#88: How artificial intelligence will impact sales efforts with Steve Jamieson

[Music]. good morning, dfw. you're listening, you're watching the dallas fort worth business podcast. i'm erin spatz. hope that you're doing terrific and, yes, we are getting ready to come out of these sub zero, sub sub freezing temperatures. so i hope that you're doing well and and i know that it's impacted the metroplex in a variety of different ways and has impacted people in a variety of ways. so i i just i sincerely hope and pray that you're doing fantastik, um through it all and know that we're we're about. we're about to hit the the uh, the non-freezing temperatures here shortly. so, anyway, i want to want to jump right into today's show. i'm just incredibly excited to welcome steve jameson to the program. he's he's had a quite quite a wild ride in uh, in business, uh, but most most recently uh serving as the chief executive officer for working social. and, steve, i just want to welcome you. thank you so much for being here this morning. good morning and thank you for having me. yeah, yes, sir, yes sir. so first question i love to always ask is: are you a dfw native? if not, where are you originally from? uh, originally a new yorker? don't hold that against me, because they didn't when i first got to texas for quite a while. nice, um, and there was a couple of detours in between, but, um, yeah, i got to to dallas in the late 80s- actually early 90s- and then um had a very good, successful 25 year career in dallas running large direct sales companies, network marketing companies. for those of you that are familiar with, the home-based business is um, and now i have a consulting business. in a sense, i always kind of wink because now i get to consult for all the people. i competed against nice. well, you know, after, after, after 2025 career doing it. i think i think it's probably time, right, right, yeah, so, uh, you know one, and and then two, you know how, how, how have you fared during this whole? you know, sub-zero or not sub-zero? why? i mean, i guess the feels-like temperatures have been sub-zero, but you know this, this craziness that we've had. so how, how's that affected you at all? i'll tell you where we just live in a moment of crisis, it seems right, from the pandemic right to the weather, i think we're just bulletproof now, right, we just adjust right quickly and learn to respond. um, so i i think that's the probably the key to success in business: learning to be able to pivot: learning to be able to respond. we always used to say, in business, it's not what happens, it's how you respond to what happens right. and so, in some ways, today is a perfect example of that. no, it's so good and you know, and i've notiked that, that attitude and that demeanor- and it's not simply this flippant- oh, i'm to say this because i feel like i have to say it- it really is a way of life and it really is a core belief- is taking and addressing every single challenge. it may appear as a setback, it may present itself as a loss or some major problem, but it's always being crafted as an opportunity to either learn, get better, overcome it, so on and so forth. it just seems like that's always been the approach. it sounds like that's been been your approach your entire career. well, what's interesting for me is, when i first entered direct sales, i didn't like the business. it's not one of those that i was a fan of. i think i shared the feelings of. what i always say is: this is the only business where the government doesn't like us, right. the the public, uh, or the media mocks us, right, and the public- 90 of the public- have a bad experience after they join us. but yet the industry itself, when i entered it, fights to keep things the same, and so i always came from the perspective of that. the industry had great potential to actually be one of the best distribution channels possible for goods and services, because you were empowering customers and i just think people did the business model wrong. so i used to say is: i don't want to make a better version of a bad business model, i want to change the business model to to totally take advantage and leverage it, and that's kind of been my fight in the industry. i've always been the, the guy on the other side, not the champion of the business, but the challenger to the business. and then along comes industries which, again, if we forget how long ago it didn't exist- things like shopify, uber, airbnb, etsy- and all of a sudden there's these alternative income opportunities that give people like veterans, frequently right- a second chance at success. except the only problem with those is those had second chances with with tremendous limitations. right, no one was excited about being an uber driver, right? uh, it usually got them through in a a a tough position in life, whether it just be buying extra presents for christmas, whether it be paying an extra 300 for a car payment, but no one thought their life was going to change right because of those kind of choices, um, and and where shopify, i'm saying, gives people, gave people an opportunity to do all the work themselves, but it didn't allow them to leverage of building a network of people in beyond their own backyard to truly be able to stay at home and work with the kids and and have that kind of a life. so i still think there's a tremendous opportunity to do it right and um, and where i've. it's interesting because in the last couple years i've worked just as much with the vendors who support the industry to try to give them the tiknology to execute the vision than just giving the companies the vision themselves. interesting, um, and so i i. it's interesting for me because one of the turning points is one of my clients, interesting enough, was zoom before the pandemic, oh well, and they came to me about six months before the pandemic and said that there's this crazy industry called, you know, home-based businesses and we want to penetrate that with market share. and this is before they went public and they understand that you have the relationships and you have the contacts. and then so everyone said: oh, that was a good idea. of course, the pandemic came and it became a brilliant idea from that perspective. but so my point is: it doesn't matter whether you're a stay-at-home mom or whether you're a corporation like zoom right is: you've got to think out of the box, you got to think innovatively, you got to challenge. there's always a place to go, and i think that's the hardest thing that i find in working with so many second chance people, in a sense, is it's hard for them to believe and that things can really happen. and- and that's the one thing i think the direct sales people do well is they give people belief but they don't think they have the vehicle necessarily to follow it through. and so, even though, like i say, i'm some ways i'm retired from running companies, day-to-day i'm actually i have more opportunities to make an impact, whether it be a someone on shopify who's making 25 or 50 000 a month, and they think they're ready for prime time. that's probably my number one client who calls me of how do they move from 25 to 100 a month or 200 a month? and with tiknology it's far more easy, easier, cost effective and accessible than it's ever been before to do. um. so, like i say, i'm having the time of my life because people pay me to think, as opposed to having to get up and be responsible for one person, i'm, i it's almost like just being responsible for everyone every single day. it's a different challenge, yeah for sure. well, wow, that's a uh. that that's quite, that's quite the setup here. so i mean it's a great. it's a great, it's a great entry into into this discussion. i appreciate you sharing those, those points, because i think it's, i think it's really important for people to note. that is, you know, you've got different challenges, you've got different opportunities there that are going to present themselves. and so, as it relates to direct sales, like: so take us on a little bit of a tour of what your careers look like and and one- and i guess, real quick, to provide everybody context, what give us some a few examples of direct sales. that way people under have an underst.

GeoHash & Go

[Music]. hi guys, nice to see you all today. yes, guys who partikipated yesterday, good news for you. we have today chat working from the very beginning, so enjoy, enjoy, chatting. well, let's wait for just a minute more and we'll start taking, okay, so let's start. guys, thank you for joining and welcome to our second session now. html4 marathon. today we'll be toking about go language and Garrosh. you can see the topic on your screens now. for those guys who partikipated in our first session yesterday, don't forget to to write down, to notike the second key word for the flour challenge. you'll find it, as yesterday, on one of the last slides from Guillermo, and I remember that I promised you to send the presentation of Mihai. I'll do this today, just felt sorry about that. I promise you all do this, so expect this, this presentation, in your email boxes. it will be, Sam, definitely. well, as an introduction. this is all from my side and I would like to introduce you to our today's speaker, guillame. I yell more as you maybe get from like soft Mexico. so good morning, Guillermo. he is full stack developer and, last of meheeco, pretty happy, pretty rich experience and going. so, Guillermo, already have been, has been speaker for our events in Mexico. so today expect you really, really interesting discussion, as yesterday. all your questions please send to the Q&A section, not to chat. chat is for chatting, obviously, but all questions to go hear more about his presentation, please send it to the Q&A. he'll answer all your questions, or majority of them, at the end. so this is all all from my side. he does not please, Julia. hi everyone, my name is Guillermo Strada and we will have a tok today about do, ask and goal programming language- this visual schedule for 90 minutes. so I am going to be fast about all this, but feel free to ask any questions we have at the end so we can iron out everything we get. so, starting up, my name is game Estrada. I'm a little soft. I work in Boots of Mexico in weather Mahara. I'm a senior software engineer. as EULA said. I have 10 years experience as a full-stack developer and 9 years, you see, go since before version 1. my focus is on distributed micro services and I'm passionate about algorithms and data structures and that's why I want to bring this view a Geo hat and goal, and so there are two of my favorite things right now and I want to share that with you. so you would be wondering: why is what is view hash? and to start, I will just go in and let's clear some things up. what is the spatial indexing? so a spatial indexing you probably had have had challenges in the best when you want to use geographic coordinates, coordinates in either your application or some project and you face that many challenges. right like from the bat you say, hey, I need to be able to search for parliament's nearby, a proximity searches and stuff. and then the first problem arises: spatial databases. so what are the spatial database as well? those are databases that it is usually optimized through these spatial indexes to do a lot of things with with geographic coordinates, taking special measurements about distance, computing, wine, lands or living area. this is between geometries, special predicates which modify the special 20 kids allows true or false queries about special relationships, like if two geometries intersect or overlap, stuff like that. and the biggest challenge in this is when you're trying a new project and have to make use of this stuff. special databases are usually a niche in the industry, so you either have to learn them at that to what they're providing them, brother, providing you, or we'll hire someone that already knows them, and those are very, very limited. so what is the spatial index? a special index is a data structure that allows efficient access to special object. official object can be a geometry, can be coordinate, whatever. it is a common tiknique: useless spatial databases without indexing any search for a feature would require a sequential scan of every record in the database, resulting in a much longer process with them. so imagine, imagine you have to work with for its latitude and log. so using North databases- I don't know SQL databases or no SQL- like a key value store trying to do proximity searches and stuff like that. we don't use a normal database. we will require you to check all the coordinates and start making operations between them, but you have to do a sequential scan of every repper. you start doing the math to find a nearby place. is the stuff like? so? this is where do you hash? and specially little self. they provide us with the means to do efficient access to special object, in this case locations, right? so these are the types of the spatial indexes that happen to be in most of the geographical databases or spatial databases exist. do you have sitting there the one we were going to tok about? but there are a lot of father's, those familiar we are. 3d modeling and rendering will probably recognize something like up trees and KD trees, quad trees, and this is hard like. if you want to use the spatial indexing, you will probably have to learn one of these and then implement it, and that's just more things to know about your code. so you'll probably want to say, hey, just pick one database, start learning and ramping up on it. but I'm here to show you about the hash that it's really easy to implement on your own or leveraging the same tools and databases you already have and are used. so what do you have? does this actually takes these three into consideration? do you hazard? makes use of especially this piece of, really, and as C order? good, so let's see what are. the white geo has the right tool for the job, depending on your needs, and G hash produces a compact representation of a geolocation meeting a latitude, longitude, coordinate pair. it has an efficient proximity search. it's adaptable, agnostik and proven. it's a really simple and elegant algorithm and that's the fall. it's totally, to me, public domain. it's way ahead of open. it means you can do anything with it, modified, whatever you want, and it's okay to do so. now that we know a little bit of the challenges of spatial indexing. let's go with WebGL habits, right? so what is a hash function? started from that and the hash function is just a mathematikal algorithm that transforms any arbitrary data block- let's say the green one in 20 optimally, and let's say optimally will post people- we know that's not always the case- unique representation of that. so I said optimally, because some hash functions have collisions, and thankfully do your hash doesn't, and but but it's just like. it's just an algorithm, a mathematikal function that represents that. so what dear hands will try to do is take a coordinate pair- latitude or longitude- and hash it into a single string. that will help us a lot in to you all that I have toked about and we will see next. so what is real? - the energy sub to determine giotto system embedded by Gustav Nomura- we'll see who that guy is in a moment- and, as I said, it encodes a geographical location which is according their inter short string of letters and digits. that's cool. and also it is a here, if not spatial data structure. we toks about those, which signifies the space pockets of grid shape, which is one of the many applications which is known of the setter. this is just a formal definition. just ignore it and get on with it. who's who? Stephanie Mayer, and why I'm choosing to tok about this. well, back like around 80 years ago, when I started learning, though, he was the maintainer of the only- or not the only, but the best- MongoDB client for go, and he's a goal developer and, as you can see, he's part of the canonical team. for those who don't know, cannot equals the, the company that makes Luton and then things, and he has been developing, you know, for 15 years now, and you can see about him in there, and he invented this algorithm, which is really simple and really elegant. let's say this is not a formal definition. this is what we should take note of. it's a simple analogy on hash function algorithm, algorithm t.

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Piotr Pisarz (Uncapped): Uncapped Potential – Revenue-Based Funding | Slush 2021

[Applause]. [Music] [Applause]. [Applause] perfect hello future. hi. great to be here. thank you so much for sitting down with me for this conversation about one of the most exciting trends in european tik right now. thank you for having me. thank you, um. i just wanted to start off and maybe tok a little bit about your founder journey and what was the idea behind uncapped. how did you found the company? yeah, great question. so, um, prior to starting uncapped, i was a vc and um i met literally thousands of companies which were good businesses but didn't really fit the venture model. the vcs are looking for the unicorns, deca corns- but if you're building a good company which doesn't really have a potential to become this billion dollar business, you really struggle to get funding, to get any capital to grow your business, and they realize there must be a better way for these companies to scale. on top of this, a lot of founders were giving up all these shares, all this equity, to get money which they then spend on google and facebook. you know, this is what, uh, you know, gave me the idea for uncapped: to create a new model for the companies to um scale and you know, as long as they have positive in economics, they should get that funding which allows them to scale without any dilution. amazing. so tok me through a little bit. what exactly you guys do, um? yeah, tell me if i were five years old, how would you explain to me what you guys do, true? so, essentially, we are looking for the companies which have a proven business model and proven economics and they know that for every pound dollar euro they spend, they can generate a bit more of of returns. for these companies, we offer essentially unlimited capital which they can spend on advertising inventory team, uh, to scale our business. they come to us, we connect to our data and within couple hours, we give them a funding offer, um, which they can then leverage and use to deploy the money and grow our business. amazing. and you know what? what is the appeal of this kind of funding compared to going to a normal vc and raising equity? absolutely, i think the key differentiation differentiators between us and vc is, um, first of all, speed. as a founder, if you're fundraising- and i've been through this on many on both sides, both as a vc and as a founder- several times it takes months. it's very just. it's a huge instruction. uh, you're, you know, preparing for materials, toking to funds, doing all the legal stuff, all the diligence. you can't run the business for several months. it's actually a huge cost, a huge like operational cost for a founder, which we completely minimize. we don't expect any input from a founder other than just a couple clicks and a quick call with us. how, how does that like form look like? how many questions is on the phone? there's no form. there's no form. you come to us, you give us access to your data so we connect your stripe, paypal, shopify, we accounting software to your google, facebook, a bank account. so, just couple clicks, we have a quick call to the founder to understand what are we looking for and then same day, next day, we're getting a funding offer. that's all we have to do. um, and you know we don't take any equity, we don't take any warrants, any covenants. it's completely unsecured and you know we have complete freedom to uh, to scale our business. so one thing is speed right. another thing, what i said is no dilution. i think today, you know, average founder at exit owns about five percent of a company. like it's nothing right like as a founder, it's your baby and giving out this baby is so painful. um, and i think we want to enable founders to scale the business without giving up this equity. we have a crazy story of a company called marshmallow. it was one of our first customers. they came to us where they were doing a two million round. i did like 10 million valuation. you know we allowed them to get only one million of equity and we founded everything through the debt. today, this company, two years later, is a unicorn and with one million we help them to save. probably, you know, the founders managed to save tens of millions of of equity for themselves. so this is a proposition we have to the founders. you know, like, keep control. uh, keep higher ownership of a business. right, can you tok me through a little bit more? um, you know what are the conditions of the, the debt that you're giving to founders, and how does that potentially compare to other lenders that a founder might be able to access? uh, our debt agreement is very, very simple. we- it's literally six pages long and we have no covenant. um, nothing really crazy. there's no security. uh, don't take any equity, any equity. the only condition we have is: we want to make sure that, uh, you pay us back. like you know, we ask you to not do anything bad. don't take any other debt which could, you know, put us in a bad position, but as long as you play fair, by the rules, uh, this is a super, super simple, simple agreement for you. okay, interesting, and what kind of companies? what's the right company? what kind of company do you want to work with? so, eighty percent of our business is e-commerce companies, uh, but we funded many other businesses too. we do work out of sas businesses, but, at the end of the day, we can work with any tik enabled tik business with a proven business model. what we are looking for is companies which really found their product market fit and they know they can scale. our capital is to enhance them to get to the next level. now, we don't only provide info capital. we have a whole team of vc partnerships, uh, you know, and other kind of partners, accelerators, tiknology companies, who we can plug them into. we can help them fundraise- um, we can. we help them with strategic decisions. it's much more than just capital, um, as you know, our vision is to become the next generation new bank for startups and today, if you, if you look back 50 years ago, the banks were very local and every founder- just no founders or entrepreneurs who are going to the local bank and they were getting funding there. they were toking to the bank manager and they were getting advice. they were getting, you know, just very personal connections. yeah, exactly, we are now working to bring this back to the tik world. so we want to be the partner for every company, from the moment they start their business to the ipo, where we'll get given the funding. we also give them the tools to scale their business. we'll give them their relationships, we'll give them a contact to give them knowledge- amazing- and so i guess that ties into my next question. my next question was going to be: you know, when a founder goes out and they think, okay, i want to kind of tap into this new kind of financing, and they compare you to your competitors and, as we were toking about backstage, there are many, which is a great thing for the ecosystem. you know what? what do you think? how should they compare? compare you to your competitors and and what do you think you have to offer? um, i think a lot of. first of all, i truly believe we are the most founder-friendly uh company in the market. um, when we started to set up the terms of, uh, our agreement. we made sure they are truly founder-friendly. this is the. this is the document by which we want to always stand by and make sure there is nothing founders should be scared of. i remember we were drafting this agreement and you know it took us so much time because the lawyers were coming up with agreement which was very tough to read, difficult to read, not understandable, and we're like: no, we want the founder to understand every single word in this agreement and really know what we're signing for, signing up for. so you know we don't have any clauses which many of our competitors have, with any like covenants or early repayment fees or like forcing companies to repay early. we are truly the most funder friendly company of the phone. and maybe just to dig into that, because i feel like some of those words might be kind of intimidating or people might not be familiar with those terms- what are some of those you know?

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BAR Mark II safari Optimizing Shooting System Review

today on the table have a browning mark 2 Safari. the serial number dates back to the early 90s, sometime around 1997. the rifle has an overall length of the forty three and a quarter inches and a length of pull elbow thirteen and three quarters of an inch. I'm the Internet. I've seen a lot of people quoting this around eight pounds. I have no idea where they got their weight from, maybe with the magazine removed and without a scope or a scope mount on it. but this partikular rifle is just short to ten pounds. it's close enough to ten pounds. if I were to throw ammunition in this it would be ten pounds. this partikular rifle has engraving on the receiver and it has the gold trigger. I'm told that the gold trigger means it was made in Belgium but I can't confirm that something off to look up yourself. it's also got the balls the boss break. it's. when we first started understanding barrel harmonics- I'm in the like the 1903 s and stuff- there was a screw in the stok you could tighten that would push on the barrel. the idea was to adjust your harmonics because your bullets gonna go off or your cartridge is gonna go off, your bullets gonna travel down the barrel and there's also going to be a vibration wave, kind of like a guitar string, and as your bullet goes down the barrel you don't want it to exit at the same time that the vibrations there, because then you'll never have consistent groups, they're gonna be all over the place. the idea behind this is to extend the vibration. how to hear? so then you have the space keeping your bullet. you know from touching the barrel. so hopefully the vibration wave will still be going up the barrel as the bullet goes through, so that it's not right at the crown of the Burton, right of it, right at the crown of the muzzle, or passing through the muzzle as your bullet exits, making the accuracy terrible. and you can adjust this longer or shorter to be able to adjust that wave. this is also a muzzle brake, which is pretty good. I personally shot this rifle and the recoil isn't that bad. that brake does a pretty good. unfortunately the brake- it shoots the gases in all directions. so it's not going to really help with muzzle climb, it's just gonna help a felt recoil. basically you get recoil from a couple of different components. one, the mechanical recoil from the bolt coming to the rear. another one from when the bullet exits. the gas is following. it provides thrust, kind of like a rocket ship, and what you're gonna do is redirect those gases. so instead of pushing straight back on you, they're pushing against themselves. yeah, and felt recoil. it actually does a pretty good job. all you do get a hammer Forge barrel. this is made by FN. it is also chrome-lined, very high quality. this rifle was made to fit in eesh. basically, you got your World War 2 soldiers that are getting into hunting now. so they want a semi-automatik, they want would. they want low capacity and that's what those covers. you're looking at four rounds in the magazine and then one of the chamber, five total. it's kind of got like an m1 grand. feel about it, like just how you load in everything, which is very complicated to do. you can carry spare magazines because these lock off, so like, let's say, you run out of ammo, you could put in your new magazine, lock it and close it, but I'd rather just have a completely detachable magazine. my personal thoughts now. this rifle has unique advantage: you can chamber 300 Win Mag. well, not this partikular one, this was in 30 at 6, but you can get these in 300 Win Mag, which is pretty cool because very, very few semi-automatik rifles offer that, and, honestly, if I was going to purchase this rifle, it would have to be in 300 Win Mag. so it's special. there's no external sites, but you do have your sculpt mount so you can put a scope on this. the overall length or the length of pole- for me anyway it's too long. I like 13 and a quarter. I don't know, though, if that like the pole would work, unless I mean you could move the scope forward enough. but taking off that length of pole, I think that I'd wind up getting skull plate because my head be too close, because even right here my head's too close. I have to bring the scope forward. now the distance between the scope and the stok is pretty good, comparable, II speaking to most rifles. like I can find my skull picture, I prefer to have my head down here, so it's very consistent, and I get a very solid cheek weld. but then the scopes too high. that is something you gotta kind of deal with, though, but on a 300 Win Mag I don't necessarily think I would want my cheek really buried down in there. the Scot, the stack is cut correctly, so as a recoils, the stok is gonna be moving away from your face. but still with a 300 Win Mag. I mean that kind of changes, a lot of things. so that's a big cartridge. now this does use a rotating bolt, just like your ar-15. it's a three lug design, I mean. it works, doesn't seem to have problems, so that's good. trigger break: I don't have a trigger scale, but it feels something like six and a half pounds. it's pretty creepy - here's your wall creep and then your snap. so it's not the cleanest trigger break, but it really isn't that bad. would I purchase this rifle, this partikular rifle? probably not, because I'm now that a thirty at sixteen. now, if this was in 300 Win Mag, I would definitely consider it, because you can't really get. well, you can get a semi-automatik 300 Win Mag, but there's only like one or two companies that make it. I think it's like three thousand dollars. so this would be half the cost and 300 Win Mag now, as in like 308, its competitively priced. yeah, you can go get like a PSA ar-10 variant, but you're really lacking in the barrel and the barrel is where most the cost goes. anyway, this has a cold hammer-forged barrel that's chrome-lined. if you were to go get an ar-10 with a cold hammer-forged barrel that's chrome-lined, it's gonna be the exact same price or more expensive, most likely about $1,500, where you can pick these up and gun broker for around a thousand, but with the disadvantages of the weight, the kind of sort of detachable magazine. if I wanted to somehow a lotto in like 308, I would not choose this rifle. I would go with an ar-10 but I'd still be Seban in about the same amount just because I want a quality barrel. I shot this partikular rifle. I was getting about 2m away. now I just ran one kind of ammunition and I didn't screw around with the boss break because I don't have the tool. if I were to screw around with the boss break and played with a couple of different types of ammunition, I'm willing to bet you could probably get this to like one MOA. I doubt it'll go sub em away, but you never know the reason. I don't think it'll go Cybele my way is, because the handguard is attached and this is a external piston system and they're just inaccurate. that's nature of the beast. now, if this was in 300 Win Mag and I wanted a 300 Win Mag and I wanted so my auto without a dolt, yes, I would purchase this rifle because the competitive options just aren't there. even though it's a little bit heavier, it still looks cool, so it's kind of worth it to me. plus, it's a Browning, which is it got an awesome name. but anyway, leave in the comments below if you own one of these rifles or if you would purchase this rifle. why or why not? don't forget to subscribe.

What is Checkout com? Britain's Most Valuable FinTech Startup

over the last 18 months, we've seen digital payments businesses rise to insane valuations, from klana at 45 billion dollars to stripe at 95 billion. it's no surprise, as most transactions are conducted over the internet, as these businesses aim to power payments in a digital world. another company aiming to compete with these two is checkoutcom, a british startup that has seen meteoric growth and is now valued at 40 billion. but what is checkoutcom? what is the story of checkoutcom and how was checkoutcom started? here's how it happened. first, let's answer the question of what is checkoutcom. well, it's a cloud-based payments platform whose mission is to enable businesses and their communities to thrive in the digital economy, helping their clients to gain valuable insights into payment performance and navigating the complexities of an ever-shifting world. with 1700 employees across 19 global offices, checkoutcom is a serious outfit. checkoutcom is a principal member of visa, mastercard, union, pay, diner and jcb, and was authorized as an electric money institution in the uk in 2017.. to cut a long story short, checkoutcom is a business that does all things payments, whether that's accepting and processing transactions, detecting fraud and creating customizable solutions for their clients. checkoutcom was founded in 2012 in london by swiss national gion pusa, a college dropout after failing his economics finals at a time when his father was suffering with cancer. but the story didn't begin in 2012.. after dropping out of college in 2005, usa moved to california to pursue his passion for surfing, before taking a job with international payment consultants or ipc, a payments processing business. after running out of money a year after joining, and pusa left to try to break the payment space with a fintik called net merchant, a low-cost usd europe money transfer service. designed to be solid but simple, pusa then launched opus payments in 2009, which would later become checkoutcom in 2012, which would allow businesses to process and accept payments from any location and any payment type. at first, the business grew slowly, with pusa earning small amounts, then spending it all on new hires to fully reinvest capital back into the business. now checkoutcom makes its money by charging pennies on the dollar for every transaction made through their software, of which there are billions. their customer base boasts some of the world's largest businesses, like h m pizza hut, netflix, coinbase and deliveroo, among thousands of others. with such high profile customers, the business has grown quickly and, at the same time, checkoutcom has successfully raised capital, which includes a series d fundraise in 2022 of a billion dollars, which values the business at 40 billion, becoming britain's most valuable private fintik. calling tiger global management, qatar investment authority and dst global as its investors. this is no doubt made pusa one of the wealthiest tik entrepreneurs, with an estimated net worth of 9 billion. you might be wondering why checkoutcom have raised so much capital so quickly, given they only completed their series c funding round in 2021.. well, checkout needs capital in their bank account in order to expand to different countries needing to satisfy regulators demands for cash on hand to get licenses approved. also, whilst checkout didn't necessarily need the money now, raising capital from well-known vc players gives you clout in the market and opens doors to meetings you otherwise may not have got. check out plans to spend some of their newly acquired capital on launching new products and furthering their efforts with web 3.. anything blockchain, crypto and metaverse focused. pusa has previously suggested that web 3 is a movement that envisions the future of the internet, where digital assets play a big part and checkout wants to play a central role. they also want to improve traditional features, including their data capabilities and fraud prevention. but busa is in no rush to ipo, but they're nicely poised if they ever were to go public, being profitable for several years and forecasting significant growth by using their pipeline of clients in the onboarding queue, especially having triple transaction volumes three years in a row, with people forced to shop online throughout 2020 and 2021, payment companies soared in value, but, being founded in 2012, checkout has seen growth from global digitization, an e-commerce boom and an obsession with digital, including the rise of web 3 and crypto. checkoutcom has armed itself with experienced professionals, hiring celine dufatel from t rowe price as head of finance, among others, in a bid to lead the business to bigger and better things, living up to their tagline of powering payments in a digital world. and that's how it happened.

Silicon Canal speak to Jim Seconde

right, welcome everyone to one of the first of silicon, a very informal chat with people from the tik community, and today i'm chatting with jim ii, with the dev advocate at jump 24, local birmingham based software agency, and in partikular, today we're going to tok about one of their latest product order, net. so, Jim, can you introduce yourself and take it away with what order is, please? oh, so, yes, hello. developer advocate at John 24. I haven't actually been at jump for that long- I've been there for about two months now- and when I came on board it was interesting times. first of all, I got on boarded at right at the start. I went to the start in the middle of the covert 19 crisis, which was quite, I think it was obviously challenging for everyone, and Kovac 19 is why this product exists in the first place that I'm going to tok about. so I got on boarded and then got put on this project called order and it was. it was a logical kind of it was a logical thing for a developer advocate to be put onto it, because there's a couple of aspects I'll go into about the project, but order is came about because the on the 22nd or the 23rd of March of comment when the lockdown, when when Boris Johnson went on to on TV and said: right, that is it. pubs and restaurants are too close, etc. so so Tim, Jocelyn and and onions jump 24 just sat down one night and thought this is going to absolutely one-up the economy. what can we do about it? what could we, what can we do as an agency, a web agency in Birmingham, to try and do something to for for, for the greater good, to try and get businesses, maybe to give them something they can use to try and stay open, specifically things like local takeaways, like a lot, a lot smaller scale, and the thinking behind it came from some people would think instantly there was a silver bullet, this which is just eat and or delivery or beats or something like that. but that's the gating: the fact that you lock into their systems and their ends, that you lock into their community that they've built and their products. then the lock and stuff and they take. they take large cuts of it. this was: what can we do? that's like what can we do? that's a free service and it's really as simple as you could possibly make it. where it's here is: I'm a merchant, sign up, create a menu and then you instantly have a site on order net and you have a URL. then you just direct people to there. it was like the shortest amount of journey, like the shortest journey possible, just to jump in there to. obviously, I think my first thought there was: it sounds like just eat or whatever, but you mention there it's free. so how is that possible? yes, so there was this kind of a mixture of things we imprinted, we have in the actual project. we have a set of guidelines and we have some ethics about the fact that this is an open-source project and is to actually use it. it's free. because it's free? because if you want to do something to help that, if you try and charge for it and you try and make and you try and make it service, then it needs another justy and then you're trying to take on a multi-million pound corporation. there's actually no point in doing that whatsoever. it's free because elsewhere we had from other projects and for working with AWS, we had quite a lot of of AWS credits to use up on hosting, which, instead of just using in using sort of AC to hosting credits and things like that for our own usage, we could just we just thought, well, why don't we just- we've got so much, why don't we just use it to host this free platform? and with the cost of, with the cost of doing cloud stuff like that, I mean that the real cost has been developed in time- obviously has been quite expensive. it's gone from its. it was an MVP that was designed and delivered what we wanted to do in six weeks, eating into developer time, where it costs time and money, and we always had the, always had the, the target to never chance for it. so, yeah, expensive, but I think the answer is is ethically, because we could, and also it works for the company as well, because it might sound like it's expensive to offer something free, but to do an open-source project where you are what your company's work is, 100% in the open and it is, you can see. that was the whole point of it. it's a showcase of the kind of work we do. so you know you have to be very you have to be honest about projects like this. you can't try and pull the wool over people's eyes. so if we were, if we were honest ourselves about what we're trying to do is look at what we can do as an MVP in six weeks, it's free. but if you want the kind of quality that we do and you want to see the kind of work we do, then here you go. so just on that, open source ain't like. I think it's a word that gets bounced around and I think you know people are sometimes take it as well. it's open source, I can just go and use it and is easy, and you know, if I'm gonna make something open-source, it instantly becomes cool and trendy. alright, you used a bit more detail as to now what open source really means and, like you touched on it there, saying it, you're putting your nail. not a lot of risk, but your codes go out there. you're worth going out there. so, yeah, well, you know two questions really behind that, Jim. like you know why was, why did you really want to make sure this was open-source? and secondly, um, yeah, just what? what is it really? I think? I think it became a sort of once, once it had been, once it been desired, once the the top that goals of the project were quite clear that this goat was going to be a free thing to try and help out merchants. it just seemed like a logical choice to say, well, if it's free, why don't we need- we can- be more transparent. why don't we? why don't we just say that it's open source? once I was brought on board as a developer advocate and someone that deals with with open source, with contacts in multinational companies that have enormous open source projects every day, it's quite clear that doing that is very, very hard. so it's quite. it's quite an interesting aspect, because what I've seen in the local Birmingham, in the local in the local Birmingham, Texians affirming in West Midlands, let's say, is if someone says open-source, they work on something, and they say, if you and they make a decision, well, let's show, let's just someone else can use this if they want to, and then they put it on github, mmm sure, and then it gets left and that's it. I think that's. I mean, I've seen. I've seen that time and time again. you're left with graveyards and if someone wants to come in, interact with that, they think, oh, I've got this thing. that's like a, that's like a plug in for something you know, like WooCommerce or or Shopify or or something like that. they go, oh, if I get this WordPress thing, there's some and it's some company and berminat done it. what they've done is, if the company has made something and then thought, well, let's open source it. to say to say, you know, oh, we're giving something back, but they just do it. and then you click on them. you click on the github link and you see like a load of issues from two years ago and no one's done any commits. there's no maintainer. 'he's not. it's a complete afterthought of what open source actually means. order is is being approached from an open source project. first and foremost. therefore, we need to structure it as such, as if it was, as if it was Linux. you know, it's, that's at that level, because there's no. if you want your governance to be correct and you want contributors to adhere to things like codes of conducts and contributes and guidelines and best practikes, because it is coded in laravel, it will have some few j/s as well, because it's because it's coated in laravel. that doesn't mean the entry point is: let's go in and just put whatever, because it raises actually tons of questions in open source, such as if, if someone comes in and goes: this is a larval project, okay, great, I want, I'm going to not adhere to any of the coding standards that we've done and I go to just bolt on a load of thing that's ops - like a custom symphony composer.