Podcast
Andy Taylor – Stakk: The ten year overnight success.
Andy Taylor is Co-Founder of Stakk an embedded finance infrastructure solution. On 6 July 2026, ASX-listed Stakk Limited signed a definitive agreement to acquire US document intelligence firm ParaScript for US$63 million. I’ve interviewed Andy more than once over the past decade, way back when he was just starting to build Douugh out of Tank Stream Labs. Talking to him last week about the deal and the pivot to Stakk, three things stuck with me, perhaps even more than the acquisition itself.
Being early can almost be as challenging as being wrong.
When I interviewed Andy in 2018 he described an AI concierge for Douugh called Sophie, a digital assistant that would manage someone’s entire financial life. His vision blew my mind so much so that I called him a visionary at the time. He was also about eight years too early. Large language models didn’t exist. Open banking data was still screen-scraped. Customers weren’t ready to hand a chatbot their financial life, let alone trust its advice. The idea was right. The infrastructure to build it wasn’t there yet, and neither was the customer.
Douugh didn’t get the chance to wait for the world to catch up. Capital dried up overnight in 2022 as Russia invaded Ukraine. Investors moods changed from grow at all costs to cut costs at all costs. Douugh relied on infrastructure and rails provided by other Fintechs. Unfortunately they didn’t survive 2022. Overnight Douugh’s business model came crashing down. “I probably still have nightmares about it,” Andy told me.
Douugh had to pivot fast and become something else to survive: They repurposed what they had built with Douugh into an embedded fraud and identity platform, licensed to companies like Chime, Robinhood and T-Mobile rather than sold to consumers.
“It’s a data game,” Andy said of the pivot, and the ParaScript deal is the next evolution of Stakk. Three decades of document intelligence, clients including USPS and Deloitte, bolted onto a business now claiming 99.99 per cent decisioning accuracy for the fraud programs it runs.
If Douugh hadn’t survived 2022 it would have just been another failed neobank to the armchair critics. Being early and being wrong look identical to people from the outside. But for those who’ve been around Fintech a long time, what often determines success is whether the business is still standing when the market catches up to the idea.
“The days of raising money on a vision are gone,” Andy said. What’s left is whether you built something that can pay its own way until the vision becomes obvious to everyone else too.
Visionary is a small part of the job.
Being a visionary used to be the main role of a founder. But it’s not what got Andy through 2022 and turning the business around. What he talked about instead was grit: keeping a team believing in a plan when the plan has just been completely rewritten.
Shutting out the external noise and pressures and always showing strength for the team is probably the hardest trait for any founder. “You can never be seen to be showing that weakness,” he told me.
It’s at odds with most of the leadership advice doing the rounds in fintech, which tells founders to be open about their struggles and to lead with vulnerability. I don’t disagree with Andy being vulnerable may be useful advice for founders when we are in “Peace Time” but the reality is Fintech is in “War Time” mode.
In times of challenge people need a leader to be strong. Andy’s instincts have led to Stakk growing rapidly, expansion into the US and a $63m acquisition.
Maybe the pivot isn’t product, but location?
Andy’s advice to any young Australian founder listening is blunt: move. Go to a market that backs risk-taking and has real access to capital. It’s confronting advice because Andy is a founding father of Australian fintech. He co-founded SocietyOne in 2011, the first peer to peer lender in Australia. He’s forged a path for others to follow.
Fifteen years on, his advice to the next generation is to build somewhere else more supportive of innovation and startups. If the person who helped build the local industry is telling founders to leave, then maybe the pivot founders should consider in this market isn’t embedded finance or AI – but Australia versus Singapore or Dubai or the USA.
Too often for founders what seems like the light at the end of the tunnel has been a train coming at them full speed. The acquisition is a rare moment to reflect and congratulate Andy and the team on a fantastic turnaround.
You can find out more https://stakk.tech/
Dexter Cousins is the founder of Tier One People, Australia’s leading executive search firm for fintech. He has completed 200+ executive placements in Fintech and hosts Fintech Chatter, Australia’s leading industry podcast with 370+ episodes and 30,000 monthly listens across 40 countries.
Links from this episode.
Andy Taylor on Fintech Chatter.
- Andy Taylor, CEO of Douugh, the 2019 interview where he first described Sophie
- Andy Taylor on Douugh, recorded in 2020
- Douugh partners with a bank
- All Fintech Chatter episodes
Full transcript.
Lightly edited for readability — filler words removed, wording otherwise unchanged.
Dexter Cousins
Hello and welcome to Fintech Chatter, the podcast where I talk to industry leaders about their journey and reveal their secrets to success. I’m Dexter Cousins, your host and the founder of Tier One People, an executive search firm that works exclusively in fintech to find the 1% of talent who redefine what’s possible. For the past decade I’ve been helping founders like today’s guest hire the leadership talent who turn startups into billion dollar companies. So if you’re looking for that unicorn talent who can transform your business, then start at tieronepeople.com.
Now, on to today’s guest. Andy Taylor is the CEO and founder of Stakk. They’re an embedded finance solution that’s been on an absolute tear this last 12 months. They’ve brought on clients including Robinhood and T-Mobile. And Andy’s here to talk to me about their latest acquisition. Many of you will know Andy as one of the OGs of fintech, as co-founder of the original peer-to-peer lender, SocietyOne. Andy, great to have you back, and congrats.
Andy Taylor
Thank you for having me. It’s been a while.
Dexter Cousins
It has been a while. Well mate, it is absolutely fantastic to have you back on. I know we talked about doing this a little earlier this year and you asked me to hold off because something big might be happening. Do you want to first of all tell us a little bit about Stakk, and then some of the news that you’ve got to share?
Andy Taylor
Sure. For those of you who have followed the journey, when we pivoted the business of Douugh last year, with the rising interest rates and the real shift in investor sentiment on profitability and sustained revenue growth, we really wanted to go and sweat the asset that we built on the technology side, to effectively white label and embed services with more established enterprises, specifically in the fintech space as well as the banking space. But what I’ll go into is that we’ve broadened that out now to more core regulated industries that can benefit off this technology.
As we’ve gone along and really tried to focus on our core strength and where we see the pocket of opportunity, we’ve evolved the Stakk solution now to becoming an embedded trust platform that helps programs combat fraud. And as we’ve seen exponentially in the last 12 months, the rise of AI and what that means in terms of empowering fraudsters, the problem is becoming insurmountable for a lot of these big programs, and how you can combat that fraud, fighting AI with AI. So I think we’ve found our sweet spot and we’re getting a lot of good traction now and compounded growth off the back of that.
This acquisition was a key catalyst for us now to take this to a whole other level, because ultimately it’s a data game. This acquisition of ParaScript was predominantly about buying a pool of data, rich data that can help us drive forward the competitive nature of the model that we’re building and reinforce the moat. But it also gives us substantial revenue and profitability now, and puts us in a whole other league, which is fantastic.
Dexter Cousins
So it’s been a success. Tell me a bit more about how this pivot came about.
Andy Taylor
If you look back over the 10 years, I split that 10 years into two halves, like a football game. Two completely different worlds. When we were looking to bring Douugh to the market, capital was free, interest rates were zero. It was a completely different time. So the ambitions that we could fund were far more grandiose, and we saw an opportunity in the neobank space with a model that we thought was capital light, because we said early on we didn’t want to become a bank, we wanted to focus on the application layer. Looking at the US market back then, it was quite underserved. Interchange rates were very attractive compared to what they are here, and obviously now regulated out of existence. So we made the bold play to take on the US as our first market, which in hindsight I probably wouldn’t have done.
Taking the company onto the ASX pre-launch, pre-revenue was a very bold move. The capital was there, but in hindsight it was at the tail end of that bubble. So we had a very limited window of opportunity to try and launch products, get product market fit, and then chart a path to profitability. Back then it was all about growth. Profitability wasn’t even a topic with investors. It was establish yourself, get a beachhead and scale your customer base.
So literally when the tide turned, and I probably still have nightmares about it, I can remember it being over the course of two weeks that the market completely turned and sentiment shifted dramatically. Suddenly you were like, access to capital is not what it was, we need to change our strategy. So initially we pivoted the model to get to profitability and cut the cost base. That actually saw us pull out of the US to focus on Australia as a home market. But as you know, we had a bit of bad luck with a couple of key vendors having to shut the doors, which killed our progress.
When you’re staring down the battle at that point and investors have ultimately lost confidence, because risk on has gone to risk off and there’s been a big recycle in capital in the public markets, it was a sobering moment to say, we’ve spent an enormous amount of money on building out IP, how do we sweat this asset for the benefit of shareholders and turn around the story? So the pivot became essential.
One thing about tackling the US was that I built up an amazing network there, understood the market very well, and obviously it’s a far bigger market. So my goal was always to try and find a way to commercialise the bulk of the IP which was built out in the US market. When we came across this R-DBX opportunity it was good timing for both of us to bring those businesses together, because one thing they had was outstanding distribution and a good revenue run rate and a fantastic customer base that we’ve now built on. So thankfully we were able to turn that around, and I think the results over the last 12 months have been exceptional.
Dexter Cousins
It’s pretty incredible to have customers like T-Mobile and Robinhood on the roster. How did those opportunities come about?
Andy Taylor
It’s credit to the team and the distribution they had with a key processor in market, because effectively we’ve aligned ourselves with a key processor that provides the banking infrastructure to programs, card issuing, core banking solutions. They very much look at us as a recommended partner for what we do best, so they typically introduce us to a lot of these opportunities, and they’ve been seeing bigger and bigger opportunities. Robinhood was a big one, because they were looking to move into banking.
But also, our biggest client really is Chime, who are the most established in the neobanking market now, and growing from strength to strength. The beautiful thing about our model now is that it’s predominantly a transactional model. So as our clients grow, we grow. There’s a lot of organic growth there that we can leverage.
We’re very fortunate with the customer base we had, but I think now we’re saying this is more than fintech. This problem is so big that any platform that has to validate identity and has to validate transactions can benefit off our technology. You’ve seen that in the recent foray into the health care space. Healthcare is an enormous opportunity for us.
Dexter Cousins
It’s a really interesting point, Andy. As AI starts to proliferate all of these regulated environments, you’re going to need people who can operate at speed and pace within those constraints. One of the opportunities I see for any fintech like yourself is if you’ve got a solution that can broaden out to any other regulated industry.
Andy Taylor
What we saw, Dexter, is that with the fintech boom in the early days banks were looking to back fintechs and take a risk. Now, there were one or two quite catastrophic failures over there, and that caught the eye of the regulator, and the regulator suddenly came in pretty aggressive with some of these banks on their charters saying, you need oversight on your programs, you have no oversight on your programs, show us your processes. And a lot of these banks didn’t have any processes. They were very reliant on programs like Douugh to manage customers.
You and I have talked about this before. We spent an enormous amount of money building out a compliance team to combat fraud on our own program, because in the US it was pretty rife. So again, as regulators are tightening the screws, the need for providers to have audit ready compliance and fraud tools is becoming more important than ever. We’ve captured that wave.
Dexter Cousins
I want to take a trip down memory lane if we can. SocietyOne, the OG of Australian fintech, was really the push to the regulators to go, hey, fintech is a real thing and we need to get regulation in place and policies in place. Talk us through those early days of fintech, how you got an idea like that off the ground, and some of the challenges that were facing you coming into something that was as nascent as fintech in Australia in 2012.
Andy Taylor
It was enormously challenging. The idea for SocietyOne, we were in New Zealand back in the day, this is 2006, 2007, and the idea really came in the advent of what we call web 2.0, when social media was coming into mainstream and you had this massive movement about empowering communities via platform technology. Back then I had a digital agency and we were doing a lot of work on SEO and search marketing strategies for banks and telcos. It was actually one of our banking clients, ASB Bank in New Zealand, which is owned by CBA, that wanted us to launch them into Facebook via a Facebook application, to bring these digital personas in where you could work with a private bank and do your banking via secure chat. So we built this secure chat interface where you could talk to a digital banking assistant and do your banking.
I’d seen the emergence of LendingClub in the US around this model of wanting to become the eBay for the lending of money. And it really struck me, could we do this through Facebook? It was wild to think about now. We actually pitched it to ASB Bank and they said, you’re crazy. And quite rightly.
But then we started to go, well, when you look at the problem here we’re trying to solve, you’re actually trying to disintermediate the bank and the funding model and just connecting investors with borrowers. So we initially looked at it as pure peer-to-peer lending, where if I wanted to get $20,000 I could post an application effectively on a platform for lenders or investors to bid to supply me with that money in increments, and then the system consummates the loans. So we could have 150 investors. It was effectively crowdfunding, and then we could consummate and manage that loan. That was the idea we got very bullish and excited about.
But back in 2007, 2008 when the financial crisis hit, it hit New Zealand very hard and most finance companies went out of business. So it was almost impossible for us to raise money back then. We put it on the shelf and just focused on our core business. But we picked it up again after 2010, 2011 and made the move to Australia to commercialise that.
We were very early to the game and very naive. I was very young back then, had no understanding of the frameworks that were needed to actually operate this. When we started to bring in smarter and more experienced people than me, it became very apparent that the model we wanted to run was not possible. We had to pivot that to ultimately become an online lender that was taking wholesale funds, which is a shame, but it allowed us to still launch a very compelling product to market early and ride that wave.
Dexter Cousins
You and I first met when you’d just started Douugh. I think it would have been around about 2018, and at the time I was doing a blog rather than a podcast. I interviewed you for the blog at Tank Stream Labs, and in that blog I called you a visionary. The vision was for an AI concierge that when you shared it with me I was like, wow, this is what fintech should be. We’re now what, eight years on from that. I remember you talked about an AI assistant called Sophie, and I remember just walking away and thinking, wow, this is the future.
We’re nearly a decade on from that. One of the challenges for any visionary is that the infrastructure and the technology has to enable them to make their vision come alive. Where do you think we’re at now in terms of AI and that original vision? Do you think that it’s something that is now possible?
Andy Taylor
Yes is the answer. Again, I typically find I’m too early on things, and naive to how the underlying engine needs to be built to achieve that goal. Two things I underestimated were that obviously LLMs weren’t a thing back then, and access to the data was hard because CDR didn’t really exist. It was still screen scraping. Structured data was very hard to come by. So for us to build a compelling proposition on day one was really hard to achieve, and then building a business model around that back then was also, will people pay for this? Will they trust it?
Ironically the technology is now there to achieve this. Customer appetites have evolved and there’s a lot more trust now with open banking, and a lot more trust now with AI. These frontier models have done a great job of getting people comfortable putting their life secrets into a chatbot and using it as a coach, a therapist, an advisor. And it’s funny, Dex, if I look back now and I did this exercise recently going, what innovations have actually come into this sector in the last five years, there’s very little to none. Things haven’t really moved on.
Dexter Cousins
I think there’s a reason for that. You’ve talked about that moment where you went from, hey Andy, it’s growth at all costs, to literally, Andy, it’s cut costs at all costs, in the space of a week. That happened in 2022. What we’ve seen is that pressure of you need to just get to profitability. This isn’t a slight on anybody who’s making a success of their business, but the reality is the models that make money are essentially arbitrage models. We’ve been unfortunately stuck in 2015 ideas, because back then there wasn’t any funding around and so you had to get money through the door as quickly as possible. So the squeeze that we’ve seen has set Australia back 10 years from an innovation perspective.
The only thing that Australia’s got that I think everybody respects globally is the founders, the resourcefulness and their ability to actually build businesses with minimal resources and support and all of the challenges that get thrown at you here in Australia. It’s a bit like the Frank Sinatra song, New York, New York. If you can make it here you’re going to make it anywhere. And that’s the unfortunate byproduct of the culmination of things, of a government that just keeps making it harder for us, disincentivises any innovation. There’s a whole host of different things that have been put in people’s way this last four years.
Andy Taylor
I totally agree with you, and we saw this in New Zealand. One thing it’s taught me in terms of becoming a better entrepreneur is to really look at things through a bootstrap lens, to say we need a business model from day one and we need to bootstrap this ourselves to get to the point that we are cash flow break even and profitable, often at MVP, before we go and build out more disruptive functionality and distribution. The days of raising money on a vision are gone.
I’ve learned a lot. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I will do things very differently moving forward, because it forces you to. But I think that’s a good thing. The biggest thing when you go through these challenges is realising the mental toughness and the grit to never give up and push through the toll that has on your financial health.
Dexter Cousins
Your financial health definitely, but your mental health is, I think, something a lot of founders bury and keep calm and carry on. We’ve got to be a lot more aware about the damage that stress is doing to people and how it’s burning people out, because you lose your enthusiasm.
Andy Taylor
You lose it. You lose your spark, you lose your confidence, and it becomes a grind, and suddenly you’re going, what am I doing? Why did I start this? It’s not a vision I have. Anyway, it’s a journey.
Dexter Cousins
It is. It’s interesting though, you sharing this, Andy, because if I look at something that got me really excited and you really excited, and yet it doesn’t get investors excited, the thing that always works that I’ve found, regardless of what the economy is doing and what the capital markets are doing, is the secret that you’ve stumbled upon, which is that it doesn’t matter what’s happening in the market, if you can show a CEO a way to stay out of jail, you’ve got a business.
This whole thing around risk, regulation and fraud, these are the things that CEOs sign the cheques for regardless of what is happening in the economy. Whereas the stuff that’s consumer driven, hey we’ll help you get more customers, better UX, better product, if the markets don’t hold up, I wouldn’t say you become cynical, you just recognise that we’re in a world where people want to protect what they’ve got rather than go out and throw money at ideas.
Andy Taylor
It’s a challenge. It’s certainly being in a better financial position where you don’t have to rely on investors and you can just focus on using your own money to get it to a good point. That’s more beneficial if you have that luxury. But I still come back to, you’ve got to be solving a problem, and you’ve got to be really distinct on what that problem is you’re solving, and why your solution is solving that problem, and proving it.
If I come back to my core thesis, which I’m still quite passionate about, it’s how do you help everyday people manage their money and grow their wealth, and democratise that access? Because it’s not about ETFs and diversification when you actually look at it. It’s not about setting up budgets and trying to stick to them, because that doesn’t work. And this is where I think AI is exciting.
Dexter Cousins
Timing wise as well, if you go back to 2018, in that conversation you and I would have been talking about where we were going to invest money in shares, should we put some money in Bitcoin. Now I’m going to the supermarket going, it’s $5.50 for three litres of milk, what’s going on? We’re seeing this cost of living crisis, which isn’t just here in Australia, it’s a global thing, certainly in Western civilisation, where middle class Australia is making decisions and calls around, well I’ve spent all my salary and now I’m getting taxed at the elite tax rate, and I’m feeling like I’m just on the breadline.
So we’ve got this challenge now where in 2018 nobody was thinking about budgeting. It was, hey, I’ve got disposable income, I’m spending on Uber Eats. It was pretty frivolous. So I feel like the timing for something like the original vision that you had with Douugh is probably something that there’s going to be more demand for from a consumer side as well.
Andy Taylor
I agree. I think access to capital to help cash flows smooth, cheap capital, is still important because people are living paycheck to paycheck. There is a need, and then they’re going outside of super, which is locked up until I don’t know, 60, 65. How can you bring in enforced savings through an AI mechanism that can dollar cost average into a high conviction concentrated position in some of what I call alpha growth companies over the next 5 to 10 years?
I’m talking a lot from personal experience on my own position in one stock that I have very high conviction in. The great Warren Buffett, actually I think it was Charlie Munger that said this, and this is not investment advice by the way, but where people go wrong is that if you’ve got high conviction in a stock you understand, you cannot own enough of that stock. So the diversified ETF approach is actually irresponsible when you look at it, because tracking an index doesn’t actually get you there.
Dexter Cousins
Talk to me a little bit about what we can expect from Stakk in this next 12 months or so.
Andy Taylor
What you can expect from Stakk now is really consolidation, once we can close this acquisition, and delivering on the contracts that we’ve announced and showing that revenue coming through. Once you see the annual report and the quarterly that we’ve announced, the growth has been phenomenal and we want to keep that going. This acquisition was strategic because it gives us wider distribution and rich data to really take our proposition to another level and continue to grow.
What we’re actually seeing is that we’re consolidating vendors for partners as well, which I think is very important in this day and age. You typically don’t need three vendors to do what you can do with one, and that’s where we’re winning a lot of business. It’s pulling that together into a single brain that says you can safely allow that customer to onboard, deposit those funds, process that payment, because we’ve got that persona that we’ve built up over time, and it’s becoming very big.
Whilst we talk about AI, ours is predominantly a machine learning based proposition. It has grown and evolved. We’re not using LLMs specifically in that model, but we’re pulling from all these different programs into a single anonymised database that allows us to make a much better decision for a program. We’re talking about delivering 99.99% accuracy, and when you’re looking at half a basis point at the level that some of these programs are operating, that’s a lot of money in fraud. That moves the needle. So that’s really what we said, run with our model because we can deliver you greater accuracy which will save you money on the bottom line.
Dexter Cousins
One of the challenges we’re going to see with these global LLMs, as a bit of an offshoot but something worth putting out there, is that back in 2021 the big four banks were being heralded for bringing jobs back onshore, but the reality is those jobs were being trained, or the AI was being trained on those jobs, a lot of them customer service. We’re now seeing this proliferation and encouraged token spend of businesses that are literally giving their IP to these LLMs, and their whole operating system to an LLM. You have to look at that and go, as a CEO, what’s your responsibility to shareholders, and you’re just giving away the sovereignty of your business to an LLM where there’s no copyright infringement laws in place.
Andy Taylor
Companies are realising this very quickly, and on-prem is becoming a trend again. I think I’m going to be hiring IT managers again to manage servers and offices. Why would you give your data to Claude and AI when they can just turn around and destroy your business? There’s a lot of conversation about that right now.
Dexter Cousins
I think it’s one of the advantages fintech has, that regulation is a moat. And whilst AI might be a really good tool to help improve compliance and things like regulation, the challenge that I’m seeing, Andy, is finding the people who understand all the grey areas. There’s a million shades of grey, and we’ve got all these emerging technologies coming out, crypto and everything else, where we don’t have any regulations in place. So how do you navigate that forwards? That’s all skills that are required that are about innovation, relationship building, bringing people together, bringing regulators together.
Andy Taylor
Well, that’s what a founder does. So I think there’s an opportunity here, my belief anyway, that there will be a bit of a wash out from the major LLMs, and that’ll give opportunities for people to work in partnership with organisations to help them build that capability for themselves.
Dexter Cousins
I agree. I think with the rise of open source models now, they’re pretty good.
Andy Taylor
What’ll be really interesting now is if the US government does take an equity position in some of these frontier models, and what that means, because I guess they’re going for regulatory capture. They’re trying to enforce duopoly positions to lock out competitors. It’s fascinating to watch.
Dexter Cousins
It’s World War Three, right? But not as we thought it would be. Growing up in the 80s, when we were teenagers, World War Three was a nuclear holocaust, it’s all being wiped out. Now it’s a very different thing, where it’s a technology war. I don’t think there’s anybody in Australia who isn’t suspecting that Telstra’s outages are a software bug and not something a little more sinister.
Andy Taylor
You’ve got to think. And then you’ve got Starlink mobile ready to go.
Dexter Cousins
Exactly. That solves that problem.
Andy Taylor
It’s a fascinating time. It’s hard. I don’t think I’ve ever seen, since I’ve been alive, something that is moving so fluidly, so quickly, that it’s hard to plan. It’s hard to know which way to go. It’s almost take a step back and just watch it play out.
Dexter Cousins
I think this is where, you mentioned Charlie Munger before, you have to go, what are the fundamentals? And the fundamentals are time. If you look at any innovation, I go back to when I was a youngster where entertainment on demand was a cassette deck and a black and white portable TV, and a computer that took 20 minutes to load a game. Now I look at my kids and they’ve got anything on demand 24/7 in an instant. That wasn’t one push. That was four or five different technological innovations that had to get traction, right? But that was like a 40 year, 50 year period.
We saw computers come into the workplace, the digitisation of analog processes, and putting it into AI. Shouldn’t we be rethinking the product, the operating model, the structure of the business? I think we’re at the beginning of that. I think back to when I started the business, Andy. I talked to people like you and they’d tell me we’re going to build a unicorn and you’re going to be 2,000 people and we’re going to be global. I believed them, and they did it. Now I speak to those same people and they’re like, hey, I think I can build that again, but with 100 people or 200 people. And I absolutely believe them.
I think this is the challenge that we’ve got now, and the opportunity. Those innovators, it was never about replicating. It was building something new, something that didn’t exist before. And now they’re like kids in a candy shop, where they’re like, I don’t have to hire a thousand people, I can actually go out there and build something, and I don’t need to go and raise money. I don’t have to do a pitch deck. I can have conviction in my idea and build a prototype and have it out in a weekend. So we’re at this point now where we’ve never been more empowered as a civilisation, but yet at the same time there’s never been so much fear around change as well.
Andy Taylor
I totally agree. It’s exciting, it’s daunting. Even raising children. I’ve got two girls, 10 and 12, and we’re homeschooling them right now, and the whole philosophy on education, how you get your kids ready for this world. Everything’s getting turned on its head.
Dexter Cousins
Before we wrap up, you’ve obviously been through the ringer. It’s not your first rodeo. What’s your advice for anybody out there right now who’s a founder who might be struggling, particularly as we’ve had this budget announcement which, to be honest, a lot of people that I’ve spoken to have just gone, what’s the point, why am I doing this? What words of encouragement would you give people, and advice as to how to keep going and overcome the adversity?
Andy Taylor
It’s tough, because whilst I want to be pro Australia, I think it’s very hard to do business in Australia. If you’re a young founder, I would encourage you to move. I would encourage you to go to the US. I would encourage you to go to a market that embraces entrepreneurship, risk taking, and has wider access to capital.
You need to be very technical, specifically tech founders. It’s a very different world. Vertical integration now is key. Have a business model already, because investors want to see you can make money quickly. And it’s not just about saying we’re going to be an AI business consuming tokens. I don’t know if that bubble’s burst, but it will, because the cost of consuming tokens, yes it’s coming down for sure, they will become commoditised, but that’s tricky as well.
Ultimately I think it’s the mental strength and toughness to have conviction on what you’re doing, because that’s what gets you out of bed every morning to keep going. You have to be the leader. You have to inspire everybody else in your team. You can never be seen to be showing that weakness. It’s really hard. It takes its toll, because you’ve got investors to think about, you’ve got staff to pick up. So I’d just say, do yourselves a favour and put yourself in an environment that’s conducive to success. And choose your investors wisely and your people wisely.
Dexter Cousins
Well Andy, mate, it’s been really great to chat, but more than that, a real energy booster, knowing the journey that you’ve been on, knowing the challenges that you’ve had, to have you on the show where there’s light at the end of the tunnel and it’s not a train coming at you at 100 miles an hour. It’s great to have you on to share the story, but also, this isn’t something that’s just an overnight success. It’s been that 10 year overnight success, and a lot of pivots and challenges along the way. So I’m just really grateful for you sharing it with everybody, Andy.
Andy Taylor
Thanks, mate, I appreciate it. I think it’s important to share experiences for what they really are, because there’s a lot of fluff out there. It’s hard.
Dexter Cousins
No, it’s been a pleasure, man. Thank you very much. Great to have you.
As always, folks, you can catch up with me on LinkedIn and X. If you’re new to the show, make sure you give us a like and subscribe if you’re watching on YouTube. And if you’re on Spotify or Apple, give us a review. It really does help me spread the word about great Aussie founders like Andy and great Aussie fintechs like Stakk. Until the next episode, keep well.
