Tom Pope: Co-founder & CEO at Adfin

0:00Tom Pope:Hello and welcome back. We are here with Tom Pope, co-founder and CEO of Adfin. How are you doing? Thank you for joining me, Tom. Yeah, thanks so much. Excited to be here. Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, can you just give us a quick background into who you are and what you're building? Yeah. So my name's Tom. My background, gosh, is relatively boring, to be honest. I was a consultant, a boring old consultant, and then got fortunate to join WellPay at an exciting time in WellPay's growth. saw well played through a number of acquisitions uh quite a few actually an ipo and two acquisitions and then went to join a company called tink which is a fantastic swedish startup then got acquired again by visa and then having been acquired quite a few times thought oh this is kind of fun maybe i should give this whole startup thing again myself and that's why i'm here yeah i mean you got the magic touch i was doing my research i was like i'm not sure about that you overestimate my important to be there.

0:58Tom Pope:Or like maybe you're like a lucky charm or something, but you know, you spent like a decade in fintech and you've been through, yeah, what did you say? Two acquisitions and an IPO just at WorldPay and then Tink as well. It's like, you know, I think normally people spend some time at startups and most startups don't see the success that you'd like. And so you try out a few and maybe one of them is a success, but that hasn't been your experience. What was it like going through, you know, various acquisitions of both Tink and WorldPay? yeah well i mean and i mean it's actually four because deloitte was acquired monitor was acquired by deloitte well well pay ipo'd uh then the ipo'd well pay was acquired by inventive inventive was acquired by fas and tink was acquired by fia tink was acquired by visa so four slash five uh i think i'm ridiculous i was love to claim at the time i was this kind of really mature great corporate employee that took it really well and immediately networked myself with the new organization and did all the things you're supposed to do quite the opposite uh often i was a grumpy bastard sometimes resisting change i think now the benefit of hindsight my piece of advice for everybody is always the second that acquisition happens it's a new company don't try and cling on to anything you've been acquired you either get on board with the new company or you leave there's no resistance there's no point trying to change anything it's happened it's out of your control get on with it uh i think i got better at that by the end of my career but now i'm certainly not lucky john those things all happened despite me not because of i was very grateful they did because it kind of yeah it kind of gives you an extra free opportunity in your career right like you're doing one thing and then suddenly a bunch of new doors open because you've been acquired it's quite good yeah and and what about your you know like i said you spent like you spent like a decade in fintechs what about your experience both at tink and world pay kind have made you want to to take the leap into entrepreneurship yourself yeah i mean i was i was um i always have this itch right i mean i say i suspect it's true that most founders have got some little bit of entrepreneurialism in their background somewhere like i mean i was first doing entrepreneurial things when i was four years old right it's a classic cliche founder story but i was you know stapling bits of paper together and stamping it with an hour and selling it to my sisters so that I could take all their pocket money every month.

3:21So I've always had a bit of that in me at university, in the first bits of Bob's. But it was only after working in places like Tink that I thought, hang on a second, this is actually achievable, right? I really could build a multi-billion dollar business here. I've worked with people who have done that, and I think I could do it too. I was also super fortunate to meet my co-founder who, I have a skill set, but there's a lot of things I also don't know. and I was fortunate to meet someone who has like exactly the opposite skill set to me uh so that we can kind of come together as the right team at the right time um but yeah I mean I learned a lot I guess about payment infrastructure when I was at WorldPaint Inc that's important um I suppose you learn a lot about people and you find great people and one of the reasons we've been able to get the traction we have is just that we brought in the very very best people that work with us um over our careers so you kind of you learn a lot about infrastructure you learn a lot about the people and you learn a lot about the market and adfin is solving a problem that we very much saw in payments you know payments was all about e-com it was all about point of sale you know no one was really looking after this huge segment of the economy which is not amazon or a sexy econ brand or you know going out and selling new software to restaurants you know there's a whole section of the economy which was just completely neglected and that's part of the reason we started at and as we saw that gap and want to jump into it and i want to touch on two things there firstly

4:48Tom Pope:so you're saying you've hired almost exclusively from companies that both you and your co-founder have worked at yeah i mean jipron has the most amazing network of engineers i have a pretty good network of go-to-market people most people at tink and it's most people at advent probably most people that have been well i say that because actually i did the same i went to tink right like I brought some of the best people I've ever worked with into Tink as well. But most people we've worked with have been people we've worked with before. I think we worked out the other day, the average time we have worked with someone at Adfin is seven years, which given that Adfin is a year and a half old, tells you what we need to know.

5:25Tom Pope:That's so interesting. Wow. And how were you able to convince those people to come on board with you? God, come on. What kind of a question is that? Everyone is convincing. They were queuing up at the doors. well you know tink you know tink world play you know they hit this huge scale successful exits and then all of a sudden you're like well come back in the trenches we're going to do it all again zero to one um were people like okay let's do it or or was there an element of you know i'm comfortable things are going well don't pull me out of this place yeah i mean there is there are there are a few people out there who are still in that that position i've still got people on my list they're in these positions that you know i'm still confident one day i'll get over um everyone has to make the right decision for their time of life you know i think some people you know they're at the right level of seniority post-acquisition you know the locking can be so good that it's impossible to get people out but actually you know for most people most people most of the time it's not and actually for most people it's not the money it's just one thing right like it's great if someone's going to give you a dollar per cash.

6:33But if in return, you hate your job and you hate your colleagues and you're putting up with loads of terrible politics and your IT is awful and your laptop breaks and they won't let you install the program that makes you more effective and you have to get permission every time you, you know, it's amazing how quickly your life can be made miserable at the wrong acquirer. So startups suddenly look very, very appealing compared to

6:55Tom Pope:now yeah yeah okay that makes sense um and you also touched a bit on traction i want to go slightly back in time uh you raised an eight i think eight million dollars eight million euro round um from index ventures visionary clubs angles from like across the ecosystem from some of the most amazing companies i want to talk about that seed round so if you could touch a bit on that process how you found that and then i want to get on to results traction what's happened since yeah sure um yeah i mean we did a pre-seed of four and a half million back in april last year and then we did another top up essentially of 8 million in January.

7:28How do we find it? I think both Chippen and I were fortunate in that because we both had relatively successful careers to date. Chippen was the founding engineer at a very successful banking software company called Mambu. I essentially got very lucky, as we've already heard, throughout my career. By the way, it's amazing how much investors would go, well, that must be something to do with you. It really, really wasn't. But anyway, I'll take it. but because of that we were fortunate to have a good uh network already within the community and investors were already reaching out and saying hey you guys are going to start something maybe they're better at spotting restless people um than we are in recognizing it ourselves i don't know but um they they reached out um we were actually introduced by index originally um i'd i had never known chiprin before the summer before we raised and you know we've both been introduced to a number of people it's kind of like speed dating and yeah we just happened to click and then sort of spent six months or so going to know each other germinating the idea kind of working out who the original founding team would be because we had a really strong team of people that we also call co-founders join from the beginning that was also really important to us right it was kind of me and japan but then there was also a wider group of people who who were key to the beginning um and yeah the fundraise you know we we were fortunate to have a decent amount of interest um and yeah i think kind of after that precede round we had really good initial traction and both our internals said look we're keen to do more we we want to up our stakes it was the right time for us because we wanted to put the foot on the gas we didn't want to go out to market and do a really extensive new fundraise so um that's what that's what we did and we were really happy with them right like they're both great investors they were giving us great advice we just thought what more what more could we want than more money from these people fantastic

9:18Tom Pope:Yeah, I mean, amazing. Phenomenal investors with some of the strongest track records in European tech. So yeah, absolutely. And what enabled you to raise that top up of 8 million? Was it traction that you'd seen? Was it a more robust product? What kind of unlocked that for you? yeah i think it was it was traction i mean we started in april um with nothing you know team team started it's a testament to the quality of our engineers that by june we had our first product live with our first customer um we had pretty quickly zeroed in on where in this huge space of business payments we wanted to start and it was accountants and we worked that out essentially by talking to everybody and working out who wanted to talk to us the most um and accountants wanted to talk to was the most we thought great that's where we're going um and then we spent from june till christmas really the second half of 2024 doubling down on really with those first initial customers doing all the classic playbook right like you work with your customers you ask them what their problems are they tell you you build a product you give it to them they say yes this works no this doesn't you iterate you build you bring on board more customers and so by the end of last year we're in a position like i actually can't remember what the numbers were now but we had like just a very decent set of customers who were really liking the product investors obviously they don't tell you they're doing this but they often call up those customers and say hey this out thing did you like it uh and i guess they said yes

10:49and so yeah the timing was kind of right from us and i respect you and since then have you

10:54Tom Pope:doubling down on kind of accountants are you branching out are you seeing other use cases Yeah. I mean, we've also always been quite hot on the legal space. Lawyers are larger firms and larger firms take longer to move. But we very much are still focused on accountants. We love them. They're still our top customers. I think we're pretty well embedded in that community now, which is great. One of the things we love about accountants is, you know, accountants want to be as useful as possible to the businesses that they serve. They are fundamentally in a professional services, client service role.

11:27So the more we can help accountants be useful, the more our relationship with the accountants improves. So with our product, it's not just suitable for accountants. It can be suitable for their customers. So a lot of our work is how do we make the product as useful as possible to the accountant and for the accountant's customers so that the accountant can take that role front and center in helping their businesses. So for Adfin, what that means is we help the accountant get paid, but then we also help the accountant get their customer get paid. so there's a really nice network effect there which we're really really doubling down on

12:00Tom Pope:amazing and can you share anything about traction or stats since either launch or since around yeah i mean what would i say um i mean this year we've been consistently growing at 50 percent month per month at least which is really strong um so yeah it's been it's been going really well and the kind of a nice thing is everything's sort of growing in lockstep right so we get more invoices in the platform we're seeing those invoices consistently turn into more payments and those payments consistently turn into revenue which is good I think we would love to see it grow even faster we've got some tricks up our sleeve we've got a few tweaks and things we're going to be doing to really accelerate it into next year but yeah so far I think we're I mean it's very hard because you as a founder you're constantly you never really know whether what you're doing is good right so you're always i'm you're incredibly humble to the fact that at any given time it could not go well so it's you never know but i'd say right now we're we are as happy as we could be while also being profoundly unhappy that it isn't going faster does that make sense yeah yeah you know what i mean yeah yeah that's just like the founder attitude or ambition right it's never quite good enough even if things are going well and you're probably always scared that things could crumble at any moment um i feel quite sorry for our team a lot of the time because we'll get on a call and we'll have had like a fact this literally happened last week we had the best week ever last week we had breached a breached a new ceiling and apparently after one of the guys says me so yeah why were you so why were you so grumpy i was like well because you know this thing over here he's like yeah but we've just had our best week ever i thought yeah but we have our best week ever like quite often yeah i think it can every top of the two because it's like when do you pause and celebrate yeah that's really interesting yeah and yeah is that something that you feel that you're you haven't done enough enough of yet it's like looking back and being like oh actually we've signed loads of clients we're doing good money things are going well I don't know if I don't know when I will ever feel comfortable enough to do that because for me the point on which you stop and celebrate is the point at which hubris is kicked in and some young whippersnapper company will come up and steal lunch so i don't know i'd love to i'd love to have that like you know that kind of you know you can picture it right you're all on a hillside in tuscany and you're you've got the champagne out and you're like guys we've done so well we've nailed it you know we are successful congratulations but i don't know if that will ever come to be honest yeah i wanted to come i was gonna say you know i think a lot of founders that that at that point it's no longer you know it's about the grind right it's about the challenge it's about you know what's it like pushing the rock up the hill or whatever yeah and so when you get there you're probably gonna even naturally make it harder for yourself so that you can get back into that grind feeling and you also mentioned like your your initial career as a consultant I always ask guests on this show who started their careers consultants that's how I started my career I did it for three years I was at PPC strategy and didn't like it not for me wanted to get into tech as soon as possible what was your experience as a was it your first graduate job it was um so honestly i don't know maybe maybe some of your listeners are resonating with this when i was at university essentially if you wanted to come to london and not be bankrupt and you didn't have tons of imagination like me at the time you either were a banker or a lawyer or consultant yeah i was never going to be a lawyer because the idea of it bored me i was never going to be a banker again because the idea of it bored me i thought consultants seem great you're going to work with lots of businesses i was fortunate to join a company called monitor which was a great boutique consultancy fantastic people we had a lot of fun um unfortunately maybe like yourself i was kind of joining at the end of the boom of consulting so you'd sit in the office and hear all these partners tell you about the glory days of concord and you know jetting into far flung places on private jets and the reality is you were sat in economy with your little ibm think at 3am cursing your life um but i still loved it it was you know then the company obviously got bought by deloitte that was a very different culture i guess going back to what i said about being acquired at that time and at that age i was not ready to accept the new world right i wanted the old world so that's why i chose to leave but that wasn't because deloitte wasn't a great company it was because i just had never chosen to work in a company like deloitte i'd chosen something that was almost the opposite and could you have seen yourself staying for longer if that hadn't had happened yeah i would have done another few years i think just because the the it is amazing the growth you get in those places and i to this day we still have a bit of a bias at and i always have a bit of a bias to hiring people who have kind of had that training like it sounds it's a bit like kind of you're broken in a bit right like you're you're taught the meaning of hard work like i think a lot of uk grads you know you can i was pretty cocky when my early 20s that I needed to be I needed that kind of like beating out of me by partner to monitor I'm kind of grateful they did um and I think I've been shown okay this is what you know a year of being on a really rubbish case and working till past midnight every night looks like until you've done that you sort of don't know you can do that um so yeah I still recommend it yeah I mean that's that's always a value that I because it's you don't learn hard skills in consulting but what you do learn is just how to work really really hard and you learn attention into detail and there's like a bit of like stakeholder management kind of stuff but i think that's that that is the value it's just like grinding and getting stuff done and being that and it's so hierarchical right you go in at the most junior level and you are literally like formatting slides and you're like what is this yeah crazy i can't wait for ai to disrupt it that said i am really good at spotting double spaces in slides now i used to have a really significant partner who would deliberately insert double spaces and then kind of like haul you over the coals if you hadn't spotted that there were these double spaces you know what was the point in that but i guess it teaches you a good idea well your thing is because also do make nice slide decks the problem is that whenever i've made slide decks in the last year or so i've done it exclusively on ai and it's like and they're not as good and i do spend then a lot of time moving things like two millimeters um no slide decks at abham i think we we've probably only made i don't know two or three probably for our fundraisers yeah and that's probably it right yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah.

18:28Tom Pope:Yeah, super interesting. But yeah, I always ask because I think it's, you do get a lot of ex-founder consultants. You know, there is a path there. It's not always immediate. They don't go from consultant to founder or entrepreneur, but there definitely is a path there. And I think there'll be some great analysis there, especially when you look at those top tier, either boutique-y or MBB-style consulting firms. There definitely does seem to be a path where people at least kind of, you know, do a bit of learning or training or grinding in those early years and then find their way to entrepreneurship.

18:56Tom Pope:um yeah yeah interesting of course it's running out of time what is like top top of mind for ad fin next six months uh oh good question um i suppose i could i could give you a really what would be the answer there's some really boring things right like we as as ever there's like a pizzic right like we know we need to get better at product marketing right but that's kind of i think for us we have got this really great traction now in the uk um we feel really good about it we want to accelerate it even further so top of mind for us is what do we do to accelerate further in the most sustainable way right like we're in a fortunate position where we don't need to raise any more funds right like we should be profitable before our next fundraise we want to be in that position where the uk business is just like a really good business right it's selling something that people want for the right price happy customers good business profitable um we definitely get there i think then the question is how do you put your foot on the gas as much as possible because we don't want to become one of those fintechs that get stuck in the uk um you know this is an amazing time in the company we're still relatively small everyone's super elastic like it's it's the time to do really really bold things right well we before you get too structured um so i think we definitely next year want to do a big market launch somewhere probably raise some money to support that but yeah so next six months get the uk into position where we feel like the business is just like super solid and then go replicate in other places go forward and multiply are you looking at specific markets are you thinking europe or us oh it's the age-old dilemma isn't it for founders the age-old dilemma europe is great because it's close and familiar us is great because it's big um and speaks your language i think we were we're learning we are leaning towards the us to be candid um it does change sometimes but we're leaning towards the us because we've heard from a number of customers that there are as similar or even bigger pain points there so what we're solving here in the uk um we like the size of market i've worked a lot um in america i've worked a lot with i mean i've been acquired mostly I've always been acquired by American companies, right?

21:12So I've spent a lot of time out there. I've got a good network out there as well. You know, as I said earlier, half the battle with these kind of companies is you just have to work with the very, very best people. We've been fortunate to have them so far at Adfin. I think when we go to America, we've got a good network of great people who can help us. Amazing.

21:29Tom Pope:Well, look, I'll be watching. I'll be cheering you on. It seems like you're crushing it and it's an exciting time to be at Adfin. But look, thank you so much for joining me, Tom. and if there's anything that I can do to help or support or talk about news at any point that's relevant, just let me know and I'd love to do whatever I can. That'd be great. No, I appreciate it. I'm glad we met. Yeah, me too. Me too, no. It's a shout out to Index. Yeah, exactly. Well done, Lewis. Yeah, amazing. Well, look, Tom, thank you so much. And let's stay in touch. Well, thanks so much. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

22:08Thank you.