Leaders & Founders Adam Kinder, Tom Callaghan

Phil is a VP Engineering at Google, where throughout a 9-year tenure he's led a number of technical teams, including the Site Reliability Engineering group for Google Cloud Platform and Google's internal Technical Infrastructure. A UK native, Phil holds a BA in Mathematics from Oxford University and before joining Google, he spent 17 years as Chief Architect at Fidessa, where he led teams that designed and built databases and middleware technology for highperformance trading systems. He's passionate about the transformational opportunities created by Cloud computing, has a strong customer focus, and deep expertise in building highly reliable distributed infrastructure at scale.

Phil has some incredible insight into what it takes to scale a company from 50 -> 2,000 people (Fidessa), just what working at Google is like on the west coast and of course, how we can all navigate a turbulent tech landscape in 2023.

We hope you enjoy this one!

Anyfin was launched in 2017 by Mikael Hussain (CEO), Sven Perkmann (CTO) and Filip Polhem (COO), who together bring more than two decades of experience in helping to build some of Sweden’s leading technology success stories at Klarna, Spotify, and iZettle.
Their mission is to help as many people as possible to become the best financially stable versions of themselves.
Using new technology, they have developed fair, simple and smart services that help their customers get more from their finances, hoping to tackle this underrepresented part of the market. But not only do they want to help you when you are in bad times, they aim to become the financial guardian in your corner that will help you reach healthy financial status and reach your dreams!
The Founders quickly saw that many everyday people pay unnecessary high interest fees for part-payments, credit cards and private loans, which is where they started out. Through smart technology and skipping unnecessary middlemen, they quickly found they could offer the lowest possible rate. Jump forward to 2022 and Anyfin have incredible services that help their customers to manage their everyday life and get the most from their financial services, including innovative savings products and many other amazing products coming to the market soon!
To date, Anyfin have raised an impressive $101M in funding from investors including Northzone, EQT Group, Accel, Global Founders Capital, FinTech Collective, Quadrille Capital and Augmentum Fintech. They have also raised over $500M in debt capital from a range of undisclosed lenders.
With the total of outstanding unsecured consumer credit within Europe standing at a staggering €1,200 Billion, there is a huge market and incredible opportunity to make a genuine difference to millions peoples' lives all over Europe.
In this awesome episode we discuss the early days at Anyfin - from listening to impossible to follow audiobooks on the treadmill, not fully understanding good terms sheets to bad ones and everything in between! Yook also gives us his insight into what makes a great Product function and how to prioritise your roadmap and launch products in the market!

Tomas Ohlson is the Founding Engineer at Einride, joining as one of the company’s first 5 employees. Originally from the countryside in Sweden, Tomas grew up on a farm where he was always surrounded by creative minds, passionate about helping those around them. A societal obligation was instilled in him at a young age. Following his passion for engineering, computers and building things, Tomas graduated from university with a Masters in Computer Science and Networks. At University, he met several close and important friends that he would go on to strike amazing relationships with and work alongside in his professional life.

Tomas’ passion for building continued at a fast rate as he co-founded a number of very successful tech businesses in his early professional years and beyond. His quest for building took him from Gothenburg to Silicon Valley and back again, where Tomas now sits as one of Einride’s earliest employees and technical visionaries.

When Tomas, Robert, Linnea, Filip and the Founding team at Einride first started their mission to build an autonomous vehicle capable of replacing traditional driven-trucks, people called them crazy. But, they dared to dream big and have gone on to achieve a huge amount in the company's highly impressive, but short life.

Fast forward to 2021 and Einride are now one of the world’s most advanced and highly anticipated electric and autonomous trucking businesses, with the eyes of the world firmly on their incredible Einride Pod. The Pod is a glimpse into the future - something Tomas says was done deliberately by design - and offers insight into where the world of trucking may be heading with the correct technology and adoption. With incredible new funding behind them, a recent launch in the US and a hugely ambitious roadmap ahead of them, Einride are here to change an industry and improve the future of all of our lives.

The freight industry contributes to both a sad and huge amount of CO2 emissions into our planets' atmosphere. Einride firmly believe that electric and autonomous trucking can have a positively dramatic impact on climate change over the coming years, and are here to lead the way for Europe. They are making their own footsteps in the stand where no one in Europe has gone before them and with this comes both great excitement, but also great expectation.

They are leaders, trailblazers and great people building products that may will become a part of our every day life quicker than you might believe!

To check out Einride, please head to their website: https://www.einride.tech and check out their blog and media channels for more awesome updates on their global expansion! 

Matthew O'Riordan is the CEO & Co-Founder of Realtime Tech company Ably. Ably provides cloud infrastructure and APIs to build realtime features like chat, notifications, live maps, loT control. 

Matt has a very interesting background, coming from South Africa to the UK we hear about his journey. He founded and successfully sold digital consultancy, Econsultancy. We hear about how the idea for Ably came about and how he managed to get the business off the ground right through to successfully achieving funding and growing the business to where it is today.

We get a good insight into Ably and what they do and also what its like going through funding, he also gives some good advice for future founders. 

This is a really great episode and one i really enjoyed.

Jakub Zakrzewski is the Managing Director of APAC at Kraken Digital Exchange, one of the world's most successful and widely used Cryptocurrency exchanges. As MD of APAC, Jakub guides the team on their growth journey in the region and plays a huge part in allowing the business to scale to meet the incredible demand for their product worldwide.

With Cryptocurrency and Blockchain once again being at the forefront of many people's minds in 2021, Kraken are seeing more customer acquisition than ever before and are continuing to add to their world-class team to meet the demands for their amazing product. But asides from their exchange, Kraken also received their US Banking license in 2020 and now plan to offer a range of cutting-edge, unique cryptocurrency banking services to their global population. Some amazing things lie in store for the Kraken!

Jakub's career has been a textbook example of amazing growth, huge success and a whirlwind of a journey that has seen him at the helm of a number of high-growth businesses that have gone through to achieve unicorn status and IPO. After studying Rocket Internet Group as a thesis student, Jakub was offered a job by them in Singapore, which meant up and leaving Europe to find a new life in Asia. It is something that he would do time and time again and is thankful for the incredible opportunities that moving to Singapore has had on his career and his life.

As the first employee of Rocket Internet - Lazada in Singapore, he helped steer them to a $1Bn acquisition by Alibaba Group, which led him on to his next journey as Head of Growth at EasyShip, an award-winning digital logistics business that gained amazing press for their seamless logistics experience.

Then, after being approached by Revolut, he joined as an early employee to help them launch in Singapore. This meant spreading his time between Europe and Singapore and being part of the Revolut rocket which went on to take the world by storm with their well-crafted and hugely popular FX services. After a once in a lifetime experience with Revolut - Jakub joined Kraken as MD APAC in January 2020. It was certainly not that he wanted to ever leave Revolut, but because of his belief to try to see new trends in the market and take amazing opportunities when they arise.

Jakub sees cryptocurrency and decentralised finance playing a huge part of our everyday lives in the coming years and believes in the power of the technology behind how finance could be shaped in the coming years. Jakub wanted to be a part of that revolution and sees Kraken as the perfect place to learn the craft, understand the market and to achieve some marvellous milestones with this high-growth business!

Nicholas Goubert is the Chief Product Officer at CLARK, an exciting German-based InsureTech scale-up and has had an incredible career within Product Leadership at some of the most innovative technology companies in Europe. After studying Computer Science and geography at university, he started working in geospatial technology which took him all over the world, working on some very unique challenges. After mixing software development with project management, he then found his way into what is now widely know - but wasn't so much then - as Product Management. This led him to head of Product at innovative businesses such as HERE, Nokia, SoundCloud, Native Instruments and now at CLARK, where he is overseeing their vision following a very successful $85M funding round.

Alongside his main work as a CPO, Nicholas is also a technology advisor and mentor to a number of early-stage and high-growth startups, as well as up and coming Product and Engineering enthusiasts. He is a big advocate for mentorship and believes that paying it forward is a huge part of his role as a successful Tech professional that has great lessons for the future technologists of tomorrow.

It is some of this thoughts and life lessons that really took our interest, though, as well as his approach to life, work and technology. He wants tomorrow's leaders to be curios, be bold and to take the leap of faith. If you do not do this, then how can you say that you tried? And if it doesn't work, then what's the worst that can happen? Great advice for those that are still figuring out their next step and need words of encouragement to step outside the box and strive for what you truly want! He also gives us some great insight into how he builds his teams, how he sets them up for success and where he sees the future of Product heading.

When not working, Nicholas can be found perfecting his surfing technique, drinking a fine glass of wine and spending time with his friends and family. We really hope you enjoy this one, Nicholas is a great guy and has some amazing advice for anyone working in engineering, product and technology, and for leaders looking for innovative ideas on how to build successful teams!