Talk at Startup School Europe 2014 at The Brewery in London Hiroki Takeuchi is on Facebook. +44 (0) 20 7016 6800 Initially, we focused on helping informal groups collect money. We’ve always valued that very highly. To read about Burrow’s pivot from B2C mortgage provider to B2B platform, see here. We were always very clear about what our values are and in how we communicate them. By the time you've found the right executive with experience of scaling, you're thinking you could have done with them a year ago. In particular, we saw that the way payments were happening online, which was predominantly using credit and debit cards, was fine for use cases like e-commerce and retail, which is where the majority of payments companies focus. Friends. And as a result, up until our Series A, we’d describe the way we grew as ‘growth by surprise’ because we were growing really fast, but we weren't doing any sales or marketing. Photos. Roboadvisory is not a product, it’s a feature, Platform Banking & Value Accrual in Fintech, Dissecting the Free Stock Trading Industry with Freetrade, Robinhood, Chime and the Emergence of a New American Finance, How BELLA Is Reimagining Banking with Angelo D’Alessandro. As you neared Series B (which you closed in January 2014) what were the metrics and KPIs you prioritised and why? Videos. Hiroki is co-founder and CEO of GoCardless. Hiroki Takeuchi received his B.A. It's the sum of everyone's behaviours. GoCardless, founded in 2011, are experts in recurring payments (where they process over $1bn per annum (via the direct debit “pipes”). We [Takeuchi co-founded GoCardless with Matt Robinson and Tom Blomfield] were first-time founders, all in our early 20s, and we'd never set up businesses before. That was something that we were able to establish fairly early on, probably around Series B. Payments haven’t. Describe those early days and how you came to pivot the company? There’s a link to my first conversation with them on our website at deathsexmoney.org. We're all aligned around a similar objective, which makes the whole thing a lot easier. So the earlier you can tackle that the better. Between Series A and Series B was when we really needed to start thinking about how to grow more proactively. You can read Steve O’Hear‘s TechCrunch article about Hiroki here. Do you believe in effectively replicating your HQ when you open international offices, and sending out key people from base? Can you describe the internationalization process for GoCardless? Business models have moved on. Is it simply a case of not being able to squeeze anyone else in so it’s time to move? Then within 12-18 months, you're busting at the seams, so you start looking for the next place. At the end of the day, it's a very close relationship. We didn't know anything about payments at all at that stage. You mentioned diversity — how do you ensure you develop a diverse team from, early on, say Series A onwards? Read "GoCardless on the move: why our new office space matters. Obviously you have to give them a chance, you try and get them to change their behaviour to be true to those values. “Fintechs are focused,” commented Hiroki, “and as a result, we are going to get a greater share of global financial services." GoCardless has raised $47m to date and is backed by the likes of Balderton, Accel Partners, Passion Capital and Notion Capital. Whereas in Series B, it was much more about the actual revenue growth and the way the business was scaling. And how did that evolve as you went towards Series B? If you start saying 'This is our culture, everything has to conform to this and our culture has to be the same today now that we’re 200 or 1,000 people as it was when we were 20," it just doesn’t work because it all becomes a bit Big Brother-esque. We have a very clear values-fit interview. The important thing is probably just to be very clear about what are the things that you want to do locally and what are things you want to do centrally in support, and how do you structure that so that everyone knows where they stand. Hiroki Takeuchi is the Founder and CEO of GoCardless, a London-based fintech that simplifies recurring payment collection for businesses. The culture is an organic thing that evolves over time and you shouldn’t become too prescriptive about it or too fixated on a specific culture. It's in the 20% of difficult cases that your values are truly embedded or not. GoCardless is roughly 390 people worldwide today [autumn, 2019] – at what point did you feel it was the right moment to hire a Head of Talent / People to lead the search process? But what’s also important is that it not only enables you to scale faster, but it also enables the people that you've hired to actually focus on doing their jobs. At Series B, it's more about the actual revenue growth and the way the business was scaling. It's only as we started to really invest more into the local markets and open up local offices and hire people in those markets that we've really started to accelerate. Videos. We just hired one or two people and we were spread too thin. Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on news from Balderton, and our portfolio. FinTech pioneer and GoCardless CEO Hiroki Takeuchi is disrupting the world of direct debit payments. So we very explicitly moved away from culture-fit and more towards values-fit, because you can be more objective about values. This week we have a super-clear dive into Fintech Payments companies with Hiroki Takeuchi CEO and co-founder of GoCardless. Or should each local office have its own regional identity built around local hires? Culture is something that’s underpinned by a set of foundational values. We always believed very much in this being a global opportunity, and the vision has been there from very early on. Fintechs TransferWise and GoCardless Partner to Let Businesses Collect Recurring Cross-Border Payments, Brunch interview with Hiroki Takeuchi, founder of GoCardless, Balderton CEO Collective offsite in France, in May 2018. And in general, I’ve yet to go through a search where I feel like it was just the right moment to be hiring this or that person. But what's as important as communicating them is also adhering to them and living by them as a company. So I think of culture as something that’s underpinned by a set of foundational values. By the time you've found that person, you're thinking you could have done with them a year ago. But when it came to other types of payment, it wasn't a great fit. The thing that really determines the timing is how repeatable and scalable the core business is. I would say that what we undervalued at that stage was the need not just for domain expertise, but also scaling expertise. It was just weeks after he and his wife, Rachel Swidenbank, got married. So it's been more a question of when do we do it? — if you've got a team of 50 people and they're all men, you're going to struggle to hire women into that team. Announcing our $75m funding round to open up access to our global bank debit network. Today’s conversation covers a number of topics, some of which are quite challenging. Be humble: it’s not your typical value statement for a company with ambitious growth plans. However, I'm not sure there is a right answer to localization versus centralization; it's probably different in every business. Hiroki Takeuchi. "My belief is that one of the fundamental things that differs between fintech companies and the banks is design," says GoCardless' CEO Hiroki Takeuchi, speaking at WIRED Money 2015 You tend to end up with much less diverse teams, you're basically just hiring carbon copies of yourself and that can create some fairly bad dynamics. My view is you don't control the culture. But if you can't, then that's the litmus test. But as you scale it’s not great. London WC1X 9JF UK Hiroaki Takeuchi (竹内 浩昭, Takeuchi Hiroaki) portrayed a disguised Mecha Human in Choudenshi Bioman Ep. We've now got quite a substantial recruitment and talent team, and that's made a massive difference in our ability to scale the team-up. We’d got the UK to a position where we felt we understood it well enough, and it was repeatable enough and scalable enough for us to then divert our attention to the new markets. And Rachel is really a good follow on Instagram where she’s still chronicling Hiroki’s recovery and their life together at hiro_myhero_. That’s Rachel Swidenbank and Hiroki Takeuchi in London. We very moved away from culture-fit to values-fit, because you can be more objective about values. Hiroki Takeuchi talks to Bernard Liautaud at the Balderton CEO Collective 2018, Our focus after Series A was to build a clear growth engine. The business is on a mission to take the pain out of getting paid for recurring revenue businesses. Founded in 2011, GoCardless is a global leader in recurring payments. When you started, GoCardless was addressing a different problem to the one you’ve ended up solving. Group payments were a problem we’d encountered before when I’d been part of student societies at university and Matt had been captain of his local football team, so we just saw it as an interesting thing to try and fix. 'Fintechs TransferWise and GoCardless Partner to Let Businesses Collect Recurring Cross-Border Payments'- Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 'Brunch interview with Hiroki Takeuchi, founder of GoCardless' - Amy Lewin, Sifted.EU, Hiroki Takeuchi, Co-founder & CEO, GoCardless. That's not to say that you're focused solely on profitability, but you do need to believe that at some level of scale, this is a model that's fundamentally going to be profitable. How important is the interview process for new hires in all this? And we were a bit penny-wise pound-foolish in the sense that we were always very against hiring recruiters, and didn't really think it was worth spending money on. Please welcome Hiroki Takeuchi. When it comes to investors, you have an impressive roster of VCs – including Accel, Balderton, Google Ventures, Notion – so what’s your advice to founders on how to find the right investor match? Why did you decide to go into a particular country and how do you know when the moment's right to go there? When we first spoke in early 2017, Hiroki was still figuring out the basics of day-to-day life in a wheelchair: how to drive an adapted car, how to get up and down stairs, how to use the bathroom on his own. Thank you very much for joining us today. I think of it as a journey of discovery in many ways. GoCardless has raised $47m to date and is backed by the likes of Balderton, Accel Partners, Passion Capital and Notion Capital. Hiroki and his co-founders, including Tom Blomfield, now of Monzo, who joined us on the podcast way back in episode 17, went through Y Combinator early on and have some interesting stories about that experience. We underestimated the value of getting more people in faster. 14: Attack! “Not anymore,” suggested Hiroki. The way I think about it is that culture is the sum of everyone's behaviours. 3 min read — GoCardless. +44 (0) 20 7016 6810. But it’s an approach that is helping GoCardless achieve great things.. “Success is not about individuals, it’s about the collective and delivering the best outcome or solution possible,” explained CEO Hiroki Takeuchi. For you it was a case of lacking sales and marketing expertise, but how do you know what you need to hire when in this particular phase of growth [i.e. Initially, we were a bit too cautious. But when you're 70 or 80 people then that becomes trickier. One thing that typically startups seem to find difficult is retaining the distinctive culture that they had in the early days as they grow to hundreds of people around the world. It's really important to build out a local presence with local hires — that makes a big difference. So you need a bit more stability and a bit more room to grow into. If someone kicks you out with a couple of weeks notice when you're about 20 people that's not that big a deal. 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