is the time that you came in and and helped us with our with our leadership and our kind of next level training, is we went through this transition where we realized that like, yes, we want to create a wonderful, happy place and where people feel appreciated and trusted and all that, but we also want to be this really like high performance company. And I think a lot of companies go through this, especially like you know, we raised our Series B, we're we continue to grow, we're now servicing tens of thousands of customers, you know, we're tens of millions in revenue, and all of a sudden, like the stakes are higher. We're we really want to be this big giant success. And like it's kind of like being moved to the next league in sports and going like, oh, we need to set a higher bar.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:01

And how does that how does that integrate with our culture? And I think we we struggled for a bit, and ultimately we landed on like, let's be honest with ourselves. What do we really, what, what do we want? What do I want when I get up? What kind of company do I want to go? And I want to, and I I landed on, I want a talent-dense company.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:19

And I want a company where performance management matters and where um you you know you hold people to a high standard. And like, I think we're really good at like creating really healthy, like honesty and dialogue and and like a great happy culture, but I don't know if we're creating as much of like a performant culture. And so we went through this cycle and we updated the culture book, and we were really intentful to the team of like, here's what's the same, here's what's changed, here where it's coming from. And um, and that was a difficult period. That took like a year and a half to really go through, and like there's a lot of people that um what we found is that um the promises that we were kind of making as a leadership team in terms of like this is the expectation, because I think unofficially we always set that expectation and that reflected in the people we hired, was not necessarily the same at all levels. And then we had leadership that was making promises that um about oh no, this is more of a lifestyle job, or this is more this, or this is more that. And we saw a lot of conflict with that because they're like, well, that was never our intent, yeah, but now you're creating you've you've created a subculture standards diluted as you went further, and completely kind of like it expectations are dive, you know, being divergent. Yeah, and we had to kind of bring that back and just had to hit a reset in the culture. And I was really that was that was bruising. That's tough.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:46

Because when you're yeah, you're resetting a culture. There's people that are gonna be unhappy about it, some people are gonna leave. Some people are gonna um fight it for a while, like there's and it's you know, depending on how your leadership teams, you know, whether they take that mantle and they take that flag and and and run with it, or if they're also reluctant on that, on that culture change.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:06

And you also go through this, I mean, you see it in the startup world where um the people that got you from zero to one are not as they are the people are gonna get you from one to two. Yeah. And that's really, really hard because obviously on one side, like there's there's a loyalty and there's a lot of things. Do you want to reward loyalty? Or do you reward loyalty or performance? Exactly, right? And so you you struggle with that because then ultimately um you have to have an honest conversation with everybody, which is like at some point everybody like like we are like this company is gonna keep evolving, and like you have to continue earning your place on the team, right? And it's it's really hard. And I think that we've learned we learnt better ways to like what to have those tough conversations, yeah, and to be more honest about like hey, like um there's a lot of influence for I think in that Netflix culture around like the keeper tests and around those kind of structures, which is just like you can still make people leave with dignity. Um, and that's a hard skill that took you know a while to learn. We're saying like that doesn't take away from everything that you did to get us here. Yeah, and but like now the the team is in a position where it can't grow unless you grow. Yeah. And we have to have an honest conversation about whether or not you can grow.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:19

If the team outgrows you and your pace in which you're improving, right? That's that's part of it. It's like hi, you know, I think that employees sometimes struggle with. I would say that one of the things is as a founder, as an entrepreneur, as as the David in the story, you uh you hit your the in your face, you hit your limitations constantly. Yeah, you were constantly like hit by your limitations. And I remember a younger version of me was pretty upset, like a couple things not working out. Like, and and I went to my mentor and I'm like, man, I'm like, I'm trying my best. And he's he looked at me and he's like, Well, your best is not good enough. Yeah, yeah. You're like, ouch, what do you what do you mean? Because you want to feel like your best is good enough. He goes, Your best is not good enough. What made you and it was a tough level? He's like, What makes you think your your current best should be good enough? Just because it's your best. So find another best. Find like what does that next level look like? And I think that's interesting. As an entrepreneur, you're constantly faced with that because you realize that my company is not gonna grow if I don't grow.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:18

Um, but sometimes when you're in the machine, you don't always come face to face with that. And that's sort of what you're facing was like, how do I increase the skin in the game to an individual employee who might not be seeing the impact of their lack of growth?

SPEAKER_05 1:12:33

Yeah. And I think it's funny because as a as a founder, especially as like a venture back founder now, you have you have a pretty constant scoreboard in front of you. Um, where it's just like, are you grading growing at the right rate? Is your business, you know, the all the metrics of your business? Are you able to successfully fundraise? How are you doing compared to your competitors? Like, you know, the the the the investment world and will will let you know pretty quickly when you're gonna be able to do it and it's results.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:58

I don't care how hard you're trying, I don't care about effort. Great. Um you're not sleeping, you're not working every weekend. Okay, what are your numbers?

SPEAKER_05 1:13:03

And that's all I care about. Exactly. So so then you have to go, okay, how do I how do I merge that with um knowing that a startup is ultimately about like experimentation and failure is is part of that process, but then it's still expecting performance. What does performance mean? Is performance just about delivering on the numbers, or is it about taking risk? Is it a mixture of the two? And it's like, I think that's the really tough part about like uh at C Ona Founders that like you have to you are constantly faced with that immediate scoreboard, yeah, but then you have to like find a way to like set the right expectation, but also give enough room for the magic to happen, that experimentation to happen. So um, not that the the market will give you that, but you have to find a way to give that to your team.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:48

Yes, yeah. I think I think you I mean, you know, you you make a great case here for for culture, you make a great case for teamwork, but you also make a great case for your leadership team had to level up. Now, you had to level up as a leader. So what were what was what was what were some leadership like growth moments for Nick? Like that, you know, the the boy Nick that had to the 23-year-old Nick that had to like grow out of, you know, certain habits that he formed earlier. What were some some like hard leadership moments for you in your own growth?

SPEAKER_05 1:14:23

I think that I mean there's a few. There, one of them was like learning to let go of the keyboard, even from the coding standpoint. That was definitely a bit of a.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:31

Yeah, exactly. Because we're builders, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:33

And you have to learn to like um get that vicariously through the teams that you've empowered to go build as opposed to you trying to build it yourself. That's a lot lesson. I've kind of fumbled a few times on that one because it's so hard, right? Um, the the you know, I've I've brought in some executives lately that like have challenged me straight up going, like, you know, come back to my office after a big leadership meeting and be like, how useful do you think that meeting went? And like when you hear that from your subordinate, you're just like, oh shit, okay, let's talk about this. Yeah. And being open to that, um, you know, I think I've created a uh a culture that like we can we can give each other that pretty raw feedback, which is good. Um, I mean, you hear it all the way time from your investors and your board and things like that, right? Um, it's it's it's a it's a it's a tough gig. Um, but then you have to decide like everybody is replaceable, and do I still want this job? And I'd like I don't, you know, I can be a different role. I can be, you know, innovation person, I could be a developer. It's like if I want to be CEO, then I better, like, this is not um this I'm not entitled to this job regardless if I'm a shareholder or not. Like they are separate. And I better like show that I am learning and growing, or like this job will no longer be mine.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:56

I I think that's a I mean it shows the level of humility you have to understand that. Genuinely, because I uh you know, we sometimes in this world mythologize the the Steve Jobs and Elon Musk's and Bay. He lost his job. Right. Steve Jobs got fired for being a bad leader. Musk got a five. And musk fire for being a bad leader. Now, Jobs, I think, learned the lesson because Ad Catmull in his book talk about talks about how in Pixar days, Jobs sort of eases up and learns to have some some people skills. And then, you know, when he comes back to Apple for round two, he does a bit better. Elon Musk, I don't think, learned the the lesson. I think the lesson he learned was retain 51% so they can never remove you.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:37

Wrong lesson.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:38

Wrong lesson. Uh Bezos gets an executive coach at uh in in I think it was in his it was in his book, but I think in in 2010 kind of period where they start seeing growth, he he realizes he's not people managing, he hasn't grown past certain limitations of his own, right? Like there is this this sort of like the team that got you here won't get you there, but the leader you are that got you here won't get you there either. And and and there's there's a part of that, like, does do you grow into that next phase of leadership? We got to series B, you 5X from Series A to Series B, ride in a pretty good way, got some new team members in. That's 2003. We're today, we're 2005, near the end, getting into 2006. Yeah, yeah, 2005, geez, 2025 going into 26. Um how are things looking? What's what's the future? What where where are where are we in this David versus Goliath battle? Because obviously it's still happening. What's what's what's the current where are you currently? What you know, what numbers are you uh comfortable sharing with us? Like what are some of the milestones? What's some of the growth rate? And what's what's to come?

SPEAKER_05 1:17:44

So I say we've tens of thousands of customers, tens of millions in revenue. So we've definitely like reinvented ourselves and are doing pretty well. Um, I think that how about this? What used to keep me up at night, certainly like in the kind of reinvention phase and five years ago, was like, can we survive? Can we, you know, we bid off a lot, can we get to the other side? What keeps me up at night now is can I capture the opportunity that we've created for ourselves? And that's a funner, like it is it is better. Like I have like, don't wrong, I I I live and breathe and think about this nonstop, but it's more fun to think about like to be focused on the upside as opposed to like, will we survive another day? It's really nice to be out of the way.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:26

You were you were swinging for first base, yeah. And now you feel like you can swing for some home runs. You can exactly take the bet.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:34

So um, I think for us it's really about like when we think about our country expansions, our product expansions, like we have a lot of exciting things coming out, and that's a lot, you know. It's funny because in the moment you're still thinking, well, you know, we're still tiny compared to to Square, and we could be so much bigger, and there's all this bigger stuff coming, and like that's good. That fire keeps you keeps you going. But then you have to catch yourself and be like, yeah, but like first of all, we've grown a fantastic amount in the past couple of years. We continue to grow really well, we've all this fun stuff coming. Like, just enjoy it for a second. Enjoy it. I think that's the main point of of focus right now. Yeah, and I think what's tough is that like you have to have this like endless paranoia in order for you to even get to this point and survive. The only the paranoid survive, right? Exactly, right? So then you get you get a little bit scared of putting down that paranoia because you also got really good at it. Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:26

It's become your skill. Yeah, I think like one of the challenges that uh the one of the founders' uh typical David's base best skills is the ability to see where they are, see where they want to be, identify the gap and tackle it. But if you're always in the gap, then you're never looking at the reverse gap of like where where'd you come from? Can you be happy for a moment, right?

SPEAKER_05 1:19:46

And I'm I'm I'm I'm bad at that as a leader in terms of like the team has to remind me, like, why don't we do a celebration about this milestone? And why don't we do a pizza party? Why don't we do this? What is it? And I'm like, but tomorrow, like it's just like this next challenge, this next hill to climb, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:19:59

So yeah, that's a that's a skill that's was there was there a moment moment for you to sit back where you were like, okay, yeah, like I'm I'm no longer in survival mode. Was there was there an was there maybe the big partnership with Verizon? Did that feel like uh did that feel like a moment? Was there a leadership moment? Any any moment where you you know a moment in the beach on vacation where you didn't have to answer everyone's question as CEO?

SPEAKER_05 1:20:23

I don't know. I just I I you have moments, but they're so fleeting where it's just like, yeah, you we we announce a big partnership with Verizon, and or you you have this day where you have like everything clicks and and you have great talks and great talks with investors, great talks with your team, great talks with customers, and you're like, oh, we got this, right? And then the next day everything's on fire again, and you're just like that, it's fleeting and you're back at it. So I don't know if there's any um, you know, people talk about like that that that letting go, and I've never experienced an exit. And obviously, we're focused on just building a big, big, fantastic business, and we have got so much more of this business in us, though it's not that's not our focus. But then you have founders that talk about, you know, that like catalyst of like okay. But then you also see like I remember seeing a business hardware review that says, like, uh, you've sold your business, congratulations, get ready for depression.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:16

And it's like because the adrenaline of what you've been running on from fire to fire to like goal to goal, you've been fueled by goals, and now there is no gap, there is no goal, which is why you go, okay, so when's this next startup? Like, when's the what's the next game to play?

SPEAKER_05 1:21:34

So, what I try to remember is like if I'm when I'm 80 years old and I looking back, like I got to find a way to like enjoy the moment right now, regardless of how many fires, how many what's you know, what's working, what's not, because if not, um you can't just look for that that it it has to be now. Yeah, it has to be. And I look back, it's funny, I look back at the the 20s and the craziness and all that, and I look at it pretty fondly. Yeah, but in the moment it doesn't feel that way.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:02

In the moment. So, okay, looking back at some of this story, when we when we were analyzing David versus Goliath stories, we sort of identified that there's there are some things and characteristics and behaviors about the David, the leaders that are interesting and unique and sort of we can learn from. But then there are things that we can learn from the team, kind of how the team works together, what the teamwork looks like. And then there's sort of the strategy that they use, right? What are some of the pieces? And so we've talked about that, like, you know, um uh re they rewrite the rules of the game. David doesn't play the can't David can't fight Goliath in his own battle. He's gonna lose it. They build their own surfboards and learn to ride it. They run up the stairs, they swing for they they have less to lose, so they swing for the fence more often because like uh what am I gonna lose? Just let me do, right? That was you taking on the license. Like it's like less to lose, so I'll just take on a license. I'll try this out, right? So we we've got these, some of these strategies. Those are some of my terms, right? But I'd like you to reflect on these three buckets. What is um, what were some of the key characteristics of your yourself as a founder or other leadership teams that you go, you know what? These are a few characteristics or behaviors that I think are essential for founders to succeed. Some of the teamwork pieces, we obviously focused on culture uh for you, but what are some of the teamwork pieces that really made the difference? And then were there any other strategy pieces that come to mind? Obviously, that we've talked about that that middle, we've talked about the transparency, but those are the kind of three buckets. So I'll get you to reflect on kind of all three here as one of our final big, big questions.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:41

All right. So on the maybe on the personal sound, the founder side, like I mean, this is a bit of a cliche, but um like perseverance. I'll take it a step further and say perseverance. I'd say like dogged, maybe a little bit of anti-authority. I will prove you wrong no matter how much logic you throw at me, kind of thing, right? Yeah. Like I think that um rebellious, yeah, rebellious, like slightly stubborn enough to I think for me that came from like there's a counterculture in computers in the 90s. It's about like hacking, and it was about um you weren't cool when you got into computers. You weren't, but like, but but to the world in there, like it was your world, right? And you like techno and and all that stuff. It was just like there's a counterculture to it all that I jived with really, really well. Like all your friends were getting real jobs at the banks or no and gas or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:28

No, it's non-conformist. Yeah, you have to like you have you have to have contrarian opinions. If you have opinions that everyone else has and then you're right about those, great, you don't you don't exactly it doesn't change anything.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:41

Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:41

If you have contrarian opinion, you're most likely wrong, usually in contrarian opinions. But when you're right, yeah, there's a moment.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:49

Exactly. You get you get all the upside, right? Um, so I think that that is I think that the founders have that in them. Um, but I mean, exact i the thing to remember is like for every successful founder, there's like thousands that haven't found it. Yeah, probably because they were wrong, or they just they couldn't get lecturing. The timing wasn't right, you know, you know, the way the wave didn't show up.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:10

They built a surfboard and they were just too early or too late to to the wave. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:16

I think in terms of okay, so let's let's go to the the team and culture. I think uh I mean honesty, you know, like we are trustworthy. That gets into honesty, that just gets into um if you just need to be able to get the team to like especially your media team is like to just to just trust you. Like you just can't play games, you can't, you just have to be brutally I I do that with um I say not brutally honest, Mr. Ronta, but just like completely honest and like candor, radically candid.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:47

Yeah, you can use it, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:49

And I I think I'm like I'm an oversharer, but it's part of like how I build trust, where it's just like I'm sending pictures of of of of of my kid and like here's what I do. And like I'm just like I'm like oversharing everything with with with my team all the time. Like I kind of let them into my life quite a lot, but it's just like it's it's just like letting them, it's building a certain level of trust, like this who I am, this is who I am through and through. And like they they know me pretty well at this point, so it it builds that confidence for them to be able to have honest conversations with me and and just to be themselves too, right? Um, and then finally, last one is on on the mark strategy.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:32

On the strategy, like the positioning, the strategy, what you focused on, what you didn't, yeah. Could be product, could be market.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:38

I so I'm I'm biased, and this kind of goes back to first point. Like, I love a contrarian viewpoint. It's like it's it's just like it's funny, you see that in the in the investment world, the startup world, whatever. It's just like they all talk about disruption, but man, do they like their like boxed models? Is our model that we know works? This is best practice. We exactly right. It's like it's that's like we build vertical software for this, and then we're gonna do this sale, this and and and investors love that, and then and it's just like, yeah, but everybody else is doing that. I think that goes to like the harder path where it's like do something that's really hard and like because then there'll be less people trying it.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:15

Like it's just less competition, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:18

And it's like for us, it's like we went into the we try to build a payments company from scratch, and it's like, yeah, it's brutal, but I think it's paying off. Yeah, and I love startups, like I love startups with hardware. I mean, there's the word hard in there. Yeah, I just love when I talk to founders and I had this privilege now of like um I get you'd be a bit more prominent uh uh founder in in our market, so I get to meet lots of other founders and young people, and it's like, and and when the ones that bore me are the ones that are just like uh we're making a CRM for this and this and that, and you're just like that's fine, like go. You'll make some money, go yeah, yeah, but it's the ones that are just like we are doing X, and it's just like, and you're just like you look at them sideways and you're just like it might not work, but like yeah, good on you for trying. Yeah, but if it but if it does and they're trying something that like very little other people are trying to solve, and I love that.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:08

Yeah, yeah. Well, Nick, we've had a wonderful conversation here. Um, what's next for Hellsome? Just take me into the future. What's uh what is 2025 and beyond? What's the next three years, four years? What are you excited about? What are you most looking forward to? What battles, what battles, other Goliath, are you looking forward to? Give me a pitch into the future to to to end our episode.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:31

Um I'll leave you with this. So um it's just part of 26. So like we are really liking this concept of something we're calling open payments, which is around like you hear about open banking and what what's open banking about? Open banking is really about like giving um optionality to to customers about like their data and who they they they get service and portability, and uh and and we're taking a similar approach to payments, and we're about to hit that in a very big way uh in the market where um we are we've really looked at like how we're operating in a market. If you think about like say a square, square really makes a like a little walled ecosystem, little walled garden all in one, like here you use our stuff and and so on, right? And what we've realized in part because we're servicing so many different types of businesses, way more businesses than the average. So, like like you know, I was describing like it's like whether it's like a wholesaler or a or a vet or plastic surgeon or like an auto dealer or whatever, right? It's kind of like we're never gonna be able to make all the different software that they need. And there's gonna be people that could specialize in that. But what we want to do is meet them where they are and be the absolute best payments and financial services company that we can be for them. And this is gets into the idea of like there's still a lot of walled gardens in the industry, yeah, and we're about to like drive right through those walled gardens. You want to tear down the walls, and and I think that's my that's the next, the next David and the Goliath. I like it.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:03

I love it because I think the the theme that goes into that is that the Davids often arm the rebels.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:08

Yeah, so you want to tear down the walls and arm the rebels, you know, like the and and ultimately serve there's really like one thing driving us, which is ultimately like be the world's most loved payments company and and serve small business customers that are you know being taken advantage of or not being well serviced like every day. And anything that gets in our way of that, we will headbutt until we get there.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:30

So that's amazing. Well, Nick, I'm rooting for you. We're excited to have been part of your journey to continue to help support your leadership team and their growth and their learning. And uh let's see, we're excited to see the next this next chapter. So thank you for being part of our show. Thank you for giving us a story to our audience and uh and being here today.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:50

Thanks for hearing the story. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:52

Awesome.