Venture Everywhere Podcast: Nicole Dunn with Scott Hartley
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Venture Everywhere Podcast: Nicole Dunn with Scott Hartley
Scott Hartley, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, catches up with Nicole Dunn, co-founder and COO of Revio, on Episode 10: Chasing Churn
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Nicole Dunn is the co-founder and COO of Revio, a company building the recurring payments and revenue assurance infrastructure for emerging markets, starting with Africa. Revio helps businesses reduce payment failures and arrears. Nicole is also an early stage investor and has worked with over 60 startups on a mission to unlock unrealized entrepreneurial potential in Africa.
This episode is hosted by Scott Hartley, co-founder and general partner of Everywhere Ventures (previously The Fund). In this interview, Scott and Nicole explore the challenges and opportunities in the African payment landscape, and how to prioritize go-to-market strategies in a complex market. Nicole shares with us her journey from growing up in South Africa to getting exposure to diverse perspectives and to co-founding Revio. Learn about Scott’s realization of his entrepreneurial identity and Nicole’s hot take on raising a smaller pre-seed round that forces a focus on traction. Listen till the end for their contrarian views and superpowers!
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us and be sure to subscribe to Venture Everywhere. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and ideas.everywhere.vc on Substack. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jenny Fielding
Hi, and welcome to the everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've 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.
Scott Hartley
All right, well welcome Nicole Dunn, COO and co-founder of Revio. I'm Scott Hartley. I'm one of the co founders of Everywhere Ventures, General Partner at Everywhere Ventures. Super excited to have you here with us today Nicole. So welcome.
Nicole Dunn
Thanks, Scott. It's great to be here.
Scott Hartley
So you know, I think the fun part about our podcast Venture Everywhere is - Venture Everywhere is truly a global platform. So we're really talking to our founders from around the globe, from all different continents, all different walks of life, all different backgrounds. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about yourself and about the company that you guys are building at Revio?
Nicole Dunn
Yeah, sure. So I was born in Cape Town, South Africa, where I'm sitting today. My parents were super traditional. They were doctors, medical students when I was born. And something that very luckily happened to me when I was quite young is that my dad got a bursary to go and finish his specialization in London when I was three years old. And so at a very formative age, I went to a completely different country, and got to see that life is very different everywhere in the world. And at that time, South Africa was still incredibly segregated. And so if I'd grown up there, I would have had a very sheltered existence. But because I went to the UK when we didn't have any money, and because I was from South Africa, I ended up in a really diverse, lower class School, where most of my classmates were from places like Pakistan, or were immigrants from all across the world. And so very young, I was exposed to incredibly diverse people and diverse perspectives.
Nicole Dunn
So when I came back to South Africa, that had really ignited a kind of curiosity in me around questioning the world around me. Why things were the way they were, and knowing that things could be different. And that set the platform for a lot of how I approached the rest of my life growing up. I was also really lucky when I finished school to get a fellowship at a entrepreneurial organization called Alan Gray Orbis. And that was the first time for me, it became viable, that entrepreneurship could be a career option. Because I'd always been really questioning and almost dissenting from the norm. And that had landed me in trouble, usually more than anything else. And so this was the first time I was part of a community of people who thought like me, and where that curiosity and tendency to break with convention was actually really valued and encouraged. And I don't think I would have ended up where I am today without that encouragement at a critical time in my journey. So I'm very grateful to that.
Scott Hartley
It's so interesting, I think, for many people that listen to this podcast, or are part of the the everywhere community, they'll really resonate with that sentiment. You know, personally, having sort of butted heads a number of times with former employers, former bosses, a sort of always pushing the envelope, always sort of being a little bit of a black sheep or feeling like you weren't quite there to tick the box or to follow the normal path. And then eventually waking up, at least for myself, to self identify or have the confidence to self identify as an actual entrepreneur and realize that there was a path that was just a differentiated path forward. It wasn't sort of being the the aberration, or the one that stuck out. It was actually no, I belong on a different path. And my path is called entrepreneurship.
Scott Hartley
And so I think it's, each of us has had our own sort of journey to find that self discovery or to find that confidence, whatever that block was - that the sense of, for me, you know, imposter syndrome, am I actually this thing And eventually, you kind of realize, enough times, butting heads with convention that maybe you are right, so it's fascinating to hear about your story. Growing up in SA in South Africa, I had the chance to visit your absolutely beautiful country 2007, 2008 when I was with Google. And I realized that we share a lot of affinity with a place where I grew up in San Francisco, in the fact that you've got wine country and this beautiful sort of waterfront and I even laugh to people that we both have a prison island that's off the coast of the city.
Nicole Dunn
Yeah.
Scott Hartley
There are many, many parallels and similarities and I felt quite at home in Cape Town. So you know, fast forwarding through your career, I know you spent a number of years at Founders Factory Africa and then recently co founded Revio with Ruaan Botha. And you guys are now on this journey sort of building Revio. Tell us a little bit about, I guess the genesis of the idea and sort of the problem you guys are going after?
Nicole Dunn
Yeah, absolutely. Revio we're really looking to solve two related problems. And that is payment fragmentation and payment failure. So when you look at Africa compared to other more established markets, there's an incredible amount of fragmentation that exists. There is no single dominant player like Stripe that is accessible as a payment option to all consumers in all markets. And with the rapid digitization of cash that's happening across these 54 very different countries, you've had a proliferation of many, many different payment methods supported by many, many different payment service providers. I was looking at the numbers recently, and there's more than 275 different payment service providers on the continent. So layer that on to very different markets, very different currencies.
Nicole Dunn
And as a business, you're confronted with enormous complexity and trying to do the most basic thing, which is collecting revenue from your customers. That complexity is not just the search cost of figuring out who is good in what market, it's technically integrating. It's the ongoing operational control and reconciliation, and, of course, support when things go wrong. And things go wrong a lot more often in these nascent markets than they do in more established countries. So we're seeing anywhere between a 30% to 40% average failure rate, especially on payment where there is some sort of recurring business model like lending or insurance or rental.
Nicole Dunn
And so what we are building at Revio, is in the first instance, a single platform or entry point that a business can come to to get access to locally optimized payment methods to collect revenue in these countries. So instead of having to now go and integrate with each of those 275 players, we've done the hard work for you. We've screened on the compliance, we've done the technical integration, and then we layer on optimization workflows on top of that, to ensure that you get the highest level of success rate at every stage of the payment journey. So that includes exposing the most locally relevant payment methods to your consumers at the point of checkout, based on things like where they're based, the currency, the amount of the transaction, or even the issuing bank of the card. We can then dynamically route and fail over transactions on certain payment methods. But then when payments fail, which they do for technical reasons, or sometimes customer related reasons, we can dynamically follow up with those customers through really targeted personalized interactions, that then give them options to pay for those outstanding amounts and give them much needed flexibility in certain cases, where cash flow is an issue.
Scott Hartley
You know, I think one thing that that we all struggle with is, in particularly on the venture side, you know, when we evaluate a company or a deck, there's always clearly a big problem or big market opportunity. And as you talked about 54 countries in Africa. 200+, you know, payment platforms, the integration. That the problem is absolutely enormous and intractable. But the trick in one of the challenges as we evaluate companies, and then as I think, you know, founders move to build companies is, is when you have such a massive problem, how do you prioritize your go to market? How do you think about knocking down that first bowling pin, figuring out a repeatable sales model? How do you guys think about prioritizing in such a complex ecosystem that clearly the opportunities are huge, but sort of this - the top down slide always says: my market is billions and billions of dollars? But I always sort of asked this the following question, which is, you know, what's the bottom up? The go to market? How do you think about those first partnerships, those first orientations that really help you prove the case? So I'd love to kind of think about how did you guys go to market in such a complex ecosystem, like Africa was such a huge opportunity, but sort of thinking through whether that's insurance or whether that's a particular vertical? How did you guys prioritize?
Nicole Dunn
Yeah, that's a great question. And look, I'm not sure that ours was the right, or the best approach. But we started what we knew, so Ruaan has 20 plus years in payments and collections. And he'd worked inside a local payments processor in South Africa. And he saw that even companies that were headquartered in somewhere like South Africa, and we're trying to collect even within that market, and one other, was still faced with this challenge and complexity. And we very quickly then found this market validated niche in recurring revenue where there are very specific challenges around reconciling the different revenue streams through different payment methods. But then you also sit with a big arrears book when something goes wrong.
Nicole Dunn
Of course, we can now see that this problem is much bigger. We can see this is a problem for multinationals looking to enter the continent. And we're having some really exciting conversations with global corporate banks who are wanting to partner with us to offer our services onto their clients. But we started with - look, we know this is a problem in this country, in this industry. Let's lean into that, let's engage very closely with our customers. And let's integrate with the two or three payment aggregators and processes that we know give us the best possible coverage so that we can start to learn at pace. And that enabled us to prioritize really effectively.
Nicole Dunn
The other thing that I'll say that is quite controversial, but I'm really glad we raised a super small pre-seed round, rather than getting a whole lot of capital really early. Because it's meant that we've really had to focus on building the right thing. Rather than having so many millions of dollars to fund potentially the wrong ideas and not follow the traction, we've had no option but to follow the traction. And that's been really helpful for us, because everything we build from now onwards, is really based on existing client demand. We have the great problem of not being able to keep up at the moment with the current pipeline that we have, which is great, it's still a problem. But in many ways, we de-risked our roadmap because we know exactly what the requirements are that we need to service.
Scott Hartley
Yeah, I mean, the adage of your customer is always right. It's such a simple principle, but so many companies, as you alluded to, they raise too much. And they sort of follow their own path that sometimes, you know, leads to inefficiencies. I was curious too, you know, as you and everyone kind of split the role between CEO and COO, what do you think your superpower is? And how do you guys sort of navigate that dynamic of really sort of putting the years together to be most efficient as an executive team?
Nicole Dunn
Yeah, crowdsourced some answers for this superpower question. And the most consistent feedback was my ability to cut through the noise through asking incisive questions or dissecting complex problems. And I think that was super helpful when I first came into the team, because we were able to step back and go: what's working, what's not, and how we set ourselves on a much more constructive path going forward. I'm really grateful for my relationship and partnership with Ruaan. He is the absolute product and technical leader that we need. And luckily, we're very complementary, because my skill set's a lot more on the commercial and operational side of the business. So at the highest level, the way we split responsibility is: I make sure we make money and he makes sure the product works. And we hold each other very much accountable to those high level accountabilities. And it's been really exciting not to sit and build out the team around us who are much better in certain areas than either of us are. We brought on a really strong product leader in the form of Stefan who has transformed the quality of our product. And Kyle who has built incredibly fast technology, and has enabled us to win enterprise contracts. But I think having that very candid, open relationship, where we can talk very openly about the challenges of going on this journey has served us well, and something that we'll look to maintain, even as we grow.
Scott Hartley
Your point about cutting through the noise reminds me of this quote by I think it was by Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the US. And he said: I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time, right? And the idea that it's easy to be verbose, it's easy to say lots of stuff and just throw everything at the wall. It's very difficult to be specific and exact in your language or in your decision making. And so you have that ability to cut through the noise is actually something that is hugely useful, right? And hugely important.
Scott Hartley
I was curious too, you know, one of the things that we look for as investors and one of the things that you're looking for, as a founder is to be both contrarian and right. Not to be conventional and right. There's no upside in that not to be contrarian and wrong. There's no benefit to that either. But to be kind of contrarian, and be right at the right time, right? That's sort of the whole game of building a big, innovative company. And so how do you guys think about or maybe what's exciting that people disagree with you guys? That people who are experts, quote unquote, in the space, say, Oh, that's not gonna work. We don't believe in that, these guys are are not doing the right thing. And you sort of look at each other. And you say, well, actually, we think you're wrong. We're contrarian. We think that you're incorrect. And we're going to be right about this. And that's going to be the driving forces of building a huge innovative company. What are those things that you kind of hear that actually make you excited to disagree with?
Nicole Dunn
Yeah, I think my favorite one here is when you talk about being in payments, everyone kind of rolls their eyes and go, but payments is so saturated, like there's no space for you, why would you even build in that market. And I think, especially when you are not from the continent, that seems to be even more the case. But when you're on the ground, and when you interact with businesses in the way that we have, we can see that payments are only at the beginning of being built. I think we've conflated payments with a very small part of the value chain, which is payment acceptance. And even there, to be honest, I think there's a lot of work to do in Africa around really making sure that these payment methods are accessible to all consumers, and all businesses.
Nicole Dunn
But going beyond that, there's a whole system and journey that sits around payment acceptance that really isn't in place yet. And so you've got a whole lot of enterprises, either stitching together a whole lot of very disparate technologies and systems, or trying to build something themselves to just manage payments at scale. And so whether that's around the underlying processing and settlement infrastructure being unreliable, whether that's around reconciliation of transactions, whether that's revenue recognition, or the process of engaging customers to collect payments at the point of conversion, or at the point of failure, none of that is being built in a meaningful way. So I really don't think the market is at even near the point of being saturated.
Scott Hartley
Yeah, I was eating at lunch yesterday with the person who's on the SpaceX Starlink team, bringing Starlink satellite connectivity to the continent and the whole world. And you think about the birth rates, the - just the sheer population, the sheer percentage of internet penetration. You know, mobile handset cost reductions, and the ability to sort of connect those to higher speed internet, and just the coming wave of the billion people online in Africa. As an African, as somebody who's spent your life on the continent, like, you know, if you think for the next 10, or 20 years of a billion plus people coming online, being able to enter the formal global economy in new different ways.
Scott Hartley
Where do you hope the continent gets to? Where do you hope Revio sort of plays a role in that sort of economic development story? Because I think that's something that a lot of us that love building in emerging markets, investing in emerging markets. It's not just about finding a unicorn or backing a company, it's really about changing lives and building infrastructure that brings people forward in a new way. So I'd love to hear your thoughts from that sort of bigger vision of just beyond the company to the continent.
Nicole Dunn
Yeah, I mean, there's so much I would want to say on this topic. I think it is so exciting to imagine the impact that digital technology and connectivity will make for the potential of the continent and democratizing access to opportunity for those billion people. And I'm really curious around the intersection of some of the more digital technology we're seeing and traditional development pathways. And something I sometimes worry about is we see those two things almost in separate categories, where if you look at how other countries have historically developed, I think there's a lot we can learn and amplify with this wave of connectivity and digitization.
Nicole Dunn
So something like the Asian tigers, where did they start? They started with increasing the productivity of smallholder farmers. There are millions of smallholder farmers on the African continent. And we have the ability to potentially accelerate their rate of productivity through things like blockchain for proper land ownership rights, digital marketplaces, giving them better pricing power. And so there's an infinite possibilities sitting here if we can bring together these two kinds of narratives in a really constructive way. Where Revio fits into that, I think, where we talk about infrastructure gaps and institutional voids on the continent, people not being able to find each other buyers and sellers, a dearth of infrastructure. We often think about things like roads or internet access, but money movement is still one of the critical barriers to achieving individual and commercial prosperity. And so the small contribution that we make is enabling businesses to properly collect funds from their customers in ways that work for both sides of that transaction. And to do that at the most optimal and efficient cost that can be achieved.
Scott Hartley
Yeah, so interesting. One of my sort of pet peeves was always the definition around impact investing - around sort of the definitions of it being specific to you know, water or sanitation or health or thinking about the sort of very kind of United Nation's defined boxes. Whereas payments infrastructure to open banking infrastructure, there's so many different layers to the stack that democratize and give access. They have impact and therefore are impact investments, but maybe aren't defined as so by formal metrics or whatnot. So I think even though Revio is clearly for profit, big company, there's an underlying layer that is hugely impactful for potentially a billion people on the continent. So I applaud you and Ruaan, for the work you guys are doing. But I think that there's a huge story to be told around that as well. On the flip side of kind of the things that can go right, but the things that can go wrong, what is it that keeps you up at night, or makes you worried, as you are sitting at the helm of a high growth, early stage startup?
Nicole Dunn
Yeah, I think, on the border of kind of personal and business, I think it's learning to disappoint people at a rate that I and they can accept. I think one of the biggest challenges of stepping into this role compared to even previous roles on the investor side or in a more traditional occupation is that you can never do enough. And everyone always wants more from you: your clients, your investors, your team. And for someone like me, who is a high achiever and never wants to let anyone down, it's been really, really difficult to try and adjust to this new world where I simply just can't get everything that I would want to. And so balancing that and learning how and who to let down and when is a really intricate exercise that I don't think it's spoken about enough. And it's something we could all learn to do a little bit better. And I think to normalize, that we're all going through that would be super helpful. And I think that that is reflected at the business level as well, right? You're constantly trying to balance the market expectation of rapid growth with scaling safely, and making sure you don't lose your customers' trust at the same time. And making sure your team doesn't burn out in the process. And that's something I didn't fully appreciate when I was at Founders Factory and sitting on the other side of some of these conversations with founders.
Scott Hartley
Yeah, I love that perspective. It's similar to you know, when you catch investors, you have a pipeline, you sort of work your way through the sales funnel of pitching investors. And the goal is not to get everyone to like you, it's to get a few investors to love what you're doing, right? Same concept of, you can't sort of make everyone happy. But you have to sort of communicate as best you can, and do your best. But know that you're always going to fall short in some ways.
Scott Hartley
I had a conversation with one of our founders, couple years ago. We were talking about this definition of quitting. And this definition of quitting is being singularly defined as like hitting the eject button or hitting the quit button. It's sort of all these micro moments of giving up or not responding or not sort of pushing through. And it's that delicate line of knowing that you can't be perfect, but also sort of choosing to engage over and over and over again, because it's - quitting is really the accumulation of doubt or the accumulation of not doing the things that need to be done. And so it's such an interesting, but more complicated story, right, then, sort of the knee jerk descriptions of how these things work on the outside. So thank you so much for sharing your story. We have a few kind of last speed round questions that I'd love to ask you. What's a book that you're reading or a podcast you're enjoying currently?
Nicole Dunn
The Flip by Justin Norman. It's a great podcast and the latest season is around where will jobs come from in Africa? Which based on our discussion sounds like you'd be super interested in. And it's a question I've kind of obsessed about for the past few years.
Scott Hartley
Amazing. I'll check that out. And if you could live anywhere in the world, aside from Cape Town, where would that be for a year?
Nicole Dunn
Look, it's tough to beat Cape Town. It would be a tough call between Nairobi and Cairo. I've had some of the happiest times of my life there. The people are great. And the ecosystems are at a really interesting inflection point. So the energy there is just unmatched.
Scott Hartley
Yeah, both incredible cities. What's your favorite productivity hack?
Nicole Dunn
Super simple. Just focus mode on my Apple devices. I don't like the notifications. And then recently, I've found in this remote world, changing up my workspace or going to a coffee shop or going and visiting another partner's office just for a change of headspace.
Scott Hartley
You find that you do things more effectively if you do certain creative work one place or you do certain focus work another place? Or how do you compartmentalize your time and space?
Nicole Dunn
Yeah, I have a freakish ability to compartmentalize. I reckon I could be at a nightclub and pull out my laptop and start focusing. But every now and again, if I'm doing more creative work, going to like a favorite coffee shop that I really like with just soft chatter and ambient music is really nice. Whereas if it's deep focus work. I'll go into a private office in a co working space and just put my head down for a couple of hours.
Scott Hartley
I'd like to see that that productivity hack in a nightclub. Where can listeners - if they want to find you - where's the best place to reach you?
Nicole Dunn
I'm quite low key. I'm most active on LinkedIn. I'm contemplating trying out Twitter, but I don't know if I'm up for the challenge.
Scott Hartley
No Tik Tok, no Tik Tok though?
Nicole Dunn
No Tik Tok yet.
Scott Hartley
Amazing. Nicole, thank you so much for joining us on The Venture Everywhere podcast. We're super proud to have you as part of our portfolio. And amazing company, Revio, based in South Africa. So thanks so much for being with us today.
Nicole Dunn
Thanks so much for having me. It was really fun.
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.