Cable acquired by Synctera! with Peter Hazlehurst

Today’s conversation is with Peter Hazlehurst, the CEO and co founder of Synctera, the company that just acquired my company, Cable. 

Peter has a fascinating story, having grown up in Australia and teaching himself to code as part of his “gap year” job working for the government, before traveling to Silicon Valley and landing a job building a core banking system. Many tech jobs later, including stints at Google and Uber, he is now building Synctera, which could in many ways could also be described as a core banking system. 

One of the themes of our conversation were the lessons that we can teach our children, and we covered:

• How an interaction with the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra when he was 14 years old gave Peter a life philosophy that has stuck with him since
• How being lazy can unlock near-endless opportunities
• Peter’s core belief that if you build something, you have a responsibility to make sure that, as far as possible, people can’t do bad stuff with it
• How the secret to making B2B businesses successful is the relationships built over many years
• Lessons on managing teams learnt from Google
• The similarities of the dot come bubble and today’s AI hype cycle
• How startup life influences parenting styles

Listen along to hear more from Peter, and for a chance to reflect on your own early life lessons. I hope you enjoy the conversation! 

00:00 Introduction and Acquisition Announcement

00:31 Peter's Childhood and the Influence of Music on his Life

11:30 First Job and Teaching Himself to Code

18:06 Moving to the US and Jumping on the Startup Train

21:29 How Startup Life Influences Parenting

24:43 Leadership Lessons from Google

26:33 The Through-line of Payments, the Origins of Synctera and the Importance of Building Relationships

38:10 Acquiring Cable

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to In Control. I'm Tash, your host, and today we have a special episode. Just a few days ago, we announced that SyncTra has acquired cable, the company I founded six years ago. And today I'm speaking to Peter Hazelhurst, the CEO and co-founder of SyncTara, about what led him to SyncTara and why he acquired cable. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Peter, thank you for joining me today. We're definitely going to talk about the acquisition. But I actually want to spend some time meandering through your journey to where we are now because I think it's pretty fascinating, and I'm not sure that many people have heard it in a lot of detail. So set the scene for us. You were actually born in Australia.

SPEAKER_02 0:49

No.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

No. Where were you born?

SPEAKER_02 0:52

I was born in Oxford, England. So actually, yeah. So my dad was at the tail end of his PhD or had just finished school and college and stuff. And I was born in 1972. And then they had this really cool thing when he got his tenure at ANU in Australia. He could travel by any means possible. And back in those days was the dawn of the jet age. So you could have theoretically jetted across and it would have been like five stops from London or whatever. But they ended up sailing on a passenger ship, which is a glorified bus. And it was like this three-month journey, stopping off everywhere, like picking up, dropping off people. And my mum, who's the ultimate pack rat, kept a letter signed, a plaque signed by the captain of the boat, you know, this is Peter standing on the equator. Yeah, so I grew up in Australia from a very young age, like four months, five months old, type of thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

And then moved to the US in 93.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

So you had your like your childhood, your school, your young school years all in Australia. Where in Australia?

SPEAKER_02 2:03

So I grew up in Canberra, which is the boring capital of Australia, and a place most people seek to exit as fast as they can, including me. It was a very sleepy town, strangely perfectly laid-out city with no one-way streets until 1984, designed by an American because Sydney and Melbourne couldn't agree who would be the capital. So they put a dart in the middle and said, let's create a new city. And they had this international design competition. And this guy, Walter Burley Griffin, won it and laid out this literally perfect every street, everything laid out to his plan for the first 70, 80 years.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Why do you say that you wanted to leave? Like what was childhood like there? I mean, the typical like thing that people think about when they think about a young man growing up in Australia is like lots of outdoor, lots of sport. Was that you or were you on your computer the whole time?

SPEAKER_02 2:54

So I grew up, my father was an academic, um, and my mum was at traditional housewife initially, and all that sort of stuff. And started at a private school as a kindergartner. Went to the same school from kindergarten until 18, with one year off in seventh grade off. I went off to boarding school, kind of trying to escape crazy divorces and stuff like that at my home. And boarding school wasn't for me. Uh it was very weird and it wasn't my jam. So ended up coming back to my old school for high school. The childhood life life in camp was just pretty straightforward. I was big into music, so I was playing in the orchestra and the concert band, and I had a big band and a rock band. I was just like music all day long in sort of later years of high school, which was really fun. And a bunch of nerdy stuff was not really the jock type. Um, I don't know, I played cricket and tennis like all Australians must, and soccer and rugby in in the winter. But yeah, Australia was pretty pretty small country at the time. So, and there was no gut, there was no business in Canberra other than government. So it literally had no purpose other than the secret cheat code, which was pornography was not illegal in Canberra. All international porn was imported to Canberra and then distributed out of Canberra to Sydney and Melbourne. Which, like, if you wanted to have one industry, you would never have guessed that would be it, but that was it.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

I bet there were some entrepreneurial teenagers who made some money funneling it out.

SPEAKER_02 4:24

I have no idea. I don't know what you're talking about. But yeah, so I I don't know. I started playing with computers in third grade, fourth grade, something like that. Um, we had an Apple II at the school library, and one of the first things I worked on was a little catalogue of all the books in the library, and that was like a little side project I did, I think, in fifth grade. Didn't really do much with computers until you know playing games and stuff over the summer with my friends. 1984 was a seminal moment when the Mac came out, and I was really lucky one of my friends in school, Phil, his dad was an architect and could afford one of these Macs. And the Macs at the time were really expensive, and they were very primitive. The Fat Mac had 512k of RAM, it wasn't like a big device, but it was beautiful, and you know, I used to go over to their house because they had all the cool tech. They had like a Bangin' Ollison record player, which at the time was like insanity expensive, but it was the time I got my first music recorded onto metal tape, and and you know, back in those days you're living on your Walkman, there was no digital downloads or any of that crap. But it was really learning to play with the Mac was like this big unlock. And the game at the time was Lode Runner at 150 levels, and me and my friend Phil, we would just play all day, trying to crack, and you get to like level 137, and you just sit there all day long. And there's no YouTube to watch someone else that shows you how to play the level.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

What music did you play? Were you singing? Were you playing guitar?

SPEAKER_02 5:55

Bit of no a bit of everything. So obviously started like all all kids on recorder in second grade with Mrs. Allen as my teacher. She was really fun. And then third grade started playing violin, sucked at violin. Violin is like an instrument that should be banned from families, except if you have like a locked-in room where you can avoid sound escaping because it sounds so bad until we've been playing it for like five or six years. But I did that for a year or two, then I played symphony in the orchestra, and then in fifth grade took up flute, and flute was my big instrument. So I ended up playing that all the way through high school, and it was part of my graduating exams and all that sort of stuff. After a little while of flute, so about third year, year nine, third form, I started playing piano, but I kind of sucked at piano, and so I ended up doing jazz piano, which is a way of being able to play without really knowing how to play. And then, you know, it was singing uh a lot, so we had I had a big band in high school, which was kind of fun, and you know, a lot of Harry Conic type of music. It was that sort of genre of big band jazz, which is my sort of ultimate jam. Did that for a while, played flute in the orchestra, played at the concert band, which was kind of fun. And part of this was self-directed. So my the school I went to was an all-boys school, and we had a sister school literally called Girls Grammar. I was at Boys' Grammar, they were at Girls Grammar, and the only integration between the schools was music. So if you wanted to see girls during the week, optimize for music. And and so that was like the great unlock. So all the girls would get busted over to our school because we had better concert prep places and stuff. And that was pretty fun. But music was all day, every day. In ninth grade, we did a thing called work experience. So you basically tell your school, I want to be a lawyer or a doctor or whatever. And um I thought I wanted to be a professional musician. So I was lucky enough to get a job as second piccolo with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_02 7:59

So it was really great, and we did, I don't know, a week of rehearsals, and and we're in the dress rehearsal, and this amazing conductor, Stuart Challender, comes in, and he's like, he's the typical firebrand, loose cannon conductor. If something goes wrong, he'd throw the lectern and all this sort of stuff. And I'm playing, and I'm pretty sure I'm getting it right, and he looks up and he's like, throws the lectern down and looks in my general direction and says, Can't hear you. And the trumpets are behind me, and so I assume he's referring to the trumpets. So I just sort of sit still, and I'm in my little school uniform shorts, and everyone's else is in tuxedos. And he's like, You boy, stand up! And I was like, Oh shit, he means me. So I'm basically standing up, I'm I don't know, 14, 15 years old, starting to cry. I'm terrified. Like, this is he's like, if you're gonna be in my orchestra, make big fucking mistakes. Otherwise, don't play. And I was like, What? He's like, Can't hear you. Play louder, be all be bold, be great. And it was this amazing unlock, which was like being perfect but nobody knows doesn't do anything. And he changed my like in that one moment, my philosophy became, you know, create and do and and take risk. And it's better to do that than to be perfect and nobody knows you exist.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

So you're you finished school and you have given up the idea of being a musician, and and what do you do next?

SPEAKER_02 9:32

Well, I haven't for the record, I haven't given up. So assuming Sinctera ultimately does pretty well, the end state for me is off to Juilliard to do conducting and big band jazz.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Moved to New York and Why why conducting? Why not playing?

SPEAKER_02 9:46

Well, conducting big bandmaster. So sitting up front, running the band, singing.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

But why not why not playing anymore or singing?

SPEAKER_02 9:53

I don't think I'm good enough. I I can I can build teams and uh I think I've got a reasonably good skill of collaborating and and helping people be better than themselves. But my actual performance skills aren't that great anymore. And it's just it's just so much effort to do it. So I I enjoy watching my son who's now started to sing uh in high school, and he's like picking on my singing. He's like, Dad, you're too many singing. I'm like, well, I'm Australian, so fuck off. But and and he's like, and so I'm getting notes from my 15-year-old son on singing, which is so cool, and so weird at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

I like to play this game of if I had the time and the the ability to go get some coaching now, like what is the one sport that that I think I could still get to the Olympics with, if any? And I it is conducting the like musical equivalent of now we are past our prime and we don't have all the time and the hours and the training that we used to have. Is that the is the conducting the equivalent of the thing that you could get to the musical Olympics with now?

SPEAKER_02 10:58

I I I think I think that's a good way to frame it. I think orchestral conducting, definitely not. Orchestral conducting is top of your game because you've got such a diverse orchestra of musicians and so on. And I love doing that too. So I have a bunch of big scores and I'll sit there and guest conduct Verdi's Requiem myself. But it's sort of the place you can go where if you don't quite have the talent anymore, but you want to be on the team, the coach of the football team or something. Um yeah, good analogy, Tash. I didn't think of it that way. That's kind of cool.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

So you decided that you weren't gonna do music at that point in your life. So how did you how did you end up in the US? Did you come to the US for college?

SPEAKER_02 11:42

No, so uh I finished high school in 1990, um, took a gap year with every intention of doing, you know, junky job for the first six months, raise some money, fly to England, and do what all Australians do. Travel through Europe and backpack it and all that sort of stuff. Uh and right as I'm getting on that journey, my dad gets a new job up in Brisbane, uh Queensland University of Technology as the new dean. So he gets to create an arts degree, which is the dream job of an academic. And he's basically like, I'm moving, you can come with, otherwise, you're on your own. And no money, nothing, just you know, good luck. And I didn't really want to move. So I needed to get a job to pay for rent, and I didn't really have any skills. Um, but I could type pretty quickly. And the type so I did went to a typing, literally found in the newspaper jobs for typists. This I remember it's before the internet. So literally my first job was typing in inspection reports on this IBM mainframe terminal, which had at the time a 75-board modem, which is really slow. And um, and you know, people complain about having 750 megabits of bandwidth. I'm talking 75 bits of bandwidth. And so, but the job it had a 32k buffer. So you could type, type, type, type, type, type, type, and then you could walk away for three hours, and the keystrokes would be echoed up to the mainframe. But if you missed a tab key, you're screwed. And you wouldn't know. So at the end of the day, we had these big giant band printers, which are like, I don't know, three feet wide, and you hit print, and it's and it's basically like printing a spreadsheet. And if everything's correct, all the columns are beautiful. If you missed a tab key, then you'd suddenly see straight, straight, straight, straight, and then everything off by diagonally. And the first time this happened, I knew it because there was this amazingly attractive receptionist at the office. And she's like, Do you want to go for coffee? And I was like, Yes, I did.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

I was like, tie.

SPEAKER_02 14:01

Uh, and then walked away. And we had coffee in the two hours that I was uploading my keystrokes. At the end of the day, print out comes out, and you could see clearly where I went to coffee. And so then I had to type it all in again. And I was like, this shit, I hate that. Uh so then I said, I'm not gonna take this girl. And then a couple of weeks later, she's like, Do you want to go for lunch? And I was like, Oh, yeah, yeah, I did want to go to lunch. And so we went off to lunch, and the same thing happened. I was like, screw this, I'm not, I'm not gonna type this in again. So I went down to the basement, and it's literally government office building, and in the basement were the nerds. And everyone's in suits and ties. I didn't have a suit and a tie, I had a jacket where I couldn't afford a suit. And so down in the basement, there was this dude, Kevin, and he had long black hair, tied with a shoelace, and he wore jeans and a t-shirt. And he looks at me, he's like, Why are you in my offs? I was like, and I showed him my printout, and he throws me this EasyTree 2 IBM mainframe programming book and says, fix it yourself. So I was like, okay. So I went upstairs and started trying to hack the code and move the data one column to the left. And then that unlocked my ability to go for lunch whenever I wanted. So that was sort of my entree into being paid to code. So anyway, so I worked for the government department, and about nine, six months into that, my boss, who was the section head, he's like, You're bored, and I was like, Yes, I am. He's like, Well, we're getting this thing called Windows, and we're getting a network, which, and we're the first government department in the whole country. Would you like to learn how to program on Windows? And I was like, sure, sounds great. Uh, and off I went down to Melbourne for a one-week programming course uh in this language called SQL Windows. And so I graduated with a programming course and came back and we started building Windows-based apps, and it was wild. I I didn't know anything, I was just making it up. And it was definitely not engineering because I was self-taught. So I did that for the first year. Um, and then in the summer of 91, came to Silicon Valley on my Gap year because the company had a developer conference, which was back in those days really unusual. I went and saw all these nerds and I was like, cool. 1992 starts, I start university doing a double degree, law and accounting, and uh working full-time.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

In Australia?

SPEAKER_02 16:30

Yeah. So uh 38 contact hours of school, uh, 40 hours a week of work, no car. I was super skinny, cycling everywhere. But I worked, worked, worked, went back to the developer conference in the summer of 92, and while I was there, I got three job offers. I was like, what's going on? And um, one was to go and work as the database administrator for the 777 project at Boeing, that it was just kicking off. So Boeing launched their first plane in 96-97, so quite a little bit after that. Another was to go work at this company called Goldman Sachs, but I didn't know what that was. So I was like, screw that. And then the third was to do a startup. And but I didn't know what startups were. It's like Australia in 1992. Like, you know, being a startup founder was, you know, you'd be walking in the Kimberleys and discover diamonds and say$50 billion to dig all the diamonds out of the ground. And so this startup wrote to me and we met and we talked and then didn't hear anything, and I was like typical. In like October of 92, a fax arrives, and the the receptionist very delicately said, Here's your contract. And I was working for the government, and my salary at the time was this astounding figure of$25,384 Australian per year. Um, which as a 19-year-old, actually not bad.

SPEAKER_00 18:01

My start my starting salary at Ernst ⁇ Young in 2010 was not that much more than that.

SPEAKER_02 18:07

Um and I had the advantage of being a long time ago. Inflation adjusted. Uh but anyway, so this job offer comes through and it's 55,000. I was like, wow, double. And then I thought about it for a second, I realized actually it's four times because the US dollar was two to one Australian. I was like, fuck school, I'm out, I quit. And moved here in March of 1993 to do a startup. And prom zero, we created the first Windows-based core banking system. And I didn't know what a banking system was. It was all just learned on the job.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

Um what was the company called?

SPEAKER_02 18:44

Called Phoenix. And and it still runs today. So the company we started back then, and like half the guys and gals that we hired back then still work there. My best friend Aaron, who I hired like six months in, he still works there.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

Who owns it now? Is it an FIS or a Jack Henry product or a FISER, or is it independent?

SPEAKER_02 19:02

Oh, it's it's the lesser of those, it's Finastra.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 19:06

Yeah, I mean we took it public in 96, which was crazy, and then it's been sold, I don't know, four or five times to private equity in various generations since then. But it's weird to think that stuff that you built and wrote 30 plus years ago is still running. Yeah. And you're like, really? It's weird.

SPEAKER_00 19:28

I wonder if I wonder if there's any code with your name still on it.

SPEAKER_02 19:31

Oh, my code's all over the place. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 19:33

I went to work, I met we had a like a 30-year reunion two years ago, whatever it was. And I was sitting with with an engineer, I was like, just pull up the code. I was like, I was like, oh, that's still my code. I was like, yeah. Oh wow. And I I used to put a lot of comments in the code, and my cunning comment title was PH, but no one realized that were my initials. They just as short assumed it meant it goes bad, read here. So it was pretty fun, and I don't know, it's like the the it all comes back to the music thing with Stuart Challenger, which was when you don't know that you can take risk, and the risks are incalculable, because like what's the downside for me? I I theoretically deferred from university for one year. You can be bold, you can try stuff, and you can be creative. And and you've done this journey yourself with starting cable, which is risky. You went from a probably relatively cushy job at Monzo and where you knew everything, and suddenly you're like, start from zero, but what is zero? Like it's it's a privilege to be an entrepreneur, to be able to have that risk taking. And I think you'll agree that the only real way to do it is to be surrounded by people that support you. Because it's not just you doing this, it's you and your partner or your wife or your boyfriend or husband or girlfriend or whatever. It's their extended family who are just staring at you thinking, what the fuck is wrong with you?

SPEAKER_00 21:06

Lots of that.

SPEAKER_02 21:07

Like, go work at IBM, go work at some big consulting firm, make butts. You know, I worked at Google, like cushion job of the century, and then stopped working at Google to go to another startup, and people like me, are you insane?

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:21

And I don't know, creators and builders just aren't satisfied by normie life or something.

SPEAKER_00 21:29

How does that play into how you're bringing up your kids? Like, what do you talk about with them or what do you encourage them to do that that helps their I mean, do you or do you not want them to do it? Like, how how do you think about that with your kids?

SPEAKER_02 21:40

It's so interesting. I was thinking about I think about this all the time. Like, what is their job? What what career trajectory can they go on? And I think I anchor it in the fundamental building block of if you enjoy it and you're happy doing it, the chances are you're gonna figure out how to make a career out of it. And So I remember giving a speech one time at my old school, and all the teachers were like, you know, tell the kids to work hard. And I was like, I'm not telling the kids to work hard. I'm going to tell them do the things you want to do. Don't do the things that your parents make you do. I spent a bunch of time with my kids now. It's still pretty early, they're only in ninth grade. But they have clear proficiencies. So Leah is an amazing artist and is doing just beautiful digital art. And it's really good. Like commercially good. And I'm really proud of her and her creativity and her ability to make up stuff. Because making up the imagery is as hard as making up music. It's like it's from nothing and it's really exciting. And then Luke, who um is a big boy, he's taller than me and another 50-60 pounds, he's big, is playing the anti-protype. Like he should be on the football team, like 100%. And the the football coach keeps knocking on the door. Peter, can you get your son to play football? I'm like, no. You if you can get him to play, great, I'll help him. But Luke's hardcore into gaming, he's like ridiculously proficient at his PS5. He loves to sing and he's into music. Does he want to be a musician? I don't think so. But if he did, I'd let him go. And I think um, I don't know, parenting's hard. I I know you're you're going through it as well. Figuring out what you want for your children versus what they want for themselves. It's a really weird trade.

SPEAKER_00 23:38

Yeah, it is. I uh I used to think before having kids that I would any child of mine would be a professional athlete because it's what I thought I would be raising an athlete, yeah. But I I I don't know. My daughter is mu she puts on a dress every single morning. And uh I I don't think I put on a dress of my choosing apart from when my mum told me I had to my whole childhood and I was just running around outside kicking a football, and she just wants to be painting faces and drawing and making music. So no, it's funny. It is funny creating these people and then realizing that you have absolutely no control at all over them.

SPEAKER_02 24:16

Yeah, I mean it's this eight-dollar cliche like executives or or business folks moving into families and sort of saying, well, the hardest part about it is losing control. But it's really true. And and it's not a cliche, it's legit. Like if Leah doesn't want to come down for dinner, what am I gonna do? Wrangle her with a leash and bring her downstairs? Like, what are you gonna do? You have to meet people where they are and what they want to do and help them find their own space. And I don't know, it's for me, it was a huge transition. So when the kids were born, I just I'd started quite recently at Google and I'd been at Yodli, where to be fair, I was one of those command and control managers. So I had 600 people on the team, and everybody knew this is the hierarchy, and everything worked there. And then joining Google, I had this really big product team, but no engineers. And so I couldn't get anything built. Like they didn't want to do it, they just didn't do it. And it wasn't like they had to, because every team at Google back in those days was about minus 20% on headcount. So they just couldn't team and go to another team. And there was no mobility controls, like you couldn't say you have to be on the team for six months, they just go. And so my whole philosophy of being a leader and a manager was screwed, it didn't work. I had to find a way to actually encourage people to want to work on the things that we were doing.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

Well, how did you manage that? What was the most successful thing that you did there?

SPEAKER_02 25:51

It's sort of indirect bribery. Basically, you've got to find a way to be top of mind for Larry and Sergei and and the most senior folks at Google and show to that engineer or that product person you get a visibility in and interest from.

SPEAKER_00 26:07

So it's prove proving that you have like stakeholder buy-in, basically.

SPEAKER_02 26:10

Yeah, and actual interest. Like, is Larry actually literally playing with Google Wallet? And we would check, we'd be like, I think he opened it. I think he did. He's done the tap and pay, yay! And we'd run around sort of celebrating the first taps by all the senior staff. And that was this sort of internal dog fooding that got validation that you're working on a team that was interesting and fun. Sadly, a little bit after that, Larry and Sergei bought a bunch of satellites, and so Google Wallet wasn't that cool anymore. But that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

I wanna I wanna make sure that we get to how you ended up at St. Terra because I think this like through line of your career has been obviously payments. Your first real job after your kind of government, your your government job was building a core banking system. And then you kind of kept coming back to payments and moving money. Why was that? Were you particularly interested in it, or was it that you knew it and kept being offered jobs in it? Like how did you think about it?

SPEAKER_02 27:06

I think, and maybe this is sort of another way of thinking about what's happening with AI and stuff like that. Being a horizontal generalist back then and today is okay, but it means you're you're never going to really be deep or understand something really special or have a unique understanding of stuff. If you're a phenomenal engineer, you can learn any domain. But as a product y person like you and me, we actually people value us because we actually understand what's happening and we know where to go and where the pitfalls are and the challenges. And part of it is just duration. Like the more you be in the space, the more you learn either by osmosis or by direct fail. And um, so I tried a bunch of different things to try and escape payments. I did a mobile email company, I did a wine startup, I did uh solar panels in Africa startup, I did all different things, but every sort of couple of years, someone would drag me back and say, How about some more payments? I'm like, all right. Uh and and I was lucky that we worked with some really cool things and we were at a really interesting time in tech. So sort of going through dot-com was incredibly crazy and ridiculous, and AI today feels a lot like that, to be honest. Uh, the sort of parallels of people just creating companies out of nowhere and sort of going to great revenue and then suddenly going back to zero was very dot-com and it's very AI right now for me. At the same time, when Google finally sort of came on the market, 2003-2004, everybody's whole mission in life was to get bought by Google. And then Apple with the App Store, same thing, which was they peeled off every good idea and then either spun up a team or bought the team and added it to the OS. And we're kind of that mode right now with AI, which is there are so many great ideas, but how many music generation software companies do we need, and how many age ends do we need doing avatars that say my voice and stuff like that? And then Google just kills them all every six weeks with a new release. Same thing with Claude and Athropic and and all those things.

SPEAKER_00 29:13

And so what can't be killed by AI?

SPEAKER_02 29:16

Exactly. So deep domain knowledge of a vertical that isn't discoverable technologically is pretty interesting. Like it's quite hard to figure out how does an ATM machine work. The actual get the technological, think of just logistics. How do you get the cash to it or from it? What happens when you detect a counterfeit bill? All of this sort of stuff. And ATM is such a small fraction of the problem of payments and banking, but it's something that you and I can touch and feel, and we say, Oh, I've been to an ATM machine, I know what happens, I stick it in, I push my pin, and then cash comes out. But when I did that and I checked my balance, I didn't realize my issuer is getting charged 36 cents for the privilege of seeing my balance sent across the network. And then, you know, I didn't know I could push money to a debit card. Well, you can't. It's illegal because it's a fraud vector of someone doing a refund without having a purchase. And then Square and Chase and Visa said, Well, what if we stop that constraint? Now I can push money to a card, and it from the network perspective, it looks like an unfunded refund. But suddenly you've got this domain understanding of what's an ISO 8583 message going to do at that point in time. And the first time I coded an ISO 8583 was in 1995 when we built an ATM processor for Phoenix. And you learn the nuances of half-bite encoding back then, and it carries you forward. I was talking to one of a team members, and we're we're having problems importing um checked mobile check deposit capture files. And this is in this ridiculous format called ICL9. I don't even know why it's called ICL9, but it was basically developed by IBM and the Fed in the 80s. And you think you're going pretty good, you and then you realize it's a pain. The images themselves are encoded in TIFF format, so they're fax facsimiles. And modern tech probably hasn't seen a fax machine in a long time. And so my guys were like, it's really hard to read this file. And one of the one of our engineers said, Oh, we'll fix it in a couple of weeks. So I sat in front of Gemini and like 60 seconds said, decode this file, make me a nice table, generate some false data. And then I could see the descriptions, and the descriptions of the transaction should have said, you know, check for$75, Smith. But it was all gobbledygook. And that's when I reminded Gemini the files in EPSIDEC format, which is pre-ASCI, IBM mainframe. And it's like, oh thanks. And then it decoded EPSIDEC, and we were done. And in the space of 45 minutes, we had an ICL9 file reader that we could drop into our app. But the only way to get there is if you knew what an ICL9 file was, what EPSIDEC was, what ASCII was, and all of these building blocks of deep domain understanding. And I think for a while that's going to be a safety net in our space. It's not an unassailable safety net, but for now it's pretty safe. And the difference perhaps between so people would have said the same thing about the law or medicine and stuff like that. And I think there's huge value in deep understanding of the law and of medicine. But because there are so many players in banking and payments, and there are so many disparate networks and infrastructure, it's quite hard to see the interconnectedness of it all at the moment. It'll come, but it's not there yet.

SPEAKER_00 32:45

So after Google, you spent some time at Uber and you built out a lot of the payment product work at Uber. Do you see SyncTara as like the culmination of everything that you've learned? Do you see it as like this kind of pinnacle of your career so far? Or how do you think about SyncTara?

SPEAKER_02 33:04

Kind of, yes. I mean, it's kind of an intersection of a whole bunch of different things over time, which is really interesting. So my first startup, Phoenix, was core banking for community banks. Now we're doing a new core banking system for community banks. It's kind of interesting. The guy that started my last the first company, Brahm, he was kind of basically the same age as me when I started Synctera. And he adopted me as his son, basically, you know, when I was 19 years old and I had nowhere to go. And I used to eat at their house three nights a week because I needed food. And but what was really interesting was his model for getting it started included the first 10 banks were the first 10 investors and they had to agree to install. And I don't know that I thought about it concretely as a plan, but we've kind of ended up in the same place where we've got a number of our banks are investors in the company, which is great. The play forward and the interconnectedness, we work with big players as well. We're public on the open market where anybody can play with our APIs. We've learned, you know, like we learned at Google, faster APIs, easier access makes it better platform play. I learned from Uber that getting there first, despite the economics, is a win. And then you can always go back and optimize the economics. But if you don't have any customers, it's academic. So there's a lot of aspects of things that I've done over time that have folded up into this. But I would central it back to ultimately the thing that makes Synctera succeed is the relationships that we collectively have formed and I've had built over the last 10, 20, 30 years. And it's weird when these relationships come back to help you. Like when we were doing the deal at Google with MasterCard and First Data and City, on one side of the trade was Brian Christ, who was the lawyer representing City. He became my GC at Uber. And the MasterCard person was this uh wonderful person, Sherry Heymond, who we work with all day long. And so from 2012 to 2026, there's two people that were in a moment in time that have now played forward in these long-term relationships. And it's all over the place. People are coming out of the woodwork that I started working with in the 90s and in the 20s, 2000s, and they're back. And you know, when we first connected in 2021, I didn't know who you were, you didn't know who I was, but we've evolved that over time into a trust relationship. And you know, I think we were lucky in being able to meet back then, and then to have this through line of interconnectedness of the ideas that we were building that were very complementary. And I don't I don't know that I would change any of that. I think the relationships you form are really imperative. Every now and then you screw them up and you either try and repair it or it becomes a broken thing. But on balance, we try in our space, in in this universe of connected people, to foster long-lived relationships because you know even if you don't do a deal today, you might do a deal in the future.

SPEAKER_00 36:08

Yeah. I think there's this pressure in Silicon Valley or in startup world to make it rich or make it successful so young. And I think what is interesting about your story is like all of these building blocks have been there over the 20 or 30 years of your career. And it has culminated in this company that you're leading and that you've just acquired cable within. It's it's not this race to make a quick buck. It is actually the building of a long-term career, which I'm sure if there was some psychological study on the mental health of someone who is 60 who had made their money when they were 25 versus somebody who had built it up over these building blocks, I'm sure it would be much a much more stable, happy psychology through that latter route than the quick buck route.

SPEAKER_02 36:57

I think we have seen just in the last six or seven years, sort of during the edge of start and end of COVID, that it's been very easy in payments and banking to make a quick buck. The consequence of which is real consumers get screwed. And we saw that with Synapse, we saw it with Solid, we've seen it with many other players in the market where the desire to make a number transcended good judgment of is this in fact the thing that is this really good for humans? And and I am sure we have turned away deals that we could have taken that would have been quite lucrative if we would have made lots of money, but were the wrong thing to do. And I'm sure team members got frustrated when I've said no to something. Um, and I probably said no to too many things. I probably should have been a little bit more lean-in on some of them. But I just can't get in my head this idea that the people that entrust us with their money are fungible. They're not. They're real humans. And and there's so much ill will that can be created, and you can never earn it back if you mistake their trust in you as sort of perpetual or without risk. And I just won't do it.

SPEAKER_00 38:06

So why did you say yes to the cable opportunity?

SPEAKER_02 38:10

Because I saw a great team that were passionate, that knew a space in depth, and would be immediately collaborative and complementary to everything else we do. There's almost no overlap in product, which is super rare, other than logged in users or something stupid, but we'll fix that. Single sign. It's the vein of everyone's existence. But the complementarity of the two product teams and the and the way we work was really good. Philosophically, I think we're on the same page. Like you started a company with the objective of helping to spot when people did the bad things, which is great. And I like the fact that the way we can work together makes one plus one equals three for sure. This isn't just add your bits to our bits and suddenly we have a richer thing. It's actually better because of both of us working together.

SPEAKER_00 39:03

The banking as a service space has been pretty tumultuous over the last five years. And a lot of people talk, a lot of the players in this space talk about compliance and you know, it's a pretend that they care a lot about it. Why do you think that this is really the first compliance acquisition by a Bass player? Why haven't there been more?

SPEAKER_02 39:24

I would say generically, because compliance is hard. And you know, at its root, SyncTeRa is a really, really cool spreadsheet that keeps track of math and money. If you sort of boil it down to the nuts and bolts of a ledger, you can just stop there. You can just be a software company that delivers a ledger and says, I don't care what you do with it, it just works. And you can say, stitch together fintech your own solutions around this problem. Please try not to onboard criminals and sponsor money laundering. That's one strategy. And I think for the really, really big fintechs, like me at Uber, for example, that can actually work just great. We would assemble the bits, and because I had a big compliance team, we could wrap it around with that. No one else has those resources. And turning a blind eye to compliance is a convenient way of saying, I just did the software. It's not my problem. But the reality is if you build a tool and you have no thinking about the consequence of the use of that tool, and you don't build all the checks and balances to make sure that people, even if they are only doing it by accident, are making mistakes, then you're kind of sort of releasing into the world a thing that can do bad stuff. And, you know, the the extreme version of that was the anthropic guys not releasing their tech stack to DOD. Um, and we are obviously not at that level of risk creation or whatever you want to call it. But we all share a responsibility when we build things that are open-ended with no control, to think about well, what would happen if someone didn't have my ethical standards or my value systems or whatever. And minimally, you've got to build a system to keep track of where all the money went, even if someone uses it and does bad things with it. That immutable ledgering is sort of the fame of crypto and Bitcoin and all that sort of stuff. And I think to the regret of most of the people using Bitcoin to do bad things, that the ledgering is actually pretty good. But in our universe, helping people do the whole solution better actually just means that the marketplace is healthier. And I think what's happened, we've had this sort of limp-along period for a couple of years where all the bad actors are getting flushed out of the ecosystem. And there'll be new bad actors. There always is. There'll be the next ledger that doesn't do ledgering correctly, I'm sure. God help you if you're using Dell for your SOC 1 or SOC 2. But I think building things that are sustainable and actually create value for everyone, and don't objectively try to cut corners creates a long-lived business. And in payments and banking in particular, resilience and just durability is one of the most important assets. The reason why core banking systems are 40, 50, 60 years old is because they take a lot of time to build and mature and become rigorous and stable. And you could argue that you know Assembler is not the most awesome programming language for the mainframe. But it kind of works. And then what you're doing is surrounding the code with people and process and building a company together with you, Tash, like that, is pretty unique. And I think we share a belief system that is important when you're putting two teams together. That we don't we don't want the quick butt. Um, even though it's it can be really seductive and attractive. It's much better to build something that's going to survive. And it may grow a little bit slower, and your investors may sort of grumble a little bit and say, go faster. But it's better than dying. And building things together is much more fun.

SPEAKER_00 43:14

I think we should leave it there. This was awesome. I really appreciate you chatting with me, Peter, walking me through your background. So interesting. And take care of cable.

SPEAKER_02 43:25

Oh, for sure. And I'm sure we will be tapping into your experience and wisdom for a long time to come. So thank you for building something special.

SPEAKER_00 43:34

Yeah. Thank you, Peter. This was awesome. And uh we'll see you next week on In Control.