Hiroki Takeuchi

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

Thank you! 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.

Um, so hi! I'm Heroi, and I started Go Cardless 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 Cat asked me to talk at Startup School, she asked me to talk about the earliest stages of Go Cardless and tell our story. So when I was thinking through our story, I was trying to like figure out, okay, what should I talk about? And I realized that actually, for me, the lessons I've learned didn't come from just, you know, specific events or one story here or there. They're lessons that I learned over time.

So rather than telling you a straight story, I thought I'd share four lessons that I've learned along the way and then give you some anecdotes as well. See if this clicker works. Okay, so our first story is about when your journey starts, and actually, that 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 Go Cardless 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 one day?

But then I realized 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. It was during then that I met a guy called Carol. He was in the year above me, and he did Maths too, and he kind of took me under his wing. In one 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.

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. And 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 K and Haj. 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 2005 and 2006, when they started their business, no one was doing that in London. Everyone was going to 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, “Okay, cool, come and like join us for the summer.”

When I got there, it turned out that they'd actually teamed up with a guy called Patrick, who's actually on stage earlier, and they started Automatic 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 firsthand what it was like to be in the earliest stages of being in a startup. I remember getting there, and we spent two months living and working out of this tiny apartment in San Francisco.