S3E09: Andy Barker - The Payment Eras Tour

Welcome to Commerce Famous, a podcast that celebrates the celebrities of our industry. Join us for a conversation with the tastemakers in ecommerce. In their daily lives, these are just normal everyday people like you and me. But to us, they are commerce Famous. Alright.

Welcome to episode nine season three of Commerce Famous. Today, I have a very exciting fun guest good that we travel in the Wayback Machine, to talk about early life at Digital River, which is how I know mister Andy Barker. Andy, welcome. Yeah. Thank you, Jason.

It's it's great. I think we were reminiscing at the beginning, and normally, we only get to see each other running past each other at the airport. So this is awesome to actually spend time together having a a chat about our history and everything that's going on in the in the commerce industry. Amazing. Well, the, the podcast is called Commerce Famous because there is no hall of fame for ecommerce.

But if there was one, you would in my mind, you would be a member. That doesn't mean a lot, but take it for what it's worth. No. That that's good. Alright.

Well, so the the format of the of the pod is pretty simple. We kinda talk about your journey, who you are, what you've done, and we really kinda go deep in some of the moments in time that made, you you know, your e your ecommerce experience unique, and hopefully our listeners can kinda benefit from that. So why don't you introduce yourself, a lifelong payments guy, but tell us about Andy Barker. Yeah. So I'm Andy Barker.

I, have been in the ecommerce industry since 1997. As, Jason, you mentioned, I started my career in ecomm at a company called DigiRiver here in, Minneapolis. Back basically when the Internet was brand new and ecommerce was just starting out. I think I remember when we first started, it's like, is this thing really gonna take off? And then all of a sudden, a year later in '98, we're talking about going IPO and that ecommerce is gonna destroy brick and mortar.

That was basically the story until kind of the February early two thousands that were there. So I started, basically, I was the first customer service agent, if you can imagine that. I was good with talking with people, and when you're the twentieth person at the company, with a brand new technology, you need somebody to answer the phones. So I I basically started off, you know, I was the guy that was answering the phones as well as, doing emails I would bring. I think I had a 20 gig hard drive with all the emails on it that I would bring home and then do emails at at night.

But as you can imagine, you know, it was, like, very repetitive. There were problems. I had to go on the database. I started writing code just to make my job easier. And then six months in, they're like, hey.

You know how to code? And it's like, well, yeah, kinda. And then they immediately said, can we hire you as a developer? And as a biochemist at a ecom company that didn't know how this was gonna work, I'm like, yeah. I'll jump on that.

I'll be an engineer. And, basically, what I realized is they got an engineer at half price. So maybe not necessarily that it was good, but that they got it at half price. And, really, that was the start of it. I was engineering.

You know, we wore lots and lots of hats when you're a start up at the beginning, being able to support the systems and as the company just had that exponential growth that was there. So when you're a good coder and you can guide people, they make you a manager and you get to do less coding. And, basically, I had tour of duty, lived in Germany with Digi River for a couple times, ran that team, and integrated their systems into ours. And then eventually fully took in took over managing payments. And that's I I would say 2005, you didn't know I was building payment system.

2005 is when I developed the name, the payments guy. So if you didn't know who I was, that's really when I started developing and and owning payments for DigiRiver, that eventually became Digital World of our World Payments after we acquired Netjaro and everything else. So it honestly, it was probably one of the best on the job trainings that I think any of us possibly coulda had at the beginning of the Internet and and ecommerce. We learned a lot. We had lots of problems.

We broke lots of barriers, but it was just a a pretty exciting thing. And then going forward after that, basically, my career has always been leading, payments organizations from the product and engineering side, moved over to payments partnerships and and commercial aspects. But, fundamentally, my passion is really about how do we solve problems within payments and if that means building stuff yourself, doing that, or if it means partnering and and kind of moving the payment space further into the gray area to provide value to to the end, you know, customers, which in many cases in my career have been merchants. Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source ecommerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already process over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through Shopware.

Find out more about Shopware and the best value in e commerce at shopware.com. Yeah. Well, let's let's let's spend a little bit more time on Digital River, then we'll move to your eBay enterprise world, your Magento world, and Miracle and other because you've had an amazing journey that I think the listeners are gonna wanna listen to. But what's interesting about the moment that you had when you were a customer service agent, this was actually before I even got to Digital River. This is I got there in 2000.

But what you'd said was really interesting. You basically were the guy that was handling all the problems. And at a startup, your job is just to figure out how to solve them. And I love that because what you did is you you you patterns you spotted some patterns, and you wrote scripts and and things to get rid of them. You made your job easier.

Yeah. It's interesting that we're in this exact same spot with because there, you know, there were not people who went to school for ecommerce engineering and development, really. There were coders building software products, but not SaaS based ecommerce people. So even if DigiRiver wanted to go hire twice spend twice as much money, they wouldn't have got someone who could come in and have the same level of experience you had. You agree with that?

Yeah. I fundamentally agree. I mean, it's it's actually throughout my career, it's kind of guided my hiring is it's important that you went to school, but really, fundamentally, I want to know people that are curious. They're passionate about solving problems and have a fundamental understanding of logic. And, really, ultimately, that's what it came down to is at the beginning, there were problems, but there were consistent problems that happened.

So it was a repeatable type of thing. I would even go as far as now almost thirty years later. The problems are kinda exactly the same thing. But they get maybe a little more complex, a little more extended because you have multiple parties that are involved in it if it's kind of a roll your own system. But really, fundamentally, it's understanding logic and understanding how to solve problems.

And and that's really what it comes comes down to. If you can do that as an individual, you're successful. You're the one that's keeping your job. If it's a company that's doing it within the products that they're building for their customers, then they're going to win in that particular case. It might take a while, but they're going to win because, ultimately, the problems are the same, and merchants just really wanna sell shit on the Internet.

Excuse me if I Yeah. No. It's okay. You can say that. We probably are gonna get the the, the explicit filter sometime later anyway.

You're good. Yeah. Well, let me let me actually create the parallel because I actually think we're in a similar moment right now. I mean, people who are going to school for e commerce and, you know, and to try and be developers in that world well, three years ago with with ChatTPT and all the things happening in AI and vibe coding, there's a whole different set of skill sets and mindsets that people are hiring for today that probably don't have classical training in schooling. So they're looking for the next kinda Andy Barker who they can pay half the price and get, you know, twice the output.

Yeah. And and for me, I look at it as like, oh, am I gonna lose my job? As a product person that I do day to day, it's like, no. Product people are really important because now with ChatGPT and Cursor and Cloud Code and stuff like that, I can create proof of concepts, like, in a snap of a finger. What would take days and weeks and negotiations to get capacity, we can actually set and do things.

So people that are important are people that can think, people that can solve problems, and our our ability to gather the insights and capabilities that are necessary for the market to be able to solve their problems. So to me, all the AI has just made us supercharged and make us more efficient. It's a little scary for somebody new coming in if they're just a core engineer. But what I would say is start thinking beyond just coding and about problems and about what that is and understanding that. If you're an engineer that can think broadly beyond just the technology or frameworks that are in place, you're gonna have a much better time standing out in the crowd than if you're just a, you know, a rock star, Java programmer or Go or anything else that's out there.

Right on. Well, let's take a let's take the next step in your I'm gonna skip Singular Logic and WeatherNation. Two cool companies. But, as the payments guy that I know you as, let's talk a little bit about, GSI Commerce, which later became eBay enterprise. Can you talk a little bit about your experiences there?

You were there about four and a half years. Yeah. Yeah. So I got, recruited into there by, a common friend of ours, the mister Michael Schnauf. He basically said, hey.

You know what? They're gonna start a payments business here. They need to know somebody that's got interesting information. So I said, yeah. I'll go talk to them, and I talked to, let's see.

Michael Michael Rubin was I there's two Rubens in my career. So Michael Rubin, I think, is the one from GSI. Yes. That's right. The other one is Roy Rubin, which was from my Magento days.

And Michael, I talked to him and basically said, here's the plan. This is what I'm thinking. This is what you have the opportunities. And then, basically, I flew back home after talking to them in King Of Prussia, and he says, hey. Do you want a job?

So I ran over there to basically develop and build a payments business, which is became at that particular point, we're talking 2010, so mid two thousand time frame, is companies that were similar to DigiRiver. They were they had, you know, a SaaS based platform that was for more larger enterprise, merchants. They were looking at how do we verticalize. Instead of providing a website, how do we start moving into really solving problems and and giving expansion capabilities to these customers? But if you can do it at scale for the customers, they take the benefit.

Again, what we did at Digi River is you build it once and then you can have it for all the other, all the other merchants that you have. It was interesting. I got hired at GSI. Six months later, I was an eBay employee, after they were eBay acquired GSI and rebranded the company to eBay enterprise. And really, again, the focus was kind of the triumph where there's fraud, tax, and, and payments that were built into it.

And, again, it was how do we build something that makes it easier for merchants to expand their business, increase acceptance rates, you know, optimize their ability to go internationally. And at the same time, how does eBay enterprise make an additional revenue stream for the company that if if done correctly is is very lucrative for the business. What I always love is the is the origin story of how one thing kinda created a market leader, which created other players. And if you think about, you know, the Digital River days, Digital River was dominant in consumer electronics, software, and gaming, and really nowhere else. And GSI then took the the playbook and said, we're gonna run a similar playbook, which is provide many, many services, payments fraud, tax compliance, commerce platform marketing, etcetera, to apparel and other classical online businesses.

Well, this this, Michael Reubens you're talking about, Andy, is the guy who created fanatics. He's a multi billionaire. He owns the Philadelphia 76ers. I mean, he is a major player both culturally and in technology in the history of ecommerce in The States. So you are kinda at the ground floor of what became a very successful person.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it's interesting how you say the origins because, really, GSI eBay enterprise, really their origins wasn't retail because he was selling skis out of his basement, but it was fulfillment. So they came the fulfillment track.

GSI eBay enterprise had a massive fulfillment, optimized system that was in place. And if you look at the parallel to Digi River, Joel Ronning had a MacUSA. It was a catalog business. So he's going from how do I sell stuff, not necessarily the fulfillment angle, but the the selling and how do you do the logistics sides and as they come together. And that was the fundamental difference with GSI is they were really the retailer.

They were the ones that were basically, if brick and mortar was gonna go away, they were gonna be the ones that pioneered that for what we consider the traditional brick and mortar retail stores and get rid of the mini malls and all those other things where DigiRiver, like you said, it was electronics, it was game. A lot of things that were core focused on digital delivery of goods because that's where DigiRiver just absolutely sewed it up is how do we expand. I mean, we had all the try before you buy companies. You know? It was just amazing at how we cornered the market for delivering digital goods, which now I show my kids a floppy disc or a CD, and they're like, what the hell is that?

And it's like, exactly. You know? This is this is what some of these technologies has moved by the wayside that have been driven by these companies like DigiRiver and GSI. Yep. Well, you know, so in in what's really interesting about it is while e GSI and eBay enterprise don't really exist in their current form today, both parts of them do, and I'll get to the last one in a second.

Radial is still a world class customer service and and fulfillment business. There's some marketing businesses that were part of the the stack. And when they were under the same, family as, at eBay enterprise, you had Magento. Can you talk about how you got into the Magento world and a little bit about that experience? Yeah.

So so Magento is interesting. So the other Reuben that's there, Roy Reuben, he basically you know, we we hear this term democratization. And at sometimes, it's like, oh my gosh. Do I have to hear it again? But he really democratized ecommerce is how do I open this up to the world?

How do I make it easier? How do I actually build an economy that's bigger than the revenues of Magento itself in these solution providers, SIs, and agencies to actually build, web stores on top of the Magento technology for customers that are out there. So PayPal had actually, invested in Magento or had advised eBay because we're all one's family. So eBay enterprise was owned by eBay. EBay at that time also owned PayPal, and, you know, had Magento.

PayPal had Braintree and Venmo, so it was this big massive conglomerate. Well, Colorado icon came in in about 2014, and he just broke it up. As an activist investor, he pushed to basically separate these things. Ultimately, he was saying, I make more money if eBay and PayPal are separate. So, basically, they separated.

Now because eBay and we're all part of the same family, we are all, as any good portfolio company is, trying to work with each other. How do we expand our own businesses by working with the other portfolio companies underneath that? And, basically, Magento was one of them. So I started advising them on payments and the capabilities because they were just a core platform that was there. And then after the breakup of eBay and PayPal, eBay went in and did some soul searching and decided we need to focus on our core marketplace business.

And what we're gonna do is divest some of these other properties so that we can really take that capital and focus on our core business, which was their marketplace. So Magento, some of the, the marketing, like Clear Sailing and those others, were actually bundled up and packaged, and they sold off eBay enterprise as well as Magento. I ended up hopping over to the Magento side because, Mark Lovell, who is actually running and overseeing, eBay enterprise and Magento at that time, decided to go over to Magento, and I have a massive of respect for Lavelle all the way back to, his his days when, he did bill me later. So, basically, it just made sense for me to come over that direction. So I hopped the ship as things were separating.

It was very interesting time, I would say, in my career. But in basically the end of twenty fifteen is when I officially jumped over to Magento after the separation and did not only business development, but also did product in that case. And really, the core focus was how do we build and expand a payments business for for Magento. Yep. Well, so what's really interesting about that, number one, Roy Rubin was guest one on Commerce Famous.

So you can text him and tell him you've also been a guest. Took you took you three seasons, but you made it. Yeah. I did. The second thing that I would so the parallels are actually the the opposites of what the business you were at.

So you were at a business at DigiRiver whose goal was it to provide as many services as possible and monetize them all. EBay enterprise, similar. Right? They had clear sailing. They had a bunch of marketing suites, going global, all these things.

They wanted to control the the airwaves. Magento was the opposite, as you kind of mentioned. They wanna provide a great commerce platform and an ecosystem for everyone else to make money. And frankly, it's and I don't know who deserves the credit, but the secret of the success was the community of Magento. And if you go and if you go around, even to this day, I I think it's safe to say Adobe doesn't really care about the long tail of Magento merchants.

Even to this day, there are Meet Magentos in every major city around the world of this alumni group still getting together as a community. Yeah. Yeah. A a 100%. And, you know, a shared person we both know is Ben Marks.

You know, Ben Marks was basically the head of the community at Magento. So he came in under Roy at that time, and then when we separated off, he was driving that. So like I said, the the the economy that was built underneath Magento that made Magento successful, it was in the hundreds and millions of dollars a year that was being generated by people implementing Magento. So I had never seen anything like that in my life. You know, it was always, as you mentioned, we wanna verticalize, we wanna control, we wanna wrap around arms around it.

Magento just embraced that open source. So it wasn't only just implementation of our solutions, but we had the community edition, which was the open source version. People were pushing call requests every single day to help make that platform better. So it it was eye opening to see that there are alternative business models than just pure verticalization. There is way that you can use the community to help them feed their families, which helps you build a a bigger and greater product that's out there.

Yep. A much bigger moat. A moat that even what is it? Ten, fifteen years ago, started to dry up, but the moat still exists. You know, the greatest let the the oversimplification of how to make money in business is either bundling, which is the Digital River GSI way, or unbundling.

And yeah. And it's and they were the master of unbundling. A 100%. Well, so what's really interesting about where I'm at now, Shopware. We're we've we're learning a lot about the great ecosystem that was built in the great community.

And in a lot of ways, I'm I'm running the same playbook and it's really, really, fulfilling to me, to do it. But part of the reason I'm here is I met you randomly in an airport in Minneapolis, and I said, how does Digital River figure out a way to part with partner with Adobe? And you said, here's Ben Marks. I'll make an introduction to you. And so my intro to Ben, and then he left and went to Shopware, and that's how I they got on my radar.

So in a in a in a multi step, you're you're responsible for me being here. Well, I'm I'm glad I could have done that, and I'm glad we saw each other, in the in the airport and stuff. It's Yeah. It's even though the hall of fame for commerce doesn't exist outside of this area, it should because we have some of the most amazing people, within this this, this market that, really help a lot of people silently in the background. Yep.

Totally. Well, we both live are you still in Hopkins? Right? You're still local? Yeah.

And I'm I'm in Minnetonka Hopkins as well. So we're neighbors even though we only see each other in the real world. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about so so I don't know if people really grok it, but part of the reason that Stripe is who they are is because they were the default engine inside of Shopify when Shopify hit the rocket ship.

Yes. And and if you rewind the clock, it's actually a play that when PayPal and Magento were part of the same business, that was what was done. And I have a feeling you had your fingerprints on it. But can you talk a little bit about that partnership with PayPal and Magento and how you drove such adoption? And then I'd love for you to transition to a little bit around how you were the head of payments products at Adobe, what that meant?

What what did you guys actually build? Yeah. So, I mean, you look at you look at Shopify. You know, everyone looks at Shopify as an ecommerce company. Actually, Shopify is a payments company that happens to have an ecommerce product.

I mean, they have the formula down. They figured it out. There's a long game that's associated with this, but it it really was that relationship with with Shopify and Stripe and being able to have the best of both sides work together to actually develop a solution that solve people's problems. You know, if it's easy and you click a button and you can get processing and payments globally and you get funded and maybe, later on, you can actually get, funded faster than either ACH or any kind of monthly sweep that might happen, you're providing value there. So when it came to Magento and the fact that PayPal, even though we weren't, we were ex sisters, I would say, or a brother and sister, we still had lots of connections.

So, really, that's what I started to do is develop that similar types of relationship because, really, it helped PayPal grow beyond, their traditional, you know, peer to peer kind of payments and drive further into commerce processing because they have a number of underlying processing systems that are in place, you know, the old Verisign platform and a number of others, Braintree. So really the core of this was is on the BD side was, hey. Let's develop a a product that works similar to the way, Stripe works with Shopify, but do that for Magento. And do it in a the the complexity is you got an open source product that anyone can basically muck with the engine under the hood. Shopify has it where they've got a locked ecosystem.

So the complexity was how do we do the similar same things, provide value, and not just look like a money grab, but actually do it where somebody might be tinkering under the hood. And that's really what, happened is, worked on striking that relationship, working with the great team at PayPal. And then basically, Mark Leonard, my boss, and, and a couple other people were like, we got nobody to build this that understands this. Can you now build it? So then it was like, okay.

Let's put on the product and engineering hat back on and then basically built the team to actually develop that product and roll it out. Ultimately, PayPal built a system called, payment, PayPal commerce platform. Yep. PPCP. Yep.

Yep. PCP. I I kinda mentioned. I said that you really wanna name it PCP? And they're like, yep.

It's already it's already locked. So anyways, outside of that, with what we were pushing, PayPal officially said, hey. There's an opportunity here. Let's do that. And it exists in the market today.

It's it's the payments product from Adobe Commerce. Right now, I think they support both the open source or the the the con non commerce version, whatever they call it, if it's still the community, as well as, Adobe Commerce. And it's it's, a very successful product for for Adobe. Yep. And I think in a lot of ways, it's kinda you the work that you did shined a light on other open source platforms like Shopware that, hey, this is valuable, not because it's a money grab, but because you can make it a lot easier to onboard and enroll and utilize payments.

And we all know that the bigger that you get, the more negotiating leverage that you might have to get better rates. But if you're a small guy, you don't have much leverage. And so the real value is gonna be speed and convenience and, you know, making sure it all just works, the plumbing. So Yeah. And and the thing is is we have the ability because we have a contract, we have the relationship with PayPal, we're sitting on top of it.

And then when I say we, I mean Adobe slash Magento at this point. We have that collective of marketing. So you have the ability to negotiate better rates. So if somebody really gets on the rocket ship and jumps off, they don't have to leave, then there's the ability to give better rate processing and things that are there. But you hit it on the head.

Ultimately, it's how do we just make this work? How do we make this more convenient? We're only getting paid if they're being successful. If if the merchant is being set up. I'm a firm believer in those specific models when it comes to commerce is it's almost a rev share kind of thing.

It's like we make money when you make money opposed to just, I don't care if you work or don't. I'm gonna charge you this flat fee. In certain cases, subscription fees are are perfect, but when it comes to payments and these other things that are paramount to the business, having those models that are, I get paid when you're helping me solve my problems, I think are the best ways, to to actually make sure that your goals are aligned and you're you're making sure that everyone's happy in the entire chain. Yep. And and so the two places that I think have justification to charge a revenue share are the ones where your expenses don't occur unless there's a transaction.

And so payments is the perfect use case. Payments by definition is already a rev share because of interchange, and so that makes sense. And the other one is really hosting because the amount of traffic and orders and all this stuff is where all the burden is on infrastructure. I don't believe just so you know, I don't believe in the rev share as a percentage of sales for ecommerce platform. But I certainly do on payments and I certainly do on hosting.

So Yep. Yep. So so transition. So you had three pretty great successful outcomes. I mean, at at the time, Digital River was a multibillion dollar business.

GSI got sold or excuse to EB enterprise, which was a great outcome. It It got unbundled, which was a great outcome. You got Adobe, which was a great outcome. You decided to go to Miracle. What's going on in Miracle?

So in Miracle was was a really interesting one. Again, it was one of those things where, Miracle was looking to do something with payments. And and Miracle is a SaaS based platform specifically for marketplaces. So, I had known the Primera guys from, the acquisition of Magento. So Primera, a large, private equity firm out of The UK in The United States, they were part of leading the the acquisition of Magento.

So I had helped them with some of, some assessments on payment companies during the time. So I I developed a relationship with them. They were the ones that led the series I think it was the series e at Miracle. So they had reached out to me as well as a former colleague, that is head of m and a at Miracle, reached out and said, hey. Miracle's interested in learning more about payments.

So it's one of those things. It was like, is this a job interview or am I advising? So I I gave some information about this stuff, and they said, hey. Would you wanna do potentially an interview? I will have to say it was the single greatest interview that I've ever been on in my entire life.

As we get to the different levels, a lot of the times, you know, we're getting into different companies by somebody knowing somebody and, yeah, you have an interview and all those other stuff. Hell, I didn't even have a resume up to date at that point. But I went in and I had to do a presentation for them that was basically saying, this is what a payments business should look. This is how you can expand. This is how we can expand beyond just processing and all these other things.

And basically was offered the job to basically build a a payments business at Miracle. And because it was the marketplace side, we were actually not looking and we weren't in the processing flow for the transaction. It was an experience for me to learn on the payout side. So we're if you're traditional ecommerce, you're actually pulling money in and that's what we're talking about payments. Most people, I would say 80% of the time, we're talking about payments of credit card processing, BNPL, buy now pay later.

It's traditional commerce. With marketplaces, you have third party sellers and everything that goes into that. So I was able to learn something brand new, but take all the the experience that I had in payment processing and basically connections within the industry to really build a payout based system. So it's on the back end side. It's like, how do we distribute money?

How do you look at what are all the compliance? You know, the compliance that's associated within Europe is so strict. Do we become a bank? Do we not become a bank? You know, all these decisions.

So you're not looking at, I need to solve this within, six months. It's like, what do I need to solve for six months, but what do I need to solve in five years? And put that kinda chessboard in place. So it was a fantastic experience. I had an amazing team, primarily based out of of France and and Europe.

So there's nothing bad about, you know, going to Paris every single month to to work with the team and stuff, but it was a fantastic experience to be able to work on a different component. Because sometimes it's like, I know this stuff, it's rinse and repeat. You know, you know, you crave learning something new and being challenged, and that's really what Miracle was. Yeah. But it was I mean, it's an amazing company.

We love Miracle here at Shopware. We we actually partner with them. In fact, I was talking to Henry Vallee, Henri, and I mentioned your name, and he's like, oh, we love Andy Barker. So you got a great reputation there. Alright.

Thank So so so you probably got a call from, I'm gonna guess, Klaus, and he had over at Pagos and said, hey, Andy. I need you. So tell me how that went and why and what Pagos is. Yeah. So so I've known Claes and Albert who are the cofounders for Pagos since twenty twenty twenty four or, 2004.

Excuse me. So it's like twenty one years. Have the utmost respect for those two guys and and really have kept in touch over those entire periods of times. They had told me about Pagos. I had just started at at Miracle.

So I was, you know, keeping an eye on things. And and a couple times, they would ask, hey. We're thinking about launching this. Can you take a look at it? And it was like, yeah.

Yeah. I'll help you out. You know, I'm friends, and I want you to be successful. And nothing really ever was like, hey. I'm gonna leave kinda stuff.

I actually was not looking to leave Miracle at all, in this case. It was more rather, we had some side conversation about something, Klaus and I, and it turned into, hey. You should really take a look at what we're doing here. So I said, fine. I'll I'll really dive in, to what's going on.

And it was it was amazing. I mean, honestly, Jason, if I had the products, that Pagos is offering my entire career, I would have been so much more successful. You know, I I you know, ego aside, I think I've had a pretty successful career. But with what Pagos is doing in the ability to visualize and streamline, intelligence around payments was it my mind just exploded. And the company is full remote, so they fully adopted that we don't want to focus on where we're gonna have our office.

We wanna focus on being able to hire the best people wherever they live. So, you know, it checked the box of this is something I can believe in, fully remote, hiring good people. It's a small start up. So, you know, we we have less than 50 people in the company, and everyone gets up every day wanting to solve customers' problems. You know, we're not a new processor.

We are not in the money flow. All we're trying to do is is really solve the problem that the core payments has in being able to consolidate all of your payments data, normalize it to make sure you're looking at apples to apples, and then actually gleaning the insights out of that. So no matter if you're a payments team of a 100 people or you're just Joan in accounting that the CFO says now you're responsible for payments, you can run a high performant payment system because you will be able to see the insights in your payments data as well as with AI and, you know, this isn't just a code word kind of slapping AI on it. We use AI to actually go through your data and identify opportunities to increase acceptance, decrease cost, and really drive insights into even up the the funnel to marketing. You know, how are your marketing dollars actually going?

So, really, it was one of those things where, again, I wasn't looking for a job, but it's like, hey, man. This is a a once in a life opportunity. And when you're getting later in your career, it's like, what do I wanna do at the last couple companies I'm gonna be? You know, I wanna work with people that I really respect and that is is really solving, customers' problems. Well, I love it that you get different views of the value chain.

You get this merchant of record model. You get this this, payment facilitator offering. You've got, basically, you got marketplace payouts and now you've got analytics and kinda business operations. So it's really you're kinda moving your way through the value chain of payments. Correct.

Correct. And and the having more opportunities on the commercial side, so not simply being, strictly product engineering. Sometimes the pointy heads, you can get so myopic where you're just focused on that. But being able to be like, hey. You know what?

Product is really good. How are we gonna drive more leads into the top of the funnel? How are we going to because Pacos, there there isn't really competitors that are out there. So the the issue that happens with that is most people don't know that we even exist. You know?

Once we tell them what they're doing and showing what they're doing, they're like, holy crap. Where have you been all this time? It's like, well, we're here. It's how do you get the message out? How do you educate the market that are there are things that you can do to make your capabilities better?

So focusing on that product marketing side opposed to pure product and engineering side, I think as an individual, and as an executive, it it makes you more and more well rounded to be able to understand and really have blood, sweat, and tears in kind of those core areas of of of a business. Man, when I think about you know, obviously, I've been in payments for twenty some odd years. The last three, I haven't. But But when I think about some of the smartest people I've ever worked with in payments, Kloss is on the list. You're on the list.

Kapil's on the list. Albert's on the list. Like, four of Mark Miller is not, but he works for you guys. But four of the I know 10% of your company, and they're some of the smartest payments people have ever met. So, for anybody who's listening who has a how big what does the average customer look like for you guys?

Do they have to be processing 50 to a 100,000,000 to be a good fit, or what's the what's the lines? So they don't have to. I would say, basically, a 100,000,000 in hires where our traditional company, kind of segmentation is. Really large enterprise type businesses are what our commercial team is going after. So when you look at the size of businesses, so we have Adobe, Eventbrite, GoFundMe, Groupon, Mint Mobile, you know, LastPass.

You know, we've got the largest of the large that are doing billions of dollars of transactions. But as a small company, we have to optimize where our commercial team is focusing on. There's always if you look at the growth stage, you know, we've focused a lot of time on doing a lot of self-service for our product because there's really ultimately no code that you need to do. It's it's really you drop in a read only API key for whoever your processors are, and we start ingesting the data. And then, you know, fifteen, twenty minutes later, you've got basically dashboards with your information.

So what we focused on is really that 50,000,000 and, you know, it's 50 to a 100,000,000, and we can basically have self service with them. So, they have an opportunity to take advantage of the things. Even if they're not multiprocessor, there's still value that they can see in our system. Where the enterprise traditionally are larger, multiprocessor, they're international, so they're they've got a disparity of data that they're using. But our system really is beneficial for those companies that are on that growth curve that are thinking, do I invest in payments team, or do I figure out how to use tools like Pago so that I can be as intelligent if I had a team of 20 payments experts that were theirs?

Really, you know, you talk about Klaus and Albert and Kapil and myself, it's we we not only are building a payments first data platform and ingestion and making it easy as possible, because we pull data and we harmonize it, we normalize and all this other stuff. But really what you're getting is all of our guys, you know, combined over a hundred years of experience into the system. So in the alerts, into our, Pago's AI product where you can actually, you know, chat with it to say, okay. What is this? You know, tell me my graph.

Tell me all these other things. So you're getting that expertise from us, and we want to share it with the world to make it better. So that's where, again, that growth stage is really important. But if you immediately talk to our our commercial team, you're probably doing a 100,000,000 and higher. That's really helpful.

I would, man, I would take I would take you without up on that offer to to to take a look at people's businesses and see how you can be helpful because the people you've got are a plus. Again, I know 10% of the company, and I can vouch for those 10%. Awesome. Well, we're at the forty minute mark, so let's let's probably should wrap up. But the one of the traditions we have here on Commerce Famous is I want you to tell us, who you think would be a good guest, who's in your hall of fame, and who should I reach out to to have, have join me?

It I two people. Schnauf. Mike Schnauf, of course. No problem. He's seen the world.

The second one is Todd Frosted because Frosty comes from the commercial side. But, as we lovingly called Todd Frosted back in the day was Skunk Works. So he was a commercial guy that understood product opposed to, like, a product or engineering that understand commercial. So those two guys, you're gonna get a different view on what commerce is, but you're gonna get some of the most insightful information and ultimately experience that they've had, within their career. Two good ones.

I don't know if, yeah. Well, Todd Todd would be a great one. Mike would be a great one. I'll reach out to both. They're both I talk to them both relatively frequently, so it'll be kinda easy.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Perfect. Well, Andy, so great to talk to you.

Thank you for sharing some of your wonderful experiences. You're a superstar and and hopefully, our paths cross again at the airports then. Yeah. Yeah. But let's let's since we're, like, two and a half miles away, let's just do coffee.

Done. I will reach out. Done. Yeah. Sounds good, Jason.

This has been great. Cheers.