Scaling, managing culture with Wayflyer CEO Aidan Corbett

In this episode of the Fintech Thought Leaders podcast by QED Investors, QED Managing Partner Nigel Morris is joined by Wayflyer CEO Aidan Corbett and QED Partner Yusuf Özdalga.

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Show notes

Nigel Morris is the co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, a fintech venture capital platform focused on disruptive, high-growth financial services companies. QED has made numerous unicorn investments, including Credit Karma, Nubank, Avant, SoFi, Klarna, GreenSky and AvidXchange.

Nigel is the Chairman of ClearScore and Mission Lane and serves on the boards of Red Ventures, AvidXchange, MediaMath and Zopa.  He also serves on the board of ideas42, and Scotia’s Digital Advisory Council, and he works in an advisory capacity with General Atlantic and Oliver Wyman.

Prior to QED, Nigel co-founded Capital One Financial Services in 1994. Under Nigel’s leadership as President and Chief Operating Officer, Capital One pioneered an information-based strategy that transformed the consumer lending industry.

Nigel grew up mostly in England and takes immense pride in the fact that he is at least half Welsh. He has an MBA with distinction from London Business School, where he is also a Fellow. He is an avid cyclist, but is happiest when he is at home in Virginia with his wife, four children, and three grandchildren.

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Aidan Corbett is the co-founder and CEO of Wayflyer, a Dublin-based company founded in September 2019 to help e-commerce businesses worldwide reach their growth potential by providing a range of financing and analytics solutions that improve cash flow, drive sales and optimize supply chains.

Through its offering of affordable, non-dilutive, unsecured capital, eligible businesses are given the flexibility to secure advertising space and inventory, paving the way for growth and profitability. Wayflyer’s unique free analytics platform also analyzes marketing performance on a daily basis, equipping eCommerce businesses with world-class analytics and tangible, granular recommendations designed to improve performance.

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Yusuf Özdalga is a London-based partner at QED Investors with a focus on U.K. and European fintech and proptech companies. Yusuf joined QED in 2017, and his career has spanned roles as an operator, advisor, entrepreneur and investor. His current portfolio of investments include Wagestream, Fidel API, Capitalise, Rest Less, Wayflyer, Weavr, GetGround and Payhawk.

Yusuf started his career at Capital One in 1997 where he helped develop many of the innovative lending solutions in the underserved credit segment. Subsequently he joined the Financial Institutions M&A Group at J. P. Morgan in 2003, advising banks and specialty finance companies on mergers, public listings and capital raising.

He started his professional investing career in 2006, with a focus on specialty finance and consumer credit companies in Europe, including early fintech investments such as some of the first online loan originators in Sweden. Prior to joining QED, Yusuf was an investment director with a growth private equity fund, helping fast-growing companies and entrepreneurs build lasting franchises by leveraging the power of data analytics.

Yusuf holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business with High Honors, and a BS in Commerce from the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce with Distinction. He completed his undergraduate degree with a dual concentration in Finance and MIS.

Yusuf is fluent in English, Swedish and Turkish and has a working knowledge of German. He is currently studying Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian.

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Tune in to learn:

• [2:28] How Wayflyer  helps e-commerce companies pay for inventory and for marketing spend and solves the struggle of working capital requirements.

• [4:59] Why banks have traditionally refused to enter this space, including why e-commerce companies typically don't have many assets that a bank can use as security other than inventory.

• [7:17] Why this twist on a vertical banking theme was so appealing to QED and how knowing the return on marketing spend affects loss rates.

• [8:52] How Wayflyer uses data sources to underpin a merchant cash advance by essentially purchasing future receivables.

• [10:59] Why the challenge of using AI in not necessarily in the analysis of the data, it's in cleaning the data and labeling the data effectively, for example in extracting value from bank account data.

• [16:22] The decisions that led to Wayflyer expanding from Dublin, first to the U.S. and then to Australia, all during COVID-19 pandemic.

• [21:27] How to maintain a  cohesive culture that supports the business strategy, while emphasizing the importance of asynchronous communication.

• [25:50] How a company needs to think intentionally about its culture once it crosses the Dunbar threshold -- the point where a CEO or manager can no longer remember the names, titles and duties of every person in the company or office because it has grown so much.

• [30:35] The benefits of having a two- or three-person founding team that covers the full vista of different functional requirements.

• [36:57] How a company such as Wayflyer thinks about product expansion and the potential for moving beyond e-commerce.

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Full transcript
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‍Nigel Morris:
Thank you for joining us for today's Fintech Thought Leaders podcast, and I'm really genuinely excited by the discussion we have in store today. Two wonderfully thoughtful minds. Today I'm joined by Wayflyer CEO and co-founder Aidan Corbett and our own QED Investors partner, Yusuf Özdalga from our London office.

Yusuf has known Aidan and his co-founder Jack Pierse from before QED made its first investment in the company in 2020. And actually I remember, Aidan, you coming to visit us in Alexandria, Virginia, just when COVID was hitting and we were trying to make sense of what this virus was coming over from China. I think it had just hit Italy and there was some breakouts on the west coast, which was, I think just about two years ago. Yusuf has been the deal champion for our investment in this incredible rocket ship of a company.

And it's also worth mentioning that earlier this month, Wayflyer announced a $150 million Series B round. It makes Wayflyer the sixth unicorn in Ireland's history, and remarkably the fastest of those six companies to reach a billion-dollar valuation. So congrats to you Aidan and to your incredible team in Dublin, London and Atlanta.

And if I also could add, I think it is QED's 25th unicorn, now in our 14 years of attempting to be good investors. But before we take a deeper dive into Wayflyer, let me pass the ball to you, Aidan. And if you wouldn't mind just sharing a brief 30,000-foot synopsis of the company. What it does and the origin story and how Wayflyer makes such a difference in the lives of burgeoning, emerging e-commerce companies?

Aidan Corbett:
Sure, thanks Nigel. The need that Wayflyer solves for e-commerce companies is we help you pay for inventory and for marketing spend. And e-commerce companies really struggle with that working capital requirements. If I take a simple example of an e-commerce company making an order in preparation for Q4, last year in 2021, they'll probably contact their supplier in August, that supplier will ask for a deposit on order, then in six weeks time they'll need to pay the remainder of that order before it leaves the supplier's factory, then that shipment will take a couple of weeks to arrive at the warehouse, then they'll spend money on marketing and only then will they generate revenue.

And what Wayflyer essentially does for e-commerce companies is we fund that spread. So we give e-commerce companies the money to pay for inventory, to pay for marketing spend and help them convert more inventory and more marketing spend into revenue. So it's a very simple value proposition for e-commerce companies.

The business idea actually came from my co-founder Jack Pierse. And before Wayflyer he was working in an e-commerce accelerator and he saw this working capital challenge up front with all of the companies going through the accelerator. And at the time I was running a business called Conjura, and Conjura had a customer analytics solution for e-commerce businesses.

And Jack came to me and said, "That's a great technology, but a better use of your analytics platform is to help solve this working capital problem by providing short term finance to e-commerce businesses." And in September 2019, we created a new business, met with QED a couple of months later, and then in April 2020, after seven months of development we launched, just as COVID began. So that was a very quick history of Wayflyer wave and what Wayflyer does.

Nigel Morris:
Very, very, very exciting. In some ways, personally, I've made a career finding businesses that can scale and be really attractive to various parties. I'm thinking of the Capital One days and then throughout QED. And a casual on-looker might say, you know what? I don't see why there's a place for Wayflyer. Surely the banks who are, apparently, or they say they're very focused on enabling small business to grow and small business is the lifeblood of our economy, surely the banks should be doing what Wayflyer does. Why haven't we seen the banks be in this space?

Aidan Corbett:
So e-commerce companies are very unappetizing for banks for a couple of reasons. The first is that they typically don't of many assets that a bank can use as security other than inventory. And I'm not sure a bank would like to be holding $200,000, for example, as security on finance. Second, they typically haven't been around for very long. And third, banks, don't like this working capital profile for a business.

So e-commerce itself is not particularly attractive to banks, but in actual fact, I think the reason that banks won't actually compete with us really head on is a more fundamental structural change. And that's the move from regional banking to vertical banking. And when I say regional banking, it harks back to history when you would go to the local bank because that's who knew you and that was their USP.

Today, I think we're moving into an era of vertical banking where the mechanic goes to the mechanic's bank. The e-commerce company goes to the e-commerce bank. Because when you focus on a vertical and your whole company is focused on a particular vertical, you understand that vertical much better, you gather more data than a bank would because it's in your interest, because a hundred percent of your customers will have that same data source. And as a result, you'll be able to offer finance to companies that will be turned down by banks because a bank won't have focused sufficiently on your business model. So this move from regional to vertical banking or vertical finance, I think is going to unleash a whole host of new, small businesses and small business entrepreneurs. And it's a massive net positive for the world.

Nigel Morris:
I think that's absolutely right. And Yusuf, we talked at QED a lot about how there's a whole series of different vertical banks, specialty banks, finance companies that focus on a particular segment, be it the silver tech population, be it the underserved population, Mission Lane, be it young millennials who have appetite for crypto current. But if you put your mind back, Yusuf, was it the vertical bank theme that got you animated about Aidan and Jack's business over two years ago? What got you all excited here?

Yusuf Özdalga:
Yeah, Nigel that's correct. What was really exciting here was actually a twist on that vertical banking theme. And specifically what was really interesting was that if you're going to be a vertical bank, you need to understand your customer better than anybody else, as Aidan said. And Wayflyer and the team that Aidan and Jack built were doing exactly that. There's a very interesting exhibit at the London Zoo that shows how a bee sees the world and how a bee sees a flower and how humans see that same flower.

And as Aidan mentioned, banks, when they look at an e-commerce company, they're looking at data that's three months old, all they see is risk and they say, no. What was really fascinating is when Aidan and team were looking at that same customer, we were actually peering into the future because they know the profit the company was going to make in the next three months, because they knew that return on marketing spent on the particular product they were selling today and for the next upcoming two months.

So as a result of that, they were able to say yes to that same customer and what's really fascinating is when they say yes, they end up with a loss rate that is actually way lower than the bank does on their prime customers.

Nigel Morris:
For the listeners who haven't read any of Yusuf's pontifications online, he will give you poetry and he'll give you philosophy, and here he gave us London Zoo. So thanks for that Yusuf and the eyesight of bees.

But Aidan back to, so here we have this segmented or approach where we know e-commerce companies really well. We know what makes them tick. We know how quickly they turn over. We know how they have to manage working capital. And then there's this proprietary data that you have access to, which is very orthogonal to traditional tools that banks would have to evaluate risk.

Aidan Corbett:
Yeah, so we do advance money to customers, it's in the form of a merchant cash advance, but we are giving money to customers and we are basically purchasing future receivables. So it's not new in terms of the concept in the banking or the financing world, what is new is the data sources that we use to help evaluate our customers. So the concept is not new, but what is new is our ability to underwrite customers that I think previously banks in particular, would've found it difficult to underwrite. And what we're bringing in is new data sources. So while there are lots of different verticals that are being attacked, in a good way, by difficult new entrants, I think e-commerce is the best vertical. And I think it's the best virtual because e-commerce companies can scale incredibly quickly when you solve the working capital problem for them.

And number two, e-commerce companies can provide you with data very easily because they have all of this data sitting in the cloud already. So the data that we can access to help underwrite them, be it Shopify transactions or your Facebook ad accounts, they're all accessed very easily through APIs. That would not be the case if you were trying to underwrite a restaurant or a mechanic or a hairdresser. The ability to access data that's already online and also the fact that these companies can scale incredibly quickly, I think probably makes it the most attractive with the verticals that we've seen.

Nigel Morris:
Well, I mean, the TAM is big. The total addressable market is big and growing, of course, as e-commerce gains share from analog distribution. And I hadn't really internalized the theme of the ability to access in real time accurate and really powerful data. Without giving any away any trade secrets here, Aidan, what are the kinds of data sets that you use that are really powerful in this prediction? And how much of it is simple mathematics that even Nigel Morris could do, regression analysis, and how much of it is really whiz bang advanced artificial intelligence?

Aidan Corbett:
So the interesting component for us is the artificial intelligence is not necessarily to do with the analysis that we do. It's actually in cleaning some of the data that we collect. So you might know this, and I think a lot of companies realize this, that today the challenge is not actually performing the data analysis, it's cleaning the data and labeling the data effectively. So one of our most challenging tasks is actually extracting value from bank account data in particular.

And we actually spend a ton of time building our own labeling machine learning models to help us accurately allocate a line in a bank statement to a particular cost base, because that's one of the data sources that we really look to. So a lot of the machine learning and really advanced work is actually done in coming up with the ability to read and label bank transactions effectively. And we use Ntropy, which is a QED portfolio company, to help us with that as well.

On the analytical side, what we're really trying to understand from a customer is probably what you look at as a VC is the unit economics. So what are the channels that you're using to acquire customers? What is your payback period? How sustainable and how scalable are those channels? And then what are you trying to do to expand customer lifetime value? For e-commerce companies it's very difficult to remonetize customers on a regular and a consistent basis because you don't have recurring revenue. So they're really the things that we look at.

Nigel Morris:
Well, that's really fascinating that you're using advanced tools for much more cleaning and getting rid of the noise than for actually modeling risk prediction, per se. That's fascinating and Naré at entropy is really on a role in helping companies like you be able to access the data accurately that they want to be able to make decisions. And that's really very, very fascinating.

You did touch on unit economics and I'm going to pass this one to Yusuf. Yusuf, we never, I can't think of a time when we've ever invested in a company and QED's invested in now I think 170 companies over our 14 years, where we haven't felt comfortable with the unit economics of a portfolio company, or in some cases when it's very nascent, we would want to see the co-founding team really, really be fanatically focused on unit economics. How well, how were the conversations with Wayflyer around unit economics and how would you compare them with other companies? And then in the two years that we've really been rolling our sleeves up working with Aidan and Jack, how have those unit economics evolved?

Yusuf Özdalga:
Yeah, that's a very good question. Even when we first started talking to Aidan and Jack, it was clear that the unit economics here were quite exceptional. It has five key characteristics, which is, as Aidan said, it's in real time, everything is embedded, there's a better catcher's mitt in the form of merchants cash advance to catch the collections. It is targeted, so the use of proceeds are very targeted and it uses previously unlocked sources of data. So we combine all that, that supported some phenomenal unit economics.

So I will not go into the rates here. They're probably good, competitive, but very good rates in terms of what they can achieve, but more importantly, the losses were extremely low for the first period. When we looked at it, it was actually very close to zero and it has remained very close to that, driven by these data insights that they can leverage. And then that has translated into a very low cost of funding, because it's not like QED is the only one who can understand this. When you go and talk to the big banks who would fund Wayflyer, they also realize these characteristics, and as a result, the team has been able to get exceptionally low cost of funding from the big money center banks. So when you combine all that it's probably one of the best unit economics in lending that I've seen that still has such good win-win-win outcomes for the customer and the lender and the company itself.

Nigel Morris:
To have multiple win-win-wins is fantastic, where the e-commerce company gets the access to the breath of air of working capital to scale, Wayflyer makes good money. In the scenario you mentioned, the funding bank gets a great return, and lastly, little older QED can do well here too, as the Wayflyers of this world ascend rapidly.

So Aidan, I want to just focus on scaling a little bit here. You've scaled incredibly rapidly. I think you have over 200 people now and you had a few tens of people when we invested. And I've always said that if you don't start in the U.S., but you really believe that your product or your service can transcend geography, you have to affirmatively look at the U.S. every year, because if you crack the code of the U.S., it's five or 10 times, or even more, of a multiple of your core country. And you started in Ireland and then over to the U.K. and very unusually now, looking to make a huge dent in the biggest market, which would be the U.S. And I think you started in Dublin and you had some offices in London, and now I think in Atlanta. Can you talk a little bit about your geographic aspirations and how those three cities are fitted in?

Aidan Corbett:
Sure. So we started off in an unusual situation where I think we were in Dublin initially and when COVID kicked in, we were actually selling into the U.S. out of Dublin. So we had always intended to go to the U.S. early. I think Jack and I had spent a lot of time in the U.S. prior to launching Wayflyer in different roles. And we didn't really find it maybe as intimidating or as an unknown as some European founders do. And the interesting thing about the U.S. is, it's just such a great place to do business. I just think they're great customers. Especially in B2B, when you sign up a U.S. business, they're happy to pay, they'll make decisions quickly, they'll give you a quick no, you don't need to visit them four or five times. And so we actually always wanted to launch in the U.S. really early on, and with the nature of our product, you can't launch apropos at three weeks notice, you need to have your contracts in place, you need to get regulatory advice, legal advice.

So we always knew we wanted to launch in the U.S. in month two. So we were in Ireland, the U.K. month one, U.S. month two. And that was a really great decision because I think it was helped by COVID to a certain degree because our sales reps didn't have a lot going on in the evening because there was a lockdown in Dublin and they were working in shifts late into the night. And that's really how we began to scale the U.S. And it was always the majority of our business from one to two onwards.

As COVID began to recede, and as we realized, we needed to scale, we chose Atlanta as the location. And the criteria for Atlanta was quite simple. We wanted a direct flight from Dublin and London for connectivity. We wanted somewhere on the east coast. We wanted somewhere with a warmer winter than Boston, and we wanted a city where you had really strong sales talent, ideally with fintech. And Atlanta and New York were the two obvious decisions. And we went with Atlanta because we actually thought the concentration of fintech talent there with AmEx, with Kabbage, et cetera, would actually be even stronger than New York. So we made that move in July 2021, I think we opened up the office there and we've been scaling it there aggressively ever since. And I would highly recommend it as a location for European companies heading into the U.S.

Nigel Morris:
We've made some investments in Atlanta and think very highly of it as a hub of talent and a thriving fintech community. We've noticed a number of U.K.-based companies I'm thinking, or European companies, Monzo, N26, came over to the U.S. and haven't necessarily cracked the code immediately and have had some travails. Yusuf, what is special about this Wayflyer model that really scales into the U.S.? I love the way Aidan framed it that, doing business in America is really great, people make fast, empirical data-driven decisions and you can scale really fast. What would you add to that?

Yusuf Özdalga:
Yeah, crossing the pond is not easy as you know. A few other companies have done it, but many have failed, especially going in that direction from Europe towards America. It is also a very competitive market. I think two things that Wayflyer did that stand out in my mind, one is that the expansion was very much founder led. So Jack actually moved to Atlanta and he was there physically setting the culture and that really goes to underline the importance of culture and the importance of the founder presence in the new markets. That's one.

And two is, they're really focused on it from day one. So it was not an afterthought, we are doing well, and a year later, maybe let's go to the U.S. They had that in their sites from day one, and that's very important as well. So I think those two things stand out and that's why they've been successful where others have not.

Nigel Morris:
It's a common refrain, listeners, that so many fintech businesses have global exportability and can easily, at least conceptually, cross geographic barriers. Just about every investment that we've made in Mexico, and we've made quite a few, they want to go to Brazil and Brazilian companies want to go to Mexico. And I was having this conversation with Daniel Vogel at Bitso recently, and they've done incredibly well in Mexico. And he, like your partner, Aidan, moved to Brazil to build the Brazilian business out of the ground. And I think there's a lesson that if you want to conquer a new geography, so to speak, you have to send the 'A' team over. And that person then becomes the carrier of the culture and the ethos and the business model and can in a sense recreate what was created in the starting point country.

And I think a lot of people don't really internalize how important founder-led business expansion really is to success. And Aidan, you five X-ed a number of six X-ed a number of people in the last couple of years, how has that gone? And how do you maintain a really cohesive culture that really supports the business strategy?

Aidan Corbett:
So, funnily enough Nigel, I actually think COVID has acted as a great forcing function for companies to build the infrastructure, to reinforce culture across multiple offices, because we all now have to be much better at asynchronous communication, and we all have to think about the employees that are not in the office because none of our employees are in the office. So I actually think that COVID has forced every company to have the infrastructure in place to help them scale internationally. Because the thing that I found is, it's much harder to maintain the culture and maintain really strong communication with two offices than with one office. That was the big change in my head. Simple things like Irish people will get jokes that US employees will not. And that sounds small, but if you have a hundred Irish people in the business and 10 U.S. people, and suddenly they're not included in any of the jokes or the terms of praise, that actually can have a big impact on culture.

So one of the things that we focus a lot on is becoming a culture where documentation and asynchronous communication is really strong. And I think because we launched post COVID, that actually was ingrained from day one. I don't think we're absolutely amazing at it, but I think we're much better than we would've been if COVID had never happened.

And then the second thing we try and do is we try and share as much about the company as possible with the employees. So when QED gave us our term sheet for our seed round, I did post the term sheet in the Slack channel for everyone to see. And we did an all hands on the term sheet and what each of the terms meant, and what it set us up to do and how we wanted to do it. So we're extremely open with documentation internally. For example, each of my execs have to give an update, a small written update, every week on one thing that they're struggling with, one thing that's going really well, and one thing they just want everyone to know. Anyone in the company can go in and look at those notes. It's not limited to the senior execs. So sharing that information right across the company.

And then the second thing, which is really forcing the company to get good at writing down documents. And being a write-down company, along with encouraging asynch communication, they've been two of the things that we've really relied on to maintain the culture, especially as we open up multiple offices. I think we're we're at four now.

Nigel Morris:
Do you and Jack, are you still the torch bearers for the culture? Have you built an HR apparatus that allows you to scale it more easily.

Aidan Corbett:
I would've spent a lot of time coming up with the values of the company, but if those values don't permeate down to the company, particularly middle management, then it doesn't work. So what I'm beginning to realize now is that the success of the company, really, is how well we empower middle management. Because we can't control what a [they] says to a lead. We can't control them on a day to day basis. We can control what we expect from a manager who's managing those [people]. So really what we're trying to do is pass those values down through the organization and not actually for us, we don't have to be the torch bearers for it. Obviously we have to embody it, because if we contradict those values, then nobody's going to take them seriously, but you do actually have to put the infrastructure in place to make sure that that permeates down through the company, particularly as you're strung across 12 different time zones and you have four different locations.

Nigel Morris:
Yeah. I often talk to portfolio companies, CEOs, about the so-called Dunbar number, which is based on the cognitive capacity of a species drives the natural organizing size of a family group or a group of people coming together. So dogs have seven or eight, and chimpanzees have 20 or 22. And humans are about a hundred. Some of us are better and can get to 150 where we'll know pretty much everybody's name, what football team they support, and whether or not they like Irish or American jokes. But at some point between 150, you will not know everybody's name. When you crossed that threshold, Aidan, I presume you did, was it scary to you?

Aidan Corbett:
I don't think so. And I think the reason was that, once we... It was scarier for me when we actually opened up the second office, which probably happened... And it was during COVID, so I haven't met any of the employees that we've hired in Atlanta in person. And so I think I have never met the employees that we've had in Sydney. I'm going to Atlanta shortly. I haven't been to make it to Sydney, it's quite difficult. So I think we got there maybe even earlier than the Dunbar number, because we opened those offices before we hit the Dunbar number. And that sensation of, we're opening an office in a country, particularly during COVID when Jack and I couldn't travel there for a long period of time, that really was probably the most unnerving component.

And the interesting thing is, I think, those offices have different cultures to the Dublin office. We have the same tenants, but they actually have different cultures. And the thing that I learned is that's perfectly fine and that's okay. Your offices will have different cultures. It's helpful if there is somebody on the ground who has come from head office to bring the values and bring the habits that you want to instill in a culture, but it's going to be different and you need to be okay with that. And I think we probably got there before we hit the Dunbar number, just given how we grew.

Nigel Morris:
Great to hear that. Yusuf, you've watched a lot of founding teams, CEOs grow their businesses with your work at QED. Without making Aidan blush here, how would you describe his superpowers?

Yusuf Özdalga:
Well, that's a very good question Nigel. I think it's being on that razor's edge of balancing things that are very difficult to balance for most people. So I think Aidan, in this instance, is very good at being very humble, but also extremely ambitious. So that is one set of skill sets that most people can't or have difficulty with balancing. I think Aidan does that exceptionally well.

Similarly, another one is being able to go from the macro to the micro very, very fast. So you'll be able to talk about macro things, big picture, and then drill into micro details instantly. And more importantly, relate that micro to the macro. So those are two qualities, but obviously beyond all these and most importantly, he's a really, really decent, really, really good human being, which is something you look for at QED.

Nigel Morris:
Yeah. The authenticity in you, Aidan, shines through. Look in the years, gone by Rich Fairbank and I carved up a lot of the different roles in the building of Capital One and taking it public, and then with QED initially with my co-founder Frank Rotman also came from Capital One building QED and later Bill Cilluffo, how do you and Jack work together? How do you compliment each other and how do you think about division of labor?

Aidan Corbett:
So it's probably changed actually recently as we've grown our exec team. So for the last two years, roughly speaking, Jack looked after finance and sales and I would've looked after product marketing and to a lesser extent engineering. And really what's happened over the past couple of months, which is exciting for me, is that we've managed to extract Jack out from finance, because he's a great CFO and he can do it and he's really successfully built out our underwriting team, we've raised hundreds of millions worth of debt, but his actual area where he's world class is going from zero to one. And what we have him working on now is our new products, and that's where he is literally the best person I've ever met. When you give Jack an opportunity with a new product, his ability to go from zero to one and to take that idea and concept, get it into the market, road test it with customers, and then just get something up and running. That's incredibly compelling. He's just the best of the world that I've seen. And we've really managed to unlock him to allow him to do that full time. And I think he's really excited about it.

So it's changed a bit over time as you build out your exec team. And that's one of the great things about building out your exec team is that you can take one of the parts of your daily role and find somebody else in the exec team to do it for you. And Jack has done that. We met a great finance hire a couple of months back and she just unlocked Jack to really begin to work in the areas where he is world class. And we've done that in a couple roles, but that's probably the nicest part of about building out your exec team is you actually get to spend more time on the parts of the business where you're world class,

Nigel Morris:
It's a natural evolution here, Aidan, where often you have the two or three founding team who basically cover the full vista of different functional requirements. And then through time, you start to bring in functional specialists, CFO, product tech, HR, and that allows then the original founders then to be able to play a broader integrating role, but also be able to drill down into spaces where they can add unique value. And I love this unlocking theme that you talked about, unleashing Jack and yourself to do the things that you can add the most value at the margin. And I always say to our CEOs, look, if you can find somebody who can do it nearly as well as you, and you know how to do it, let them do it. And then you go and do the stuff that's the really hardest thing to do because you, you have those skills and the history to do that. And it sounds like you unleashing Jack to do that.

Yusuf, take a step back and think about Wayflyer here, what are the key strategic issues you think that Wayflyer has to wrestle with? And we've touched on geography, we've touched on lending, but I'm thinking more about product expansion and I'm thinking about, does Wayflyer ever drift away from and take advantage of other verticals, given the skill sets that's been developed?

Yusuf Özdalga:
Yeah, that's a great question. And we talk about that at the board quite often. And right now the direction has been very much in product expansion and being very deeply focused on the e-commerce vertical. And as the results show, that's paid off really, really well for us. And as Aidan mentioned, Jack is doing a really, really outstanding, exceptional job of thinking about what new products do e-commerce merchants need that we can bring to the table. And I think the challenges will be as we do those new products for that same vertical, we had an amazing first product or first couple of products, it may not always go as smoothly. I certainly hope it will, but in any realistic journey in life, there will be bumps. So how do we deal with those bumps is question one. And then question two, as you say Nigel, is, do we then go beyond e-commerce at some point? I think that's still quite are in the future. And I don't think that will be anything that we'll discuss this year, but in the years beyond, it will be a very interesting question to tackle.

Nigel Morris:
I remember we talked when we were London two or three months ago, about how there was a product extension into providing other add-on services to your e-commerce clients. I think we talked about inventory management, for example, leveraging scale and unique insights you have on the supplying side. And of course there's been a number of hiccups in supply chain management over these last months as we come out of COVID, how's that gone?

Aidan Corbett:
It's going really well. We currently have one or two products that are in beta at the moment. One product, which actually is growing faster than our original merchant cash advanced product. The challenge that we see and that we're really excited about is the challenge of finding a manufacturer, negotiating with a manufacturer, arranging for goods to be sent across as samples, and then eventually getting goods shipped across as inventory to your warehouse. That component of the supply chain for e-commerce companies is still nowhere near optimized, and there's a huge amount of value that Wayflyer can add. Today, we are actually part of that process so we will normally give you the money to pay for inventory, but there's a whole host of different jobs to be done in that process of getting your inventory from the manufacturer to your warehouse, and we're going to explore that really deeply over the next couple of months. And I'm excited to see what we can do.

Nigel Morris:
It's a very logical extension. So as we begin to close out here, Aidan, as you look back on these last two years, and they've been absolutely amazing, as we touched on earlier, if you could have your time again and these last 24 months, is there anything that you would've done differently?

Aidan Corbett:
That is a good question. I think I would've scaled our engineering and design functions faster than I did in 2021. So I think we scaled sales and associated underwriting really well in 2021. I think we could have kicked off our expansion into new products a little bit faster, and we could have beefed up our engineering and designer resources faster than we did in 2021. We're busy doing that now.

Nigel Morris:
And Aidan, you didn't do that because you were worried that your runway would get too short. You didn't do it because you felt that you were fighting on too many fronts. What was it that held you back?

Aidan Corbett:
I think we probably didn't put enough executive time into it. So one of the things that I'm trying to do now, trying to get a bit better at. Again, when you're essentially doing two or three C-level roles, as a single person, something falls through the cracks. And I talk about this with Onya, our head of people a lot, where, am I jumping at this issue and said, "You were busy at the time on other stuff. It's not like you were gassing." But it's very... You look back and sometimes you think, how did something that obvious fall to the cracks? And normally it's because you were doing eight other things at the time. And as long as it's not something terminal, we'll get through it. But yeah, if I had my time again, that would be one thing I would change.

Nigel Morris:
Well, you shouldn't beat yourself up too much. I always say, do three or four things really well, then seven things average-ly as you're building out and scaling.

Yusuf, for budding entrepreneurs that are listening to this conversation and you reflect back on the journey of QED partnering here with Aidan and Wayflyer, a key lesson or two for entrepreneurs?

Yusuf Özdalga:
Yeah. I think one is, make sure that you get complimentary co-founders. I think it's possible to have one founder build a business, but your odds go up dramatically well if you have a team of two or sometimes even more, but I think two is an ideal number of co-founders. And in so doing it's very important that they're complimentary and that you trust each other. And that's something Aidan and Jack have done very well.

The second one is focus. Aidan was not new to the e-commerce space via what he had built at Conjura. Neither was Jack. So they took this and built something new out of it.

But then thirdly, they were always open and always looking to learn and always listening. So they listened to what QED had to say, they listened to what the market had to say, what others had to say, so listening and being open minded is also crucial.

Nigel Morris:
I couldn't agree more on that front. And, I had a conversation with the 20 minute VC recently, and I was asked what my favorite book was. And I think the expectation was that I'd come up with something very cerebral like you would've come up with Yusuf. And I pointed to a children's book called Officer Buckle and Gloria. And Gloria and Officer Buckle make a fantastic team. And when Officer Buckle is by himself, it's really boring and when Gloria is by herself, nobody takes any notice. But you put the two together and two plus two equals five. So partnering and trusting and division of labor and working together and having somebody to go on the journey with you is absolutely invaluable. Well, I'm going to close it out with that, if I might. This has been absolutely incredible fun.

And I can't tell you, Aidan, how pleased and proud we are of what you and your team have built. And it's really inspiring to see you balance tech and product growth and a huge, deep commitment to people and talent, and in the end, never losing sight of the value that you're creating for your e-commerce partners. And I think you are on incredible roll and I think you're just getting started, which makes it really fun and exciting. So a huge thanks to you, Aidan, and being willing to share today and also Yusuf for your championing and stewarding of the investment here with Wayflyer.

So until next time, thank you very much, gentlemen. Talk soon.