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My guest today is Hristo Borisov, CEO and Co-Founder of Payhawk, the first ever Bulgarian unicorn where they’ve built an all-in-one finance platform serving businesses across 32+ countries in Europe and the US.
Founded just four years ago, Payhawk now enjoys unicorn status and has raised equity from Greenoaks, QED, Lightspeed, Endeavor, Hubstpot, and many more.
In this episode, we discuss:
Scaling to unicorn status – Hristo shares hacks and techniques that helped them scale from zero to one
"We started with a very tiny budget, myself and my Co-Founder, Boyko Karadzhov, we started with a 15,000 Euro budget… and we spent maybe 70% of that on Amazon gift cards, so that we could incentivize financial people to speak to us for 30 minutes. Otherwise, that was really hard"
The growing Bulgarian startup ecosystem and why it pushed them to build a global company from day one
“We had to be international from day one, because Bulgaria is a market where yes, we are present in it, but we are here, just so that we can actually serve local companies and bring that innovation locally as well. But we're doing it mostly for employer branding, rather than kind of a strong business case… And because we had to target these international companies from day one, and be overseas from day one, that allowed us to create a pretty international company.”
Payhawk’s unique model for building and shipping products extremely fast, while keeping everyone at the company laser-focused
“We have an extremely efficient engineering team. When we closed our series B round, we had an engineering team of just 11 people… And we operate as a company on the SaaS Cadence, something that was introduced by David Sacks in Yammer, where you split the company operations into two phases…”
Early mistakes and challenges as a fintech founder and why you should always overinvest in talent… and a lot more!
“I think one of the biggest mistakes we made were in places where we didn't listen enough to the customer… Second is not letting people go immediately, when you see things don't work.”
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Miguel Armaza is Co-Founder & Managing General Partner of Gilgamesh Ventures, a seed-stage investment fund focused on fintech in the Americas. He also hosts and writes the Fintech Leaders podcast and newsletter.
Hristo Borisov, CEO/Co-Founder of Payhawk – Building Bulgaria’s First Unicorn, Over-investing in Talent, & How to Keep Your Team Focused