- Hiroki, co-founder and CEO of GoCardless, is the next speaker.
- GoCardless is the UK's leading direct debit provider and is expanding to serve Europe.
- Hiroki shares four lessons he has learned from his experience with GoCardless.
- The first lesson is that the journey of starting a business begins earlier than expected.
- Hiroki's journey started in university when he was introduced to the world of startups and entrepreneurship.
- The second lesson is to be careful of "whiteboard ideas" and to find something that excites you.
- Hiroki and his co-founders initially didn't have a specific idea when they left their jobs, but telling people they were starting a business forced them to come up with an idea.
- They started a company called Group A, which aimed to simplify collecting money for informal situations.
- They faced challenges and had to pivot to focus on sales in the UK.
- Hiroki shares anecdotes from his time at Y Combinator and the early stages of GoCardless.

- The speaker's business initially failed and they had to pivot to become GoCardless
- They realized that the key to success is building something for themselves or their friends and family, not just an interesting idea or a big market
- Progress in starting a business is not linear, but involves making mistakes and constantly course correcting
- Momentum is the hardest thing to come by in the early days of a business
- It's better to start doing the wrong thing than to not start at all
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of having emotions that can withstand the ups and downs of starting a business
- They share their experience of struggling to raise investment, but eventually securing funding and achieving success
- Starting a business is challenging and comes with constant peaks and troughs, but having a supportive team and network is crucial for success.

- Starting a business is a challenging journey that requires perseverance
- Holding on to the wave of entrepreneurship is difficult but worth it
- Being emotionally resilient is key to success
- Starting a business can be one of the best experiences in life

- Hiroki, co-founder and CEO of GoCardless, shares four lessons he has learned from his experience with the company.
- The first lesson is that the journey of starting a business begins earlier than expected, as Hiroki's journey started in university.
- The second lesson is to be careful of "whiteboard ideas" and to find something that excites you, as Hiroki and his co-founders initially didn't have a specific idea when they left their jobs.
- They faced challenges and had to pivot to focus on sales in the UK, leading to the creation of GoCardless.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of having emotions that can withstand the ups and downs of starting a business and the importance of having a supportive team and network.

Talk at Startup School Europe 2014 at The Brewery in London

Now, on to the next speaker this afternoon.

Hiroki is a co-founder and CEO of GoCardless, which is the UK's leading direct debit provider.

And they now serve more businesses than any other direct debit provider, and they're also expanding to serve Europe.

Hiroki and his co-founder Matt started GoCardless in 2010, so they've got a fun story to be telling you about their history.

Wow, it's really bright up here and I think that's a good thing.

I can kind of barely see the back, so I can't really see how many people are in the room right now.

Hi, I'm Hiroki, and I started GoCardless actually in the beginning of 2011 with my co-founders Matt and Tom.

For those of you that don't know about what we do, basically we make it really easy for businesses to accept recurring payments via direct debit.

When Kat asked me to talk at startup school, she asked me to talk about the earliest stages of GoCardless and tell our story.

And so when I was thinking through our story, I was trying to figure out, okay, what should I talk about?

And I realized that actually, for me, the lessons I've learned, they didn't come from just specific events or 1 story here or there.

And so rather than telling you our straight story, I thought I'd share 4 lessons that I've learned along the way and then give you some anecdotes as well.

So our first story is about when your journey starts.

And actually your journey starts way earlier than you think.

When I sat down to really think about this talk and start thinking about what's the story of GoCardless and where did it begin, it actually turned out to be a pretty non-trivial question.

Was it when we wrote our first line of code?

Or was it when Matt, Tom, and myself agreed to start a business together?

Or perhaps it was when Matt and I met for the first time and we shared our dreams of starting a business 1 day.

But then I realised that for me, my story began way earlier than that.

My story began in the first week of university.

I'd got to university and, you know, like most people, you meet lots of new friends, you try out new activities and take up new hobbies.

And it was during then that I met a guy called Kirill.

He was in the year above me and he did maths too.

And in 1 of those first weeks, he took me to this meetup for this society called Oxford Entrepreneurs.

Basically, it was a student society that was there to promote entrepreneurship.

And I remember my eyes being opened for the first time to this world of startups and business.

Before that I had no idea what it was about.

I thought business was like Lex Luthor and Mr Burns.

So I remember going to this event and meeting all these really cool people that were interested in taking this other path.

And it was there that I met Kulveer and Hajj.

They're going to kill me when they see this picture because it's an awful picture of them.

But they were the first people that I met that had started a business.

Now you've got to remember that back in the, you know, 2005, 2006, when they started their business, no 1 was doing that in London.

Everyone was going into banking or law, and These guys decided to quit their jobs and start a business together and pursue their dreams and I found that fascinating.

So when they decided to move out to San Francisco, I knew that I needed to persuade them to give me an internship.

In the summer of 2007, those guys finally relented and said, OK, cool, come and join us for the summer.

And when I got there, it turns out that they'd actually teamed up with a guy called Patrick, who was actually on stage earlier, And they started Auktomatic together.

It was basically an inventory management tool for eBay power sellers.

That's them at a conference with their I like being on top t-shirts.

And I got to see first hand what it was like to be in the earliest stages of being in a start-up.

I remember getting there and we spent 2 months living and working out of this tiny apartment in San Francisco.

It was a 2 bedroom place and there were 6 of us.

We had 3 air mattresses between us and we had to sleep in shifts so that we wouldn't knock into each other in the night.

That summer I spent my time just doing customer interviews, testing out the product by selling lasers that we imported from China.

They were so powerful that you could hit an airplane out in the sky with them.

I remember this 1 time we did it and we thought we were going to get caught by the police.

And I also was surrounded by all of these developers and learned about what coding was.

Before that, I'd never really been exposed to it.

And I also got a chance to go to Y Combinator and see what those dinners were like.

And I heard some of the stories from founders back then.

When it came to starting my business, I realized that I learned so much from my experiences at Automatic.

When I first met Matt, would we have had the debate about the pros and cons of co-founders versus starting a business on your own?

Or, when it came to starting and building out our first product, Would I have learned the value of coding?

Would I have even applied for Y Combinator had it not been for the experiences that I had then?

So remember that your journey starts way before you think it does.

And if you want to start a business 1 day, then think about what you can be doing right now to learn about what you'll be doing in the future, because you never know what's going to be useful.

So my second story and lesson is about being careful of whiteboard ideas.

I'll explain what I mean by that in a bit.

When I met Matt for the first time, it was when we first started, it was our first jobs out of university and we were working as management consultants for our sins.

And we quickly realised that we had this shared interest in starting a business, you know, that maybe 1 day we'd want to start a business together.

I remember we used to spend hours in between projects and on the weekends just toying with ideas bouncing around on whiteboards concocting plans of what we might be able to start 1 day.

I also remember that we had this really terrible pattern where every time we came up with an idea, we'd then spend the next week or few days just tearing it apart and realising how terrible an idea it was.

So when it came to leaving our jobs and we decided that we were going to take the plunge and start a business, we still didn't actually have an idea of what we wanted to do.

We hadn't settled on something we were excited about.

Now it turns out that actually doing that and telling your friends that you're starting a business but you don't know what it is yet is a really great forcing mechanism.

We quickly joined forces with Tom and decided to start something called Group A.

This was 1 of my early designs and the idea was this.

If you're a football captain of your local team or you're going on holiday with your friends then collecting money for those informal situations is a real pain.

So we wanted to start something to fix that.

I'm going to fast forward a little bit now in the story.

We were out in Silicon Valley and we were working out of an apartment in the Mission.

We were on Y Combinator and we had a prototype of this product that we were trying to get anyone and everyone to use.

We were quickly approaching demo day, which is the culmination of the Y Combinator program.

It's when all of the founders of Y Combinator get into a room and present this to a room full of the who's who of investors in Silicon Valley.

But we had a little bit of a problem because we look like this.

And so in a last-ditch attempt to really try and drum up business, we decided to move the whole company, engineers and all, there was 4 of us at the time, onto sales.

Now it turned out that all of our customers were in the UK.

So what that meant was waking up really early in the morning every day to cold call into the UK a list of local football team managers that we'd found on the internet.

I used to remember when Matt used to come into my room at 5 in the morning every morning to start the day's calling.

It turns out that 5am San Francisco time is the perfect time to catch a football manager going into the pub.

It also turns out that the only thing that they had in common was that they had no idea how we got their numbers.

Needless to say, we didn't have much success.

So in a last ditch attempt to salvage something from the situation, we decided to pivot the business and become GoCardless.

Now, we got lucky, because a lot of the work that we'd done for Group A turned out to be exactly what you would do to start go cardless.

We'd learnt about payments, we'd gone and got a banking deal and we were applying for our regulatory approval.

But what if we hadn't have started GoCardless?

What if we'd have wanted to do something else?

I often think what went wrong in those days in Group A, and it's really easy to come up with various reasons why it didn't work out.

But if I'm gonna be honest, I think the reason it didn't work was because we weren't really building something for ourselves.

We weren't even building something for our friends and family.

We come up with this idea on a whiteboard and we thought how theoretically great it could be and we were building a solution for that instead.

So when it comes to starting your business, beware of those ideas, those ideas that seem theoretically really interesting, or the ones that are in really big markets.

Really ask yourself the question, is this something that I'd want to use myself?

So, My third lesson is about focusing on momentum.

Now when I first started GoCardless, I thought that progress would be a fairly linear thing.

I thought that we'd get from the start to success something like this.

But when I think about the story that we've had with GoCardless, it couldn't be further from the truth.

Our story looks something more like this.

Now, in the early days of GoCardless, we used to spend ages just debating the smallest things.

We would just spend hours discussing the smallest of product changes, or we agonized over the strategy that we were going to use for capturing this huge vision.

We had limited time and limited resource, And so we thought, we can't afford to make mistakes.

We need to make sure that we get it first time round.

But actually what turned out was that rather than just going in a straight line from start to success, We'd just spend ages going from A to B and then realizing it was wrong in the end anyway.

And so our path just ended up looking like a zigzag but just a much slower 1.

This is something that's happened so many times I actually struggle to come up with even a specific instance.

It's like asking what you had for breakfast yesterday.

You do it so often that you know you can't even remember what you ate yesterday.

And over time it's made I've realized that these mistakes are bound to happen.

Instead of agonizing over each and every decision that you make and making sure that you do exactly the right thing, it's better to get your head down and just run with it and then course correct afterwards instead.

And it's through that cycle of just constantly course correcting that you just run really fast and wiggle your way to success.

In the early days especially, momentum is the hardest thing to come by.

It's way harder than deciding on what idea to do or whether something's the right thing or the wrong thing.

It's actually just getting from a standstill to something at all.

So I'd say it's better to start doing the wrong thing than to not start at all.

My last lesson is about being an emotional cockroach.

When I told people about this they said what does that mean?

So I'll explain first otherwise I'll just confuse you all.

A cockroach is well known for being able to withstand a nuclear attack and that's what I mean.

You need to have emotions that can withstand the biggest of ups and the biggest of downs.

I remember when we were doing Y Combinator, Brian and Nate from Airbnb came and gave a talk.

They told us about the first thousand days of starting their business.

And I remember walking away from that talk and thinking, wow, they came so close to financial ruin and it took them so long to see any success.

How did they have the courage to do that?

We hit our financial low a little bit earlier in the summer.

That's my co-founder Tom in his comfortable abode in San Francisco.

We'd just moved out there, and we didn't have anything.

So Matt and myself took a trip to Ikea to buy the essentials.

We were really poor by that point, and so we had to be really careful.

We got there and we had 1 flimsy mattress each, 1 knife, 1 fork, a plate, and then a choice between a mug and a bowl.

When it came to the checkout the only way we were able to settle the bill was by splitting it across Matt's debit cards, the remains of my overdraft and the absolute dregs of my credit limit.

But we just got into Y Combinator, so things were looking up.

Later that summer, we'd just been pitching at Demo Day, and we were starting to think about investment.

Now, for the last 9 months, you've got to realize that all of my friends thought I was broke and unemployed.

We said, we will raise a million dollars.

And if we raise a million dollars, then no 1 can joke at that, right?

I remember talking to a room full of investors after the demo day pitches and getting really excited.

Everyone seemed to be really interested in what we were doing and everyone wanted to find out more.

We'd heard all these stories about YC companies that closed their rounds in weeks, if not days.

But then, over the coming weeks, the initial eagerness turned into hesitant maybes and eventually definite no's.

A month and a half later, we had raised less than a quarter of what we wanted to and we'd been rejected at least 60 times on separate occasions.

We drove there, Matt and myself, and we had a meeting with an investor there.

We didn't even need to get to the end of the meeting to know that there was the, this ain't never going to happen, in the, yeah, sure, let's keep in touch.

I remember driving back to San Francisco and it felt like 1 of the lowest points yet.

We had to go back to London soon and we were going to go back failures.

I remember turning to Matt and saying to him, hey, how would you feel if I just crashed into this side barrier here right now?

But then a few weeks later, it all just seemed to click into place.

We were back in London and Tom had been speaking to the guys at Accel and we'd also just been introduced to another fund called Passion Capital.

We had our final meeting with the partners at AgCell, and I remember getting the call, and we all huddled round, and Adam from AgCell told us that they wanted to put in 600k.

The next day, Passion told us they wanted to put in 400k too.

And all of a sudden, almost overnight, we'd gone from abject failure to smashing our targets and closing a round of 1.5 million dollars.

I'd like to be able to say that from that point on it's just been smooth sailing but that would be just a lie.

Every single time you think that you're going to get to a certain milestone or achieve the next thing or get to the next level and it will all be okay.

That, you know, everything will be great.

But no matter what, there's always the next challenge.

These peaks and troughs are never-ending.

I never appreciated how hard it would be to start a business.

I've had some of the best times of my life working with the guys at GoCardless, but I'm also about 5 times greyer than when I started.

If it wasn't for my co-founders and some of the early team and my girlfriend and the friends that supported me, I don't think I would have made it this far.

I remember Sam Altman giving us 1 of the best pieces of advice that we ever received.

He said that Starting a business is like riding a wave between life and death.

If you can hang on long enough, you're bound to succeed.

It turns out that holding on to that wave is 1 of the hardest things you'll ever do.

But If you're an emotional cockroach, you can do it.

It will be 1 of the best journeys you ever take on your life.


Speaker 0: Now, on to the next speaker this afternoon. Hiroki is a co-founder and CEO of GoCardless, which is the UK's leading direct debit provider. And they now serve more businesses than any other direct debit provider, and they're also expanding to serve Europe. Hiroki and his co-founder Matt started GoCardless in 2010, so they've got a fun story to be telling you about their history. Thanks, Hiroki.

About their history. Thank you, Heroku. APPLAUSE

Speaker 1: Wow, it's really bright up here and I think that's a good thing. I can kind of barely see the back, so I can't really see how many people are in the room right now. Hi, I'm Hiroki, and I started GoCardless actually in the beginning of 2011 with my co-founders Matt and Tom. For those of you that don't know about what we do, basically we make it really easy for businesses to accept recurring payments via direct debit. When Kat asked me to talk at startup school, she asked me to talk about the earliest stages of GoCardless and tell our story.

And so when I was thinking through our story, I was trying to figure out, okay, what should I talk about? And I realized that actually, for me, the lessons I've learned, they didn't come from just specific events or 1 story here or there. They're lessons that I learn over time. And so rather than telling you our straight story, I thought I'd share 4 lessons that I've learned along the way and then give you some anecdotes as well. Let's see if this clicker works.

Okay. So our first story is about when your journey starts. And actually your journey starts way earlier than you think. When I sat down to really think about this talk and start thinking about what's the story of GoCardless and where did it begin, it actually turned out to be a pretty non-trivial question. Was it when we wrote our first line of code?

Or was it when Matt, Tom, and myself agreed to start a business together? Or perhaps it was when Matt and I met for the first time and we shared our dreams of starting a business 1 day. But then I realised that for me, my story began way earlier than that. My story began in the first week of university. I'd got to university and, you know, like most people, you meet lots of new friends, you try out new activities and take up new hobbies.

And it was during then that I met a guy called Kirill. He was in the year above me and he did maths too. And he kind of took me under his wing. And in 1 of those first weeks, he took me to this meetup for this society called Oxford Entrepreneurs. Basically, it was a student society that was there to promote entrepreneurship.

And I remember my eyes being opened for the first time to this world of startups and business. Before that I had no idea what it was about. I thought business was like Lex Luthor and Mr Burns. So I remember going to this event and meeting all these really cool people that were interested in taking this other path. And it was there that I met Kulveer and Hajj.

They're going to kill me when they see this picture because it's an awful picture of them. But they were the first people that I met that had started a business. Now you've got to remember that back in the, you know, 2005, 2006, when they started their business, no 1 was doing that in London. Everyone was going into banking or law, and These guys decided to quit their jobs and start a business together and pursue their dreams and I found that fascinating. So when they decided to move out to San Francisco, I knew that I needed to persuade them to give me an internship.

In the summer of 2007, those guys finally relented and said, OK, cool, come and join us for the summer. And when I got there, it turns out that they'd actually teamed up with a guy called Patrick, who was actually on stage earlier, And they started Auktomatic together. It was basically an inventory management tool for eBay power sellers. That's them at a conference with their I like being on top t-shirts. It was on top of auctions, that is.

And I got to see first hand what it was like to be in the earliest stages of being in a start-up. I remember getting there and we spent 2 months living and working out of this tiny apartment in San Francisco. It was a 2 bedroom place and there were 6 of us. We had 3 air mattresses between us and we had to sleep in shifts so that we wouldn't knock into each other in the night. That summer I spent my time just doing customer interviews, testing out the product by selling lasers that we imported from China.

They were so powerful that you could hit an airplane out in the sky with them. I remember this 1 time we did it and we thought we were going to get caught by the police. And I also was surrounded by all of these developers and learned about what coding was. Before that, I'd never really been exposed to it. And I also got a chance to go to Y Combinator and see what those dinners were like.

And I heard some of the stories from founders back then. When it came to starting my business, I realized that I learned so much from my experiences at Automatic. When I first met Matt, would we have had the debate about the pros and cons of co-founders versus starting a business on your own? Or, when it came to starting and building out our first product, Would I have learned the value of coding? Would I have even applied for Y Combinator had it not been for the experiences that I had then?

I'm not sure we would have. So remember that your journey starts way before you think it does. And if you want to start a business 1 day, then think about what you can be doing right now to learn about what you'll be doing in the future, because you never know what's going to be useful. So my second story and lesson is about being careful of whiteboard ideas. I'll explain what I mean by that in a bit.

When I met Matt for the first time, it was when we first started, it was our first jobs out of university and we were working as management consultants for our sins. And we quickly realised that we had this shared interest in starting a business, you know, that maybe 1 day we'd want to start a business together. I remember we used to spend hours in between projects and on the weekends just toying with ideas bouncing around on whiteboards concocting plans of what we might be able to start 1 day. I also remember that we had this really terrible pattern where every time we came up with an idea, we'd then spend the next week or few days just tearing it apart and realising how terrible an idea it was. This was all done on a whiteboard.

So when it came to leaving our jobs and we decided that we were going to take the plunge and start a business, we still didn't actually have an idea of what we wanted to do. We hadn't settled on something we were excited about. Now it turns out that actually doing that and telling your friends that you're starting a business but you don't know what it is yet is a really great forcing mechanism. We quickly joined forces with Tom and decided to start something called Group A. This was 1 of my early designs and the idea was this.

If you're a football captain of your local team or you're going on holiday with your friends then collecting money for those informal situations is a real pain. So we wanted to start something to fix that. I'm going to fast forward a little bit now in the story. This was 6 months later. We were out in Silicon Valley and we were working out of an apartment in the Mission.

We were on Y Combinator and we had a prototype of this product that we were trying to get anyone and everyone to use. We were quickly approaching demo day, which is the culmination of the Y Combinator program. It's when all of the founders of Y Combinator get into a room and present this to a room full of the who's who of investors in Silicon Valley. But we had a little bit of a problem because we look like this. And so in a last-ditch attempt to really try and drum up business, we decided to move the whole company, engineers and all, there was 4 of us at the time, onto sales.

Now it turned out that all of our customers were in the UK. So what that meant was waking up really early in the morning every day to cold call into the UK a list of local football team managers that we'd found on the internet. I used to remember when Matt used to come into my room at 5 in the morning every morning to start the day's calling. It turns out that 5am San Francisco time is the perfect time to catch a football manager going into the pub. It also turns out that the only thing that they had in common was that they had no idea how we got their numbers.

Needless to say, we didn't have much success. So in a last ditch attempt to salvage something from the situation, we decided to pivot the business and become GoCardless. Now, we got lucky, because a lot of the work that we'd done for Group A turned out to be exactly what you would do to start go cardless. We'd learnt about payments, we'd gone and got a banking deal and we were applying for our regulatory approval. But what if we hadn't have started GoCardless?

What if we'd have wanted to do something else? I often think what went wrong in those days in Group A, and it's really easy to come up with various reasons why it didn't work out. But if I'm gonna be honest, I think the reason it didn't work was because we weren't really building something for ourselves. We weren't even building something for our friends and family. We come up with this idea on a whiteboard and we thought how theoretically great it could be and we were building a solution for that instead.

So when it comes to starting your business, beware of those ideas, those ideas that seem theoretically really interesting, or the ones that are in really big markets. Really ask yourself the question, is this something that I'd want to use myself? So, My third lesson is about focusing on momentum. Now when I first started GoCardless, I thought that progress would be a fairly linear thing. I thought that we'd get from the start to success something like this.

But when I think about the story that we've had with GoCardless, it couldn't be further from the truth. Our story looks something more like this. Now, in the early days of GoCardless, we used to spend ages just debating the smallest things. We would just spend hours discussing the smallest of product changes, or we agonized over the strategy that we were going to use for capturing this huge vision. We had limited time and limited resource, And so we thought, we can't afford to make mistakes.

We need to make sure that we get it first time round. But actually what turned out was that rather than just going in a straight line from start to success, We'd just spend ages going from A to B and then realizing it was wrong in the end anyway. And so our path just ended up looking like a zigzag but just a much slower 1. This is something that's happened so many times I actually struggle to come up with even a specific instance. It's like asking what you had for breakfast yesterday.

You do it so often that you know you can't even remember what you ate yesterday. And over time it's made I've realized that these mistakes are bound to happen. You should try and embrace them instead. Instead of agonizing over each and every decision that you make and making sure that you do exactly the right thing, it's better to get your head down and just run with it and then course correct afterwards instead. And it's through that cycle of just constantly course correcting that you just run really fast and wiggle your way to success.

In the early days especially, momentum is the hardest thing to come by. It's way harder than deciding on what idea to do or whether something's the right thing or the wrong thing. It's actually just getting from a standstill to something at all. So I'd say it's better to start doing the wrong thing than to not start at all. My last lesson is about being an emotional cockroach.

When I told people about this they said what does that mean? So I'll explain first otherwise I'll just confuse you all. A cockroach is well known for being able to withstand a nuclear attack and that's what I mean. You need to have emotions that can withstand the biggest of ups and the biggest of downs. I remember when we were doing Y Combinator, Brian and Nate from Airbnb came and gave a talk.

They told us about the first thousand days of starting their business. And I remember walking away from that talk and thinking, wow, they came so close to financial ruin and it took them so long to see any success. How did they have the courage to do that? We hit our financial low a little bit earlier in the summer. That's my co-founder Tom in his comfortable abode in San Francisco.

We'd just moved out there, and we didn't have anything. So Matt and myself took a trip to Ikea to buy the essentials. We were really poor by that point, and so we had to be really careful. We had rations for ourselves. We got there and we had 1 flimsy mattress each, 1 knife, 1 fork, a plate, and then a choice between a mug and a bowl.

When it came to the checkout the only way we were able to settle the bill was by splitting it across Matt's debit cards, the remains of my overdraft and the absolute dregs of my credit limit. But we just got into Y Combinator, so things were looking up. Later that summer, we'd just been pitching at Demo Day, and we were starting to think about investment. Now, for the last 9 months, you've got to realize that all of my friends thought I was broke and unemployed. So we set ourselves a target.

We said, we will raise a million dollars. And if we raise a million dollars, then no 1 can joke at that, right? I remember talking to a room full of investors after the demo day pitches and getting really excited. Everyone seemed to be really interested in what we were doing and everyone wanted to find out more. We'd heard all these stories about YC companies that closed their rounds in weeks, if not days.

And I thought, how hard could it be? We're going to close this no problem. And we were so excited. But then, over the coming weeks, the initial eagerness turned into hesitant maybes and eventually definite no's. A month and a half later, we had raised less than a quarter of what we wanted to and we'd been rejected at least 60 times on separate occasions.

I remember going to Sandhill Road. We drove there, Matt and myself, and we had a meeting with an investor there. I won't name names. We didn't even need to get to the end of the meeting to know that there was the, this ain't never going to happen, in the, yeah, sure, let's keep in touch. I remember driving back to San Francisco and it felt like 1 of the lowest points yet.

We had to go back to London soon and we were going to go back failures. I remember turning to Matt and saying to him, hey, how would you feel if I just crashed into this side barrier here right now? Luckily we both just laughed. But then a few weeks later, it all just seemed to click into place. We were back in London and Tom had been speaking to the guys at Accel and we'd also just been introduced to another fund called Passion Capital.

We had our final meeting with the partners at AgCell, and I remember getting the call, and we all huddled round, and Adam from AgCell told us that they wanted to put in 600k. The next day, Passion told us they wanted to put in 400k too. And all of a sudden, almost overnight, we'd gone from abject failure to smashing our targets and closing a round of 1.5 million dollars. I'd like to be able to say that from that point on it's just been smooth sailing but that would be just a lie. Every single time you think that you're going to get to a certain milestone or achieve the next thing or get to the next level and it will all be okay.

That, you know, everything will be great. But no matter what, there's always the next challenge. These peaks and troughs are never-ending. I never appreciated how hard it would be to start a business. I've had some of the best times of my life working with the guys at GoCardless, but I'm also about 5 times greyer than when I started.

If it wasn't for my co-founders and some of the early team and my girlfriend and the friends that supported me, I don't think I would have made it this far. I remember Sam Altman giving us 1 of the best pieces of advice that we ever received. He said that Starting a business is like riding a wave between life and death. If you can hang on long enough, you're bound to succeed. It turns out that holding on to that wave is 1 of the hardest things you'll ever do.

But If you're an emotional cockroach, you can do it. It will be 1 of the best journeys you ever take on your life. Thank you. APPLAUSE Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

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Hiroki Takeuchi