HiveMind Podcast
HiveMind Podcast
Podcast Description
Building sustainable Fintech companies isn’t easy. Selling is more complex and risk-driven, decision making is syndicated, and sales cycles are longer. Delivering product requires more resilient and expensive engineering, and the market it crowded.
I wanted to explore how to build a commercially successful Fintech from every perspective; from the buyer, through product and across sales and marketing. Revenue isn’t simply a ’sales’ challenge - it only happens when the entire machine is working perfectly. Let’s unlock the secrets together with my guests.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
The podcast delves into significant areas such as customer retention, innovative marketing strategies, and the realities of launching and scaling fintech ventures. Episodes include discussions on leveraging LinkedIn for growth, the challenges of creating a new fintech category, and the ins and outs of fintech talent acquisition.
Having a good product and having a business are two different things.
Fintech HiveMind is a conversation with the founders, CEOs and revenue leaders building technology companies that sell into regulated markets — where your customer answers to a regulator, nothing is a quick yes, and the buying committee is bigger than the room you’re in.
We get into the commercial decisions behind the growth. How they price it and take it to market. When they hire, and when they deliberately don’t. What they’d build differently. The deals that taught them the most, including the ones they lost.
Past guests include Steve Lamb of Kyckr, James Bushby of Tuum, Matt Mills of Ripjar, David Brear of 11:FS, David Jarvis of Griffin and Simon Rogerson of Octopus.
Hosted by James Barker — 26 years in sales, 16 of them in fintech and enterprise technology, up to Chief Revenue Officer.
Steve Lamb runs Kyckr, and he would rather make money than take money — hiring, in his words, is an absolute last resort. He argues the industry has automated its go-to-market in exactly the wrong order, and points at the AI labs themselves: the ones preaching full automation are busy hiring salespeople. Also: why verifying a business is still manual when verifying a person is nearly solved, and how few company registries worldwide actually work properly.
What you’ll get out of this
- Why hiring is “an absolute last resort” at Kyckr, and what they do instead as demand grows
- What the AI labs’ own hiring tells you about automating go-to-market
- Why verifying a business is still manual when verifying a person is nearly a solved problem
- The order of operations most teams get wrong when they automate sales communication
- How many company registries worldwide actually work like Companies House (not many)
- What a “competence amplifier” is genuinely good at — and what it is not
Chapters
- 00:00 — Cold open
- 00:47 — Sponsor — FTT Fintech Festival & Future Identity Festival
- 01:31 — Every job under the sun: which function is Steve?
- 03:21 — What Kyckr actually does
- 08:39 — Fully remote — and why they’re reopening in London
- 11:34 — The AI labs preach automation and hire salespeople
- 16:35 — Hiring is a last resort
- 19:23 — Growth at all costs is back
- 23:12 — Why business verification is still manual
- 26:50 — NVIDIA, Intel and the chip nobody can name
- 30:55 — Registries like Companies House: count them on one hand
- 36:48 — How Steve actually uses AI — and the hidden-employee rule
- 45:26 — Automating the thing that should have gone last
- 47:02 — One piece of advice for a first-time CEO
Fintech HiveMind is made by GTM Hive. More from GTM Hive.
This series is sponsored by VC Innovations — the FTT Fintech Festival and the Future Identity Festival. Find out more.
Disclaimer
This podcast’s information is provided for general reference and was obtained from publicly accessible sources. The Podcast Collaborative neither produces nor verifies the content, accuracy, or suitability of this podcast. Views and opinions belong solely to the podcast creators and guests.
For a complete disclaimer, please see our Full Disclaimer on the archive page. The Podcast Collaborative bears no responsibility for the podcast’s themes, language, or overall content. Listener discretion is advised. Read our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for more details.