Secret Leaders

If you’ve ever wondered how entrepreneurs without a specific idea go on to found a unicorn startup from their bedrooms, then this episode of Secret Leaders is for you. 

“One of the things that really strikes me that's changed over the course of the last 10 years is the level of awareness of what's possible. When we decided to start GoCardless, most of our friends just thought we were unemployed and couldn't get a job.”

Today’s guest is one third of the British equivalent of the PayPal mafia, Hiroki Takeuchi, co-founder and CEO of payment giant GoCardless. 

GoCardless is a global payment network taking the pain out of getting paid for more than 50,000 businesses worldwide from multinationals to SMB, processing over $15 billion of payments annually across more than 30 countries.

Hiroki and his fellow co-founders Matt Robinson (who now runs successful property tech startup Nested) and Tom Bloomfield (who has recently stepped aside as CEO of challenger bank giant Monzo) have raised over $120 million across 7 rounds of funding, securing $75 million in their latest series E.

But it’s not been an easy ride. 

“The first round of investment that we raised was definitely the hardest. I think we had something like 64 ‘no’s’ before we got our first ‘yes’.”

Hiroki has been on a real journey, not just professionally, but personally too, having to physically rebuild his body after a horrific cycling accident in 2016 that left him paralysed from the waist down, drastically altering how he manages himself and the business day to day.

We chat about:

• The hardest part of starting a business
• The hockey stick growth curve
• How to mentally prepare to fundraise
• When co-founders leave the business
• Choosing a CEO and building a leadership team
• The future vision for GoCardless

Links:

• Nested
• Monzo

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