I'm Ed Cowan and this is scaling up.

One of the things that I think is really important about, you know, the founder journey, especially if you're continuing to run the business as the CEO, is that the needs of your role are changing all the time.

What you should be spending your time on, you know, how you should be interacting with the team, how you should be doing your job, you know they've changed in quite fundamental ways.

This podcast aims to educate and inspire by telling the stories of great growth companies as told by their CEOs and founders.

TDM is an Australian based investment firm that invests globally in fast growing public and private companies.

For more insights, visit our website tdmgrowthpartners.com.

Scaling up his back and my guest to kick off this new series is Hiroki Takiuchi, the Co founder and CEO of Go Cardless.

Started in 2011.

Go Cardless.

Is a star of the.

Blossoming UK fintech scene last valued at $2.1 billion.

The business is on a mission to take the pain out of getting paid for businesses of all shapes and sizes, from your local gym collecting monthly memberships right through to some of UK's largest utility companies.

Of course, payment collection is a problem as old as time.

Huge companies have been built right across the value chain and with this, the opportunity for Gocardless is enormous in creating a bank payment.

Network to rival the card.

Networks like Visa and MasterCard, it's also operating and navigating an incredibly complex ecosystem.

But within this, Gocardless has already seen tremendous success, currently processing over $35 billion in payments annually from close to 100,000 customers.

Aside from the regulatory complexity that is only heightened when you throw in cross-border payments, the challenge of scaling a business that has from day one had such a wide.

Variety of.

Customer shapes and sizes gives rise to some wonderful lessons for operators.

Hiroki's personal story.

Is also one I find incredibly inspiring.

Founder's journey always involves A level of grit and determination to overcome adversity, but Hiroki takes this to a new level.

Five years into the GO cartless journey, he had a bike accident that resulted in a spinal cord injury.

If anything, gave him a perspective on life and leadership that has enabled GO.

Cartless to flourish like it has.

This episode is a wonderful way.

To kick off.

Series 8 of Scaling Up Hierarchy Welcome to Scaling Up.

While we have listeners from all around the world, you're in fact our first ever guest from the UK.

We're recording this.

Late at night and.

Maybe the time one between London and and Sydney has something to do with that?

But I'm excited to tell the go kartless story today.

Thanks for having me, I'm really honoured to be your first UK guest.

A good place to start I think is always the founding story, so if you can give us a little snippet back in.

2011 I think it.

Was recent graduate entrepreneurial spirit.

What was the opportunity that you saw in the payment space that you wanted to go after?

We started in 2011 and you know, the time I was 23, Matt, my Co founder was 22, Tom, my other Co founder was 24.

So you know, we didn't have a lot of experience, right?

And and certainly no experience with payments.

So we were coming in very naive into this space.

And so, you know, the, the initial idea that we, we, we were first working on was, was more about helping groups to manage money, right?

So it's a much more like tangible problem for us at that, that age, right?

You know, being captain of your local sports team, running a student society, going on holiday with your friends, that, that kind of thing where, you know, we'd found that it was really awkward keeping track of who paid, who hadn't, asking the same people over and over again and chasing them.

But it was only when we were going and trying to solve that problem that we start to learn about payments.

And, and one of the things that we, that really struck us from very early on was how complicated payments was and, and how difficult to access the systems that were.

So at the time, you know, the really the only way that people were paying for things online was using credit and debit cards.

And we thought, OK, well, you know, that there must be other ways, especially given that the cost of, of card processing, right?

The idea that, you know, an individual would soak up like 3 or 4% of a transaction to, to collect money from their friends with something that, you know, felt, you know, impossible to us.

And, and when we were looking for alternatives, we were really struck actually by how few there were, right?

I think we were looking at things from first principles, right, as a result of not knowing anything about payments.

And I think one of the things that really struck us was, you know, you had these car payment systems and we were trying to figure out like, why, why is it cost so much to process a car payment, right?

I mean, like in the world where the Internet exists, it feels like a lot of this stuff should just, you know, be simple, right?

And then you start to investigate and you go, OK, well, there's like four or five, maybe there's six intermediaries in between each and every transaction.

And each of those intermediaries is taking their car.

And, you know, I think one of the stats that I've always looked at and has always surprised me, even to this day, is if you look at the payments revenue in the world, and this is just direct payments revenue, right?

This isn't even like the indirect costs and all the costs around collecting payments, just how much there is in payment collection itself.

There's about $3 trillion almost in, in revenue around the world, right?

I mean, like global GDP is the $90 trillion I think a year.

And so you're talking about like a tax on Society of like almost 3% for payment processing.

So, you know, it's a huge, huge industry, but one that we, we felt, you know, coming into this that, you know, with the advent of the Internet, it should be a lot simpler.

It should be a lot cheaper.

It should be a lot easier.

You know, there aren't that many options for collecting payments, right?

You, you broadly have hard payments and then bank payments of the only two kind of electronic payment methods that exist out there.

And so from an infrastructure perspective, there aren't that many options.

We start to investigate these bank payment systems and yeah, that's really what goes on to this journey.

And it's been a bit of a whirlwind ever since.

What a great lesson for entrepreneurs I.

Always think by the very.

Nature of the risk that they're taking off on the 1st.

Idea is not in fact what the.

Business ends up solving for but the skill to pivot and not be stuck.

On a singular problem can obviously lead to wonderful and initially unintended.

Outcomes and of course go Cardless bread and butter is recurring payments, invoices that might come quarterly or annually even to, you know, utility bills that turn up on businesses and consumers doorsteps, but also of course, businesses who need to collect payments from other businesses, be it locally or cross-border as well.

So I just want the listeners to really focus in on the recurring relationship your customers have with their customers.

And so let's start with the larger question as we break down the ecosystem and, and that is why direct debit, which is where go cardless plays compared to the card networks.

You touched on cost.

I'm sure you'll touch on churn in your mind.

At a very basic level, why is direct debit a better way to collect recurring payments than the card networks?

The first thing I'd say is that oftentimes people think of payments and they go, OK, yeah, payments, that's a big market and it is a big market.

But the reality is it's actually quite a fragmented market, right?

Depending on what your collecting payment for and in what context, the right way or the optimal way, it can be very, very different.

For us, like we were looking initially at bank payments really because of the cost, right?

These are payment methods that are much more cost effective.

But the reality is that because you don't have all of those intermediaries, there's also some other really meaningful benefits that you get from those rails.

And so, you know, when you think about direct debit specifically, if you think about the context in which that was built and you know, every country has its own version of direct debit, right?

It's really was was built for the kind of large utility type companies.

They were collecting payments on an ongoing basis from their customers.

But you know, there's lots of those kind of examples, as you said, like recurring payments, like it's a very broad set of use cases, especially over the last 1015 years, I think we're seeing more and more of the economy move in that direction, right?

Like people are subscribing to things more than they buy things.

People are, you know, moving more towards like usage based models.

And so, so there's all these kind of trends that we're seeing which are pushing the direction of travel towards more of these kind of recurring types relationships.

The real benefits of these kind of bank payment systems are firstly, yes, cost is much more cost effective way of collecting payments.

But I think secondly, you know, and really importantly, they're much more reliable payment mechanisms as well, right?

You know, if you think about cards, you know, and what they were built for, they were really built in the, in an age before the Internet existed to enable someone in a restaurant to pay their their restaurant bill in a world where none of that Internet infrastructure existed, You know, how do you connect, you know, a card that someone held to the banking system?

That's really what all of the card network was built for.

And it was really very much primarily focused on in person and one off transactions, right.

And then obviously they've tried to layer on all of these things to bring that to an online world, bring it to, you know, more of a recurring kind of model with things like card on file.

But these are all things that are built on top of like that fundamental infrastructure.

And, and as a result, you know, and especially given that there's so many intermediaries, you see a lot of failure on those, those kind of car payments, especially for on recurring payments.

So the stats vary depending on the industry, but you'll, you'll typically see somewhere between 10 to 15% of card payments fail for a recurring transaction, right?

Since if I'm a, a business with a, with a subscription model, that means that every month, like one in 10 or maybe even more of my customers are, you know, having payment problems.

And then that ends up being one of the biggest causes of churn for a lot of these businesses.

One of the big benefits with Derek Debbott is that, you know, because you're collecting payment directly from someone's bank account, it really the only reason that payments fail is because there's not enough funds in the account, right?

And you know, for us, like across our network, we see failure rates of around 2 to 3%.

So it's almost an order of magnitude difference.

And, and that's actually one of the primary reasons why a lot of our customers use us and, and use direct debit as a payment method.

So there's a lot going on, but yeah, I think it's three simple things of a cost, reliability and preference.

You can only imagine the local gym, the amount of lost cards, the amount of expiry dates on cards and the hassle for that gym to try and collect payment as opposed to account to account direct debit and and knowing more likely that in fact they will be able to collect payment.

So you've touched on the benefits of direct Debit, but of course direct debit is built as you've mentioned in the banking rail system.

The legacy direct debit players be at the banks or or other legacy players have relied on a manual system, essentially a bulk batch manual system to process these direct debits.

Can you give some colour and unravel the complexity of of what the cloud native players like a Go Cardless has provided and how they've been able to do that within this ecosystem?

I mean, it was almost like a natural thing for us to do, which was, we were starting in 2011, we wanted to set up a, a way of collecting payments online.

There was no real other option than offering this as an API, right?

And make it cloud native.

You know, there wasn't really any, It just seemed like the natural thing to do.

And I remember like when we first got access to these direct debit systems in the UK and saw how they worked, we, we were quite shocked, right?

We, we thought, OK, wow.

Like there's no real technology here at all.

Almost like it's just batch based file based mechanisms.

There wasn't really any kind of meaning for transaction level data that was shared in a way that was easy to interact with.

And so we had to build a lot of that cloud layer just just to build our offering right Now, when we did that, we weren't explicitly thinking about solving that cloud problem for others.

We just thought, OK, if I was a, you know, small business that's trying to get access to direct in this day and age, how would I want it to work?

I'd probably want us to work with an API or with a, you know, simple online interface.

And so that's what we built.

And, and the problem we were solving was really for small businesses to get access to these systems for the first time.

And, you know, that was where all of our early momentum and customers came from.

But what we found was that as we were scaling and building more awareness in the market, we started to see like larger organizations approaching us and often times organizations that were already collecting payment via direct debit, right?

So they didn't necessarily have an access problem, which was the first problem we were solving.

All they had was a technology problem.

And so they were looking for someone to help them solve that.

And it turned out that all of the technology that we've built and the APIs that we've built were really good solution.

Something that you did mention just to clarify and given the regulation you talked about access back in the day, the small gym down the road couldn't even process direct debit in in many instances because of regulation.

Well, it was actually never really about regulation.

What it was really about was that there needed to be a level of oversight around like how these businesses were collecting payments, right.

I mean, if you think about it, you're enabling someone to to pull money out of people's bank accounts.

Like, so as you can imagine that there's a bunch of rules and regulations around that.

And so there was nothing in the regulation that specifically said, OK, if you're a small business, you can't collect payment this way.

It was more just that, you know, from the bank's perspective, they couldn't make it work from an economic point of view.

Well, they couldn't say, OK, well we're going to, you know, oversee how this small independent gym down the road is going to be setting up all of their direct debits and collecting payment.

And So what we were able to do and the reason we were able to open up access was because we built a cloud based model where we were operating the system on behalf of all of the customers we were serving, right.

So we hosted the checkout, we submitted the payments, we sent the notifications, everything was being done through our platform.

So the banks felt comfortable because they could oversee us and say, OK, are you doing things correctly?

And then if we were doing things correctly, we were doing it on behalf of all of these small businesses.

And so we could say, OK, well, we don't need to worry about whether you're doing this in a compliant way because we're doing it for you.

And so that was like the kind of layer that we built that enabled us to to open up access to these small businesses for the very first time.

That's a far better description than what I provided.

So hopefully the listeners by now have have got a sense that Go Kart List provides both access and the technology to small businesses and big businesses alike.

And probably the last lingering question they had is what about these large payment service providers that have been technology first be it back in the day PayPal and now Stripe.

Why does Go Cardless have such a dominant position in direct debit against these massive payment services providers?

I, I think it really comes down to the, the point about fragmentation.

And then as a result of that focus, right, when you think about those companies and you know, I have a, a tremendous amount of respect for them.

You know, I think Stripe is a phenomenal company and has really done amazing things.

But really what they've been focused on is cuts, right?

You know, that's like 95% plus of the volumes of their processing and that's where all their energy goes.

And they're, they're solving a very different problem, which is, you know, how do you streamline and optimize card payments for e-commerce transactions predominantly?

And they've obviously, you know, gone beyond that now, but that that's the large amount of their focus.

And these bank payment systems, they work in a very different way.

They're not the same payment method and they they operate in very different ways.

And so that's where we're able to really shine, I think is that we've stayed very, very focused just on these bank payment systems.

Yeah, more recently we've gone beyond just direct debit into other bank payment methods.

And you know, I'm sure we'll touch on that in a bit, but it is that focus on these bank payment systems that's really enabled us to create a much more robust and and unique offering.

Right.

So everything from the optimization of how could you can get paid and how quickly you can process transactions, optimizing, you know, the level of failures that you see, you know, connecting all of these bank payment systems around the world into a single API and a single contract.

Like there's all of these things that we've done which have only been possible because we've been very focused and have been the reason why, you know, a lot of our customers choose to work with us.

It's as though you've been reading my notes because my next point is part of ATM framework that we call One Mission One Platform, which is.

Exactly what you've just described, the ability to provide a.

Single solution in a fragmented industry and be solely focused on driving that mission.

Through your singular platform every.

Single day is a huge.

Competitive advantage.

So thank you for for spelling that out.

The other two real competitive advantages in my mind, and, and feel free to add some colour here are the process power and what you do.

And you've touched on the technology and infrastructure being very hard to replicate, but of course the massive network effects that are in place and, and people when they think of the great network business, they think of the the credit card networks.

But of course, you're doing exactly the same thing in in the direct debit space and the data and payments intelligence that can be provided through that, amongst other things, provides a really powerful Moat for Go Cardless.

Yeah, I mean, it's actually something that I think we're only really just starting to scratch the surface on.

You know, as you said that there are massive network effects that you can leverage in payments.

The reality though is that you need to get to quite significant scale to to be able to really unlock those.

And you know, we are starting to be able to do that.

So there's a couple of areas in particular that we're really excited about.

You know, the, the, the 1st is one that you've already touched on, which is around, you know, what we think of as payment intelligence and is really about leveraging the data that we have to optimize the transaction process.

That's something that happens very much behind the scenes.

How do we estimate, you know, whether a transaction is going to be successful or fail and you know, act accordingly?

How do we minimize fraudulent transactions, that kind of thing.

But but the other area that we haven't actually really been investing in to date, but it's something that I'm I'm very excited about and I think it's something that we'll be exploring in the in the coming years is on the actual payer experience side, right?

And you know, we now have taken in the UK which are home market a high level of density of use, right.

So around 60% of the transactions that we process now are for customers that we've seen before.

Yeah.

So when someone's setting up a new authorization, we we've seen that customer before in 60% of cases.

That's actually a staff that I've been tracking for, for many years now and it starts to really accelerate.

And so when you think about that, then you think, OK, well, if you're coming back to our platform over and over again and paying for different to different merchants, but through the same platform, what can we do to make your experience easier and more streamlined and improve the conversion rate for the merchant, but also make life easier for the, for the consumer.

And that's another area where, you know, there's, there's huge network effects that you can create.

So I, I think it's absolutely right that payments is an area where there is a huge opportunity to create very strong network effects.

But actually it's something that I think is, is still, you know, we're just scratching the surface of.

Hopefully by now the the listeners feel like they've had a bit of a crash course in payments if if they weren't familiar with it.

And it gives a great launchpad to discuss about the specific scaling challenges that you've faced as a founder from 23 to now, 13 years later.

Some of the strategic decisions you've made that have caused pain points hopefully will provide great lessons for all the operators listening and and some of these I'm pretty keen to touch on one.

That you've already very briefly touched on that is international expansion.

Many fast growing technology businesses of course have global ambitions, but the operational challenge to do that is hard.

But it's not just the operational challenge for you, it's the technical challenge.

There are various.

Banking systems in every single.

Geography that you want to operate in.

So I'm I'm really keen to unpick the lessons that you've learnt on opening new markets and the steps that you've taken to really solve these problems both effectively and efficiently, I think.

For us, that experience is, is probably quite unique, but not, not unique to, to us specifically, but to, to fintech as a, as a general kind of category.

One of the big challenges around international expansion is, is not just, you know, technical, it's also regulatory.

And there's a lot of complexity that comes from, you know, trying to satisfy the different and often conflicting demands of the various regulators around the world.

You know, that that creates a lot more complexity than I, I definitely realise going into this and, and it's a huge lesson that we've taken is, you know, how do you scale up across markets whilst, you know, maintaining both the kind of compliance that you need to the regulatory requirements, but also not creating a huge amount of complexity whilst you do that.

The other challenge that I think we face is around go to market focus, right?

We have a very broad customer base.

If you take the UK as a home market, it spans all the way from your tiny SME and other kind of organisations through to really, really large ones, right?

We work with some of the biggest energy companies in the UK.

As you can imagine the go to market focus between that spectrum is is very different.

And I think one of the mistakes that we made as we were going into our international expansion was that we were also still on that journey of going up market and developing these different go to market motions.

And as a result of that we were quite scattered in the way that we went into our initial international expansion.

We were, you know, trying to serve small businesses, but being more of our focus on trying to win larger customers.

If I was going through this journey again, I think one of the things I would have been much more disciplined about is sequencing those expansions.

You know, really getting the go to market across the different segments of the market right before going and internationalizing the business rather than trying to do both of those things at the same time.

Maybe this is a good.

Time to tackle this, this scaling challenge more broadly of go to market.

And as you mentioned, you've got two very distinct customer bases and one is often very self served focused and one is sales at the other end of town that the enterprise sales is, is a very different motion.

One thing that that does strike me though in regards to go cardless go to market is the ability to both have these two strategic levers, but also a really big focus on the partnership channel.

So the direct channel has been very good to albeit hard and and keen to unpick that, but also trying to balance that out with a partnership channel and and maybe you can bring that to light for us.

Well, I mean, partnerships has always been really core to what we do, right.

I mean, the very first customers that we got when we first launched Go Card List were in partnership with an accounting platform in the UK called Cash Flow who I mean they were effectively our first customer, but they were actually a partner.

So from the very first day, you know, partnerships was was a key part of our success.

Right now, you know, the business is roughly 5050 split between partnership and direct.

And you know, it continues to be a really, really important part of how we grow.

And I think in particular, one of the big reasons why partnerships has always been called for us is we're a really big believer in the importance of, you know, software plus payments.

And this is a theme that I think has been going through the payments market for a while now.

But it's pretty important, right, Because one of our early insights was that people don't really think about payments on a stand alone basis.

So wanting to create a general purpose payments platform, you know, you're going to be working with customers across many different verticals and in our case many different sizes.

And, you know, as a result, you know, trying to build that software is out of the question, right?

You can't build a software stack that serves, you know, small scout groups and also large utility companies at the same time, right?

And so our view was that rather than trying to combine software plus payments, let's empower the software platforms to enable payments within their platforms.

And that's always been a, a real big, you know, driver of our success.

And one of the ways in which we, we entered the Australian market was really due to that partnership, right?

That we had a big partnership with Zero, who continued to be one of our biggest and most successful partners.

And they obviously, you know, have a big, big home market in Australia and New Zealand.

Yeah, that was a big part of what took us into to Australia.

And there's a big part of what's driven our success in the market.

And so, yeah, we're, we're, we're really big believers in that partnership model.

One big topic that listeners know that I'm incredibly passionate about, to the point of obsession is around the scaling challenge of of people and culture.

I know you're equally obsessive about this.

What about your, your own personal journey as a founder?

Yeah, first time founder.

As we've touched on, it's a really interesting view that you hold.

You know, how is your view on the importance of culture changed from 2011 to now?

And I guess further to that, what is really distinctive about your culture?

What What's been intertwined in your culture from day one that has remained the same?

My view on the kind of importance of culture hasn't changed at all, right?

You know, we were very clear from the very beginning of go Kart list that culture was going to be a really important thing.

And, and it was actually one of the big drivers of, of why we want to start a business in the 1st place was that we wanted to, to build somewhere that we could be really proud and excited to work.

And the biggest part of that really is about the people that you're working with.

So, you know, we, we placed a huge amount of emphasis from the very beginning around making sure that we were hiring people that we felt would be a really create a really great culture.

I, I think what, what's changed is more around how I think about enabling that culture and fostering it.

And, you know, as you can imagine, the ways in which you can Foster and grow your culture when you are really small, you know, when you're 5101520 people versus when you've got hundreds of people is, is very different.

And yeah, I think that that's where as we've scaled, we've become more values oriented.

Not to say that we weren't values oriented before, but we became more explicitly values oriented and secondly, embraced the organic nature of culture.

I sort of studied maths when I was at university.

So like, you know, I kind of think in terms of, you know, equations and, you know, culture for me is the sum of everyone's behaviours, right?

And so, you know, it's a very organic thing.

Everyone every day is defining the culture of the organization.

And as you scale, as you can imagine, you, you want to foster that diversity, you want to encourage it.

And that means the culture's always changing.

And that was something that, you know, took me a while to to realise and to embrace was, you know, the importance of that organic nature and the ever evolving nature of of culture.

And so I think those are the two main lessons for me is embracing that evolution of culture and that it's always going to be changing and then also becoming more values oriented and being very clear about, you know, in the context of a always evolving culture.

How do you ensure that there's certain pillars of your culture that stay true and that you you don't see change in my research?

I I've picked.

Up a really interesting.

Tidbit around your hiring process.

I know that go.

Kart List has previously had one interview that is purely on values.

And so it doesn't matter if it's AC suite.

Or a junior hire.

They've had to go.

Through a separate values interview.

15 questions, three on each value the interviewer themselves.

Have no idea on the.

Potential role of that person, what they're going to be doing in the business, but it was their job to be solely focused on determining if there was an alignment on values.

Yeah.

I mean, I, I think it's important not just in order to identify the values of an individual, but it's also important signalling, sort of signalling to the team that we have already about, you know, how much we care about this, But it's also signalling to the, the candidate about, you know, this is something that we take really seriously and is an important part of our decision process.

For me, you know, it's not just about the hiring, right?

You know, the hiring process is super important, but the reality is you're never going to get it right every time.

And it's also about how you manage people, you know, once they get into the business, how you, you know, eventually say goodbye to the people when they don't live the values, you know, how you make decisions as an organization and, you know, ensuring that people feel like they can hold each other accountable to those values.

And so there's, there's lots of different parts to it.

I think it's hard to boil it down to a sort of a specific silver bullet And it, and it's always a challenge, I think, right.

You know, it's something that I'm always worried about is as as we scale, how do we maintain the values orientation of the culture?

Just touching on.

On the personal growth journey of the entrepreneur, it's, it's one of challenge and adversity from day one.

But yours is, to be honest, face more than the average entrepreneur.

And for those that don't know, you had a horrific bike accident that resulted in a spinal cord injury.

And it's a story of pure inspiration, of grit and determination.

I'm curious how the accident, if you're happy to talk about it, has impacted how you lead as the CEO emotionally.

Well, I mean, I think.

Firstly, it gives you a bit of perspective.

I remember as I was kind of going through that experience, you know, I was out of the business for, you know, about 3 months entirely.

And then even when I went back into work, you know, I had to do it in a very gradual way.

You know, there's a lot of rehab that I had to go through.

I wasn't really fully back into the, my role full time for maybe 12 to 18 months post my injury.

And, and so you know, you, you have a lot of time to reflect, you know, you have a lot of time to think about, you know, what's really important.

And you know, that perspective I, I found really valuable.

But also, I think one of the things that I found valuable about that experience and, and I, I, I truly believe that it made me better professionally, you know, may have taken a bit of time to, to realize that and get there, but you know, it, it, I did find it was something that may be better professionally.

And a big part of that reason was that for that was that, you know, I had to be very, very conscious about my role, right?

You know, when I went back and I was working one day a week initially and two days a week and three days a week, you know, I had to really ramp up in a very gradual way.

You realize, like how many things that you were doing that you are the micromanaging or you weren't delegating or you didn't need to do, weren't really adding value.

And it, it, it makes you really assess like, you know, what you, what your role should be.

And so, you know, I, I found that was quite a formative experience in many ways.

And I still take many lessons from that experience today.

And especially as the organization grows.

One of the things that I think is really important about, you know, the founder journey and especially if you're continuing to run the business as the CEO, is that the needs of your role are changing all the time, right?

What you should be spending your time on, you know, how you should be interacting with the team, how you should be doing your job.

You know, they've changed in quite fundamental ways.

And so you you need to be able to reflect on that.

Be very open minded about doing things wrong.

You know, I've made so many mistakes along this journey and I'm always kind of very open minded to to thinking about doing things in different ways.

And you know, I think that's something that's a really important part of scaling lends itself.

Perfectly, to my last question, in regards to how your leadership has changed, how you've grown, What are the gaps that you've had to fill?

How have you filled them?

Can you just bring a little bit of colour, maybe with a couple of examples of mistakes and errors that you've made or gaps that you've had to fill in your own leadership capability to ensure that you can scale as a founder from one employee or three in your case, to many, many hundreds I.

Feel like we could do a whole another podcast on this question.

If I was going to boil it down to just a few things though, I think firstly one of the things that took me a while to really embrace, but made a massive difference once I did was valuing experience, right?

I think that, you know, when we first started, we were very young, did everything from first principles.

And that's super important, that ability to think from first principles and, you know, tackle things on a first principles basis.

But I think I appreciate more and more that you you have to do that in not everywhere.

You know, we were talking about innovation before.

Yeah, I think innovation is expensive and you have to really try and focus that innovation on the things that really matter, right.

And the things that really matter are what your customers care about, not, you know, how you're managing your teams or yeah, I remember when we first started out like we, we built our own expense management tool intern because we thought all the other ones out there sucked.

And then, and I look back on that and I go like, what was the point of that?

Yeah, none of our customers care about how we manage our expenses, certainly.

So you know, that was a wasted effort in terms of innovation.

You know, you need to be really disciplined about where you think from first principles and apply that approach and everywhere else you kind of just want to rely on experience and copy from what's worked before.

And so I think that's something that for me was really important, hiring people with more experience than me, learning from what they've done before, not necessarily trying to figure everything out from first principles.

And that enabled us to accelerate significantly.

So I think that's the first thing.

I think the second, I would say, is transitioning from doing to managing to leading.

I see those three things as quite distinct, especially for me, you know, having never really ever even managed anyone before.

You know, that was something that I had to adjust to, especially as the organization grows bigger and bigger, realising, you know, the way in which your words, the way you show up, what you focus on can have big effects on the team and effects that you may not be aware of, right?

That's something that I had to become very cognizant of and took me a while to learn.

And then finally, the thing that I think has been really important throughout the entire journey is being just very open minded to being wrong.

I always tell her the the team, I'm I'm the least experienced person at go karts because you know, every step of the way, this is the first time I'm seeing it, right?

So I'm learning on the job the entire time.

As a result, you make a lot of mistakes and I think that's fine, right?

You know, I remember when we were doing Y Combinator, Sam Altman used this analogy with us around building a startup is like riding a wave on a surfboard, right?

And as long as you don't like crash out and you know, you'll end up being successful, you'll you'll end up back at shore.

And so, you know, it's fine to make mistakes, but it's about learning from them and you're being open minded to doing things differently.

And I think that's super, super important as, as you scare as a bounder, Hirakya.

By now, I'm sure everyone's got a sense of your egoless humility is is part of the reason why you've been able to scale so successfully as a founder and and a leader.

And the success of go Kart list is so intertwined with your own personal growth.

So thank you for sharing.

I think that's a great way to wrap.

Thank you for joining scaling up.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

It's been.

Great to join you.