Venture Everywhere Podcast: Kiaan Pillay with Jenny Fielding
Jenny Fielding, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, catches up with Kiaan Pillay co-founder and CEO of Stitch, on Episode 9: A Stitch in Payment Time
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Kiaan Pillay is the co-founder and CEO of Stitch, providing payments solutions to help businesses seamlessly connect to the financial system. Stitch builds developer-friendly infrastructure, APIs and tools that simplify and optimize the task of creating delightful financial experiences. Prior to Stitch, Kiaan was the co-founder of Pelichat.
This episode is hosted by Jenny Fielding, co-founder and general partner of Everywhere Ventures (previously The Fund).
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jenny Fielding
Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who have come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that: founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
Jenny Fielding
Awesome. Well, I'm excited to get going today with our guest of our first season, who's Kiaan from a company called Stitch in Cape Town. So welcome, Kiaan!
Kiaan Pillay
Thank you, I'm really happy to be here! Excited to be one of your first guests.
Jenny Fielding
Awesome. Well, love to kick off just a little bit with your background. Actually, while I was snooping on you, I saw that you did a stint at another portfolio company of ours. So I definitely want to talk about the ecosystem and the interconnectivity in places like South Africa, etc. But kind of start off just telling us a little bit about your origin story, and how it led you to be an entrepreneur pretty early on in your career.
Kiaan Pillay
Well, I think my origin origin story was when I was 10, I got a computer for my birthday. And I was - thank you grandparents - I've always really, I think, been into everything techies since then. I studied computer science and finance at university. Right after university, I kind of tried to build my own thing, which was a bit of a disastrous app at the time. But it was kind of like, my first foray into I guess, a little bit of the like startup world. Right after that I joined a startup, I was the first team member there, called Root, which was a fully digital bank, which is really one of the first of its kind, was certainly the first of its kind in Africa on the continent. The idea was bank for developers, which kind of combined everything I thought was cool in the world. It was like banking, and finance, and Dev, and API access to things. And that was really exciting. And it was really cool.
Kiaan Pillay
It is actually not incredibly dissimilar to what we do at Stitch now. Except we were doing it like as a bank. We're going to try pulled out the bank that enabled people to like get API access to bank. So that was kind of very fun. It was also exceptionally early stage. And then right after that, I assume at Smile, I actually just realized, I think I sort of knew this, but I didn't realize Smile Identity is a portfolio company of yours. So I assume that's what you're talking about. So after after Root, I joined Smile Identity, which is does identity verification, as a service is the like, butchered version of what they really do. But kind of serving African markets. I used to run partnerships there, which basically meant I got to spend a lot of time traveling throughout the continent, which was really cool. It was one of my first opportunities to like, really, really spend time throughout the continent. And I think it's a really exciting product. Like, again, it's an API product. It enables like developers to build more quickly in emerging markets.
Jenny Fielding
Seeing a theme here, I'm seeing a theme. APIs are the way!
Kiaan Pillay
it's a boring like three piece theme, which is the API API API. And I really, like love that concept. And then I think, also, when I just sort of like, got to dive into it, was pretty amazed at the talent of the startups. It's like a terribly broad thing to say. But just like in the African ecosystem, I just like phenomenal founders, product people like really big ideas people working on and it was just like, getting to the stage, like timing wise. We were starting to get a little bit exciting from a venture perspective, like people raising big rounds, and there were follow on funding. And there were unicorns being minted. And like it was like, like a cool space and exciting to be in. And so I think that was like my first sort of, like, hit that, like, I used to have, like, some myopic view that Silicon Valley does cool things and like some places in Europe do cool things. And then even to some extent, South Africa, and Cape Town, kind of pretend that they are this like silicon cape of Africa. It's true to some degree. And that like, we definitely do have great talent, a great like ecosystem. But that's kind of just true throughout the whole continent. And so that was really exciting, too.
Kiaan Pillay
And then as like a little bit of a side project, me and my co founders were trying to build a person to person payments app, not dissimilar to like Square Cash or Venmo type product in the States. It's just as simple. I have like Jenny's phone number, I should be able to send her money. And I think we very consistently thought it would only take us like one, two weeks. It's super easy. We you know, we're all developers who understand financial systems. And it took us like nine months, we built like an absolutely horrifying app. But I think most of it was because you end up dealing with like banks and compliance and there's no infrastructure to be there no API's to be able to, like build on top of things.
Jenny Fielding
Why we love investing in young entrepreneurs, because they don't know what they don't know. Yeah, like a lot of people that have been in, you know, in finance for a long time realize, like almost how impossible this is. And I think as an investor, there's something like incredible about a young entrepreneur who doesn't see those barriers. So you know, it's interesting that you mentioned that because I feel like in many ways, that's a characteristic that we look for.
Kiaan Pillay
Yeah, that like naivety of youth. But the more you dig into that...
Jenny Fielding
I mean a big vision coupled with that, in many ways of like, oh, we can do this, as opposed to, you know, 20 years of like people telling you now and being beaten down by the system.
Kiaan Pillay
Yeah.
Jenny Fielding
All right, before we go into like the new company, instead the question I kind of wanted to get at, though is what do you think inspired you to come out of university as a developer and start, you know, your own company? You know, as opposed to go into Google and you know, working your way up or going somewhere else? Was there something in your life? Were your parents entrepreneurs? Were there something that kind of gave you the agency you think, to take this path or put you on this path?
Kiaan Pillay
Sure. I think it it again, kind of stems to this. I was like, 10, when I got a computer, and let me be careful about how much I reveal. I pretend I'm younger than I am. But I was still like, very early, like people did not really have computers back then, people were not really using the internet very actively. And there was like this, like, early wave of things that were just like starting. And I just remember being so baffled. And so in awe of the fact that, like three developers - and this is reductive - but like the developers could sit in a room, and they could build Skype, right? And I was like, oh my god, like, how did they build this like thing and just like the whole world uses?
Kiaan Pillay
And it's just like, we're sort of just like this very awe inspiring thing for me that like, this is probably not true. But I felt like one of the only disciplines in which you had that much leverage that you as an individual could just pull something off this much scale, was just like engineering and computer science and software development. And like crazy things that like, probably like everyone has long since forgotten about, but like, Winamp was like, the coolest thing in the world. For me, like we had all my friends thought Winamp was the coolest media player, and it had like a visualizer. And it was like, I just like, I can't believe someone pulled that! I was like, you know, I used to spend five hours a day on Winamp. But it was just like, if someone thought that I was just like, so incredible that people could just like sit and build. And obviously like the same equivalent is true for like a Google or Facebook, anything that did start somewhere. But I always was kind of just like, pretty, like smitten with the idea of that, like creation of something.
Jenny Fielding
That's cool. So it didn't really come from a person it came from, you know, your experiences in the industry. That's interesting. Like for me, my parents both work for themselves. So even though I started very corporate, like I went to law school, and I worked in banking, like the inspiration was really work for yourself, because that's what I saw my family do. I think that's pretty interesting. And, and kind of cool that it was actually being an engineer that led you to entrepreneurship, as opposed to your external experiences. That's neat. Okay, so now, you started your own companies, you worked at some other early stage companies, you have a bunch of learnings. Tell us about the origins of Stitch? Really, how did you meet your co founders? And what was kind of the the founding story there?
Kiaan Pillay
Sure. So yeah, the origins like I mentioned, we were all kind of like very interested in building this person to person payments app. One co founder, I have known since birth, he - our parents are just best friends. And I have grown up with him. And I've known him absolutely forever. The other we used to work together at Roots, the digital bank, so she joined about a month after me. And the other was actually just sort of during like peak lockdown and stuff. He was working in Cape Town. And he was working actually on his own like E commerce type idea, which was also trying to patch together like a bunch of different payments companies and stuff in order to make like, just just like an econ product work. And we were also sort of noodling on these things at the same time. And so was also like a happy accident that we just happen to be working - like two are from like a past life. And one is from like, we were happened to be working on the same thing at the same time, which is also really cool.
Kiaan Pillay
Yeah, all of that was felt like a lot of Kismet there. And then I think we all just really liked API's, again, which which is a silly theme that keeps coming up. But we, I think, all never wanted to build like this person to person payments app. We never wanted to build a consumer facing app. I'm truly in are of like, tons and tons of consumer facing app for things that we were always like really interested in. We're building like the pipes, the infrastructure, right? And so when we sort of found out like, Oh, this is like very obvious narrative. But like, in order to pull the consumer facing apps, typically, there's some sort of like underlying foundation, which are API's, which are like infrastructure. And we like, we had to build that ourselves in order to like literally just pull the side project, and to build the side projects from person to person payments app. And we sort of got to like these janky endpoints that if you hit, they made payments, or they accessed the balance. And that was sort of the its moment for us. We were like, Oh, we could do this as a full time thing. Every company that built anything financial that Africa kind of needs this right? Like I've seen that through some of my experience at Smile, the companies that we had worked with there. We have seen it and trying to build this last startup that Natalie had worked out. We have seen this trying to build the person to person payments app. So that was really kind of the culmination of things. We really did not have much left out but It was kind of just like this is quite cool. And I think like all other startups sort of need this.
Jenny Fielding
That's awesome. So you guys decide to, you know, go on this crazy journey. What's next? Did you guys bootstrap to a certain extent? Did you, were you focused on, you know, building product? Obviously, you were a lot of builders? Did you run out and raise money? So tell us about, you know, that first kind of six months of Stitch?
Kiaan Pillay
Sure, I don't think we had much plan. We literally made the first like full on API call. And then we sort of clicked in that moment that well, this is an API. And then within a week, we have all quit our jobs. Because it was just something we really wants to work on that we didn't really have an inkling of like, shall we bootstrap or venture whatever. And I think by quite happy accident, and these are your co investors, we got quite lucky. And then like quite a few of Smile Identities investors, like I knew from my time at Smile, I had spent time with them while I was in San Francisco and in some other markets. And when I was leaving, we got very lucky and they found out I was leaving. And Mark who is the founder of Smile also reached out to them and said, Hey, Kent's leaving, you know, Kiaan, you should speak to him. And quite fortuitously, within, like my notice period, like while I was still working at Smile Identity, we had a term sheet from one of the investors.
Jenny Fielding
And so cool, as a side note that, you know, the company founder that you were working for, put in a good word for you. And you're like, what I mean, that is really, you know, such a testament to like Mark's vision of, you know, a bigger a bigger vision, right, for everyone. So I think that's awesome.
Kiaan Pillay
That was super helpful. My direct boss, Wayne, also he directly put some money in. And he also introduced me to like a bunch of their investors and other things, which is really nice. Wayne, I think is like the greatest person in the world. So the fact that he did that was like this really like, like, big moment from our side. So that was great. I think this is probably the path we would have gone down, it probably would have been more painful and filled with more ups and downs, where we got lucky that we kind of came about it that way. And then yeah, we been like pretty venture back ever since.
Jenny Fielding
Off to the races. Alright. So now tell us concisely, like what Stitch is. And you know, what's, what's the real vision there and the mission?
Kiaan Pillay
Sure. So we help companies more easily move money, basically, is the way that we've sort of landed up. And we do that in African markets. We're currently live in South Africa and Nigeria. And at this point, I think we kind of had our ups and downs, we literally started with the data product. And then we started with purely pay-ins product. And I think where we've come to is that actually just in general, like, whether it is startups, SMEs, whether it is enterprises, or whether it is global multinationals that are trying to enter the African market, like money movement is just a hard thing. In general, it's difficult to receive money from any payment method, whether it is cash, whether it is card, whether it is bank transfer, it's very difficult to just like reconcile your money. So whether that is like opening a bank account, whether it is actually doing payments, reconciliation for multiple methods, and then ultimately a payout, right? How does like money move back to users in this ecosystem? And so we're kind of tackling all ends of this at this point. We've done a lot of scrambling to get there. And we certainly didn't do all of those things at the beginning, we like started as data and we purely started as a pay by bank method. But now that's kind of what we do. We mostly are more like enterprise focused right now. But that's us in a bit of a nutshell.
Jenny Fielding
Great. Any learnings, twists and turns along the way that have been formed the product?
Kiaan Pillay
An unlimited amount.
Jenny Fielding
Alright, well highlight one or two or something, you know, an assumption that you thought early on, potentially, you know, you had to prove or disprove and that changed the path. I think those are always interesting.
Kiaan Pillay
They're like, all mostly low light. So I'll give you a few low lights. which got us yeah, but but in a good way. So we started for whatever reason, the origin story is like we were making a payment startup. And then I don't know where we kind of went awry but we've launched the data product. I think maybe we saw who does like plaid was like getting exciting at the time, or like open banking was a thing, mostly for data, not for payments. And so I think we were like, Oh, wait, like, you know, okay, linking to your bank account. Linking to financial infrastructure is cool. But why are we doing that for payments? Let's do that for data like that to like, you know, we that's not solid, like that's just like solid, the database. That was wrong. I think you like very quickly realized, I think there's obviously phenomenal products in other markets. And I think they will be an African markets, we just got the timing like horrendously off. I think like, that'll be interesting in five years, or in seven years is my like, my personal hypothesis. But I think the overall size of the market is just not developed yet. It's just way too small. And then the like, second order of that is there's no urgency for like any of these things. I just remember having like tons of really painful conversations at the beginning. And like even more painful because the people that we were trying to sell to were agreeing with us, we would say, Hey, you guys have all these crazy manual human base processes. We give you this digital solution, and people would say yes, we love that. That's great. And then we were like, well Okay, cool, awesome. Like you can buy this from us today and then say, oh, no, no, we will look to do that in like two years or three years, which is like, net dead flash. Right? So
Jenny Fielding
then you're like, why are you so excited about it? If you can't do anything? It's like, Yeah,
Kiaan Pillay
got it. Yeah, exactly. So that was horrible. And you actually almost wish they disagreed, right? You always want someone to say like, No, I don't get it. And you can try explain it to them. So that was pretty bad. And then we sort of got like, our first little bits of pool from some companies that like we really respected that they were doing, like really good work at the time, Luna, which is the biggest crypto exchange in the continent chipper cash, right? And they were like this, like, link, a bank account kind of concept is interesting. Like, why are you doing it for data? Why don't you do it for payments, like payments for us is hard. And we're like, oh, really, it kind of seems like you guys have it worked out. You guys are like big companies, you must sort of have to solve. And so we kind of built this like, you know, quote, unquote, payment by bank product. And we did it very superficially, we did it like from like a bunch of different sides, it didn't work. But like stitch was not in the flow of funds, for example. So like the money moved from, like Janee, to chip or cash writer, we didn't touch it at all, we sort of like just added a digital layer to it. So to be honest, it wasn't there super merchant experience. And it wasn't a super customer experience, like say what you want about cod, but like the customer experience, like usually is pretty good. And it's like very well understood at this point. And so it was kind of like Bostitch highs on like, both ends of that. And so we sort of saw like an inkling of, there was something that someone wanted here, which we did not see at all with the data piece. And then I guess when we like kind of look back at it, we we sort of took like a little bit of like a hunch. And we like actually, we went very deep, we got like super license because like licensed across all the major banks in South Africa, we were able to hold funds on behalf of like merchants, and like we weren't like super like, quote unquote, vertical. And that just allowed us to like be much, much, much closer to actually the entire payment lifecycle, which started to like, allow us to do one click payments, real time payments, recurring payments, be able to do like real time notification of payments. And we just thought it's to offer like all the same sort of like product suite as card. But with some like additional things such as like fraud protection, such as better commercials, the user experience was the same as card, you only have to see us once you could like be tokenized. From that point, it could be recurring. And then we started to find something that like started to work a lot better, and also started to work for just like larger enterprises. That was kind of the stumbling that got us there.
Jenny Fielding
That makes sense. That's a good story like that. Shifting gears to kind of a little bit more of the macro. You know, I made my first investment into an African based FinTech company, I think in 2018. And I'd say, you know, people kind of in the US New York, you know, where I am, we're like, oh, Africa, that's interesting journey, you know, and then, you know, 2020 21, it seemed like, that just was this kind of incredible ramp up, especially from international investors, people that were in the US and in Europe. And you know, a lot of people have been investing in Africa for a long time. But it seemed like a lot of people I knew were like really jumping in. I'm curious, like, that was my perspective here sitting in New York City, like what was it like for you just seeing the ecosystem develop seeing a lot of international money come in, did it feel as drastic as it did, to me,
Kiaan Pillay
maybe even more, so.
Jenny Fielding
Love to hear more.
Kiaan Pillay
I think having sort of a front row seat to some of this was like very interesting, like, in the very, very early days of this and like I did 2014, there was no concept of venture capital, you could like either Bootstrap or like, I don't know, get get a loan from a bank, or I'd friends, family fools kind of money ever, like big capital was just another thing. They were, you know, local venture capitalists, but most of you, if you're lucky, we're gonna get $100,000. And they were gonna take 49% of your business, and they were gonna expect to return within two
Jenny Fielding
years. Sounds like a great group. Where do I meet them? Yeah, exactly. Which
Kiaan Pillay
is why it wasn't a thing again. And then there was like, an interesting like, bit of momentum, like people did start to build technology businesses, right. And they did it. However, they bootstrapped and whatever, and people build compelling businesses and sort of got their legs chopped off. After like, whatever series ACSB I'm about to do some like really like, serious scaling stage, because there was just no way to support that growth. And so what solders happened was they just started to get bought by like, huge incumbents, right. So you did see some, like, quote, unquote, success stories, but it was like a bank would buy you or an insurer would bite you or like, and so there's like these, like, companies that to me, it seemed like really, really high potential kind of got stopped, right when they were taking off. And then like, you know, one of the big draws for me for smile identity was like, whoa, this was like this, like, you know, Silicon Valley like San Francisco venture capital American venture capital back company, but it was focusing on African problems. And I was like, Whoa, there like probably was, you know, a handful of those companies at the time. That was really exciting. And I think there were like a few of those companies that started to do this like I didn't know that like early cohorts were like, you know, there was a pay stack and it was flat away. And and like, largely a lot of these companies actually just came through YC to get like some exposure there, like small was one that did not. That was like really interesting to me. That was like quite an eye opening experience that there were a few people taking these bets, but they were kind of like, quote unquote, like African VCs. They were like, based in America, but they had this like African thesis. That was interesting. And then I guess when we started stitch, I think at least having an even closer view of that, I thought it was like quite fascinating because we actually raised like money at almost six month increments, but not like full rounds at each time. The first time we ever raised money was from like all smiles, investors, who were quote, unquote, African investors. They were great. They had like, you know, us venture capital, but they were after invested. Six months later, we raised a bit more money. And this is still quite telling to me, raised a few $100,000, all from operators, it was all like the founding team of like plaid and was like the founder of Kleiner, and it was like the founder of Venmo. And it was really interesting to me that like people that had like all empirically, both, like really large scale fintechs were like taking an interest in it wasn't just us. They were also like investing in like lockdown and stuff at the time. And it was quite interesting that they were like a leading indicator, like where things were, because it was like there was smaller checks, but they were like very interested in their high conviction. And then six months later, we raised a seed round. And that was all basically actually these like founders and operators saying like, you know, VCs, you got to start looking in Africa, you got to start looking at the stitch company. And then fast forward one year later to RCA said, it was like, the floodgates are open, right? There wasn't a single, like, if you didn't have some sort of emerging, like, market Africa type of thesis, you were like, way too slow, right? And you slowly started to see every like tier one Baek Mae VC, like, do their first investments. And it like just completely completely, completely became mainstream. I mean, just like global reservation around deploying capital right now. But it was like, truly, like a pretty crazy thing to like, watch unfold,
Jenny Fielding
I must have been, I mean, again, from the purview of New York, it seemed like all these people who had never invested outside of the US were calling me being like, Hey, Jenny, you know, I hear you have great, you know, flow into some, you know, emerging markets, like, you know, Africa and Latin. And I was like, really? Are you sure that you're interested in that? It was pretty interesting, obviously, you know, I thought it was great for the entrepreneurs over there. So I was excited about it. It did seem somewhat unsustainable, right? Like it was, it was almost like a frenzy. Now, here we are in 2023, where everything has settled down, people are not chasing deals even, you know, in Silicon Valley, for the most part, you know, how have you seen it over there? I mean, you may not be raising, but what are you kind of seeing in the ecosystem more broadly? Sure.
Kiaan Pillay
There's definitely been a pullback. I mean, that's true in any market. And I think it's okay, I think, right, this will settle over time. But there was I think Frenzy is a good way. It was like a bit of a frenzy. And it was almost like, Oh, you just have to have to do something in Africa, or you just like, had to get in on the deal. Because you just could like, like, say you were part of some things. Yeah. And you know, like any sort of like, situation like that you get investors that don't have high conviction, or you get companies that otherwise wouldn't have raised money that raise money. And so like, all of that has just stopped like completely, completely, completely any sort of, like FOMO investing or anything like that has like completely disappeared, good companies are still getting funded. A lot of things are happening that are not being as publicized, they're not flashy, right? They're not gigantic rounds with huge valuations. We're seeing a lot of things happening. Blacked maybe slightly above, slightly below.
Jenny Fielding
But are you seeing in general, like some of those, let's call them tourist VCs? Who kind of came in? Yeah, dipped in? Are they just not answering calls? Now you think or they are also kind of in for the, I'm gonna get a better price, you know, flat round. I'm just curious if we've seen a retraction or if you know, round,
Kiaan Pillay
I think most most of them have completely retracted. I mean, we spoke not in the capacity of a fundraise, but we spoken to some and they've you know, in, in many cases, they're actually quite transparent about it. And they've said, we're just not doing deals in Africa or in other emerging markets. Because right now, the opportunity cost is just another US deal. It's something we know it's something that's safe, it's something that we can get over the line. So a lot of people have said that. And like for the most part, I think people are going to have to wait till there's more momentum that starts up again, in order to do that people that still had conviction before I had like a very strong thesis around something specific. I don't think there's like a quote unquote, like Africa thesis, you just do like the whole thing, and that'll just work are still doing stuff. There's a lot of support, I will say, which I think is quite good from the more reputable VCs that did make these investments that do need to do breech rounds now or need to do like a little bit of follow on capital that might not be like you know, your next best round. Some of that is still happening. But for the most part, I think everyone that like frenzied in has like frenzy doubt.
Jenny Fielding
Interesting. So with this kind of new normal in terms of the downturn and you know, back to basics, how are you and your team thinking about it in terms of your business? Are you guys thinking about extending runway? Are you thinking about, you know, slower growth? Potentially? Are you thinking about that forbidden word profitability? kind of curious how you guys are thinking about the business for the next, let's say it takes 12 to 18 months? And I don't know in Africa, you know, what you think that timeline is? That's kind of what we're saying, Our founders, like, you know, make sure that you've got a plan for the next 18 months, because it could be rough.
Kiaan Pillay
Yeah, I think that's right, I think timelines, we're probably looking at the same, no one should ever take any advice they have on like, the macro economy. But I think we're also kind of thinking that like, at least it'll take 18 months before things maybe start to pick up or settle, or however it swings, I think we had quite a drastic shift from like, revenue growth, and like, you know, payments, volume growth, which is like, like, the other kind of growth that we check are obviously, like, very coupled. But historically, we had sort of, you know, taken a little bit of like, let's get new logos, and let's get like payments volume, and like, let's keep attracting and like growing this and many times like you can use price or like the units as like a lever to like accelerators. And very quickly, like that became quite obvious early in last year, that that's just not a thing anymore. And I think even more just being in a an emerging market, like, when will that capital come back? I don't even know, I think that might even be a lag. Like, I think the companies always get funded. But I think the ease of capital might be like a lag even further than the rest of the world. We were fortunate that we raised money, we raised a fairly large series A at a good time. So we're not worried about conserving capital, or now burn is still quite low. But we are like, our new mindset is how do we get to profitability cloud, we like, take more control, like, chances are, like Walsall have, like venture in our future and back, but like, we don't want to do it. Because we have six months money in the bank to put some money in the bank, we want to do it because we have needs to accelerate our growth. And actually, I think we've seen that with a lot of African founders and startups, it's just like, Okay, how do I kind of like flip things? So it's more like on my terms, and my control, because it kind of was for a little period of time, we'd like to venture capital market was really hot. And like, yes, it was like not your capital, but like you did have like a lot more say in the terms and stuff around that. And so that's kind of how we're thinking about it, we are using the P word.
Jenny Fielding
Excellent. So I recently started teaching as an adjunct at a university here in New York or Cornell. And I just gave a session earlier in the week on market sizing and, you know, existing markets kind of easy to quantify developing markets that are growing and really hard to like figure out market sizing. I just kind of had a thought with you guys. Like how do you think about the growing market for your business? And for kind of, let's call them African fintax? Like, can you just give us a sense, and it's just like your your sense of the growth opportunity in a region like yours?
Kiaan Pillay
Sure. Yeah. I mean, this is a question that we get all the time, right. Like, this is like, Tam is a VC favorite question tab in emerging markets, it comes up even more often, the opportunity is, I think, one you would find, like, individual markets are far greater than people think. Right. And like, I think people think about Africa. And like, often, from a venture perspective, people think of Nigeria, and that at face value kind of looks like a large market, it's 200, which it is, it's 200 million people. It's like growing very fast Internet penetration, disposable income, digital penetration. But like you look at it, like a ton of like other markets, like South Africa, which is obviously where most of our businesses don't currently is smaller in terms of like people, it's like 60 million people, but it's really small, but like, our GDP is the same size as Nigeria, for example. And I think like, one, there's like quite a misnomer on that, like, you have to be Pan African for this to be like, gigantic, be big. I think the truth is, yes, you can't be in a single market. Like it'll be probably pretty hard to build the you know, $10 billion business just focusing in South Africa, for example, for like, the rate of growth in each individual market has just been like so tremendous. And kind of just across sectors and across the industry is like, we actually check like growth trends in the markets that we operate in and that we want to operate in literally on like a payment channel method because they're like, so drastically different. So like digital payments are increasing. You know, why 40% year over year, you see, like individual methods or like large user base is already like increasing like 100% year over year and it's like, we check it per section like that, because there's so many, like individual opportunities within an individual market like yes, we think about geographic expansion as well. But I don't think anyone has even like scratched the surface of this yet and like people start to see it with like, the volumes that company is like a flutter wave, or like some of the like other Nigerian processes that are like a bit more at scale are doing now. But that's still like mostly come from a single market, it's still mostly comes from single method. There are like small micro examples I would use which are like really monopolistic, but like if you look at like an M PESA in Kenya, for example, right? Like, that is just globally a giant, gigantic business, right. And it is like in Kenya in an economy that no one thinks you have a right to build like a large business that is like a digital first kind of payments business. And it's just like so well penetrated that you just have these opportunities yet that you just, I think don't always actually have in more developed markets, because a lot of these things have been done already. And it's almost just like, I used to be broke like but often accurate, this like, like leapfrogging opportunity to just go like from like the banking system to like kind of a more like New Age digital bank system. So yeah, I think there's a ton of upside, we'll have to see time horizon wise, how in each market plays out?
Jenny Fielding
All right, I'm gonna have my students listen to this for sure. It's very hard to describe how you quantify as an investor and market that doesn't exist yet, right? Or growing market. And those are oftentimes the most exciting investments to make. But what's the data that you're you're going on? So super interesting, totally switching gears a little bit? At the fun, we often talk about this idea of like superpowers, you know, what's the thing that is kind of unique to you? I mean, I built two companies, I think at some point my superpower was was maybe, you know, building a product. But now I'd say my superpower is fundraising and helping, you know, helping founders with a fundraising strategy. So that's kind of I think, what I've known for a little bit, yeah. And what would you say is your superpower? Oh, sure. You have a ton of amazing things you do. But what are the things that people are like? Wow, Qian, like, he's the guy I go to for this.
Kiaan Pillay
Very few things. Very few things. I'm hyper responsive on WhatsApp. I don't think many people would disagree with that one I do for like, quick little bits and bobs of information. I'm like, very good on WhatsApp with that. I don't know if it's a superpower, but I am proud of and I think I am like pretty well connected within sort of like this ecosystem, as well as like general startup and venture sort of ecosystem. And wherever possible. I mean, most people do this throughout the continent, but do try and connect folks like on the side that don't have access to like European networks or US networks or anything like that. That's like maybe one area I try
Jenny Fielding
the superpower of yours because most founders I've spoken to seem to know you. It's not from you starting your podcast, right? It's that they've had some, you know, interactivity with you, or you've helped them or something. So I'm gonna I'm gonna deem that your superpower your connective tissue amongst the continent. So I will take I will. Alright, this is our speed round. We're just gonna finish it up with a few quick questions. You know, one or two word answers. What's a book or podcast or media that you're enjoying right now?
Kiaan Pillay
I just started reading, winning by Tim Grover, who was the coach or trainer for Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. It's a bit intense. It's like hardcore. It will be for everyone. But I am enjoying it a lot. It like maybe takes things a little bit to the extreme too much, but about like having a winning mentality, which some might argue in like a Jordan's case, for example, it was like too far, but it's super relevant to a lot of startups. And like this, tons of tidbits that I've been enjoying.
Jenny Fielding
Cool. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
Kiaan Pillay
Um, Turkey. I think this is like a highly uninformed answer. But I was on holiday there for eight days, I think last year, which was criminally too short, I was just an Eastern ball. So also like a naive answer, but just had such a great time. It was beautiful. The food was great. The people were great. I think I will do that at some stage for like, three months, four months, I don't know about a full year, but I would love to spend a bit more time to add really good time.
Jenny Fielding
Incredible country for sure. Favorite productivity hack?
Kiaan Pillay
Sleep. I got to get to sleep last year. This is a silly and obvious one. But like just high quality sleep and sleeping consistently. sleeping enough is just a complete game changer. I think it's like a performance enhancing drug.
Jenny Fielding
I love it. And where can listeners find you? Oh, I should know this. I think well do you confer that they get to you on you know on LinkedIn on Twitter. Where's where's the best place for people to track you down? Do you have a blog first anything just go to stitch and they'll find you that stitch
Kiaan Pillay
money HQ is our Twitter and we're also very active on LinkedIn. So stitch is where to find me.
Jenny Fielding
All right. Well, thank you so much for spending, you know this great time with us. It's been super fun to get to know you. Obviously, you know, thrilled to be supporting you on your entrepreneurial journey in a very small way. But thanks so much, Ken.
Kiaan Pillay
Thank you so much. He really enjoyed it too. Awesome
Scott Hartley
Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn about everywhere, we’re a first check preseed fund that does exactly that. We invest everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc on LinkedIn and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we'll catch you on the next episode.