Paul van der Boor: The Power of Embedded Finance - Revolutionizing Everyday Business

This transcription is AI-generated and may contain errors or inaccuracies.

Leszek

My name is Leszek and I will be talking with Paul van der Boor about balancing innovation with regulatory compliance and the role of product leadership in fintech. Starting from the top, Paul, can you walk us through your career journey, highlighting the key milestones that led you to your current role as head of Product at Mollie?

Paul van der Boor

Yeah, sure, yeah. So by way of introduction, I'm leading the partnership. I'm co lead of the partnerships domain, which is an area in Mollie that looks after platform customers. So those are integrations with e commerce parties like Shopify, WooCommerce, SaaS parties or marketplaces. So this is really, we kind of work in domains and this is a domain of about 100 people that thinks through how do we kind of not only build products for these tech platforms, but also how do we distribute our product, our products at large? Because this is on the one hand a customer group, but on the other end also a distribution channel for us. So how I got there, I started my career, I was a bit of an entrepreneur in university.

I started Ecometrics and based on those two things I was like, I want to do something entrepreneurial. I also want to do something. I started Econometrics. I also want to do something that is tangible and where you can use your kind of more analytical brain. And so I ended up in the world of investing via and I did basically did an internship at a private equity company. I really enjoyed it. The short stint abroad in consulting for a year in South Africa.

And I came back and I worked at an investment firm for the next four or five years, which is an incredible opportunity because you work for a very small team with very smart people. And the person that hired me and led the firm is a very successful entrepreneur in his own right and incredible person to learn from. And I kind of got to that opportunity at like age 22, 23 to kind of learn from his team and be in a conversation in boardrooms, kind of talk about strategic topics, about buying companies, about strategic direction. And so it really taught me a lot about business. And as we used to say, it was better than business school. Right?

You really kind of, you work hard, but you also learn incredible amounts. And that I did a little bit shorter than five years. At some point though, I kind of felt like this need of, okay, how do I kind of do really cool stuff with my life? And some of my friends were working in starting businesses or entrepreneurs or working in the technology space. And what I really loved was that they were thinking about how they should change the world for the better And I felt sometimes in an investment role, you're also a bit of a tourist, right? You feel like you come in, you're relatively inexperienced, you kind of talk to these topics, but you've never been with your boots in the mud, you've never really done it yourself. And so I decided, okay, I can either stay here.

There's a lot of advantages. It was incredible place work. But I also am drawn to kind of finding a bit more of an exciting journey in the world of technology. And so I looked around in over like company that was on, on a high growth trajectory and to really kind of experience what it's like to, to build a company. And I joined, I kind of came across Molly. I joined Molly as chief of staff. At the time we were almost 50 people.

And Molly, I was at the right time, the right moment. I picked up my laptop the first day of work. I then immediately got sent home because everything closed and Covid happened And Molly was really well positioned. Molly, by the way, is a payments company that helps businesses all sizes to get paid online and also do a lot of other beautiful things that I'm sure we'll get to talk about and model is really well positioned to have all of these offline businesses to go online and kind of, yeah, sell stuff online and process payments. And so we grew very fast. I was, As I said, 150 people. Two or three years later we were 850 people and we raised, I don't know, in total somewhere like 800, $900 million in funding.

And that was a super exciting journey. I kind of made my way through the company. I did operations, I worked a bit in the finance team, fundraising. I did go to market on a couple of markets and then I kind of were led into the, in the world of products. And the reason for that was, well one, you also get the opportunity, right? And I got that opportunity. But if I think about the choice that I made was like if you work in a tech company, working in the, in the commercial area or in the operational area, that's so interesting.

But, but really thinking to okay, how do we go from A to B and where's the future? That's really what you do in product. And I think that was where I really thought I can kind of make the most impact here and really kind of work on steering the ship in a way that will be more successful with each other. And so I really got drawn to that, to this area. And yeah, that's been a super interesting journey for myself and for the team with Me.

Leszek

Fascinating. Fascinating. I was actually, I was going to ask about the decision or the reason by why or reason behind selecting or actually focusing on the product side. But I think, I mean that resonates very much with me that it has a lot of impact but also it's, I think it's, it requires looking not just, you know, what's around the corner, but more long term view of the product of the business. It's fascinating to me.

Paul van der Boor

Yeah. And I think there is quite a lot of overlap between an investment job and a product role. Right. Because I think one of the most important things of our product role is also deciding, okay, what are you committing yourself to in your team? Right.

As soon as you're building something, you're, it always takes a little bit longer than you expect and you always, a little bit, you're working on the topic for a while and so depending of course on the nature of the, of the product, but it always, I think, understanding really, okay, where are we going to create value for customers and for our business? Right. And what, and how do we prioritize these different opportunities? It's very similar to a, to an investment job where you get a lot of opportunities to kind of invest in different businesses or in investment thesis and you get it on your desk and you try to kind of evaluate according to a set of criteria, okay, what is the, where's the place I'm going to put my money and my time in. And in a product role. I think that's a mindset that is very important. Right.

And I think if you grow from a junior product person to somewhat more senior, you learn also that it's not about, it's not about making everybody happy or saying yes to a lot of things or supporting a variety of stakeholders, but really rethinking to okay, how do you create value for ourselves and our customers? I think that's, and that's really needed in both jobs.

Leszek

I think it requires every single product person to actually understand what problem they are solving. And I think in many departments or areas of the company, people forget about it.

Forget about what is the actual problem that you're solving for the client. I think this, this is the, also the, the overlap or the common thing that in investing where you actually think about what's the problem, what's the addressable market for that problem, does the solution actually solve?

I mean that's whether the proposed solution actually solved the problem, et cetera. I think many cases or many areas of other areas of the company, say sales for example, or administration it's not, you know, the main thing. Yeah. I mean that's.

Paul van der Boor

And in both worlds. And then we'll stop with the analogies. I think you also burn yourself if you don't do your homework well enough. Right. So an investment opportunity that comes across and you haven't really done enough due diligence as called. Like you haven't really asked a couple of questions. Underlying, okay, why is it growing so fast?

Is there, is there a catch somewhere? Right.

You need to be quite skeptical, right? Because if things are presented too good, someone is trying to sell you something that there's always a question, okay, is it as good as being presented? And similarly, if you're in a product rule and commercial stakeholders or other stake or style, yeah, this is the next big thing. We need to build this because their customer told them. So if you don't ask a couple of follow up questions and you really understand, okay, how does this work?

Is it really viable? Is it feasible and usable? Then you build something that in the end of the day doesn't add a lot of value. I've seen this happening a lot in our business also go wrong. Right.

Where something's presented, everybody gets on the train, everybody's exciting. But then for reasons that you might have been able to find out a bit earlier in the process, things don't generate the impact that you expect. And I think that's the mindset and the work you need to do in a product role. Probably everybody in a company is like, okay, how does this really work? And it requires you to be very rigorous in your disciplined into understanding, okay, how do things work? And indeed falling in love with a problem also to a large extent.

Leszek

Exactly. I'd like to unpack the concept of embedded finance. This is a term we hear often. And could you explain what the metad finance is or means? And also what's. How does it fit the context of Maldives business model?

Paul van der Boor

Yeah, I think, I think, I mean if you would look at the definition, right. I think embedded finance in itself means you're basically integrating in a somewhat seamless manner a financial service or financial product into an everyday platform for experience. And I think the typical example that I think people really can relate to is you go on your website, book an airline ticket, right? And you, you came there to, to go to fly from Paris to Amsterdam. And on top of that kind of flow, at some point someone also asks you, hey, do you need a, do you also need a, a car? Right?

And so that's a journey that's really embedded into, into that flight buying journey. And the same way we do the same with embedded finance, that means that hey, using a software platform and on top of that you've embedded a financial product which can be payments, which can be lending, which can be a bank account, a card that you, a credit card that you want to receive. And why this is so interesting, I think is because it really gives you opportunities to kind of almost revolutionize everyday services and businesses. And the really exciting part about embedded finance is that normal, not so digital businesses get the opportunity to kind of become more digital and as a way to kind of re revolutionize the business. I think an example is if you go into, if you go into a restaurant, right, you need to pay there, you, you kind of make a reservation beforehand, they end up there, they need to pay at some point and you walk out of the restaurant. I think what software platforms that we're working with are doing, for instance, is that they, you create a reservation immediately, on top of that you pay. They maybe store your car details somewhere.

You, you, you enjoy your dinner, have a nice glass of wine and you walk out. And because the, the platform already understands, hey, this is the person and this is their card details, you don't even have to go anymore, wait for your check, you just automatically pay, right? And all these type of examples I think have the opportunity to create new experiences that are better than the standalone alternative, but also they create a world that's much more inclusive, gives new opportunities to different consumer groups, but also businesses. And what I really like, also what we're doing with Mulle is that the way we've always been designed and the way Alia Mool started the company 14 years ago was really to kind of help small businesses to be really successful. And in that same journey, embedded finance helps tech platforms across the board to help all sorts of small businesses, whether they're in retail or in hospitality or whether they're gyms, to kind of really run their local offering much better. And I think that's the thing that really gets me excited about embedded finance. It really has the opportunity to do better than we had to give them access to means to invest in their business to grow.

And that's very much a journey and a mission that we're supporting. Also here at my job, could you.

Leszek

Describe in what way does Molly actually solve this problem or help the those small businesses to, to flourish? How do you exactly solve this problem for those people?

Paul van der Boor

Yeah, so for instance, I worked or we worked with a team on, on the Molly Capital. So coming from investment world I've been in the process of, of trying to attract financing, right? So you, you might have a business and you want to buy new machinery or you want to invest in working capital. Um, so for all sorts of reasons, people want to invest in a business to, to grow and to, to do better. Now if you do that and you go to a local bank, it takes forever, right? You need to, you need to make a financial statement, you need to write a business plan, you need to go to the, you need to find the right people. And after a three to six month process where you've done a lot of work, you need maybe get audited numbers from your accountant, then at some point they come back and they either give you yes or no.

And it's a pretty binary flow. And so you might have done a lot of work there. And as a result of that, and this is very well documented across the European Union people, small businesses have a financing gap, right? So they would like to get access to funding to grow their business, but they don't have access to it. Within Molly, we are servicing over 240,000 small to large to kind of medium sized to large enterprise type businesses. And so a lot of these customers don't have access to that funding. And so what we've done with Molly is that based on the data that they have of us, because we see how much revenue they make, we automatically track that and we say, hey, if you want, there's funding available to you and it just takes two clicks of a button to get that access.

And I think this is really the power of embedded finance. It takes an existing platform, all of Those customers, those 240,000 businesses are already on our platform and we know them, we've done a lot of research, we've done our customer due diligence on them, we know their data, right, and how well they're moving. And now, and now they get a really integrated and seamless experience because two clicks of the button they get excellent funding and they don't have to do any applications, it's just there. And that creates a whole lot of opportunity and a whole lot of security, right? Because now you might be an E commerce store that really wants to do something exciting for the Christmas period and Black Friday, and you want to buy a bit more stock to grow your business that year, then you can kind of just flexibly press a button, get access to that funding and then sell a lot more during that period. And I think that's how financial services can really support also our economy to do much better I think that's a example of an embedded finance journey and I can give you of course a couple more. But in the end everything that we do is about creating products that are really easy to use and to make financial services really simple. Right?

And whether it's payments, whether it's lending or other products should be simple, it should be accessible and, and it really allows all of these businesses to grow and, and prosper.

Leszek

Nice, nice. It's also, I, I can also, there's bunch of benefits and I can also think about other ones like in terms of financing and lending there's so their risk is reduced in a significant way for the, for the people with capital. It's like it's database. It's not random, it's not like you mentioned all the paperwork etc, but the other side, the one that actually owns the capital and distributed or allocated, it's so much safer. On the other hand as well, right? It's, it's, it's not, it's database like you just said.

Paul van der Boor

Yeah, exactly. So I think that's also why this is going to work, right? It's, it's, it's, it's better because we will get better customer experiences. The, the ability to, to adopt and to kind of get access to the product is much faster and accessible. And on the other hand it's much more data driven. Indeed. So that means there's no person in a bank picking up a file, reading through information that might or not be correct.

All of that work is done. So you kind of save a lot of cost, operational hassle and then indeed on the decision making. I think risk based decision making based on data are a lot better than the alternative. Right?

It's real time. You can see how much performance is happening with the business the day before. So this is really an example of how financial services will really become a lot better than the alternative. And that's also why I'm very hopeful that Mollies and other, other parties like us are going to really make this a lot. This industry that has been like a financial services industry is of course quite a weird one, right? It's been relatively profitable. Reason for that is the barriers to entry are relatively high. Right.

You need to get a lot of regulatory licenses. So innovation in banks and other types of parties have been relatively low compared to other sectors and it's not so easy to just disrupt those. And I think the whole fintech sector with parties like Molly are really now able, based on new experiences, new forms of data to really try to make things better. And I think that's a super exciting journey as well.

Leszek

True, for sure. So what it's like to build a product in that, you know, hyper growth fintech environment, what it's like, it doesn't seem like a walk in the park.

Paul van der Boor

I mean, I don't know, like, I don't think it's necessarily more difficult than other parts of the software world. Right.

I think building good products in itself is a very challenging thing. And I think the added complexity, of course in a, in a fintech environment is that it's regulated. So that means that experimentation in itself is slightly more difficult. Right.

So I think in a SaaS setup, in a normal software environment, if you're Google, you can kind of do a bit of a B testing and then you know, hey, this is a better or worse outcome. You test now in certain areas of our business as possible. But in other areas of our business, for instance, launching new ways to do onboarding your customer, new ways to add new, new payment mechanisms, maybe other ways to move money, some of this stuff really requires you to be quite rigorous on what you can do and cannot do because, um, because there is a regulator that watches over your shoulder and that's really going to ask you, okay, if you're launching new products and services, have you done your homework? Have you done the checks around what kind of risks are involved if you mitigated those risks? And so that means that the added complexity in our world is that experimentation is somewhat more limited and the time to market and the thinking you have to do in advance of that, slightly more complex. On the other hand, some of it, it's not always bad, right? I think sometimes it also is a good forcing mechanism for you to think before doing.

Have we thought about everything? Right?

Have we thought about all the risk? Have we thought about our key assumptions here? And so if the, and I think that's an evolution that also has happened in our company. Maybe at the onset you really think about compliance and risks and all of those words as something that's really hampering you. I think when, when you get more mature as a business, as Molly has done, some of these functions also become a way to kind of support the actual outcomes. Right.

And to create better products. And I think that's also a journey that we're on here as well. So to kind of summarize, I think it is all of the complexities of normal product building, which is not really hard with the other complexity of regulatory scrutiny, because the, the worst outcome is that you do something and that the, the bank, the, the, the Dutch central bank which is owning, is basically regulating our business as well as the UK FCA is telling us, hey, what you've done there is not okay. And we're going to, I don't know, find you or worse, right? That would be pretty bad.

Leszek

Do you have any sort of rule of thumb or framework or a mental model, if you will, for balancing the innovation with stability or compliance? Is it, I don't know, just guessing, be as fast as possible but compliant at the same time or.

Paul van der Boor

Yeah, you can't cut any corners there, right? Everything has to hold up to the. It has to be compliant and it has to be in accordance with rules and regulation and there's absolutely no shortcut that we will take there. I think on stability, I think that's another interesting thing, right? I think for payments business like Molle, stability is absolutely critical, right? Because you provide infrastructure that our companies, our customers are relying on. So that means that even more important than doing new stuff is.

Well, that's like, that is that you are a stable platform, that you have super high uptime. We talk about 9, 9, 9% uptime. Really, really high performance. And that means that throughout the years we also always have to invest a lot in stability and making sure that our systems are scalable. And that's of course a bit of tension between making sure things are secure, stable, reliable versus versus sometimes moving forward and doing innovation. Right.

And I think there's no, there's no real good answer for like how you do that. I think what I've seen, and also in an individual product team, you have the same discussion, right? It's like, are we building this new feature or are we going to work on some tech depth? I don't really like the word, but on cleaning up our code and making things more scalable. And I think the one lesson I have on it is that communication is the most important, right? Different stakeholders have different perspectives and bring different values to the table and it's really about understanding everybody and where they're coming from, where this goes wrong, if is one group of people is having too much power, right? And they only look at the compliance side of the, of the world or it's only engineers that only care about like that only care about stability or it's a product person that pushes through and just wants to move forward with new features, right?

In the end of the day, somewhere in the balance of the different opinions and the different people on the table is the right answer. And I think that's really the One thing you cannot do enough of is really communicate and checking in.

Okay, where are we? What does it mean? And that's where team rituals and team discipline also really comes into play.

Leszek

Collaboration rather than handovers, in a sense.

Paul van der Boor

Yeah, that's a nice way to put it. Exactly.

Leszek

Just out of curiosity, what's wrong with the word tech or the phrase tech debt for you? Why do you like it? What, you don't like it?

Paul van der Boor

Basically, it's such a black and white way of phrasing things. Right.

It assumes there's an end state somewhere and only if you solve this tech depth, you end up there. Right.

And I mean, I of course understand the, the context in which the word is used, but I think, I think in the end of the day, I've never, like, if, if you would, if you would commit your team to just kind of set up the perfect architecture and endlessly build on the scalability of the systems, the reliability, all the other beautiful things, then that is a, that is a. That is a task that they will never finish because you can always do better. Right.

And so it's really about understanding with a team, like, what's acceptable, what's not acceptable. And I think that's a, that's a great skill. That's not black and white. It doesn't mean that if you finish this that you don't have tech depth anymore. It means really like, hey, we as a team want to reach these goals. And that means that we're going to kind of accept that this is built in a relatively minimal way. And some other stuff we really want to test and have absolutely the best performance.

Like we want to build a Ferrari or we want to build a, maybe a bike, because both, because in different circumstances, both would fit the purposes of the, of the much better. So I think that's the. So I think the tech dev word is really. It avoids the nuance that's behind the discussion. That's what I dislike about that phrase.

Leszek

I'd like to shift gears a bit and talk about the landscape of the industry. I think it's rapidly evolving. And could you share your thoughts on the most significant trends or shifts you're observing in the finance or payment or specifically payments landscape?

Paul van der Boor

Yeah. And of course, I think, I think. And it's, of course, I'm also very biased because this is the area that I work in. But what is fundamentally changing? And maybe I can tell you a bit of a story about Mollie. Right.

So Mollie got started in about 40 years ago, and at the time the banks were the Way to do payments, right? So you would build your e commerce website and you would maybe go to ING here in the Netherlands and they would give you access to a local payment method, Ideal. And that was an incredible hassle. So, so, right. I think at some point Alia Moore, the founder of our business, built a SaaS company, Message Bird, and he also wanted to accept payments there. And he, they and the team kind of noticed, okay, this is incredible difficult to do. Let's build a more modern API that will give you access as a developer to really easily process payments to get paid and actually build a business.

So fast forward, they kind of bundled all these payment methods and you get out of the box, you get credit cards, you get ideal, you get PayPal. Right?

That came out of a box. Now these e commerce businesses at the same time also had an evolution, right? So at some point everybody built their own website and now people were looking at that and they said, hey, if everybody's building the same website, I can also build a SaaS solution for it. And so e commerce businesses didn't build their own stuff anymore, but rather they use Shopify, WooCommerce and all the other e commerce platforms. And so what happened was that instead of directly building out your website, you could get this out of the box and instead of having to directly go to a payments offering, Ideal MasterCard, you could go to a SaaS version mod. And these two, these two things colluded and now we got embedded finance because all these e commerce platforms then said, okay, we can also solve your payments needs. All right, so Molly wouldn't necessarily have to go directly to that business, but rather on top of Shopify or other companies, you would get, you would get the payment solution of Molly out of a box by just clicking a button in Shopify, WooCommerce only.

And they own the relevant e commerce part. And so did our bad. Right?

And I think that satisfaction of e commerce was very interesting. Now the same is happening now in another area of the world and I think that's happening in northern E commerce because I think that was the first industry that where it happened, but also in all of the other verticals. And I think that's where the most interesting thing is happening now in payments is that across all of these old school industries where it's in B2B, whether it's in B2C, SaaS solutions are coming up and they are vertical SaaS typically, and they are powering all of these individual businesses. And on top of that they will get access to a lot of financial service.Right.

And that's where embedded finance comes into play. Now where we are playing in that area is that we are really enabling all of these SaaS platforms and all of these marketplace and other tech platforms to make that leap to kind of say what has happened here with Shopify, where you kind of get payments and other things out of a books. We're going to have the same journey for all of these platforms, but now in, as I said, in gyms, in restaurants, in different industrial goods, and you can't name it in any part of our economy, things will kind of morph into one and payments are going to be essential. Right.

And what we see is happening is the way this payments gets distributed is no longer you as a single business go to a party that provides you with an in person payment solution or, or goes to an online solution, but rather you go to parties like, like SaaS. Platform and modeling will be in the back power that year and that's, I think that's quite exciting because it will make a lot of these customer journeys a lot better. It will make, make things work a lot more smooth and you'll get all of these new and exciting products that will come out of it. Whether it's in lending, whether it's in. And that's the examples that I talked about. I think that's a dramatic shift from where the industry has been and there's a couple of reasons why this happening is cloud. It's where the hardware that you need for an in person payment is changing.

You can do it from a tablet or on your phone and all of these journeys will kind of converge into one. And I think that's, I think that's really what's most interesting about what's happening now in the payments industry, that the way we are consuming financial services will change.

Leszek

That's very interesting. My understanding is that you guys are actually, your intention is to catch that wave. You're probably already on that wave considering the, you know, the growth, the financing, everything, you know, that happened so far.

Is that right?

Paul van der Boor

Yeah, we've been doing this for a while. Right.

So also working with these tech platforms. Right.

As I said, we were quite early on the journey of E commerce platforms and we've kind of been doing that for the past many years. And so there's a couple of reasons why. So what kind of, there's a couple of reasons what you need to kind of empower and build the infrastructure for these platforms. Right.

So if you're a SaaS business, so what are you looking for you're looking for a party that gets you really clean and moving APIs, right. And makes it really developer friendly to work with your PSP in this case. But you also need someone that kind of understands the local business because you want to have a tailored payment solution and every like that's a complexity of payments. Right. In Germany, the way to pay is very different than in France to versus Italy. So you need a player that can kind of help you with all of those local markets and then you need to deal with all of these. And that's, I think what's particularly strong about molding where heritage is coming from.

If you're a tech platform, you're, you're, you, you itself are representing a lot of your customers on their end, right? So you might be a hotel software, but then you have a lot of hotels attached to it, right. So you need a product party that then helps you deal with all the hassle and operational load of working with all these smaller businesses. And that's I think, where Molly is really catching up on this way. Because on the way we have got really good technology and we're building out a lot of cool technology. But on the other hand, we also really understand what it's like to be servicing a smaller business or medium sized business and to kind of help them work through support and onboarding. And we kind of offer that basically as a service to all of these tech platforms so that they don't have to deal with the complexity.

But we take it in on our end.

Leszek

By the way, the story of you guys actually raising roughly $800 million, that's my understanding. That's an impressive figure. And I was wondering if you could share a little bit of insight into what this process was like and you know, key lessons learned. It's always, you know, fundraising journeys is always interesting topic for, for our target audience, I believe.

Paul van der Boor

Yeah, I think, I mean, I mean of course a lot of it is timing as well, right. So I think understanding when your business is ready and the market is ready for going to kind of fundraising. I think our founder, Adam Moore has incredible, I mean he has got the experience and also incredible intuition of when that timing is right. And I think a couple of lessons there is. I think what Molly has done really well in that process is be very well prepared. I think we were talking to potential investors for a while. Right.

I think fundraising in itself is not a binary thing, but rather you kind of build up a network for a while, you kind of talk to these investors and you don't really kind of start that process when you're ready to push the bottom, but perhaps you already start quite a lot earlier and you build a bit of an ecosystem around you. And then when we were ready to kind of do the fundraising, I think we had a really strong team internally here that built a great story, showed a lot of data. Right.

And. And that took a bit of preparation. Right. So the maturity of being able to show, okay, what is your LTV to cock, what is your. What are your growth rates? And really kind of let the data beef up the story about your growth and the opportunity ahead. I think that's very important in a fundraising story.

And yeah, be really on top of that narrative. I think Molly had really big dreams. I think maybe a bit unlike the local Dutch market or maybe European businesses sometimes. We also had an American CEO at the time. I think he also helped us push there. But I think our vision, I think, yeah, man, we had a really strong vision. I think our.

Led by our founder, by our management team, and I think people at the board. I think we really wanted to dream big. I think that also came across right, because an investor is not going to put any money in if it doesn't have, like, if it's a small business and you want to stay small, that's fine, but then it's not a venture tech business, right? Venture.

Leszek

It's about growth. Yeah.

Paul van der Boor

Venture capitalists are looking for placing an investment and then have outsized return because they take quite a lot of risk, of course, because that future isn't there. And so they need to see and feel within the air of the company and the people they talk to in the industry and how to portray it, there's an opportunity to do something really big. And I think we at the time, and still are on that journey of making that impact. And I think that's what people get. So I think creating that type of excitement is super important in a fundraising journey.

Leszek

To your point, very early in our discussion, you said after the investment sort of engagement or being engaged in the investment space, you selected a company to join, which was growing fast, I believe. And I believe this was one of your.

Or maybe I'm wrong, but I'm just. I think you also sort of approached it as an investor, but of your. Of your own, you know, time and effort, and you join Molly. Like it was a very, you know, conscious process and conscious decision to join this particular company. Not other out there. That's my. I sort of, like, I never thought.

Paul van der Boor

About it like that, but I guess I was Like I think, I think having a, if you're thinking about doing a next career step, right. I think like we all have finite time, right? I mean that's the most, that's the most truthful. I mean the most truthful about our human experience is that we don't have, we don't have all the time in the world. So if you're, if you're committing to do something and joining a company is a, is at least a three or maybe a five year commitment, right. I think much shorter doesn't always give you all the benefits. Then you need to be mindful of where you're going to spend your time on.

And the problem is of course you don't really know, right? It's a bit of a, you don't have all the information to take a really good decision, but you can be very clear about what your own criteria are and what is the thing that gets you exciting. I think for me, my previous firm's motto was building better businesses. And I, so on top of everything it wasn't, was, okay, I want to be part of a company where I really learn how to build a business. And where do I learn that better than a high growth company? Because that's where a lot of interesting stuff happenings, right? You need to hire people, you need to think through how to structure companies, you need to restructure your organization a couple of times.

You need to think about how you build a culture or how you evolve a culture rather. You need to think through how to, how to set up new teams, how to go to new products, how to build product market fit and new customer segments. And I think all of those things came for me at Molly. Did I know exactly the type of journey that was ahead of me when I joined Now. I was super lucky and luck plays.

Leszek

A part as well, right?

Paul van der Boor

Absolutely. Like you can't, like you can join the best startup in the world and it might fail. Right.

Two months later so I'm, I'm not saying you have all the control in the world here, but what is important, I think it's very important.

Leszek

Nice, Nice. My final question or topic would like to discuss is your leadership lessons. You know, throughout, throughout your career, especially in your current role, what are some of your most valuable leadership lessons you've learned?

Paul van der Boor

I really think the most important thing that I had to learn was when you come from a kind of more investment background, right. Which is very meritocratic by the way. But also everybody there is very ambitious and is expecting to work quite hard, right. And it's also very. I think the culture that you come, that I came from was very, very opinionated and very. And, and, and the, the standards for performance were super high. And so it's very much on the challenging part and challenging yourself to do better, challenging the companies you work with to do better, challenging the management team you're working to do better.

And I really like that, that environment, but it takes also a certain person, a certain mindset, right? When I joined Molly or. And I worked in different teams and I started to lead different teams, I think what is very important that I had to learn was you can't rely only on challenge all the time, right? Because people will. Won't like you very much and it's not typically very enjoyable. So I always think about this framework. Karen there.

Someone once asked me, okay, well, what do you think is the right balance between caring and daring for. And I said, good question. Probably should be 60, 40 or so. A little bit more care than there where Darius is planning a part. And care is like personally first. And so then the person replied, yeah, that's wrong. It is.

You need to care 100% and only then you get to dare someone to do better. Right?

So I think what I, what I think what I think is very important while working with teams is like, you need to fully invest in your team and, and enjoy having fun with each other. Care about someone's personal life before you even get the opportunity to challenge them to do better and to. And to do great things. Right?

And I think I don't believe in the type of leadership or boss where you're kind of just like Steve Job style, perhaps like where he's shouting at everybody, okay, it needs to be on the other side. Like not, not a lot of us get to be Steve Jobs, right, That I. And I haven't seen. And unless you're a brilliant inventor yourself, I think you also shouldn't try. So I think that would be my main lesson, really invest in your, in your personal relationships. And I think another thing that I'll say about it is also if your team and yourself are also having fun, right, Things also, like, really your things start to gel a lot more. And I think that kind of sense of joy that you get when things are going well, when people are actually showing up to work with a lot of excitement on what they're working on, you'll see that things will go better, the quality will be better, and things will go a lot more efficient.

And I think an analogy that I once heard was, I think it was in a postcast and maybe resonates a bit with historians. Like, if someone asks you about. About a Ferrari, do you think it's an efficient car? I mean, nobody will say a Ferrari is an efficient car. Like, it's a very fast car. Right. And if you think about work, we often think about a Ferrari like, it needs to be got down fast.

You need to get to the destination quickly, perhaps very flashy at all. But actually, that's. That's the wrong metaphor. And you really should go for efficiency. You should. You shouldn't kind of be a fast flash and then take a lot of energy, a lot of fuel, and then be tired the next day. Actually, you should kind of efficiently go from A to B.

And we have not spent too much fuel on the different tasks. So don't be a Ferrari, but rather something very. Perhaps a tester or something very eco friendly. Because that's, I think, much better for a team and a company culture to.

Leszek

Really excel long term, especially. Yeah, I mean, this. This. I. I love this phrase about caring and daring.

And you have. That. You have. Have the one. The. The first one first, and then.

Then actually challenge. I think there's also. I think in that balance, I think there's always. What I've observed in the market is always. Sometimes there's also.

People forget about the daring part. There's also a balance needed there, I think. I mean, that's precisely what. What you said is what I believe.

Paul van der Boor

Yeah, that's. I mean, that's the other way. Right.

So I particularly probably would position myself into going too quickly to the daring part that I. And that's not because I think I'm. I don't care about people, but just because my mindset was very much colored in a way where I was like, let's do crazy things together. And that's where I get a lot of my energy from. I think the opposite is also very true. Right.

I think people, managers that just care and are very soft and talk about a lot of stuff, but aren't helping people to grow in their career and to do things that they're proud of and to create impact that also is completely, like, disempowering. Right.

And people just check out completely. So I think it's 100% of both. Like, you cannot just care about someone and not ask them to do great things and vice versa.

Leszek

Great insights, Paul. Thank you very much. It was super valuable for me. Thank you for your time.

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