Venture Everywhere Podcast: Thalia Pillay with Scott Hartley
Thalia Pillay, co-founder and CEO of Orca Fraud, chats with Scott Hartley, Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures on episode 77: Orca-strating Fraud Prevention.
In episode 77 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder and Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Thalia Pillay, co-founder and CEO of Orca Fraud — a South African-based startup building fraud prevention tools tailored to the realities of emerging markets. Thalia shares Orca's origin story, driven by the urgent need to bridge the gap between rapid financial inclusion and escalating digital threats. Thalia also discusses how Orca is developing real-time, context-aware tools to protect mobile-first economies and drive inclusive growth across underserved regions.
In this episode, you will hear:
How Orca assesses fraud risk in mobile wallets and underserved areas
Designing fraud tools that reflect local behaviors and cultural norms
Staying product-focused and efficient with a small, technical team
Navigating infrastructure and data challenges across emerging markets
Growing a trusted fraud and compliance network with “Friends in Fraud”
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 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.
00:00:34 Scott: Hi, everybody. My name is Scott Hartley. I am co-founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures. We're a global pre-seed fund focused on the intersection of money, health, and work. I'm here today with one of our favorite startup founders based in Cape Town, South Africa, Thalia Pillay.
00:00:50 Scott: Thalia is the co-founder and CEO of Orca Fraud. Orca is a South African startup dedicated to combating fraud in emerging markets through innovative context aware digital safety solutions.
00:01:02 Scott: Thalia's background is as a full stack developer. So we'll go into a little bit of her background becoming a full stack engineer before it was the cool thing to do, working across a number of fintech companies, including our very own portfolio company called Stitch, which is also based in Cape Town, South Africa.
00:01:20 Scott: And, Thalia, you co-founded Orca with your co-founder, Carla Wilby. Welcome to the podcast. We're gonna talk a little bit about the fun underbelly of fintech, which has to do with playing defense. We'll get into some of the mechanics, but why don't you walk us through a little bit of what Orca does and where you saw this problem emerge and the goals around what you're building?
00:01:39 Thalia: Thank you so much for having me. With Orca, just to take it back a bit, myself and Carla, we'd spent many years in fintech, many years in banking, building out different payment methods. In emerging markets, things are super different.
00:01:53 Thalia: Financial inclusion is definitely top of mind for anyone building in emerging markets, but the big problem we felt was that digital safety wasn't as top of mind. With all the great work every other fintech is doing in the space to do financial inclusion, we weren't really seeing the same advancements in fraud prevention.
00:02:10 Thalia: So Orca was really born out of the need for real tools which solve the needs of emerging markets. Our hypothesis when we started last year January was that fraud in Africa looks different. The main reasons for that were the different socioeconomic climates and the different payment methods. So what looks fraudulent here might not look fraudulent in, like, LA, for example. The user behavior is super, super different.
00:02:33 Thalia: Another very easy example is that the payment methods are very different throughout Africa than it is in somewhere like America. I know you guys still have checks and clearing houses, but here, mobile wallets are king in places like Kenya.
00:02:46 Thalia: A lot of tools just don't treat those payment methods like a real method. So Orca’s really built on the premise that new methods with new tools and really to push financial inclusion, we need digital safety.
00:02:59 Scott: It's so interesting because this is something that people don't necessarily realize unless you get on a plane, you travel, you go across the world, and you realize that as you land in a new country, sometimes you have your ability to pay with Visa or whatnot. But there's all this fragmentation, all these local banks, local wallets, as you mentioned, in places like Kenya, mobile money that's been around for decades plus.
00:03:21 Scott: I think this is something that's maybe lost on people is that the underlying infrastructure and the payment rails and how people transact, how people pay businesses or they pay individuals peer to peer or B2B are vastly different across these different ecosystems.
00:03:35 Scott: And so when we think about the evolution of playing offense, so building out these payment rails, building out these systems, there's this flip side of the coin, which I often talk about as the B-side of the record. The A side of the record is focused on maybe one aspect, and the B side is playing defense a bit.
00:03:50 Scott: But that's really where you guys are sitting is looking at the evolution of payment fragmentation, the evolution of mobile wallets, the evolution of these different modalities of how people transact across emerging markets and then building commensurate tools on the defensive side. Is that right?
00:04:05 Thalia: That's exactly it. To your point, I had the privilege of heading to Abidjan and Francophone at Côte d'Ivoire last month. Even though I'm in South Africa, mobile money has never really been a thing here. The moment I landed, it was just mobile money everywhere. I could barely use my credit card. Mobile money was so prevalent.
00:04:22 Thalia: But I love the B-side analogy. People, again, are doing such amazing work innovating in fintech, but we're also seeing a lot of fraud on some of these newer systems. It's really important that we build out in the same way that people are building our financial infrastructure, but just fraud infrastructure. So, how do we protect everything in real time as well?
00:04:41 Scott: One of the things that I've talked about with other portfolio founders is thinking about the evolution of banking rail, banking as a service or these infrastructure layers that were built out, which then enabled consumer-facing fintech to be built, where a lot of consumer-facing neobanks were really helpful in bringing the base of the pyramid or the middle of the pyramid into financial inclusion for the time, especially in emerging markets across Africa where maybe people were unbanked or were typically underbanked, and they were then able to open their own mobile account, get onto the rail of formal financial inclusion.
00:05:15 Scott: But then the flip side starts to emerge where you have a number of millions of new consumers that are using formal financial tools for the time. Then this negative side of that, which is people trying to take advantage, people trying to defraud, people trying to steal money, people pretending to be somebody that they're not, pretending to be a business that they're not.
00:05:35 Scott: And so it's this natural evolution of infrastructure players that then became enablers of consumer-facing neobanks, consumer-facing finance. Now I think we're in the third wave of how do we think about the defensive side. You're not alone in our portfolio thinking across these different modalities of KYC, of identity management, of fraud prevention.
00:05:55 Scott: But maybe talk a little bit about the specifics. Are there specific cases you could talk to to give people a sense of what does fraud look like in South Africa? What does fraud look like in general? What are some of the tools you guys are building to try to get ahead of this?
00:06:09 Thalia: A great example is the socioeconomic aspects. If we look at scams these days, especially with the rise of AI and gen AI specifically, it's easier than ever to spin up a very legitimate looking scam.
00:06:22 Thalia: What we found, especially in South Africa, is a lot of the scams take advantage of local and cultural nuances. A good example are things known as faith and healing scams, where it's built on the premise that if you pay someone, you're going to recover and get better.
00:06:37 Thalia: One of our traditional languages, like the Zulu people, they have a specific healer called the sangoma. It's very common to go to the sangoma to get better. Essentially, these scammers are posing as digital sangoma. You'll pay them X amount to get better and then they just go invest into crypto and defraud you.
00:06:58 Thalia: That's a really great example because when I tell it to a lot of my Western investors or anyone in the U.S. or anything, they're like, why on earth would I pay someone to get better? It's such a common thing here, especially amongst the Zulu people. It's honestly really impressive with how nuanced some of these scams are.
00:07:15 Thalia: The work we're doing is really to identify these cultural nuances. And then also the locational variability because we have a large informal settlement throughout Africa, and it's all about how do we know what is the risk level of a different area, how do we not just blanket cover the whole area.
00:07:35 Thalia: Another good example is that a single informal settlement or township could essentially share the same IP. A lot of fraud platforms would block their IP, which would then block the entire area.
00:07:46 Thalia: So it's really important to take in mind that all of these very local specifications and just make sure that you aren't also biased against African people. We've definitely seen that with great KYC providers, like Smile ID and the work that they're doing there where we really need to train our models on African faces, on African data, just to make sure that we aren't just building them in favor of the Western world.
00:08:11 Scott: Absolutely. We love what Mark Straub and Smile ID are doing. Like you said, there are these very unfair things that start to happen. For example, you have fraud coming from one particular place. Maybe it's in a certain neighborhood. Then that neighborhood all shares an IP address. If you don't have very nuanced or very specific means of counteracting fraud, you end up disadvantaging a whole community of people that may be unfairly disadvantaged because of their location.
00:08:38 Scott: The work that you're doing really is empowering in a lot of ways because by getting these more granular solutions, by coming up with alternatives to just broad-based IP blocking you're actually enabling more people to move into the formal economy, more people to have access to these services that they deserve to have access to without being unfairly penalized just because there's 10 nefarious actors in the neighborhood and therefore everybody is blocked.
00:09:02 Scott: But that's pretty interesting too about the cultural nuances. We see that in the West as well. If you have a Coinbase account and you start getting text messages saying your Coinbase account has been hacked, call this phone number. There's all these little nuances to the behaviors or the platforms or the things that we're all on.
00:09:18 Scott: It's a very top of mind issue for a lot of people because as AI has become more and more explosive and more and more enabled, this ability to spoof, this ability to build a cultural profile that feels very local and very authentic in many ways becomes so much more duplicitous and so much more dangerous to defraud somebody.
00:09:37 Scott: Maybe taking a step back to talk a little bit about your background. You're really an incredible figure within the South African startup ecosystem, being a woman, being technical, being a multi-time founder. Talk a little bit about your motivations, and how did you get into coding at a young age, and how did you become a full stack engineer?
00:09:56 Thalia: The town that I'm from, it's a pretty rural village in South Africa. It's pretty close to the border of Swaziland and Mozambique, so on our East Coast. My parents are all doctors. No one else in my family is an engineer. They got me this very cool robotic dog toy when I was in grade five, which I think is very cliched, but I was like, wow, this is very, very cool. But the town itself lacked any form of digital infrastructure. We got our traffic lights when I was in university.
00:10:24 Thalia: When I was doing my back work, we were building boats and welding and soldering. There just wasn't any tech. But when I studied, I chose to do robotics engineering at the University of Cape Town, which is actually where I met my co-founder, Carla. She also was studying engineering there.
00:10:39 Thalia: I've always loved building stuff. I really love the robotics aspects of building something from nothing to solve a problem. One of the things I built were these sign language gloves which translated sign language to spoken English.
00:10:51 Thalia: I'd always wanted to be a founder. I always wanted to solve real problems. Working in different startups in South Africa really exposes you to so many different challenges and problems.
00:11:01 Thalia: I love being an engineer. Even now, I still code a lot just because it's so cool to be able to build something from nothing. Orca's really built on the premise that you can build a world class engineering team from anywhere because a lot of people think that great talent only lives in Silicon Valley or certain places, people who've been exposed to different things can build different things.
00:11:22 Thalia: But what we've learned from the various startups we worked at is, you can build amazing machine learning businesses from South Africa, from other African countries that are way more affordable, way more effective and also built on a full African data sources.
00:11:36 Thalia: I almost became an accountant instead of becoming an engineer. It probably would have made my business sense be a lot better, but I still just love to code. Especially now more than ever the rise of AI solutions, it's such a cool time to be an engineer. But I also love how accessible it's becoming for everyone else as well.
00:11:55 Scott: As you navigate the world of being a CEO and being technical, how do you split your time? It sounds like you still keep one foot in the world of coding. Are you seeing? Are you guys adopting? Many of these internal tools to help accelerate and amplify your own technical abilities or your own coding abilities within the company?
00:12:13 Thalia: For sure. We've been really lucky where even though we raised our pre-seed ground last April or May, we were really intentional about the team size. AI tool really helped us be way more effective in the work we do.
00:12:26 Thalia: For most of us, it was just me and Carla coding and working with clients. Before that, it would have taken at least a team of 10 to 15. Especially at a pre-seed, you can’t really afford to be burning money unless you have paying customers. Really grateful to be building in this age and just being able to add people super intentionally to bring in very different skill sets.
00:12:46 Thalia: But in terms of how I spend my time, I always joke that Carla builds and I sell, so that's how we spend it between the two of us. During the day, I do all the business stuff like sales, partnerships, marketing, anything like hiring.
00:12:59 Thalia: I love being close to the product. For me, some of my favorite technical CEOs are still really close to the product. I'm a big fan of dogfooding your own product because we're in the fraud space, the real time aspect is so important.
00:13:13 Thalia: A lot of my clients always joke that it feels like we're another fraud analyst because I'll be sending them alerts or just answering things very timely because it is such sensitive information that every second does count. So just by being more in the product, more involved, we're really also able to iterate and build a much better offering as well.
00:13:32 Scott: It's interesting. To your point of adding people very intentionally, there is a blog post many years back that Keith Rabois from Founders Fund wrote about the difference between barrels and ammunition and barrels being the rate limits.
00:13:45 Scott: For example, how many guns you have out there versus how much ammunition you have behind those cannons or those barrels. As you add an individual, what you want to make sure is you're adding somebody that gives you leverage in the sense that they're adding a whole new person that can expand your rate limit.
00:14:00 Scott: So if you're two people and you add a person who's truly a go-getter, an innovative person that can drive using these AI tools, you've now increased your rate limit from two barrels to three barrels to four barrels.
00:14:11 Scott: Thinking about how you hire and how you really make sure that those people aren't just falling in line behind you because that gives you no additional leverage, but they're actually increasing this breadth of this rate limit, which is limited by the number of barrels that you have. But in this era of AI, that effectively gives you more ammunition behind each of those individuals.
00:14:30 Scott: It's amazing what you guys were able to do in the early days. And still with two people, I remember getting your investor updates and looking at how the cash position had decreased by next to zero. And yet you guys have produced all sorts of code. You'd push 20 updates. We're looking at it saying, gosh. You guys have years of runway and barely raised a pre-seed round. We wish all of our companies were as efficient as you guys.
00:14:52 Thalia: That's really funny.
00:14:55 Scott: Going back to your background, working your way into fintech, what was it about this problem around fraud prevention where you said, gosh, rather than go join another company, there's somebody else out there doing this. I'm gonna jump in with Carla and start building. What was it in the gap in the market, or how did you get that conviction? How did you get that confidence to make the leap?
00:15:15 Thalia: When we were building payments, we were just looking at so many different fraud platforms, and there's so many that I'm such a big fan of. But it was hard because none of them really fit the South African payments landscape.
00:15:28 Thalia: Also they were really expensive. So even for well-resourced company, they were still super expensive. So to pay for something which didn't really fit you didn't make a lot of sense to me. What we wanted and what made us start Orca was we really felt the world was changing so fast and more and more payment methods were coming in. So the sooner we got into it, the better our solution would be.
00:15:52 Thalia: If we look at mobile money as our earlier example, even Mastercard have done such amazing things in terms of card prevention and card fraud prevention. With mobile money, we haven't really seen anyone specialize on mobile wallets. Like, how do we score a wallet? How do we create a universal system, like a credit system for a wallet? So we really felt like we were uniquely positioned to be able to do that on a global and infrastructural level.
00:16:16 Thalia: I just wanted to work with Carla in any capacity because I've been her fan, from over a decade when we were at UCT together. For me, it was also really about building a diverse team. I don't think it's super common to have two women technical founders. I can barely think of any other continent at the moment.
00:16:34 Thalia: For us, we just really wanted to build great tech together, and fraud was the biggest problem we could identify because there's such a social impact, it really resonated with both of us and really just protecting the financially vulnerable.
00:16:50 Thalia: When you are in payment, when you are in banking, you're really exposed to amazing stuff. At the same time, you're also seeing people lose their entire life savings to investment scams. So we really just wanted to be socially responsible, build a company we've always wanted to work at, and just build some great tech in the process as well.
00:17:08 Scott: It's truly remarkable. The fact that two women, two technical founders raising your pre-seed round. I know you made the Norrsken 100 list for impact. You guys raised the most for two technical women on the continent ever.
00:17:22 Scott: Truly groundbreaking, glass ceiling breaking, and totally inspirational too, I'm sure. Congratulations on all that. I know you're just at the very beginning of the journey with this business, but it's truly remarkable already what you guys have been able to achieve. So we're proud to be involved in many ways.
00:17:37 Scott: I know one of the challenges in building and emerging markets in South Africa is going in fundraising, convincing people that one, you're the team to do it. Two, you know, that this is a problem worth solving. And three, you know, the market dynamics and the risk associated with being in Africa, being in South Africa.
00:17:55 Scott: Did you feel like there were headwinds for you guys in fundraising? How did you tell that story around the market opportunity? Because Everywhere Ventures, as our name suggests, we're truly globally focused. Probably a third of our companies are outside the U.S.
00:18:08 Scott: So we really believe in the opportunities and the huge market tailwinds that have real venture scale returns behind them, but not all funds do. So talk a little bit about that fundraising process and how you guys were able to tell the story to get this pre-seed done.
00:18:23 Thalia: We were really fortunate. Looking back now, a year and a bit on, I don't think we realized how fortunate we were. Especially coming off the back of where we worked previously, everyone was keen to see what Carla and I were up to, what we were building. They're a super successful venture backed company, so it was a very natural progression for a lot of people to follow our journey.
00:18:41 Thalia: I do think that two technical women, not super common at all. I think Ford is a pretty hot space. We're seeing amazing companies in the U.S. and Europe raise really strong rounds of this attraction with being in companies like Sardine, SEON, Featurespace with the Visa acquisition. It's such a rich space for collaboration and acquisitions.
00:19:02 Thalia: So I think there were a lot of things playing in our favor but how we played well with we knew exactly the type of support we wanted. And, again, we were fortunate enough to be able to pick and choose who we involved in the round.
00:19:14 Thalia: For us, it was really important as an all women team to have investors that we felt represented us and were diverse. At least 50% of our cap table are women, but we brought in some really strong, Unicorn founders like Laura from Alloy, Nicky from Tunic Pay, and also Nova Credit.
00:19:32 Thalia: We surrounded ourselves with brave women. Obviously, Jenny from Everywhere as well. I don't think everyone has the luxury of doing that, which is why we were super fortunate.
00:19:40 Thalia: But convincing investors to invest was surprisingly easy because we had a lot of conviction because we were technical and knew what we could build. We derisked ourselves in a lot of ways.
00:19:51 Thalia: We also knew officially being in South Africa, South Africa is quite different to other African countries. So we knew we have to build global from day one. We really wanted investors that had the network to ensure we could build globally from day one.
00:20:03 Thalia: Because when you're building for emerging markets, some of the markets are quite shallow from the time perspective. So you need to either offer many revenue streams per market to capture the full value or go to a lot of different places.
00:20:15 Thalia: Because we're big believers in collaboration but also the network effect, we were like, okay, we're focused on the global South. Let's try to get as much countries in from day one and make data our most defensible assets because a lot of the markets we're in, no one has data on. We're fighting forward all over the show.
00:20:33 Thalia: Earlier I was on a call, someone was asking me about East Africa. They were like, we've never launched there. Do you know who's good there? I was like, well, I know these are some confirmed fraudsters. You want the list?
00:20:44 Thalia: It's really rare and rich insights. Anytime someone asks me for fundraising advice, I'm like, I don't think I'm qualified in any way. But what we did well was we had a process, we had conviction, and we knew exactly who we wanted on board.
00:20:57 Thalia: A lot of people don't realize the value investors can bring to their business, like the right ones. Rather going after a few rather than many and building the type of business you want is super important.
00:21:09 Scott: Absolutely. So for you guys in the process, you were Delaware C corp even though based in Cape Town. One of the pushbacks sometimes that you might get is, okay, great. You have local cost structure. You've got the ability to hire locally. You're raising international investors in dollars. You're a Delaware company. You have local cost structure, but then you also might have local revenue opportunities and the volatility of local currency market.
00:21:33 Scott: You've got the advantage of local cost structure, but sometimes the headwind of currency volatility or political volatility that can impact your revenue. How did you navigate that, or how did you convince investors as you were thinking about this? Was it the global from day one's ability to risk mitigate by having different clients in different markets and different currency exposures on the revenue side? How did you think about that?
00:21:56 Thalia: We do have our Delaware C corp, and majority of our clients are actually dollar-based clients because most dollars these days are incorporating in Delaware. It makes it super easy if they're paying you from their Mercury or Brex account into your Mercury or Brex account.
00:22:10 Thalia: But currency risk and volatility is a very real issue. We do have very specific contracts which we do price sensitively per market. And then if there is any form of volatility, 10% in either direction, we open ourselves up for processing renegotiations.
00:22:26 Thalia: I don't think it's super conventional. It's probably not great business practice. But our big belief that Orca is about meeting our clients where they're at. For them in their markets, they still deserve to have really great forward tools.
00:22:39 Thalia: If it does mean pricing in local currency or pricing in dollars, but just renegotiating should it change, we're really open to that. I don't think a lot of other players are for their own various reasons because it's not scalable.
00:22:52 Thalia: But it's worked really well for us because a lot of people here are very sensitive to dollar-based pricing. The moment they see dollars that's an immediate no. But there's also really cool ways to price where it's like value-based pricing or risk-based pricing and that's the type of approach we're taking at the moment where everyone knows how far a dollar takes you here and you can't really afford to spend it on nice-to-have.
00:23:15 Thalia: But by incentivizing the right behavior, for example, only charging for confirmed fraud stopped or only charging for high risk payment methods, we're really able to strengthen our pricing model.
00:23:36 Thalia: There's also no risk for currency volatility because people know, okay, Orca is very much aligned with my outcome rather than just extorting me, and I get no benefits for my company.
00:23:37 Scott: Like Everywhere, being a community-based fund, being focused on having this building this global community of founders, I know you also have a community aspect at Orca in this friends in fraud layer. Talk a little bit about that. And then Orca comes from the whale, obviously, but orchestration as well. Right?
00:23:55 Thalia: Yeah. Probably we've been named from that. We started that as part of Orca, in August last year. And Carla and myself, we're both engineers and super technical, so we've always been hyper aware that we aren't the fraud expert even though we work and build those solutions and stuff.
00:24:11 Thalia: It was really important to us that we give the fraud and compliance community throughout Africa a space to share things, a space to come together, share learnings, insights, and empower them with a safe space to talk about things.
00:24:25 Thalia: Because fraud is super stressful and a lot of the broad teams we work with, it's super time consuming. They're dealing with hundreds and thousands of alerts. It's like a team of four that they have to work through in a certain time period. So it's really about creating a community on the continent where people can go to each other, share fraud learning, share compliance insights.
00:24:44 Thalia: It's been awesome because it's taken on a life of its own way beyond us. It's not to sell Orca or showcase us in any way. It's really for the community. Someone had a really cool example of petrol cards being used as an elaborate fraud syndicate. Then someone else from a different company was like, oh my gosh, we have the exact same thing.
00:25:03 Thalia: Normally these businesses wouldn't really get together. It's not like the developer community where we have lots of gathering. It's a less evolved community. There's this collaboration. So that's been really, really cool.
00:25:15 Thalia: In terms of where the name Orca comes from, well, it does come from the whale because I do love whales. But it’s short for orchestration. And I think a lot of the guys with payment orchestration were like, oh my gosh. We should have done that. But when we launched Orca, we launched as a full orchestration platform because we really believe in the power of a unified platform, which operates at the intersection of fraud and AML.
00:25:37 Thalia: We also did follow Orca though because orcas are vicious even though they're cute and orcas also band together to take down boats which is a very common thing in South Africa where these two orcas are killing all of the great white sharks. In the same way we want to collab with different fraud providers, different payment companies to also take down fraudsters as well.
00:25:57 Scott: It's such a good metaphor. I love that. The teamwork of orcas to go after sharks is metaphorical to what happens on fraud prevention and AML and the things that you're working on with orchestration.
00:26:07 Scott: And on the community front, it's so interesting. This is such a forward thinking aspect of your business. A lot of founders think product, product, product is the only way to build market share. There's so much to say for building community, building thought leadership in a space where you guys become one of the go-to groups that I almost think of network.
00:26:29 Scott: Some people think of network as a proprietary thing, like we want to have relationships and preserve and protect those relationships and own them ourselves. Another school of thought would be to say, we want to be the node of all the relationships and be the center point and be the instigator of all these different people coming together.
00:26:46 Scott: And in that, become the strongest linchpin of this whole ecosystem and really own the thought leadership of this ecosystem. One is a very proprietary approach, and one is a very community driven-approach. I see over and over again, the community-driven approach of making your business the linchpin and the center point as bringing together all these actors ensconces you as the category winner or the category owner.
00:27:09 Scott: It's a very shrewd business move, but it's also a great place to sit at the center of this ecosystem as far as bringing together these actors and in building that community. But it's something that we really believe as well in how we build Everywhere. But hats off to you for doing this to own the thought leadership of this whole community of actors across South Africa, but also just the continent writ large.
00:27:29 Scott: As we wrap up here on podcast, I'd love to know what podcasts or books are on your list in your library. Anything that you're reading right now or listening to?
00:27:38 Thalia: That is a bit hypocritical of me, but I don't think I've ever listened to a podcast before. I'm just not a podcast person, but I am a book person. My sister and I set up Goodreads challenges every year to read 100 books a year.
00:27:51 Thalia: But ever since I started Orca, it's been abysmal and I'm not really anywhere near 100 books unfortunately. But at the moment, I'm actually rereading War and Peace because I went to a secondhand book fair a couple weeks back and I got the nicest version. It's cool because it's just something that's not a business or productivity or life hacks. It's just like going home as I read it so many times.
00:28:14 Thalia: But a newsletter that I really enjoy for the continent is by Samora. It's called Frontier Fintech. One of the best newsletters I've ever seen. I just think anyone who's building in Fintech on the continent should definitely subscribe to that. Really cool podcasts coming from that as well. Nothing on those I haven't listened to.
00:28:32 Scott: I love the fact that you just said War and Peace is your go-to book that you've read many times. It's been on my list for my entire life, but I've got some shorter Tolstoy books on my shelf, but haven't yet made it through War and Peace. So maybe I'll add that to my Goodreads list.
00:28:47 Thalia: If you come to Cape Town, you can definitely borrow my very recent secondhand version I just bought.
00:28:53 Scott: If you could live anywhere outside of Cape Town, where would it be?
00:28:56 Thalia: I love places which are super efficient, like energy efficient, people efficient. For that reason, Iceland, I had the pleasure of going there. I'm a big horse girl, so I like to ride Atlantic ponies. I just think it's such an efficient, energy efficient country. So it'd be cool if we saw more and more of that in other countries. So I'd love to live there one day.
00:29:18 Scott: That's amazing. I've spent a few days in Iceland, and it's such a remarkable place. When you want to unwind, between riding horses or reading War and Peace, do you have any other methods of getting away from the computer, getting away from the IDE and getting away from the business side of things?
00:29:33 Thalia: I play a few musical instruments, and I always used to joke with Carla in the early days of Orca, when we were pre-revenue. I was like, we just need new revenue line items. So I would play weddings and stuff as I play my flute part of it. There aren’t revenue items for Orca. Don’t worry. But I just want to be hysterical if we diversified our revenue so much to become Orca Flutes instead of Orca Fraud.
00:29:56 Thalia: But what's really cool about Cape Town is there's so many great outdoor places, beaches, hiking. With the team, we always try to do either arts and craft days like we did Rose and clay the other day, which is where we drank Rose and built little clay whales. That's definitely my favorite way of unwinding at the moment.
00:30:13 Scott: I love that. You said Rose and Clay. We should add that to our next off-site. I have to say Thalia, a complete renaissance woman to summarize CEO of a fraud prevention company, full stack developer, horse rider, War and Peace reader, flute player.
00:30:29 Scott: Truly remarkable what you guys have built in the company, but also just the life that you're leading and truly an inspiration to a lot of us. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Where can listeners find you?
00:30:40 Thalia: Only on LinkedIn, really. I wish I had a cool Twitter account, but my Twitter account used to be a Harry Styles fan page so I'm trying to delete all of those tweets. But mainly LinkedIn for now.
00:30:52 Scott: I will admit, for the first time ever, that my Twitter account used to be a Bollywood celebrity Twitter account. This was back in 2007 or 2008 when I was living in India.
00:31:02 Scott: We had an auto-follow on Priyanka Chopra and Shah Rukh Khan and all of the key Bollywood players. Built up a huge Twitter following. Unfortunately, that account got hacked, and I no longer am able to use it. There was a period of time where bollywood_celebs… was the name of the Twitter account. So I empathize with it. The genesis of your Twitter account being a Harry Styles fan page is in line with my Bollywood DNA, I suppose.
00:31:27 Thalia: That's so funny. Honestly, that made my day.
00:31:29 Scott: I love it. On that note, we will end the podcast. But it's been a true pleasure, a joy. For anybody who's passing through Cape Town, Thalia is based in Cape Town and an incredible part of our portfolio. We're super proud to have over a dozen companies on the continent. Thank you so much for spending time with us today.
00:31:45 Thalia: Thank you so much for having me.
00:31:48 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoy today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a check preseed fund that does exactly that, invests 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.