Jeppe Rindom, co-founder of Pleo, joins Henrik Werdelin for a walk through Copenhagen — retracing the first thousand days of one of Europe's leading fintech companies. They started without an idea, without a name, and without a plan. This is the story of how they built it anyway.
Jeppe Rindom, co-founder and CEO of Pleo, joins Henrik for a walk through Copenhagen — starting at the cheap shared office where it all began, ending at the restaurant where Jeppe first convinced his co-founder Nico to move back from California and build something together.
It's a surprisingly unglamorous story. They incorporated a company called "The Company of February 3rd, 2015" before they had a name or an idea, spent a few weeks on payroll software before deciding it was the most boring thing in the world, and onboarded 70 customers in a single day before having to call most of them back and ask them to leave.
They also cover:
Pleo: pleo.com
Prehype: prehype.com
00:00 Copenhagen & The Beginning of Pleo
01:34 Starting Without an Idea
03:33 The First Pivot
04:53 Why Most People Never Start
06:02 Raising Money Early
07:42 When It Almost Ended
10:18 Luck vs Momentum
12:41 Finding the Real Problem
15:45 Validating with Customers
19:00 First Breakthrough
21:03 Growth Feels Like Chaos
26:06 Scaling & Expanding to London
29:27 The Reality of Being a Founder
35:14 Building & Scaling in Europe
41:06 Culture, Co-Founders & Full Circle
Read the full transcript: In-Between Time: Jeppe Rindom
[00:00:00] Henrik Werdelin: Jeppe.
[00:00:00] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah,
[00:00:01] Henrik Werdelin: we are in Copenhagen. It's cold.
[00:00:04] Jeppe Rindom: It is a bit cold.
[00:00:05] Henrik Werdelin: Why are we here?
[00:00:06] Jeppe Rindom: This is, um, I guess this is one of the more dodgy areas of Copenhagen, the, the northwest, uh, side, you could say. But um, but right in front of us is, um. The first headquarters of lio, if you can call it headquarters, when there are, you know, two folks with a vision founding a company, but it was right in there.
[00:00:26] Henrik Werdelin: Let me stop real fast before we get too fine to the show to tell you what's going on. When you grab your phone using that app you really love, remember this. Somebody just like you invented it. Not by superpowers with no master plan, just restless enough to start. I spend a substantial part of my life working alongside everyday people who turn nothing into something.
They're special, but nothing more special than you. They just started before they felt ready. In this show, I meet founders where their companies began and we walk quite literally to their headquarters of today, a Thousand Steps, retracing the first thousand days of their company. The messy ones. Before everyone called them visionaries, and today it's the company Pleo the founder, YPE and his co-founders were at a shared desk in Copenhagen, started a company before they knew what to build.
No methodology, just the woke, the conversation and the small decisions that added up. You are welcome to come along because the gap between wanting to start something and actually doing it, it might be smaller than you think, but let's go.
[00:01:34] Jeppe Rindom: It was, uh, it was a shared off space. It was, um, an office space only for technology companies.
Early stage. They had a little bit of a shared set up with lunch and, but mostly knowledge sharing, I would say. And, and we had. Two desks.
[00:01:50] Henrik Werdelin: And was it just 'cause it was cheap? Or why did you go out here?
[00:01:52] Jeppe Rindom: I think it was, it was cheap, but also, you know, we were amongst like-minded people, um, not too far from where we lived.
That was sort of the criteria. All in all, it, it lasted six months and then we were, you know, onwards to the, to the next place. But it sort of worked for us.
[00:02:09] Henrik Werdelin: And so what was the, I mean like for people who haven't started a company before. What was it like? You, you literally show up. You have to buy the desk or the computers.
[00:02:20] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's, there's that piece, you know, and, and a lot of that came with being in a shared office place. So you could say the infrastructure was there, but I would say the, the most frequent thing people tend to think, or, you know, assume is you have everything figured out. You know, you, you had your idea figured out, you had your team figured out, and you had a lot of experience within the field.
But the reality was, my co-founder and I, we, we had worked together before and, and the starting point was just really, Hey, let's build a company.
[00:02:51] Henrik Werdelin: So you didn't know what you wanted to build. It was not like a divine vision.
[00:02:55] Jeppe Rindom: No, not at all. We, um, we had obviously worked together, so we knew that there was a good, good chemistry, um, and we shared an office, uh, somewhere else in town, uh, whilst working on other things.
So we know we dated a bit, and then one day we just committed, said, Hey, let's, let's found the company. That's the first thing we do, and then we figure out what we want to do. Did
[00:03:16] Henrik Werdelin: you have the name there?
[00:03:18] Jeppe Rindom: No, it's called, uh, you know, in English that would be, you know, the incorporated company of, uh, 3rd of February, 2015.
[00:03:28] Henrik Werdelin: Snappy.
[00:03:28] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. So very catchy.
[00:03:30] Henrik Werdelin: Easy to get the domain.
[00:03:31] Jeppe Rindom: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So, um, and actually, you know, we, we started out, um, in a completely different problem space. We, we, uh, we started out building a payroll system.
[00:03:42] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah.
[00:03:43] Jeppe Rindom: Um, and. I think, you know, three, four weeks into that we just realized, hey, payroll has gotta be the most borrowing thing in the world.
And, uh, so you went to
[00:03:54] Henrik Werdelin: receipts
[00:03:55] Jeppe Rindom: and the most, and the most, you know, that's actually fun. That's fun. Um, and uh, and also payroll is kinda like the most localized thing in the world, so it's gonna be really, really difficult to scale across borders.
[00:04:07] Henrik Werdelin: But take me back to a little bit. So you're sitting in this office?
Yeah. And then. Because I know other people who have done that, right? They're committed to do something. Do you then, like, did you have like a brainstorm routine or was it literally just showing up every morning going, sitting with the coffee and going,
[00:04:21] Jeppe Rindom: yeah,
[00:04:21] Henrik Werdelin: so what should we build?
[00:04:22] Jeppe Rindom: We had a couple ideas in the beginning, one of them being the, the payroll stuff, and we had two or three ideas and then we honed in on the payroll stuff and, and we started building.
And then once we got deep into that, we, we sort of realized that payroll is more than payroll is also about employee expenses. And then we sort of went out that direction and, and, and got really excited about that. Um, and that's, that's how we came up with play. We started from a different direction. You could say,
[00:04:53] Henrik Werdelin: let me interrupt the walk and talk for a second just to make this point.
Everybody is waiting for that light. The shower epiphany, the moment when the universe whispered that billion dollar idea straight into your ear, but that's bullshit. Yba Nico, they incorporated a company called the Company of February 3rd, 2015. That's not exactly Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone. Is it more like two guys deciding to try something and hope they'll figure out what that something is before the money runs out?
We tell our ourself. The founders are different. Touched by some entrepreneurial genius. The rest of us just don't have, and that story, that mythology is comfortable because if they're special, we don't have to feel bad about not trying. But here's the thing that nobody tells you. Most of them are just people who decided to stand, not people who had it all figure it out.
People who were willing to sit in the uncertainty long enough for something to emerge. That's not a superpower. That's just showing up. The permission slip that most people never give themself yet, but just wrote it in Danish corporate registry on February 3rd before he knew what the hell he was doing.
[00:06:02] Jeppe Rindom: The reality was we raised money, uh, on the idea and the concept, and then as we were building it out, we, we grew the team to, let's say five 10 people.
[00:06:13] Henrik Werdelin: So that's pretty quick to raise money now.
[00:06:15] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah, and I think the, the, the reason was. Well, a couple of things. Um, first of all, there's a lot of financial infrastructure behind lio and, and that was required to get the product to market and financial infrastructure, uh, required more time and it required some licenses and license fees.
So it was, it was a slightly more costly prototype than you would normally see. So we need, we needed funds for that. And then the second piece was probably. You know, I had a family, uh, I had two kids. We had just bought a house. There was a limit to how much, you know, financial exposure we wanted to take.
Uh, early on.
[00:06:55] Henrik Werdelin: I think when you talk about, you know, the early days, and I think a lot of founders do that, specifically when the company ends up being successful. There's like a casualness to like the real is. It's like then we sat down.
[00:07:09] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah,
[00:07:10] Henrik Werdelin: we raised some money.
Yeah.
[00:07:10] Jeppe Rindom: It sounds easy, right?
[00:07:11] Henrik Werdelin: It does sound incredibly easy, right?
Yeah. But obviously having done it a few times, you know, there is this like feeling of like a, yeah, you have a pretty good idea, but also what the hell are we doing? Every time you have like something you think is brilliant, then you Google it and you see that somebody else has done something similar.
[00:07:29] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:07:30] Henrik Werdelin: So, but when you tell the story, I get the sense of like, it was very kind of like things just happened.
[00:07:37] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:07:37] Henrik Werdelin: Wa was that the feeling you had or was that kinda like, now that you're just looking back at it?
[00:07:42] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah, I mean, in a way, yes, but also there was a lot of randomness to it in the sense that, for example, in the beginning we were three co-founders.
Uh, because I was very on the business side, Nico was very on the engineering and more like backend engineering. So in reality we needed someone in between that was a bit more product design and, and and so on. And we had that third co-founder and then things just didn't happen. And suddenly it was only Nico and I and, and there was a moment where we were like, okay, should we actually continue or, or do something else?
And that, I think that was a pretty random decision that. Okay, let's just try it. We could have split up at that point in time. Um,
[00:08:27] Henrik Werdelin: what do you think? I mean, like, I think you're totally right that there's these moments where it might as well have gone like another way.
[00:08:34] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:08:34] Henrik Werdelin: Was do you think it's just randomness or do you think it's like the passion and energy and all this stuff that founders get all the credits for having?
[00:08:42] Jeppe Rindom: I, I think because we, we both came to this from a perspective, we want to create a company. And not necessarily we have this idea we wanna realize, but just we wanna build a company. Um, it just felt like the right time. And even if the first idea didn't materialize the payroll, or even if the great founder set up didn't materialize, we were like, but yeah, hey, if we gonna build a company, it has to be now.
Uh, and so I think we, we just defaulted back to why are we here? We just wanna build, build a great company. It doesn't really matter if it's one or the other idea or whether. We are two or three co-founders. We'll figure it out.
[00:09:17] Henrik Werdelin: This is the part they normally cut out of the documentary, the third guy. The one who was supposed to be between the business mind and the engineering mind.
He left, got a new kid, needed to focus on family, totally reasonable. And right there, right in that moment, plao could have ended. Should have ended. Maybe y and Nico could have looked at each other and said, you know what? This is really a sign. Let's get some real jobs. But they didn't. But here's what keeps me up at night.
How many did, how many brilliant companies died in that exact moment when the co-founder walked? When the investors said no, when it felt like the universe was just screaming, no, we are walking with EBIT because the coin landed on heads, but it could just as easily have landed on tails. And that's not humble bracking.
That's the truth. Every success story is a highlight reel with the cutting room floor thrown in the trash. We don't bill statues to the ones who stop. We don't even remember their names. But the randomness isn't a buck in the startup mythology. It's a whole god damn operating system.
[00:10:18] Jeppe Rindom: Did you get the sense
[00:10:19] Henrik Werdelin: that Lio kind of like hat momentum kind of like when you got going?
Or do you feel that there was this moment of like really having to kind of walk uphill? And I'll ask because I think with BarkBox, for example. I feel that we kind of like got off the ground and it actually, it kind of worked pretty fast. Yeah.
[00:10:39] Jeppe Rindom: And we, and we had the same experience honestly. We, we, we just went through our 10 year anniversary in this bond and I, I kind of was, was displaying to the company what did it look like in week zero?
What was the vision? What was the slide deck? And honestly it looks exactly like where we are today, which I think is a piece of. Luck and randomness. Honestly, I think there could have been easily a few pivots on the way. There just wasn't, and now, I mean, we are both doing angel investing and we are trying to outsmart, you know, what should you look for.
The reality is I see great companies that have had to pivot many times, you know, maybe just 10 years in, you know, they start to accelerate and I see companies that have figured it out from day one. It's,
[00:11:25] Henrik Werdelin: I'm very impressed by people who continue. I mean, like, I'm pretty promiscuous when it comes to. Um, like projects, like if I don't feel they work, like not in the Yeah.
First day, but like, if it doesn't have momentum, kind of like within a period of time I go for these default death days where I basically say, if I don't feel there's traction by this day, my default action is to
[00:11:45] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:11:45] Henrik Werdelin: Like, pivot, uh, instead of like, just continue. 'cause I, I've obviously also worked on projects and companies where, you know, we worked on it for years and it never really materialized.
[00:11:56] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. And honestly, you know, I, I don't think I could have kept going. For 10 years. Just trying and trying, I think just because, you know, I had family and kids and so on for me, you know, if, if, if something hadn't, you know, materialized in two years, I probably would've gone back to a, you know, consulting, whatever, corporate life.
Um, so again, randomness, it just haven't,
[00:12:19] Henrik Werdelin: let's go a little bit back. So you're in the, in the little office. Yeah. You are working with payrolls. You figure out that basically you go this way.
[00:12:27] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:12:27] Henrik Werdelin: Um, you find out that basically maybe expenses are more the thing.
[00:12:34] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:12:34] Henrik Werdelin: And you, are you calling, are you calling customers at this point or are you like building your first prototype or kind of how did you go about it?
[00:12:41] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah, so I mean, I guess you, you gotta have a little bit of context around, uh, some of my, this background as well. Yeah. We can go down that way. Um, so I mean, I've had a funky, a funky childhood. I grew up with, with my dad. Um, you know, he was a single parent to, to three children. And, and he was an auditor, an accountant, um, didn't have crazy amount of money.
Um, so one of his hacks was, Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna invite my kids to work in my office early on, because then I can pay them on their, you know, deductibles. Uh, and that's very tax efficient way. So, you know, as, as I turned
[00:13:22] Henrik Werdelin: awesome,
[00:13:23] Jeppe Rindom: as I turned 12 or 13, you know, I would start to get light accounting tasks.
So I would take some of the simple, simple clients and I would do the bookkeeping and so on, right? So very early on I got into the processing of books, um, and just felt, hey, this is incredibly manual. Um, and quite tedious at, at the time I thought it was fun, you know, received transaction and tick mark and so on.
As a child, that was quite fun. Yeah. But, um, then, you know, 15 years later I got into that world again, from an executive perspective, I had a little bit of a CFO journey, um, and I just realized, hey, much of what I did as a kid kind of still, still exist. It's not a whole lot smarter. Um, so that was a little bit of a moment.
Um, and then there were all these pieces of software out there and we tried to implement some of it, but it wasn't really, it wasn't really working very well. And then Nico, my co-founder, he had, he'd done a gig for, um, the Danish Mobile Pay You, that's a very widely rolled out mobile payment solution, which was the first, one of the first use cases in taking a mobile app and connecting it with payment infrastructure and controlling payments through the the app.
And that was a little bit of a moment for us. We were like, okay, hmm. If we could do that in a business context, you know. We could actually enable the workforce to pay and then automatically get the data from there. Both steer what they can do, but also ensure that we have all the data from the get go, which could be a game changer because then you don't need to manually process it and there will not be these unknown things that were just pulling down the organization.
So that was a little bit the moment where we were like, okay, problem is not new. Um, you know, multiple solutions out there, but still we should be able to do 10 times better. Uh, and that happened over the course of some weeks,
[00:15:18] Henrik Werdelin: you feel pretty certain at that time you could do it much better.
[00:15:20] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:15:22] Henrik Werdelin: Um, and is that because the technology had just kinda like finally got into a place, cameras and phones, stuff like that?
Or what do you think was kinda like the thing that made it
[00:15:31] Jeppe Rindom: That was, that was that, and then there was the, uh, trend around openness of payments. The fact that open payment infrastructure, that accessibility from third parties was happening. You
[00:15:42] Henrik Werdelin: wanna make it over.
[00:15:43] Jeppe Rindom: Um, so at least that was our thesis. And then we, we spent maybe some weeks just to validate that yeah, that's, that can be done technically.
And then in the meantime, we set up around probably around 50 deep customers views, spend an hour with CFOs. People you knew or No? Not necessarily. Some. Some we knew, some we didn't. Some in Denmark, some in the us. We were a little open to launching in, in one of the other market. And then we just got really good feedback that, well, A, this problem is massive and it's really tedious and we all hate it.
And then two, if you can do what you say you can do, we're gonna buy it. So it was also a little bit of a building, a pipeline you could say. Um, and we actually, we brought in my co-founder's wife to help us out on that. She was, um. She was doing some studies in University of Denmark that was quite relevant, relevant to user research.
Um, so she helped us out, conducted and sort of condense all the, the insights and so on.
[00:16:52] Henrik Werdelin: Is there a specific reason why a company like Clio comes out of Copen, or do you think it could have materialized anywhere?
[00:17:01] Jeppe Rindom: Um, yes and yes. I think, um, I think the reason we started up in Copenhagen was, was because of Copenhagen.
Like, you know, the, the fact that we love the city and we wanted to live here. So, so that was really the starting point. And it was more like, okay, can, can we built something like this in Copenhagen? Is it just gotta be difficult? And we thought, hey, um, talent is pretty mobile. Um, investments. Seemed to be done in Danish companies and so on, and just went for it.
Um, but the reality is could we have done it in outta Sweden? Yes. Could we have done it out of the us? Certainly. Would it have been easier? Well, to some extent maybe
[00:17:45] Henrik Werdelin: because of access to capital or what do you
[00:17:48] Jeppe Rindom: I would say mostly access to talent, um,
[00:17:52] Henrik Werdelin: is really a cold. I also tell one of the reasons why you guys work is because that in many ways, it's a very sensible business in many ways.
It fits, I think the, the mentality and the investment kind of like energy of the region, right? Like it's, yeah. It's not that you were kind of suggesting you would do space rockets that would land in drone ships. Yeah. It was something that people kinda understand and the business model,
[00:18:15] Jeppe Rindom: they understand it and Yep.
[00:18:16] Henrik Werdelin: Do you think that has an element as the truth to it
[00:18:18] Jeppe Rindom: from a fundraising perspective? Uh, I think it was fairly easy for us to raise the first money. People understood the problem. I mean, we were solving problem for business people. Everyone understood it. Um, and I wouldn't say it was like straightforward to raise money, but it certainly wasn't because of what we were building.
Um, I just think Denmark, but also Europe as a whole, when you come with these incredibly bold ambitions. It tend to be difficult. And I think that's a, that's a tremendous shame because how we need to incentivize people to take risk and, and back ambitious ideas because we are truly lacking that in Europe.
[00:19:00] Henrik Werdelin: So we're walking down the thousand day memory lane. Mm-hmm. And we're now like, I guess first funding round talk to 50 people.
[00:19:11] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:19:12] Henrik Werdelin: Product is getting ready.
[00:19:13] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. I mean, we started building and, and it took us maybe roughly a year to get on the first customer, which was obviously our own company. Um, so towards the end of 16 we had a handful of of customers testing.
Do you
[00:19:27] Henrik Werdelin: remember the first external one?
[00:19:29] Jeppe Rindom: I've been? I, well, the, the, the thing we tend to celebrate is the first purchase with Play card and. Because he, he had to retrieve the card information from the backend because like his stuff was not ready and he got a card number, was like, wow, we got a card number.
And he went on Amazon and he bought a, a small unicorn, uh, sort of teddy, uh, which became our company mascot. And it followed us everywhere, you know, as we were traveling the world. I mean, I, I often come across customers and they're like, we've been with you since the, the very first day. And it's like, okay, tell me when, when was the moment?
And actually quite a few of them. We're onboarded at the, the big tech event in, in Copenhagen Tech Barbecue.
[00:20:09] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah.
[00:20:10] Jeppe Rindom: So that was in, in 16. There was a tech barbecue event in, um, the opera of Copenhagen, which is quite spectacular. And you got to pitch on the stage of the opera. And so I went there and I pitched, but then we had the whole team in the booth and they were live onboarding clients,
[00:20:26] Henrik Werdelin: so people just come down and
[00:20:27] Jeppe Rindom: afterwards we had, we had only like four, five companies at the time.
Right. And as I came back from the stage, there was about 70 people queued up. And we onboarded 70 companies on the day. We went from four companies amazing to, to 74. Um, and, and we put in like a hundred Kronos on each card so they could go and try it out. Right. And we were not ready at all to support that many customers, so we had to sort of off bought them again afterwards.
But, but around 10 15 were customers ever since. Oh really? Um, so they got started there. That's quite a fun story. That's so cool. Yeah.
[00:21:01] Henrik Werdelin: 70 people in a queue. Full customer yesterday, 74 today from the outside, this is what success looked like, the inflection point, the product market fit, all those clean terms.
Venture capitalists used to make chaos. Sounds like strategy from the inside though. Yep. It is drowning. They weren't ready. They had to call people back and say, sorry, we can't actually handle you right now. Can you imagine that? Thanks for believing us, but please go away for a bit. But 15 of them stayed still customers today.
And here's what nobody tells you about growth. It doesn't feel like winning at all. It feels like trying to drink from a fire hose while somebody's hitting you with a stick and you wondered this, you prayed for it, and now it's here. You're just trying not to die. If you wait until you're ready, somebody else will already be serving those 70 people in line.
The ones who win aren't the most prepared. They are the ones willing to be unprepared in public. That's not advice. That's just math. So where are you now in like the company's journey? 70 customers, you know, like you have to onboard some of them. Yeah. Are you still out in the, in the, in the workspace? Um,
[00:22:07] Jeppe Rindom: no.
At the time we had moved into the, the meat pack district of, uh, of Copenhagen. So we had our own little office space. We were probably around 15 people at the time. Uh, all here in Copenhagen, a couple of people working remote from Canada. And, um, why Canada? Yeah. Random again. Random. Yeah. Uh, so we had a, a brilliant first engineer joining us from Canada, but he was in Copenhagen and then he had some former colleagues, uh, out of Quebec in Canada, and, and they joined us and that's how it got started.
[00:22:42] Henrik Werdelin: Do you still think back to those 15 people day? Like is that kinda like a romantic kind of like thing for you?
[00:22:50] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. I mean, and even beyond that, I would say, um. I'd say the first, the first 50 people, that's few enough that, you know, you, you almost consider them family. And, and there was something around, you know, you really had to, uh, sell the vision of play for them to join you because the arts were against us like big time.
[00:23:12] Henrik Werdelin: And why, why, why was that?
[00:23:13] Jeppe Rindom: Just 'cause no one knew what we were doing. You know, we didn't have a brand, we had raised a little bit of money, but like, why would you bet your career on that? Right? So you could say people took a very. Deliberate choice. And what,
[00:23:25] Henrik Werdelin: what was your way of pitching people?
[00:23:26] Jeppe Rindom: I was just, you know, she, she's really sharing what kind of company we are, what are our beliefs, um, what are we building?
Why could this be massive?
[00:23:33] Henrik Werdelin: I remember once I felt so guilty, 'cause I was talking to this guy, he had a good job and I really wanted to hire him. And again, like I was like, I don't know why he would've joined this company. Right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so my only kinda like argument at one point was I said like, Hey, at one point you just have to look your kids in their eyes.
And, and, and just think, do they, do you want them to think, my dad was a company man, or my dad was somebody who took a chance and he like, called and signed up and I was like, oh, great. Oh,
[00:24:00] Jeppe Rindom: that's, that's great. Um, no, but I think the point, the point being that, you know, first it's few enough people that you can really build out those relationships, but also, you know, working against the arts and people really taking a chance.
Then when you achieve something, it just becomes fantastic. Like, you know, it's. It's, we are unbeatable kind of thing. And, and those relationships are very hard to replicate later on when the company grows because you just simply don't have enough time with each person and and so on. So
[00:24:32] Henrik Werdelin: do you think it's true that the, the DNA of the first 15 people just get magnified to the rest of the company now that you are much larger?
[00:24:42] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. To to, to some extent. And then I think, you know, you can lose it. But if you, um, if you do it in the right way and not too fast, I think it'll replicate quite well. Um, then you'll go into hyper growth and then there's the risk, uh, losing some of that.
[00:24:58] Henrik Werdelin: Do you ever have like the moment where you wanna try to get some of that energy back, or do you think that's just the maturity of a company and once you're over that phase, you're over that phase?
[00:25:08] Jeppe Rindom: I think a little bit of both. Um, I think there was something brilliant around. Just really going the extra mile for the customer and not really caring about what's the financial implication of going to 10 customer visits with a small customer. There's a little bit of that mindset that I think should still survive.
Uh, and then there's some of it, it was just, just like the type of people we hired, we, we, we wouldn't be successful hiring them today because they wouldn't thrive in, in a company with a thousand people. They're all entrepreneurs now. They build their own companies, right. Um,
[00:25:41] Henrik Werdelin: do you have people that's been, came in and then out?
[00:25:43] Jeppe Rindom: Hundred percent. That's so cool. Hundred percent. Like many of them, uh, either being a part of a new company to sort of see that grow or founding their own company, and quite a few people have done that.
[00:25:54] Henrik Werdelin: I get
[00:25:54] Jeppe Rindom: successfully,
[00:25:55] Henrik Werdelin: I get so excited. I
[00:25:55] Jeppe Rindom: get so proud about, I mean too, I mean even, I mean to get proud when they go and they build their own company.
But I also get proud when I can see that they have used Pluto as a massive step stepping stone in their career. So what happens is we, we are quite aware that we won't be successful for long just focusing on Denmark. It's simply just too small of a market. So we knew next market has to be the uk We, we need to be able to show that this is beyond Denmark.
Uh, so we go ahead and we launch the UK in May, 2017. Uh, so shortly after bringing on the first a customers,
[00:26:31] Henrik Werdelin: so pretty fast.
[00:26:32] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah, six months after. Yeah.
[00:26:35] Henrik Werdelin: And do you, did you, same thing, got like a Yeah. A few desks and then kind of rinse and repeat.
[00:26:41] Jeppe Rindom: Well, what we did was we, uh, we took five of our very strong commercial people.
I think at this point we might have been, let's say 30 people. Um, so we took five of the strong commercial people, all except one were Danes actually. Um, and we moved them to London. So they sort of incubated a little bit, everything that we had built and said, Hey, go and build London.
[00:27:05] Henrik Werdelin: Hmm. Interesting.
[00:27:06] Jeppe Rindom: Take our culture, our approach, everything you've learned and, and do that here and, and build a team.
[00:27:12] Henrik Werdelin: I like that.
[00:27:12] Jeppe Rindom: And, and we did that as well, uh, when we launched Germany and to some extent Sweden as well. It was a little bit of our approach in the beginning, uh, and that that worked for us.
[00:27:23] Henrik Werdelin: And how do you think, how much of a takeaway is it for you that, 'cause I think it seems quite. Brave and also not that common that you launch so quickly in another country.
[00:27:34] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. And I, I honestly don't think we would've done that if we had started in the UK or if we started in the us for sure not. But just because Denmark is so small and, and we were also in Tacticals around venture capital 'cause we needed funding and we knew it's gonna be a, a massive risk, um, seen by the VCs if we are only debt.
[00:27:54] Henrik Werdelin: Let's get over here on the green.
[00:27:55] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. Uh, so it was a little bit also tactically to be able to show
[00:28:01] Henrik Werdelin: that you could move
[00:28:02] Jeppe Rindom: into a new, in our, uh, I guess, I guess that was our series A, that, you know, we had traction in the uk. I mean, it was Big Leap. I mean, yes, the language, we could sort it, everyone spoke English and, and that sort of thing, but still the product needs to be localized.
Um, we needed different integrations. We didn't have a massive network over there. We had been selling very much in the beginning into like. Customers we knew and by introduction and it's, it is very easy to navigate your home market from that perspective. In London, uk, we were a little bit from scratch.
We didn't know anyone. Um, we a brand. So
[00:28:36] Henrik Werdelin: how did I, how did you do it? Just called,
[00:28:39] Jeppe Rindom: yeah. Uh, I mean, different techniques. We, a couple of the salespeople were really strong at building relationships with the local VCs over there and getting introductions for them. And then we got a little bit of pr, um, what
[00:28:53] Henrik Werdelin: was the story back then?
[00:28:56] Jeppe Rindom: I, I think the story was still, I, I, I actually think in the UK the story was around, imagine you could get Revolut or Monso, but for business
[00:29:07] Henrik Werdelin: Mm,
[00:29:08] Jeppe Rindom: because that, those concept has just started to take off and people were like pretty amazed that, hey, hey, here's a card and here's an app and I can do all of these things in my private life.
And we were like, yeah, but imagine all the problems you have in your business. We will solve that.
[00:29:24] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah.
[00:29:25] Jeppe Rindom: Uh, so that was a little bit the narrative.
[00:29:27] Henrik Werdelin: I think that most people have this idea of founders as being kind of made outta something special. And I think now that you built like such a big company, I'm sure you've been told many times and stuff like that.
Mm-hmm. I also know you to be a pretty humble person. Where are you in, kinda like when you, let's just take it in the seed investment stuff. When you look at people that are kind of like going, Hey, I'm gonna leave my job and start something.
[00:29:58] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:29:59] Henrik Werdelin: Do you sit back now and go like, is really difficult, you probably shouldn't, or are you like, Hey, roll the dice.
Like, go where, because you're like a risk adjusted person, so, so you don't seem to be somebody who just kind of.
[00:30:11] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah,
[00:30:11] Henrik Werdelin: say like, just go for it and like, you know, mortgage your house.
[00:30:14] Jeppe Rindom: I think one, one thing I'm pretty clear about is don't sit back and wait for that, you know, moment where you wake up in the morning and you're kinda like, I got it all.
Figure it out. I have an idea and you know, this is what I'm gonna do. Because that rarely happens. And when it happens, you know, you guaranteed within two hours, you've learned so much about it, and you'll figure out you're not alone. Um, so I think you have to look a little bit more intrinsically and say, Hey, are you, are you up for building a company?
And you're up for going through all the swings up and down, all the grid, all the risk. And then,
[00:30:47] Henrik Werdelin: and what do you think that is? Like if you just double click a little bit on that 'cause. What is the up and down, I mean like as you're telling the story, you guys went from one office to the next office, you raised some money and it like, you never had like a near death moment.
So No, we
[00:31:00] Jeppe Rindom: didn't, but I, but I would say, I mean, because we do a lot of investing, we, we also see a lot of companies, right? And I don't think our story is the story always, as we talked about, often you see. Two, three years of pivots and, and you know, you have to try a couple of times, et cetera. So, and I think you should be prepared for at least some of that.
And then you can, you can pray for a, a smooth ride. Um, but I think what is ups and downs it is, which we also did, we started without any pay and we didn't know for how long that would last. And then for a couple of years, you know, we would get paid 25% of what we used to.
[00:31:43] Henrik Werdelin: Hmm.
[00:31:44] Jeppe Rindom: Um, and you, you have to be prepared for that.
And, you know, loads of people not believing in you.
[00:31:51] Henrik Werdelin: Do you
[00:31:52] Jeppe Rindom: think? Do, I mean, we, we, we were working so hard to get the first funding. It sounds easy and we got it, but you know, we visited 80, 90 funds
[00:32:02] Henrik Werdelin: really
[00:32:03] Jeppe Rindom: in our seed in Series A and we got maybe two interested investors. It was a lot of work.
[00:32:09] Henrik Werdelin: And did you.
Did you have like the feeling that they were wrong or did you sometimes get the feeling sense? Maybe I'm, I'm wrong.
[00:32:17] Jeppe Rindom: No, at that time I was very much, you're wrong. You're, you're simply just wrong. And, and we just kept going, kept going.
[00:32:25] Henrik Werdelin: Now, where you in London? You said, you said, uh, Sweden and there was another country.
[00:32:32] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. So Denmark. UK and then we started Germany and Sweden.
[00:32:37] Henrik Werdelin: How long Sweden, how many years are we into the business now?
[00:32:40] Jeppe Rindom: So that was in early 19. So this is about three years in.
[00:32:48] Henrik Werdelin: And you feel at that point, you home safe?
[00:32:52] Jeppe Rindom: No, I still don't feel home.
[00:32:55] Henrik Werdelin: I know that feeling.
[00:32:56] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. Um, no,
[00:32:59] Henrik Werdelin: it is funny. Like, people go like, I remember going public and everybody's like, you know, like, you're, you're done.
And you're like, oh, no,
[00:33:05] Jeppe Rindom: no, never stops. No. But I think what we've, we had some conviction that our launch in the UK had gone pretty well and, and we were seeing, uh, we were seeing the UK grow faster than Denmark at that point. Uh, so we were like, okay, we, we should be able to do that. Um, in, in Sweden and in Germany, and those launches have been.
More success and they've been successful. But what, what, what we do realize is that adding that market number four and three and four, it does add complexity to the business and suddenly you're going from a two dimensional game to like a exponential Sudoku game, right?
[00:33:44] Henrik Werdelin: Hmm.
[00:33:45] Jeppe Rindom: Um, and, and that's, it is tricky to navigate, uh, multiple markets.
Uh, Europe is tricky from that perspective, and, and sometimes I envy some of my, uh, my American colleagues because they have such a big market. It's a big market. Yeah, it takes, um, five European markets to make up the size of the US
[00:34:04] Henrik Werdelin: Y but can see the path not taken here. Bigger market, more capital, easier talent.
The US was right there. He knew it would be faster. He knew it would be simpler. And any rational business mind would've said, let's just move to San Francisco and build this thing. Probably. But he stayed in Co Copenhagen, not because it made business sense, but because it made human sense. There's this tension in the heart of European ambitions.
Every founder here carries it, the rational voice that says, just move to where it's easier. And the defined voice that says. We can do it here y, but chose defiance and it cost him in speed and money in late nights, navigating regulations across countries that can't agree on what constitutes a business expense, but it created something else, a different kind of company.
One that's rooted in a place, in a set of values, in the belief that you don't have to abandon home to build something massive. Building Lio in Copenhagen isn't just a business decision, it's a proof of concept. It's honestly the middle finger to the assumption that all good ideas have to be billed in the US and that costs money, but some things are worth the price.
You've always seemed to kind of be pretty committed to the European rollout, but also being a European company.
[00:35:19] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:35:20] Henrik Werdelin: Tell a little bit more about why. Yeah. Why do you think that is worth the effort?
[00:35:25] Jeppe Rindom: Uh, I think the first thing is, uh, our product doesn't travel as well across countries and continents. And what I mean by that is we are a regulated business, so our financial license.
Enables us to move across European countries and we have another license in the UK. Now, if we had to go to the US we would deal with a completely new jurisdiction and licensing, uh, setup. So there is a little bit more barriers to move, uh, fast. So that's one. I think number two is as we started to figure out Europe and spend a few years in that other players were figuring out the US.
So there are, there's a fairly well established market situation in the us, um, and we just believe that we need to have a distinct approach. Then it's just, let's not just go in and try to be what they are. And also, we still need to solve a lot of things in Europe. Um, we are still at, let's say, less than a percent market share in the uk.
[00:36:23] Henrik Werdelin: But besides like the pure business side, I mean like when we talk together, you often kind of. Argue for kinda like
[00:36:30] Jeppe Rindom: true
[00:36:31] Henrik Werdelin: being a European company. True. So you also seem to have something that kind of like can tell you to kind of show
[00:36:36] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:36:36] Henrik Werdelin: That Europe can do this.
[00:36:38] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. And I, and I try sometimes to be a little bit distinctive in terms of what's my personal agenda here and what's my company agenda.
And I, I just want to clear that out because, you know, we have multiple investors, European American and I. As a CEO, I just do what's right for the business. Now, he asked me as a private person, I'm like, we should be able to do better in, in Copenhagen. We should be able to retain companies better than we are today.
We should be more ambitious in Europe. And I, I really strongly believe in that and I care a lot about it and I share my learnings and I try to influence, you know, change, but it's mostly because of my background and who I am. And less so because of the company.
[00:37:17] Henrik Werdelin: What's the fix then?
[00:37:19] Jeppe Rindom: I think the fix is to create a European setup where companies just travel more easily across borders.
[00:37:25] Henrik Werdelin: So like a, a rules and regulation
[00:37:27] Jeppe Rindom: thing? Yeah. Both in terms of jurisdictions and, and you know, when you incorporate a company in Denmark, how well does that actually fit the incorporation of other, uh, countries, but also in terms of financial rules? Um, but
[00:37:39] Henrik Werdelin: do you think it's, is it a flawed assumption that we should just be more Silicon Valley like we, I think in Europe we'd often talk about like, oh, we should be more Silicon Valley.
But Silicon Valley is like a special breed. It has its own history. Yeah. And stuff like that. Obviously in Europe we have all these other kind of like things that make us, us. We, in Europe, we're generally known for having smaller companies. You know, there's like, yeah. Lister's, actions and stuff like that.
Should we, is there the document that we should reinvent? Basically what European entrepreneurial success looked like?
[00:38:12] Jeppe Rindom: I, I think yes and no because I think, you know, small companies are great and they add up and, and they should certainly be a focus of ours, but they tend to also to be local in their focus and they serve the local market.
And it's hard if we don't have those massive companies that are global and really, you know, drive down wealth to the continent, it's hard for us to keep up.
[00:38:32] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah.
[00:38:32] Jeppe Rindom: Right. And you could say, let's look at the different categories. Let's look at marketing for example. Right. Everything we spend on marketing as a company, we spend maybe 25% of our revenue go back 30 years.
That spend would go into local companies. That would be, you know, the, the, the Yellow Pages. Yeah. These types of things. Advertising
[00:38:51] Henrik Werdelin: and Google.
[00:38:52] Jeppe Rindom: Now they go into Mad and Gogo.
[00:38:53] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah.
[00:38:53] Jeppe Rindom: Um, let's look at our software goes into American companies, right. So, and I'm like, okay, we spend probably 30, 40% of our revenue.
On American companies.
[00:39:04] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah.
[00:39:05] Jeppe Rindom: And that's a problem. Why, why don't we have a European AWS? Why don't we have a European sales force? You know? Why don't we have some of that? Um, because I think in the long run, we'll just lose if we don't have that.
[00:39:18] Henrik Werdelin: Do you think that's changing?
[00:39:21] Jeppe Rindom: I'd like to believe so, but it's, it's just too slow moving.
I mean,
[00:39:25] Henrik Werdelin: the entrepreneurial speak. Yeah, entrepreneurial speaking. I think that's true. I mean, you do hear more and more people that are kind of like being a aware that this is something that is, would really change how European entrepreneurship
[00:39:39] Jeppe Rindom: would
[00:39:39] Henrik Werdelin: be, right?
[00:39:40] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. But at the same time, you look at some of the, you know, political agendas and you're like.
Okay. Um, what the fuck, what, why are we solving these tiny bits when we have such massive problems? Right. And I think, I mean, we can go down an alley here, but like the democracy, uh, and the way that's run in many European countries also makes decision quite marginal.
[00:40:03] Henrik Werdelin: Hmm. It's
[00:40:04] Jeppe Rindom: very, very difficult. '
[00:40:05] Henrik Werdelin: cause that's, I think, my concern when people talk about, well, for us to get really entrepreneurship humming in Europe, we just need to.
You know, make the rules the same and you know, and you kind of go like, that seemed to be almost an unsolvable problem. You just take, like Denmark, you know, you get the sense here that most Danes would like it to be all the same rules if people use our rules, because we obviously know how to come up with the best ones,
[00:40:28] Jeppe Rindom: right?
Yeah. Yeah.
[00:40:30] Henrik Werdelin: And so it seemed hard to imagine that that is a, something that's gonna come around anytime soon. So is there, do you think there's an entrepreneurial fix to it? Uh,
[00:40:41] Jeppe Rindom: yes.
[00:40:41] Henrik Werdelin: Like AI layers on top, that abstract stuff or companies like yourself that becomes the platform so that you can kind of move things around
[00:40:52] Jeppe Rindom: potentially.
Um, I think we need to acknowledge that the political, um, support to this movement is gonna be probably too slow to what we would like. Uh, but can we still. Built for scale in Europe. I think we can, and I think the other thing that we should neglect is the cultural piece, which I actually think is a, is a very big barrier.
People don't celebrate the courage, they shame, you know, the fact that people were investing, right. And that's a very cultural thing.
[00:41:20] Henrik Werdelin: I was kind of, I was surprised I did a startup back in early 2000 that didn't work out and it was quite like a noticeable stat at the time and. I think it was very much what you said, like in Europe, people basically looked at me like, you know, you shouldn't have left your job.
Yeah. And in the US people were like, that's awesome. And like, here, I remember you did this and this and Yeah. You know, like you guys invented a new way of using this interface to sign and stuff like that. A hundred percent. And, but I don't know where that starts because I, I don't really see that changing that much.
[00:41:53] Jeppe Rindom: I, I see it changing, to be honest. Uh, I, I see the first steps of that. Um, people always laugh when I say this, but I actually think the Danish Shark Tank and, and, and, you know, actually that TV show across European markets has changed a little bit, some of that because it's become, um, it, it, it's become a thing to start companies and you know
[00:42:12] Henrik Werdelin: that's true.
[00:42:12] Jeppe Rindom: Your uncle and auntie are watching this TV show and they're kind of like, okay, that's pretty cool. And suddenly, you know, it's actually accepted to take the risk to go fund a company.
[00:42:22] Henrik Werdelin: And I think even like being a founder entrepreneur is like something. That you have a term now? I mean, like when I grew up, that wasn't really a thing.
Right? It
[00:42:29] Jeppe Rindom: wasn't a thing. Um, you know, when I left university or business school here in Copenhagen, no one went no to be entrepreneurs. Like none. Uh, and now it's kinda like a very acceptable route.
[00:42:40] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah.
[00:42:40] Jeppe Rindom: Uh, so, so I actually celebrate that a lot. Um, and just think we need to continue down that, that trend.
[00:42:46] Henrik Werdelin: Do you get the feeling sometimes that it's easier for you and me to sit and talk about doing companies because it was easier back then, like things. Not as much has been invented and stuff like that, or do you think AI and other tools, you know, quantum Bio, all these things are just basically making all those opportunities available to people again.
[00:43:04] Jeppe Rindom: You know, well, when I thought about being entrepreneur, you know, the first time I was like, oh fuck, why didn't I make the, you know, the, the.com? Uh, that was the moment, you know, I remember that I should been.com.
[00:43:17] Henrik Werdelin: I've been thinking of that many times.
[00:43:19] Jeppe Rindom: And then you, I became an entrepreneur when it was like, what?
What was the game change? I don't know. Mobile maybe?
[00:43:24] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah. But that was a pretty big deal.
[00:43:26] Jeppe Rindom: It was a big
[00:43:26] Henrik Werdelin: deal. And you had a lot of companies like the Ubers of the world that I think basically came because suddenly yeah, you had a GPS and all these different
[00:43:33] Jeppe Rindom: things. Yeah. So that's maybe the way that we wrote and, and now there's a new one with AI and, and I think that just is gonna continue every 10 years, five, 10 years.
So I actually don't think those circumstances are very different. I find it very, very meaningful to have built in Denmark and in Europe and, and shown a little bit of what can be done here. Um, I have to say. So that's where my co-founder lived when we founded the company. Really? So we've had a couple of workshops up there.
Um, that's amazing. Fed his cats.
[00:44:02] Henrik Werdelin: I think that this bond with your co-founder though, it becomes quite special, right? Like Yeah, like it's, it is your work wife.
[00:44:12] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:44:13] Henrik Werdelin: Do you, how's like over the, do you remember the first few years? Like, do you, did you think. That something in how you had expected it to be to work with him changed?
Or did you think that it just,
[00:44:27] Jeppe Rindom: I think, uh, the reason we chose to work together was very much on like values alignment as well.
[00:44:34] Henrik Werdelin: Yeah.
[00:44:35] Jeppe Rindom: Uh, what kind of organization do we want to build? Uh, what do we believe will create a great company? Um, how will we interact with people and so on. And, and that alignment proved quite valuable.
There's quickly a moment in time where some of our competencies you can hire for that. Yeah. You know, maybe even better people. But then, you know, you start to focus on do we wanna actually take it in the right, in the same direction and how do we deal with people and so on. And that can create a great level of misalignment and we just never had that.
[00:45:06] Henrik Werdelin: That's awesome.
[00:45:06] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah,
[00:45:07] Henrik Werdelin: I have other friends who feel that they have to go through kinda like a rebirth of their company. Like, um, some of them was talking about like refounding the company.
[00:45:17] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:45:18] Henrik Werdelin: You ever felt you needed the moment to get the first thousand days back?
[00:45:25] Jeppe Rindom: Um, a little bit. We, I said we just had our 10 year anniversary in Liz Bond and it felt like a very, um.
A sort of precious moment to have the whole company together in the same room and, and start talking about the future.
[00:45:42] Henrik Werdelin: So we're getting close to what's currently is the headquarters
[00:45:47] Jeppe Rindom: true.
[00:45:48] Henrik Werdelin: How long have you guys been here?
[00:45:49] Jeppe Rindom: Actually, for six years.
[00:45:51] Henrik Werdelin: Wow.
[00:45:52] Jeppe Rindom: We, uh, we thought we would only stay two years because we were growing massively out of Copenhagen, uh, at the time.
But then. Suddenly we came up with the idea of building a hub in Lisbon and, and we were scaling outta London and, and then suddenly we got a bit more space here as well. And then six years in, we're still here.
[00:46:10] Henrik Werdelin: And you're gonna stay.
[00:46:10] Jeppe Rindom: And we're staying. Yeah, we are staying. We love it. It's, it's the very central part of Copenhagen.
No matter where our people live in Copenhagen. Lot, lot, lot of people still live in Copenhagen, no matter where they live. It's pretty close. So our headquarters is right down here. But by coincidence, this is actually the restaurant where Nico, my co-founder and I, we met. In 2014 and we had a dinner and, and that dinner became, you know, the decision of building a company together.
So we were actually sitting right there on the, the,
[00:46:40] Henrik Werdelin: do you remember the,
[00:46:41] Jeppe Rindom: the walking path?
[00:46:42] Henrik Werdelin: Like a
[00:46:43] Jeppe Rindom: hundred percent. A hundred percent. It was, um, it was a pitch basically. I, I wanted to have Nicos my co-founder and, um, why did,
[00:46:52] Henrik Werdelin: what was your pitch?
[00:46:54] Jeppe Rindom: Well, he, so you know the story is Nico is Italian. Um, he and I have been working in the us.
He got married to an American girl, but as such, there was no reason why he would move back to Denmark. No. And I wanted him as a co-founder. So we were sitting right there and said, Hey, um, come back. Come back to Denmark. He was just visiting. Come back to den. Um, it's gonna be great. It's like close had built a company and he was like, Hmm, I kind of like Denmark, you know, when I was studying in Denmark and maybe it could work out for Katrina as well.
She could continue her degree and we, we could see ourselves having a life in Denmark. So, you know, tell me more. And then we spent the whole evening talking about, okay, what kind of company could we build and what would that look like? And. You know, how long time would he, he need to take to decide and so on.
And this was probably the August, 2014
[00:47:43] Henrik Werdelin: long. 24 hours.
[00:47:44] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah, exactly. A bit more because they were living in, in California, but he was backed by, I don't know, October or something like that. And then we, we started the company in February, the year after.
[00:47:55] Henrik Werdelin: That's amazing, man.
[00:47:56] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:47:56] Henrik Werdelin: Well, thank you so much for taking me all the way down the first thousand days.
[00:48:01] Jeppe Rindom: Thank you. We back. Thanks for all the good questions and insights.
[00:48:04] Henrik Werdelin: This is amazing.
[00:48:04] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah. It feels like a full circle, doesn't it?
[00:48:06] Henrik Werdelin: It does feel like full circle. Well, not that much full circle. You seem to have at a headquarter just next to where you had your
[00:48:11] Jeppe Rindom: first. That's what I mean. You know, we've been all the way to the out of N and then we came back to the dinner place of the first night.
[00:48:18] Henrik Werdelin: That's awesome.
[00:48:18] Jeppe Rindom: Yeah.
[00:48:19] Henrik Werdelin: One of the thing that's always pretty fascinating when you talk to founders like yba is how kind of mundane the story sounds in the early days. It's not like there is like magical things happening. It was two guys in a office trying to do a little bit of software and then fast forward 10 years and it's a huge company, but I always get like so surprised by the fact that it's, there's nothing really more to it other than just you decide you wanna start something and then you kind of take one day after another and then.
Sometimes when you're lucky, you end up building a big companies. I think some of the things that kind of really stood out for me in this conversation is just how kind of almost methodical they were in their approach. It wasn't that they kind of like was trying to reinvent a lot of things. They basically had a pretty clear idea of how they, um, they just wanted to make something that wasn't very optimized and make it better.
Another thing that's fascinating with the stories, of course, that you ever kind of started this business, not like 10 years ago, but when he was 12 and his dad was kind of asking him to do accounting and so he was just sitting there and trying to kind of figure out how do you do this? And now many years later, like he built such an impressive business around it.