Harrison Rose, Co-founder @ Paddle, Goodfit

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If you're an ambitious fan of a great idea, don't hesitate to reach out. This week's episode is with 1 Harrison Rose. Harrison is an extraordinary individual having co founded Paddle, the unicorn payments infrastructure provider for SaaS companies that has raised over $300,000,000 in funding, backed by Notion, KKR, FTV Capital, Kindred, and 83 North. The company now processes over 1,000,000,000 in payments annually with over 300 employees serving 4,000 customers worldwide in 245 countries.

He left Paddle in 2022 to pursue his next venture, GoodFit, a platform that maximizes sales and marketing efficiency with commercial data. It's a great listen, ladies and gents. This is Harrison. All indications, coming in, to the control center at this time indicate we are go.

Go. Go. Lift off. We have a lift off.

Harrison, really great to have you. Obviously, behind every great founder isn't even their story. Right? So tell us about the founding story of Paddle and your personal backgrounds kick us off.

It feels like a lifetime ago now. We started Paddle 12 years or so ago. My co founder Christian and I will be at work together for a little bit before that. And in terms of what we did before Paddle, we got off that a lot, but neither of us had really done anything to be honest with you.

We started, we were like 17, 18. We were playing with a couple of businesses together whilst we were in school, or at least I was in school. Christian Leskel, after GCSEs in the UK. I, I stayed until A levels, which is the qualification just thereafter.

So it was important to mention that because it meant I had at least one more qualification with someone in the business, which I never let go. I appeal all the time. So I didn't do a lot before for Paddle. It was effectively my first real business, to be honest with you, which is also kind of mental, given the journey that we went on.

In terms of how we started, Christian, who's the more technical of the 2 of us, will talk about our kind of yin and yang relationship in a bit, I guess. But he was trying to build software in his bedroom. He was trying to sell some quite bad invoicing software. If I'm completely honest, that he realized he was spending more time building out the infrastructure to sell that piece of software than he was the software itself.

Having chattered to others building software, we recognized that was a common problem. And then we had a bunch of hypothesis as to how we could solve that, which is why Paddle today is a revenue infrastructure company, helping software companies sell their products globally. We've certainly had a bit of a muddled, curvy, curvy, disturbing, meandering path for big to get to where we are today. Chris told me about picking up your A level results and then get into the public office and start that next stage in your life.

Right. I was working with Christian completely remotely before it was cool. It was actually because we were like 16 or 17 and couldn't reach out to see one another. Yeah, exactly.

He, he done it with an email address. That was my onboarding. As I said, we, we played with a couple of businesses before Paddle, kind of with the Genesis a bit. I'm completely honest.

It was like a lot of flash deals for software, like Groupon for software and things like that. But the very first day that we met in person was also the 1st day of Paddle. We'd raised some money, got an actual office space, like one of the venture prides kind of media group is in like an edge of town in the UK. It was like the least sexy thing you've ever seen.

I drive my monitor 40 miles from my house to the office. We didn't have to spend the VC money that we raised. It was like an LCD TV. Like it was massive.

Cause I never even heard of angel money. I didn't know we could spend it. We were on like 15 ks a year each of us and had runway for like 10 years or something. The 1st day we met in person.

Yeah. I picked up my ailer results, checked those in the car and then drove straight to the panel office to meet, to meet Christian. I don't think the results ever left the car, which I've since sold. And then when I got home, eventually I was still living with my parents at the time.

As I said, we were like 13 18. We, we couldn't even move to London there. My parents didn't even know where to start in terms of 4 questions to ask either, to be fair. I haven't told that story in a while, but yeah, a long time ago now.

What were your emotions the day of picking up your A level results? I mean, everyone was going to university or college. Did you ever feel like you're missing out or you're jealous of them? Because, you know, it was quite an intense path, right?

Taking the startup journey very early on, whereas others might have a bit more freedom. Yeah. It's really interesting that ultimately, a super privileged position, to be honest with you, like, that's always the caveat whenever I talk about founding a business, like we're, we're lucky to be able to have the opportunity to do so. That being said, I don't think I'd recommend being a founder to like most people that I know.

I generally don't think most people can help for it over like decades. It's really tough. Again, with the caveats of being privileged, but in terms of emotions on that day and reasoning or rationale, like at the time, I'd actually only defer a university place. As I said, I got one Christian Dibben.

I plan, I plan to defer for a year. My results are good, which helped. So that was fine. I comfortably got the senior.

I wanted, Krishna had raised money, maybe himself, but with a bit of me in the background from an angel investor, the puddle. And yeah, I deferred for a year to see how the thing was going to go before I committed to it full time. It didn't take me long to just cancel that place at university. It was only a few months.

It didn't feel super risky if I'm honest, because I, at the time I'd only committed really to delaying what I thought my path was gonna be by a year or so before, yeah, go going all in. Honestly, I had no idea that the tech world really existed. I had no ideas that VCs existed. I had no idea about Silicon Valley.

I never heard of any of these things, like options, series a. If I'm completely honest with you, Christian was like, yeah, we'll sort your shares and options out. I like series a, don't worry about it. Fortunately he did.

I honestly had no idea what I was doing. Whereas Christian was born and raised to like be a entrepreneur in the tech scene. Like he was reading people's s one filings at the age of about 12. Well, he he was certainly all in on that part.

And whereas I kind of always thought I was gonna take a more traditional, like grad scheme somewhere, other than me. And, and solely got indoctrinated at the time. Yeah. Thank God.

He didn't get to one of the big four. Right. He often asked founders what influenced him to, to think anyway, like about starting a company. And often that's like intrinsically within them, like you referred to with, with Christian.

Did you have an itch that needed to be scratched? Did you have someone prove yourself to did come from family? And like, ultimately, how confident were you, if any confidence at all that you were gonna be a success in terms of capital as a proposition or you were the person to lead company? Yeah, it's really interesting.

I've never really worked out why I did it. I worked really hard and really intensely to be honest with you. And even the university place I was taking, I was gonna do a 4 year degree in 2 years because I didn't wanna wait too long before I got into work. I was always quite intense about things.

I am quite intense about things. I'm talking very slowly right now, but this is me at like 30% of things, to be honest. People would always let it down. I was about to say, I can imagine that really pisses off your partner sometimes as well.

Yeah. When I, yeah, she says you're being too intense all the time. That's one of my favorite phrases. So I think I just really wanted to get out there and go and do something.

I had quite a unique position growing up. I was very fortunate to go to private school, but my fam my family went well, went off in in any way. My parents worked their asses off quite frankly in order to get me there. And I'd seen a bunch of folks that clearly had had commercial financial success.

And I was like, I really wanna go out there and give you that and do something. I think that probably was kind of a subconscious motivator, but I was just desperate to go out and do something important and big. And I think what was cool about tech without me realizing it is that it's this environment whereby there's no judgment, no previous experience needed. You can go out there and disrupt something just based on your own hard work, willingness to learn rate of growth in yourself.

Like it was the perfect environment. I just didn't actually know it at the time. Really interesting take. Let let's get into Huddl, like on a deeper level behind early stage businesses, just a huge, like intertwining path of pivots, pivots, pivots.

Yeah. What was Huddl's proposition on day 1? And how did that change? Because obviously it was quite a horizontal way at first.

Like, did you find yourselves like periodically getting deeper into different verticals? It'd be interesting to hear because of the true morality of the product. Yeah. And it wasn't like that at the start by any means.

We have this hypothesis, bosses, right? They're selling software or digital product is really hard, especially globally. It just seemed really complex. And then we tried to solve that problem in quite a few different ways.

And I'm so grateful to our early investors because genuinely we were trying to solve it in like 4 or 5 different ways at once at times. Didn't know what we're doing, had no experience, no background. The vendor, not only just funding the business through some of those pivots and ad learnings, but also they effectively funded like mine and Christian's startup MBA. Like we literally have no experience, we're doing this on the fly.

So I think we could have done Paddle with some experience a hell of a lot quicker, but we took years floundering and working things out because we, we just had so much to learn quite frankly in the early days. There are some pretty significant pivots. The biggest one was our initial hypothesis. This is kind of pre Google Play with marketplaces make selling digital goods really easy, right?

For the consumer, they can go into a marketplace and buy their ebooks, games, courses, apps, whatever, all in one place. They deliver to them in a neat, we used to call it a locker. It's easy for the consumer, but more importantly, it's easier for the digital content creator because the marketplace finds you the consumers, they deliver product, they handle the payments. You just get commission on a monthly basis.

And that was our idea as to how we can make this world easier. So we built this huge marketplace with 100 of 1000 of products, like AA game titles, all of duty. And then Christian would joke that we would have sold more content just going door to door. We built this whole marketplace and nobody used it.

And over time we basically realized more and more people were seeing value in the infrastructure we built as opposed to the consumer facing marketplace. They'd take our checkout link that was on a probabilistic page and put it on their own website because this checkout link supported a bunch of payment methods, currencies, languages, prevented fraud and delivered products afterwards. And we were like, snap, right? No one's wants another marketplace.

They actually really benefit from this infrastructure we've built out to just make selling their product to their buyer, but they could attract themselves, a lot easier. Once we hear that epiphany, I think things really took off. Like that's when we really doubled down and started seeing a lot of success. Very interesting indeed.

Jack told me that you gave a great presentation holding your ICP recently at Notion's portfolio there. Did your ICP outside of the verticals you were focused on change over time in terms of like picking the business with a certain revenue level, employee threshold? Would love to hear more. We were really purposeful and strategic about this.

Again, not knowing what an ICP was at the time, it just seemed to make sense in terms of how you should go to market. We had no experience. Right. And at times it really benefited us because we had no preconceptions of how things should be done.

So quite a lot, we invented really new ways of doing things, which like were disruptive and successful. Other times, we were inventing something that had been invented before and probably could have just executed faster had we know that this was a sole problem. A lot of the time, I think a lot of business and maybe I'll be playing it, but Christian and I like a lot of decision making is just common sense. Oh, let's not just go and target everyone.

Let's be really good at targeting a very specific type of customer. That made sense to me before I knew the ICPs, I think. We were very purposeful on who we were targeting and how about a bolt at the time. We operated under quite a different business model at Padua.

It's actually quite core to a lot of its value propositions. We operated under what's called a merchant of record business model. I mean, it's quite different payment processes out there. Like PayPal allowed us to make it really easy to sell software globally.

I went for the lessons of the specifics. There were a bunch of merchant records out there. We were doing it better than in, in, in the day and age that we started. So I was like, well, let's start by going after the people who already educated about this business model, given we're doing it better.

Right. Was the starting point, the people who were using the merchant records with desktop software products, almost exclusively. So we went out and relentlessly went and tried to win every single desktop software product, Mac and PC that we, we could find. And we got really, really good.

Like our conversion rates were insane. And that fueled our growth for like probably 5 years. We realized obviously that market was shrinking over time, like desktop software sold on a perpetual license basis. Isn't a market today that's been thriving.

We could see that it was deteriorating. There's more and more people are moving to different business models like SaaS. Within it, we went quite strategic in going up the stack in terms of revenue range and getting dragged up there by existing customers also growing with us. But then at some point we made a bigger jump to be like, okay, we now also need to start signing into SaaS because this is a much bigger market and it's growing faster.

We were, we were quite sophisticated at that. It's kind of where my d business, what, it was born out of a lot of the things we were doing with beta to determine go to market on an executional basis. Maybe super quickly, when formulating your ICP, what do you think are the biggest single mistakes you see founders make? Most of the time people just have like a really generic ICP.

They're not list a bunch of industries, a bunch of employee sizes. And the question you really need to ask themselves is what is true about the customers who have a desperate need for my product? And most of the time, things like industry don't correlate as well as other data points, actually. In my comment a little bit, but there's others that are more important out there.

To give a real example and just with Paddle, right? What's true about the people that need Paddle is that they're a software company and they have a need for our tool to sell that product globally. Who, who needs that the most is the people getting a load of global interest and a load of, load of global traffic, but they're not optimized for it. Already, this is a much more narrow specific description of an ICP than most people are gonna give you.

Once you've got to that level, you can get really good at targeting them. Right? We would literally get a list of every single software company, enrich all of them with how much international traffic they were getting, enrich all of them with how many currencies and payment methods they support. And we prioritize the people with a load of international traffic without the currencies and languages and payment methods they needed to support that traffic.

The message then becomes really easy to those people, right? We can help you optimize for that track. They have a pain, whether they know that or not, more an opportunity and we can solve it. What most people do wrong though, is that they forget they need to get really, really tight on who is it I'm trying to go to market.

So people would be much better off on narrowing in on who it was they were running their activities at in the 1st place. I think people over index it. Not enough on just who is the right customer for us right now. I think loads on like, oh, what's this cool message that I could send about where this person went to school to get, so applied to me.

And it's like, are they demonstrating a need for your product in the first place? What you kind of mentioned at the portfolio day was really interesting in terms of perhaps in the early days of sales motion of Peddle. We're telling individuals to essentially screen job descriptions of ICPs, whether that be in Petal's case and accounts receivable departments. And, you know, guess what?

Like, if they're posting for roles, then they're clearly demonstrating a need for our products. Examples like defense management tools. Right? They help people with accounts receivable invoicing.

Do you have a open job in finance to manage expenses and you're an expense management tool? Go speak to that company. Right? Super, super simple.

And that's the level you wanna get to in terms of like ICP and targeting. People think so much about like, what am I gonna send to this person? But if you knew that was true about them, what you the message you're gonna send them is really obvious. Right?

Yeah, absolutely. And pre qualification was obviously super. You wore like so many different hats in Paddle, obviously. Right.

But it was all predominantly commercial community roles. Yeah. I mean, the lines get low, right, over time. Yeah.

All the go to market stuff, like revenue strategy. Yeah, absolutely. So can you explain the kind of like the sales motion of all, did that change from enterprise to PLG or vice versa? It's probably the only thing that Krishna and I didn't intrinsically agree on just by looking at one another.

We had a lot of debates on this over time. We, we operated under a very different business model. No one was looking for emotion record. I was looking for Paddle.

So I worked out, but instead of trying to get them to come to us and tried to create all of this demand and education across the entire software market for people to come inbound to Paddle, that was gonna be really hard or at least take a really long time. So instead, I needed to go out and identify the companies that looked like they had a real need for Paddle, whether they knew it or not, go and sell to them, educate them 1 to 1 and win that set of customers. That means that their ACV needs to be high enough to justify the expense to build a sales team to go and target them in the 1st place.

So it meant our minimum size customer to begin with was quite, was relatively large for us. And then the strategy was go and win those customers via sales, show them and educate them that there's a better way for them to sell their software, and then use that group of customers that we've won and had success with to then educate the market rather than trying to educate them ourselves. Right? If we've won 100 of 1000 of customers that have all moved from the traditional way of selling software to selling it via paddle, and they've all had great success doing so, and we can tell all of those stories.

I felt an inbound motion or a more of a product led motion would be much easier having all of those proof points, all of those customers, all of those stories. So to start with, we went sales led to a very specific type of customer that I felt was demonstrating the highest need. And then over time, we layered in more and more traditional, proper led growth to smaller size merchants or sellers. The way I encourage you to think about this is pretty much every business sells to a type of customer.

And I think of types of customers as a spectrum. I've always promised I'd write content on this and never have. And then on the far left, you've got consumers and assuming further and further, right, you've got prosumers, small teams, large teams, enterprises. At any one time, your way of acquiring those customers probably looks quite different at different parts of that spectrum.

Right? So we kind of started mid right of the spectrum, small businesses. And as we wanted to expand left to even smaller businesses targeting our consumers, we did that PRG. And then as we went further upstream, we did sales led.

Today we've bought both, but we started sales led exclusively. Outbound email was our exclusive channel for 5 years growing at 300%. You already had, which ads, but yeah, now we have really strong amount as well as outbound or account based solutions. Do you think you can go both DLG and sales led at the same time, especially at at the early stage?

Or do you think it's quite difficult? No, the answer is most good companies end up doing both. Right? Again, thinking of Dropbox, that they'd started actually on the other end, right?

They started product led targeting consumers, prosumers, maybe small businesses first and a PLG motion. They now have an enterprise sales team selling to big businesses. You often end up with both of these motions. Slack is another great example of a very handy sales speaking with who are now doing both.

The honest answer is if you're successful, you're gonna end up doing both. But I don't know anyone who's tried to do both from day 1. I love proving those platitudes wrong, but that, that one I think is probably true in it. The reason is the way in which you run and measure your business is completely different.

The skills you need within your business are completely different. The market in either one of those motions looks completely different. And it's just really, really hard to work out both of those things concurrently and or just to be able to afford the people, the resource, the infrastructure, the tooling to be able to work out, but as soon as concurrently because they're completely different. Right?

The tools you need to run like huge digital media, paid advertising, no attribution, like run all your content ads, whatever, versus building out an SDR machine. Both of those things are really expensive. You probably don't have that much money to start with, let alone the expertise. So doing those 2 things concurrently doesn't tend to work.

You mentioned like the stuff in the background that you have to do behind those sell motions. With PLG, how much does the pricing obviously have to change. So when you're transitioning from sales led to PLG or vice versa, what worries me is like the fact that a lot of startups that we see is they essentially layer on the enterprise cost base of like sales, marketing, customer success onto like a PLG style, like format, price and promotion. And that just doesn't like really work in my eyes.

Am I, am I right or am I wrong? The dialing proposition is different and product features are gonna be different. So like fundamentally these people are buying and using different products and using in different ways. Right.

That needs to be really clear. And then because the products are different, they should be priced differently. It might even have a completely different pricing structure. Right.

Like, I think these things need to be thought of what, in a lot of detail and quite independently at one another, albeit there needs to be a nice path to allow someone to grow through those particular plans Yeah, it's gonna be complex and different for each business At Puddl pricing was a real big discussion point for a really long time We operated under this model that nobody really understood The sticker price looked really expensive compared to the things that we would normally be in compared to We were normally being compared to the payment processor which did whatever 10, 15% of all the things merchant record does And so merchant record is obviously more expensive because it's doing a lot more But now I'm like, well, this thing costs 2% yours costs 5%.

Doesn't make any sense. And it's like, eventually when we pull hard on this, we just removed the pricing from the site altogether. We needed to be able to educate people over the phone on what it is that we did, why it was different, why it costs what it did, and actually to educate them on their own all in costs first, for selling their software. We never were able to do that through content or the website.

Before actually really truly understanding like what the product is, the marketing is. Oh, is that Then in product that becomes a lot more difficult because in that motion, you will tend to want to see a price or you want to reduce the human involvement touch points throughout that funnel as much as you can. Right? Yep.

And that needs to be like a very quick time to like value, right? Harmony extremely quickly. Exactly. The experience you build for onboarding is completely different.

We went to SalesLAD, everyone spoke to us hours before they used the platform. Product led is like this needs to work self serve, feed your product experience. Because we made the choice to go sales led first pricing from the website, win a bunch of customers, produce loads of case studies, do loads of benchmarks on their costs, how they evolved over time. And then by the time we really invested in PLG, we had so many resources, calculators, reports, benchmarks, and all of this stuff that it made it a lot easier to educate people on why the price they were seeing was the price they were seeing.

Hadoop, you know, almost moved away from the generation 1 SaaS model, right? And champion transaction fee pay, as your scale type models instead of a recurring centric model When you talk about like form factors in that vertical you were developing, what was the reason behind the decision? It's a really good question I think mainly because you want to make it easy for people to buy, right? And people, as I said, were comparing us to their payment processor.

We did repeat the need for them to have a direct relationship with their payment processor, and those payment processors tend to operate that transaction model. It made that point of comparison easier. We had the challenge that percentage always looks higher because we did more than that. And it was quite helpful for us.

And we didn't wanna make what was already quite a complex discussion, even more complex. It's like, yes, you currently pay 2% to your payroll processor. You're gonna pay us 5%. But actually on top of that 2%, you're actually be paying a, b, and c, and d for the other services that we're also gonna provide.

It made that conversation last time went a little bit easier. It wasn't anything super complex. We advise a lot of companies on how to price their products, how to sell their products. One of the biggest triggers to using Paddle in the early days was when someone was releasing a new product or moving from like a perpetual license desktop software to a fast recurring model.

We'd advise them on how they should make their transition, how they should price the product, even how they should communicate it to their users. And we had 2 hypotheses. We established quite a long time ago. So one of them is early, because I'm sure you took this second, I think, is getting there.

The first was that platform isn't gonna matter anymore. Like, as I said, we were really good at selling desktop app software, desktop PC software, and web SaaS. We have this thing called web SaaS, which is like recurring SaaS, like web apps. And then I was like, over time, like people are gonna pay AFI and use products across all of these things.

And that's, that's really true. Right? You look at like, right. Figma can use wherever you want for your subscription, which was helpful when thinking about our backend architecture and how we're gonna help people sell on that basis.

The other hypothesis that we have that I still think will come true is that pricing models are going to evolve a hell of a lot to the point where they almost don't matter them themselves. And, and the people that do pricing best have various different ways to charge their customers. Right. So they might have the recurring SaaS speed to begin with.

You then might have additional seats to amp that fee up over time. You might then have one off add ons that can also be charged and or upgrades like the different points ability to charge people different things. You just want that flexibility. I think a great example that I, I often give that sounds really boring are the people that do like the ATS is right.

Like you might charge a subscription fee to just handle all of your job postings on the hiring platform. But then if you wanna promote your job, there's like a one time fee for that thing. And then there's also different plans. They've got this really cool way to just massively increase LTV, but they charge people through a lot of different needs.

Sometimes one time, sometimes recurring. That tends to be like a Blaze based recurring SaaS fee, but I think this stuff's going to become more and more commonplace, at least with the successful companies. It's pretty clear. Hatter went on a high hiring spree, especially in 2018 to back up the demand.

You hired around a 100 people that year What were the biggest mistakes you made as a result of that when you talk about, like, good culture when hiring? And you want to match it with the velocity as well, right? I mean, our biggest mistake was having to hire a 100 people in 2018, actually. We were growing, as I said, at a massive rate year and a half, 300 percent year over year.

I think we came in with Deloitte for us. We came 6th, like, 2 years in a row. Housekeeping, it was like 3,000 percent growth. Like, and it hit, like, 3 years or something.

I was mainly annoyed that we became 6th because you get loads of perks if you come 5th, and we came 6th twice. And then we were really sad at our dinner table and then felt like massive dicks because the people around us didn't didn't get us quite so high. It was it was a bad bad moment. I'm actually actually told that less in those 2 years.

Do you remember? Deliveroo people like fucking burgers, like who knew? Like, listen, right? Like every, my dad just sexed me being like, I'm never gonna order a burger.

And I was like, Dax, I was screaming and the champagne was sore at that point. I just left. We were growing really fast, but we weren't linearly growing the team in any way. Like, again, we were doing outbound.

We were really successful at it. And then as I mentioned earlier, we were strategically increasing the size of the ACV that we were winning in each one of those years with the same team, which meant the revenue book to some degree. And again, it's quite complex in our business model being booked by that same team every year was growing hugely because we're just winning the same amount of customers, but bigger and bigger ones every single year. Think it was probably just after the series B with Notion, maybe just before, they were like, okay, we need to go at 300% again this year.

And then it kind of hit us like, oh God, like we can't actually just keep doing that with the same team that we have. And again, this seemed like a really obvious mistake, but, like, we'd never run a business before. I'd never built a hiring plan before. Like, I'd never thought about capacity planning before.

And it was like, oh, god. At some point, this team can't just keep massively increasing the ACB that we're working. We really didn't know what we were doing. I'm talking a lot to our discredit, but we were doing stuff intelligently in order to have the success that we're having.

But I'm trying to emphasize this really was the first business that we we'd ran. During that time, I once had a bunch of AEs quick. They thought the business was gonna go under and they were like, oh, we're rubbish. Like, we're not hitting our targets.

We just set targets so aggressively that they just weren't able to hit them. That was the year that we got listed as the fastest growing software company in the UK. Didn't know what we were doing to our detriment. We hit 2017, 2018, and we were like, oh God, in order to keep growing at at that rate, we need much more resources, a much big team.

We need like multiple channels. We can't just exclusively rely on outbound email. Shit. We need to hire a lot of people.

So we added about 80 to a 100 people on a, off a base of about 20 in total. Wow. We weren't 25 minutes sales. It was crazy.

It was great. It was great. It was great. My sales team was like 4 or 5 people.

And I was involved in every single deal. Like, we didn't know about how to transition our 5th sales. We did eventually, but they were real long in the process. And we're in like 1,000,000 in point.

And so we had to add all of those heads really, really quickly, which was an amazing exciting time. Like it was really cool, but it was also then like one of the worst years of growth we ever had as a percentage. I think it still is because when you have that many new people in the room, it has a massive impact on the people that are established in the company. They can't do their job as well as onboard what most people say.

We'd have been much smarter to linearly grow the team aligned with the scaling good bit sector around and much better at commercial planning, commercial capacity planning, or org design org structure in line with company growth, that base that you built off of. Did you find it like some people were super incredible from going from 0 to 30 people and then just terrible from 30 onwards? Yeah, Me, like there's going to be people who are great at different stages. There were 2 things I wanted to make really clear to the people within the business.

One was the business is growing 300% year on year, unless our people, our processes, our systems, everything that we're doing can grow at the same rate, if not faster, either the growth is gonna slow down or that thing's gonna get left behind. Me and Christian had to really demonstrate that behavior. We'd never done it before. Right?

We had to grow and learn potential rate in order to stay in our overseas business, quite frankly. And the thing that I tell to everyone in the organization is that unless you yourself are growing their 300% year on year, you're probably gonna get left behind because the rest of the businesses. The thing that I tried, I learned from Netflix actually was like, that's fine. That's that's gonna happen.

But I really wanted every single person who was in the business to be proud to have been there, be really clear on the impact that they had during the time that they were there. And then part ways happily around the contribution that they made, ready to go and contribute to another company in a much better place than they were X years ago before they joined Puddl. That was really important to me. My first ever sales hire, for example, he actually moved around a little bit within the business.

I guess my wife's birthday a couple of weeks ago. And so there's a real, there's a real art to that. Yeah. To be a human.

You mentioned a lot of the episodes and complimented your co founder in terms of being perhaps much more technical than you at the very beginning anyway. Like what would you say is like the fundamental evaluation of picking a co founder? Like did you base your decision off at the time, even though you were young and and, would you say? 1st around, he was the only one I knew.

There was no picking. I think Krishna were really lucky. We really are quite yig and yang. We're really quite diff people.

It'll be a great mix. We moved to London together about 3 or 4 months after starting Paddle, lived together for 4 years. It was literally our entire lives running this business. When we did the series b of notion in 2017, we went out to dinner and they're like, what do you guys do outside the paddle?

And they were like, well, what do you, what do you mean? Like outside the paddle? I'm like, I watched the football, I guess, like, it was our entire life. They become all, it became all encompassing.

Like every, if we had dinner together, which wasn't our open in our flat, we, we talked about paddle. It was just constant. Was that extremely unhealthy sometimes? It's a really interesting question.

I think at the time it didn't feel like it. It just felt like what we had to do in order to be successful. And I don't regret it at all. I don't think many people can keep up that level of intensity, growth and pressure that we went through over such a long period of time.

Like it's just not for everyone. Like there were lots of nights going to bed crying. There were like days where I was starting to chat to my mum in the car being like, mum, yeah. And like, I've just been asked then £3,000,000 of quarter, like I don't know how we're going to do that.

And she said, you'll be fine. There's 100 of people relying on you having never run a business before. It was just a lot. I think it was the only way that we we'd see this success that we saw.

I think about it more now, actually, 2nd time around as a founder, like, Paddle, I had this perspective. I was gonna be a complete failure and was gonna be fucked. Basically haven't been the only job I'd ever been in. Even once we were in my tens of millions in revenue, I was like, I'm fucked to mess this up.

Or we were gonna be wildly successful and I was never gonna have to work again. There was never any middle ground in my mind. It was like one of those outcomes is gonna happen. You felt like you didn't have choice but to work constantly and like make it a success.

But I think that mindset is one of the things that made us successful. I'm a real proponent and supporter of mental health, where life balance, I'm doing that a hell of a lot better. 2nd time round and I'm encouraging my current co founder of my new business, who is a first time founder to do the same. I do worry that you, you probably do need to treat yourself quite badly and, and be a bit unhealthy in order to, to reach some of the scales that, that we could at Paddle, albeit I don't think every business needs to, to be honest with you.

Like we are in a massively competitive space growing a 300% a year massive VC back. And there's other ways to run really successful businesses. But I think about that psychology quite a lot. So I can speak to founders and they've just got harder than everyone else.

Right? Like, I mean, that's just what you signed up for. I do appreciate that a work life balance point of view, because you need the support network around being, right? Because ultimately if the support network goes under them, your performance at work, you know, dips as well.

We were probably in like 10,000,000 era. And one of the biggest things that the lady at the time taught me different questions, the one I have now is amazing, medical Beverly Clark. She was like, you don't have to treat yourself like shit on this journey. You don't have to do that.

You can enjoy it. Like I was in this rubbish law flat, like we'd raised a bunch of money and I was like, well, that's pointless me moving flat right now, because I'm probably going to move to the us and launch our us operations soon. She was like, yep. You've been saying that for a year.

Like maybe you should move into it to a nice flat. And everything was around what makes sense for the business, what's best for the business, rather than looking up for myself and that we could have made a much better balance there. But to answer your question on how do you pick a co founder? My new business I've started with the guy who previously ran RevOps for me at Paddle.

We had a conversation about 3 or 4 months in where I was just like, mate, I, I don't know if you're cut out for this. Now you want me to go and scale this business to excise within Y Time Brains. I'm like, I can do that. Here's all the things you need to get better at and really, really fast.

Having seen a company of that scale or growing at the scale that you want, like here's all the things that you need to do, I think in order to get there. And I'm not sure how ready or willing you are to go and do those 6 or work in that way or whatever. And credit to him, like he massively has done and stepped up. But like, again, cut the question with them.

I might may maybe this just isn't what you wanna do, man. Like, you need to lean into a bunch of stuff that you hate doing or really bad at and be better at it. He's one of the best ICs I've ever worked with, but I'm like, if you have a team around you, right, like, you need to work in some different ways in order to enable them to be successful. I don't think you're gonna be very comfortable doing that.

Are you? You gonna be able to do that? And like, we had some really hard conversations about it because it isn't for everyone in terms of skill set, desire, willingness When you scaled this massive, massive business, millions in revenue every month, you hit Unicorn January 2020 You step back from Hato I mean, maybe you can share a bit about that decision than now starting to fit That was a really interesting time Like so much had happened We'd grown a colossal rate I actually tried to move to the US to launch the US in like January 20 And then COVID hit in like March I was locked in my apartment for 8 weeks, just completely alone.

And then came back from the US in the S in the September because none of the borders were organized. This stuff happened just before that, which was quite interesting. It really took it out of you personally. Maybe I never really thought about the influence I had, but I'm sure it did.

I came back, set set all back in UK life. I have to live with my dad again for a while. I haven't lived with my dad since I was about 7. He was so confused as to, like, how I worked.

He I was just like, dad, you can't come into this room because I'm on Zoom calls all day. And he was like, yeah. Yeah. No problem.

He he come in, like, every 10 minutes, I'll meet I'm like, dad, when I said like all day, I really mean it. Like, I really, really mean it. So that I can sympathize about that. There's a reason why you moved out.

Right? It was. Less than, I think it was cool for them. Anyway, the test went in, got back.

Like it was all good. We hired, at the time, I don't know if he had the president title guy called Jimmy Fitzgerald. He's now the CEO of Paddle. Both Christian and I have stepped back from full time roles.

And he's amazing. And the business is just running pretty well. Like I was still heavily involved. We had no issue, me finding things to do and fix.

I eventually had this like chief strategy officer role. And my job was to basically to understand everything about our current customers. What are they doing? How are they using the product?

What are they happy with? What are they not happy with? And how do we make them happy in the future? Who are our customers today and what needs to be true for them to be successful?

And then who are our customers tomorrow and what do we need to do in order to win them? As well as what is gonna break in the business based on our current rate of trajectory? How do we preempt those breakages and fix them and or accelerate in any area? I parachute into whatever in order to make better, faster, more scalable.

I was really enjoying that role. It was in 22 that we were doing the the latest fundraise, The one where we acquired ProfitWell, we hit the unicorn valuation, the 1.4 bill, and we were going through it. I was preparing the data room.

I ran rev ops with Alex. He's now my co founder. And I was seeing this story before, like, I should be so excited. We're about to go and raise $200,000,000 acquire a company.

I pride myself on my energy. And I suddenly was like, I don't know if I'm still bringing that energy to everything that I'm doing. And I went through the spiral of reflection and you feel like you're betraying your co founder company. It's been my whole life.

I eventually worked out that I hadn't been running Peddle my entire adult life. I'd never experienced life at all through any lens other than being harrisonandpeddle.com. My entire identity and friendships were so intertwined.

This I was kind of interested in, in seeing what life outside of this lens looks like. Yeah. And I've been, I've been working with an exec coach and I started to become more interested in getting to know myself better, even more so than business ones. Right.

And, and I, it just, it just felt like the right time to step back. And really importantly, I felt the business would be fine. When I, I told the board, they're amazing for me, Sabbatical wanted me to come back, offer me all sorts of titles. And I was like, I don't think that's very helpful for this for the business.

Some of them were like, what's gone wrong? You and Christian Fuller now? Or like, is is Jimmy not the right guy that you brought in? I'm like, no.

No. If I literally was worried about any of those things, I wouldn't be going anywhere. If I felt there was, like, any existential problems within the business, I'd still be there fixing them. I actually think it will be fine.

Conversations with, like, Christian were so hard. He's the same age as me. I was like, he's probably had these sorts too before. And then me stepping back from the business, but I thought I his ability to do so over for a time for a nickel so selfish.

Like, it was horrible. Absolutely horrible. But everyone who tested it in sport for, so grateful for. So, yeah, kind of, yeah, I can.

I didn't fathom like that decision making as well, once you've been a part of something for so long. Right. And quite literally your baby. Never done anything out.

It was like, what do I do now? Yeah, exactly. It's second nature. The guys at Notion told me that you were in She's the entire portfolio because of something that they called, I think it was Harrison Tech at the time, and obviously it led to the inspiration behind Goodfair.

So it'd be good to just kind of finish on how Goodfair came together mission. And I guess just why as well. The why is really different. It's quite cool.

As I said, like we were going to market really effectively at Paddle in some really unique ways. I didn't know were unique because I never done anything before. And every single time we went to do a round of investment. People were so intrigued with the data we gathered and how we're using it to make strategic decisions and go to market.

Often we'd be spending more time talking about that than Paddle ourselves. Like I invisibly remember Christian doing his best to like show this tech to general catalyst. Cause he was super involved in it. As opposed to talking about Paddle.

Whilst I was on like a zoom out and Chris Wallace, what the fuck are we doing? This has nothing to do with Paddle. But there were so many trees about it. It, it, it was iterated on over a really long period of time, but it really went to the next level when I hired So I actually hired him in, like, the most junior role that we have within the business who was tasked with madly researching accounts I'd sell to.

He came into the business, won a hackathon within about a week because he just made the whole thing entirely programmatic. He Everybody hates their jobs, Harrison. So I just made this work without anyone needing to do any manual research. And I was like, okay, you're going to come with me.

He became like a right hand within the business. Long story short, we got really good at our stuff. No shit, among other investors. Basically encouraged Alex, who's owning that Harrison Tech.

That's certainly not a fair title for him. I came up with the ideas. He built it to productize it and then go sell it to the rest of the portfolios. And he had a queue of people lined up to buy our approach to data and go to market before he even started.

So he went off and did that with our blessing before I left the Paddle. I was hyped. I was like, this guy I've hired straight out of uni. He's like, gone and started a startup.

He's super successful. We thought my best friend, he's gonna be the best man in my wedding. And I was devastated. I needed to be head of rev ops today because he's, he's one of a kind.

But after I set back from Puddl, I didn't do a lot for a period of time. And then he was like, Harrison, you'll do you've referred every single client. I have a good fit, a good fit. You basically came up with this idea.

Do you want to just come take half of it and run it with me? I said, yes, I I'd set up a bunch of criteria on things that brought me joy, and I wanted to make sure that whatever I did next could, could deliver upon those things and give it certainly could. And I told him, I'm not sure I'm ready to commit to another 10 year journey. But I'll give him 4 years.

I'll get into a certain revenue range, and then we can decide what we're gonna go and do, whether it's raise money, sell the business, like a switch chair or whatever. And that's how we committed to it. But the why I did it was quite different. I'm very fortunate that Paddle in theory has set me up to not need to work really ever, like depending on not how things go, like few years.

But it was, so it wasn't like a financial thing. What I realized was one, I wanted to do things that brought me joy and work with my mates, but I realized there was also a bunch of people that really contributed a lot to the paddle story and journey, Alex being one of them, not through any malicious stuff that students didn't get the the reward that they probably deserve for the impact that they have. And I was like, what a great environment to be able to go hire a bunch of people that I think are amazing, that maybe didn't get the shot that they deserve and to give them the the playground, if you like, to go and help them become the best versions of themselves.

I've got a mate who wants to be a VC. I pulled him out of his VC role. He was like, come join me a good fit. I'll get you into a partner position in the next years if we follow this plan.

And it was like this great platform to me to share a bunch of stuff that I've learned, help my friends be successful and achieve some of their dreams and hope we can help people too. It was like the, the forum in which I could help people achieve their own dreams and be as successful as they could possibly be and be super happy. So it kind of made sense. I'm not sure I've got another one in me full time.

I can give back. Maybe it's another way. The exciting journey. So we're just gonna finish in a quick fire if that's okay.

So super short answers, maybe 30 seconds each. And that's cool with you. One thing that you know now that you wish you'd knew at the start of your career. Everything.

I didn't know any just try, try and enjoy it along the way. Like I think it all would have been a lot easier. There were some real low moments that you don't tend to discuss, but just knowing that like that experience would set me up to be able to go and do other stuff in the future and not so think I was going to be on the streets when they probably would have made everything a little bit easier to be bad. Like you're going to be okay.

If you're running a start, probably run another one or get a great job somewhere else. What is something contrarian you believe in your field? Maybe, you know, could be vertical specific that like, I guess no one else does. One of my biggest drivers, like workplace drivers is defying something that everybody thought was previously true.

I love just proving that something that everyone thinks is impossible without really possible. Landed for us. It's the pizza. Everyone's doing that really, really wrong.

Like everyone's trying to work out how through the ads and messaging and valid propositions they can stand out and absolutely no one is spending anywhere near enough time working out what's really true. I'm positively correlating about the customers that truly want to buy their product versus not. Getting really close to who your right customer is and what is truly true about them is just something that nobody's doing very well. PLG or sales led.

I mean, if you had to choose 1, which one would you prefer? Great question. Because we could, we do have the choice that could fit. I'd always pick sales that I think is so much easier.

I think you can be very specific on who you're selling to. It means you can build a product for a very specific set of people that you've targeted. You have control over this stuff. It's really predictable, really, really fast.

I don't think you quite get the economies of scale, but there's a lot more sales led businesses out there than product led much to people's disbelief. Sometimes it's like 70, 30 split, which is much more aware of product led companies because it's their job to make us aware of them. Nice. Nice.

Harrison's been an absolute pleasure, man. So thank you so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Alright.

It's gonna shock you so much, Harrison. Wow. I'm sure you can agree that was an amazing episode. Thanks very much for showing us on lunch passports.

We hope you've discovered new insights and inspirations from today's episode that you can apply in your own line of work. Please make sure to tune in next time as we continue to unveil the extraordinary in every corner of the global markets. In the meantime, you can follow us on socials at bc passports. Safe travels.