Exploring Paysquad, AWS data centre build abandoned, China EV risks

Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain and privileged to have Cam Richardson joining us on the New Zealand Tech Podcast this time around. Cam is from Paysquad. How are you, Cam?

Cam Richardson:
Doing really well, Paul. Kia ora. How are we doing?

Paul Spain:
Great, look. Good to finally have you on the show. Maybe you can give listeners a little bit of an introduction on where you fit into this big wide world of tech in New Zealand.

Cam Richardson:
Yeah, Kia ora, everybody. I’m Cam, founder of Paysquad, calling in from Invercargill. So not Auckland, not Silicon Valley. So just adjust that mental image of a fintech founder accordingly and building Paysquad, a group payments option at checkout.

Paul Spain:
And you’ve been involved in the tech world for a number of years now, right? This is not something you’ve just picked up in the last six months.

Cam Richardson:
No, I mean, we’ll have the listeners judge, you know, if that comes through. But yeah, we’ve been in a few different roles here. Cut my teeth in Christchurch. Been a part of financial education. Started up there and down in here in Invercargill. Thought I was giving up the tech dream forever, but ended up finding a whole heap of super smart individuals to build with. And then Covid happened and hey, everybody’s just in front of a webcam right where it’s all on.

Paul Spain:
Yep, good stuff. Well, let’s jump in. Of course, a big thank you to our show partners, Spark One NZ, 2degrees, Workday, Fortinet and Gorilla Technology. And a little reminder, we have the New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards gala dinner coming up very soon. Always an awesome event to be part of. So if you haven’t grabbed tickets, I think, I think there are still probably a few available, so well worth jumping in. They do usually sell out, so suggest not leaving it to the last minute if you want to be there now. Bunch of really interesting New Zealand and international sort of tech newsy type topics keen to delve into.

Paul Spain:
Probably the first one is news of Amazon scrapping their plans for West Auckland Data centre taking apparently an estimated $45 million. Write down this decision I understand reflects. Well, this is what we’ve heard reflects changing global infrastructure priorities, cost pressures and weaker demand forecasts than. Rather than. Yeah, any, any concerns sort of specific to New Zealand. But yeah, this is, this is I think quite fascinating because when AWS had their event in New Zealand where they, they were, yeah, sort of unveiling a local presence in New Zealand with, you know, with data centre sort of capability, it ended up being a bit of a train wreck for them when it came to the public relations because it, you know, it turned out that they were really sort of, you know, leasing other people’s space rather than really, you know, launching a full operation in New Zealand at that time. So yeah, so I mean, just interesting to follow, obviously a big win for Microsoft with their investments locally with their Azure data centres and I guess potentially this makes other people’s investments, including Invercargill where there’s. We’re hearing around AI data centre type capability potentially coming online in the future.

Paul Spain:
So yeah, fascinating. What are your thoughts on this, Cam? I guess as a developer, startup founder, shall we say, you need to leverage, I’m sure, you know, varying cloud infrastructure. Is this sort of something you think is important to New Zealand to have that infrastructure from AWS or will cope with AWS’s really sort of strength for our market being out of Australia?

Cam Richardson:
Yeah, absolutely. Look, it’s a good day to be on Azure to be honest. We’re very embedded in the Microsoft stack. We do have some geo redundancies built in, but we do benefit from having a bit of local competition as well. I found it pretty interesting. I was talking to some people over in Dallas recently and Amazon had one of their best ever earnings from AWS just a couple days ago as well. So you kind of get the feeling that there could have been some, some wiggle room there. I think their revenue was up like 37.6 billion and was like the fastest growth in like 15 quarters.

Cam Richardson:
You get the feeling that it wasn’t necessarily capital constraint, but there may be some public relations or some other angles here that we’re not looking at. And you’re right to mention that about 9km from my house here in Invercargill we do have that $3.5 billion AI data centre going in and I think it’ll be the second largest user of electricity in the country, just coming straight off that line out of Manapuri down here. So second only to Ty. So I think the cooler temperatures down here will Help with some of that cooling naturally as well. So I think there’s still a lot of investment going into the space. Yeah, it’s going to be helpful for technology and particularly power hungry technology being developed in the space.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And look, we don’t have a full picture. This is part of the challenge. Companies like Amazon don’t necessarily sort of share the full story, but some of it comes through publicly when there’s a level of accounts and so on that, you know, that gets shared. It is understood, you know, they’ve still got, you know, considerable New Zealand assets and you know, they are, it’s not like they’re, you know, you know, walking away from New Zealand entirely. I guess it’s looking, you know, more like they will lean down that, you know, direction of leasing, you know, capability rather than necessarily, you know, completely, you know, owning everything in this market. So, you know, we will, I guess, you know, watch with interest. But yeah, as I said earlier, they haven’t necessarily kind of helped their own cause with their previous announcements.

Paul Spain:
Not, you know, maybe creating a bit of confusion, shall we say. So yeah, but I think great for New Zealand to have AWS in the market even in their current form and for that to grow, it’s great for there to be competition. It was still, it was a surprise to me when we started getting these announcements of local data centres from the big hyperscalers and great that what we’ve got here is here and that there’s more investment coming on stream. All right, onto other topics. There has been, I guess, a growing security concern over Chinese smart vehicles and the concern around what risks that connected cars might pose to national security. Data, sovereignty and privacy. These things have been raised, I guess over a period of years. But a local New Zealand entity that looks at civil liberties and you know, how we do the best for our New Zealand people called Pillar nz, you know, have been, have raised these concerns and this I guess comes in addition to other concerns that have been raised in, you know, in other countries.

Paul Spain:
Australia, UK, the USA, even their Department of Commerce has enacted a rule, I think last year to block connected cars from nations that are considered their adversaries. China and Russia specifically, which, yeah, I find this quite fascinating. Cause we’re in a time now where we’re clearly on the move away from the last few decades where there was a huge dominance of Japanese brands being the predominant vehicles acquired in New Zealand, either new or through the Japanese secondhand vehicle imports. And then of course there’s been American cars and there have been European cars, but that’s really been flipping to where the Chinese made cars are becoming the most common new vehicles coming through. I was looking at the recent EV sales and it was, I think, number one, number two were, you know, were Chinese vehicles for April and I think, yeah, probably the Tesla Model Y was coming in third. Those things, you know, move up and down each month depending on ships arriving and the like. And, you know, of course EVs have, you know, sales have been, you know, doing very, very strongly with the current, you know, challenges when it comes to petrol and diesel prices. So, yeah, there’s a whole lot going on here and announcements from the likes of BYD around just insane charging speeds, from getting from zero to getting very close to 100% in sort of sub 10 minutes on some of their new batteries and other batteries coming out of China.

Paul Spain:
So I think this is something. If we were to put in place a similar ban to the us, I don’t think people would be particularly happy about it. But I think it’s important that we actually, we do look at these concerns and take them seriously.

Cam Richardson:
Yeah, big time. It feels almost like the kind of TikTok type scare of the last couple of years, but maybe on steroids, if you think about it in terms of the physical geolocation, mapping, all that sort of thing. One of the, one of the things that I like to have as a bit of piece of trivia is just how big the BYD factory is in Zhengzhou. The super factory there is bigger than the city of San Francisco. It’s 130 square kilometres.

Paul Spain:
That’s insane, isn’t it?

Cam Richardson:
Which is. I can’t even imagine what that is. But you just think with that level of scale, I think consumers in New Zealand want the upside of cheap cars that we connect to cheap electricity that have amazing range. One of the BYDs was saying they could have 1000k range soon. Just incredible things. But maybe there is another angle to this that’s worth being cognizant of about the data capture, data sovereignty and that sort of thing. There’s certain, perhaps nations and things that are worth keeping up and understanding what the broader play is here and what could happen down the line.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, not an easy thing to sort of look at and go, oh, here’s a quick solution that’ll solve it. You know, China have been absolutely incredible in their levels of innovation in recent years. Their ability to scale from a company, a country that we wouldn’t have 10, 15 years ago, sort of thought of as, hey, this is the place where future vehicles are going to come from just have become so dominant so quickly and that ability to scale to produce really good, really good quality product as well. I think we look at say Tesla, the Tesla’s that you buy in New Zealand last few years have all been made in China. Have a Chinese made Tesla and Silicon Valley made Tesla. And you know, by, by all accounts the Chinese built Tesla’s the better build quality. Now there’s a little bit more to that and you know, in Tesla’s, you know, journey as well in terms of iteration. So it’s not, it’s not just about where they’re made but you know, yeah, this is a really interesting challenge and you know, we have seen, you know, I think concerns coming out of, you know, UK and Europe around, you know, the situation where hey, if you’ve got vehicles that are being made by a country that you end up in hostilities with, you know, these things can be completely controlled remotely.

Cam Richardson:
That’s the difference. Right.

Paul Spain:
You know, that’s, that’s, that’s never been

Cam Richardson:
a problem in the past. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Spain:
So, you know, just, yeah, you could, I mean just, just sort of drop that thinking on to, you know, any current or recent sort of war scenario and you know, what that, what that could, you know, could look like. And you know, that’s just one example of the concerns. And yeah, of course, you know, the US are in this position where generally they don’t have Chinese cars. I did read that, you know, for instance in Mexico the Chinese cars are becoming very popular and you know, some folks from Mexico would buy their car there and then they’ll, you say, travel across the border to university or what have you. Right. And so, you know, it’s not as though they’re not allowed in the country entirely but you know, but at this point, yeah, largely non existent. Meanwhile, you see all the videos doing the rounds online of all the incredible things that Chinese cars can, can do for very low prices but are not available there.

Cam Richardson:
So yeah,

Paul Spain:
on, also, yeah, on a New Zealand front we’ve, we’ve seen ChargeNet move, moving, moving forwards with their app and their sort of capabilities. Now, you know, Charge. Net probably largely known as the, you know, the leader in New Zealand when it comes to electric vehicle charging. And I’ve, you know, probably that’d be the, if I’m, if I’m traveling away from home, they would be the main company I would use for charging my car. When I look back over the last sort of, you know, six, six years or so, other than, you know, Tesla, when you’ve got a Tesla you’re, you know, you probably tend to gravitate to their charging network in part because, you know, to start with their navigation would always basically have all of the Tesla superchargers and they were also, you know, at that time that was your only option for really fast charging. They’ve expanded so they cover a lot more. But also they had that simplicity. Just plug it in and it starts charging immediately.

Paul Spain:
You know, there’s communication between the network and the car. It knows what’s going on. You don’t have to think around how’s this being paid for and so on. But yeah, encouraging to see that ChargeNet have landed in a similar sort of place from a simplicity perspective. It used to be you had to sort of fire up the app or have a, have a little tap of a key fob and so on to get the charging started. So it’s a small thing but it’s all these little things that kind of add up and make things a little bit simpler. So yeah, for sure. Now Cam, you’ve got a bit of a connection here with ChargeNet.

Paul Spain:
Tell us what you’ve done there.

Cam Richardson:
Yeah, look, the original team behind Paysquad down here that we built together built one of the first iterations of the charging app and definitely a space that we know and love pretty well. Since handed it on, they’ve refactored the app and everything. But in terms of being really early to that EUV space, ChargeNet’s gone from strength to strength there. I think this, this latest outcome is really a broader thing of friction disappearing at the point of transaction right where the car becomes the authorizing of the payment, it’s what identifies it and reducing frictions and payments at the point of sale. Sounds like a good thing to do.

Paul Spain:
Sounds like. You’re welcome. A couple of other topics I want to tap into as well. Kiwi team behind. Roblox hit 99 nights in the forest has landed a movie deal. The Adaptation Understand highlights global interest and creator led gaming IP and New Zealand’s sort of growing presence in the international, you know, world of digital entertainment. So yeah, I’m very curious to see how that plays out but it’s just great to see I guess Kiwi creativity getting recognized and for that to turn into generating export revenues in varying forms for New Zealand. I’m not quite sure how that will work from the financial perspective and what the flow on for New Zealand might be.

Paul Spain:
But yeah, it sounds like something that’s pretty exciting and I think there’s you know, some, no doubt, some fairly Large sort of sums involved in this.

Cam Richardson:
So yeah, Roblox continues to be an enduring cultural like stalwart and shout out to that team. That’s awesome. It should make every Kiwi founder a bit more ambitious, right?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And of course Roblox sort of has been in media and getting sort of coverage, I guess over a period of time from, you know, concerns around child safety issues. But it seems like they’ve also made some progress on those fronts. But you know, it is probably a platform, you know, not to take for granted that it’s safe if you’ve got youngsters that are using it. You know, do a little bit of reading and due diligence if that’s something your youngster’s involved in. I’m not fully up on this week’s news on it, but it does seem like to be a bit of a constant there, that there’s been significant concerns and issues but they obviously have a, a very large and successful business so they’re working to, you know, to improve things there. On the international front, there’s been some news through from Mac. Rumours suggesting that Apple may have given up on developing the Apple Vision Pro now.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, this is interesting. We haven’t seen the Apple Vision Pro launched into the New Zealand market at this time. It’s a really expensive device. If it launched here at current international prices, I think the last calcs we did would be between 6,000 and $7,000. To have this wearable on your head in New Zealand once you account for, for a bit of exchange rate and

Cam Richardson:
I think that must make it the best Apple status symbol that you could have, right? Yeah.

Paul Spain:
700 or 600,000. Yeah, I think it was around 600,000 units that they’ve, you know, they’ve apparently sold in total according to MacRumour’s reporting. So yeah, and they gave it a, a refresh reasonably recently with the M5 chip from Apple was that October. But yeah, they just haven’t seen that huge market adoption. So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see whether exactly how this plays out but apparently the team members involved in developing the hardware have been moved on to, onto other projects. So, you know, whether this is just a sort of focus on a, on a, you know, a lighter sort of, you know, wearable, more sort of smart glasses type things or, you know, exactly how that plays out. You know, be interesting to follow. But look, I, you know, I think the team at Apple have usually been, you know, pretty smart at killing things off when appropriate.

Paul Spain:
They certainly know how to turn a profit on products. But not every category is gonna fire, but they’ve often picked them very well. Of course there was their moves into autonomous electric vehicles, which apparently they poured many billions into and then exited. So wouldn’t be unprecedented if this were the end of the road for the Vision Pro Cam. Have you had much of a look at the Vision Pro? Has this sort of attracted much attention for you?

Cam Richardson:
You know, it’s one of those things that obviously was part of the caught up in the excitement of when it was first launched. And I thought, has Apple once again timed something here really well know classic Apple move of like there had been iterations in the past and now they’re going to step in and show everybody how it’s done. We’ve got, you know, connections friends that are building in the space. You know, think of Renji building like his Visor product which is like kind of a live like working workspace. They have lots of power users on that. But it’s still, it hasn’t made that leap into the collective conscience. And you can just tell that by the pace in which they’re expanding them, taking them overseas, pouring into use cases. You’d expect a lot more by now for a company with virtually infinite resources that if there was some pull from the market that would be going out there a lot quicker.

Cam Richardson:
It again just feels like a really hard form factor to break into. There’s something maybe even biologically about having your eyes covered. But even more so you mentioned the smaller form factors, the glasses and things. Just even with the meta Zuckerberg kind of releasing them, there is a growing concern about them. You know, people don’t really feel comfortable, I think with the fact that they could be covertly filmed through these glasses and it does, it’s gonna make adoption challenging at the very least.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And I mean, you know, we’ve had other products that aren’t necessarily a huge kind of, you know, massive, massive leap away from what was existing in terms of, I’m thinking, you know, in terms of in the consumer electronics world, the curved and the 3D TVs. Right. And those sort of were, it was like, oh, this is the way it’s all, it’s all going. And you know, Samsung and LG and Sony and so on, you know, they were all, they were all in on, on, on that tech. But you know, actually it just, you know, wasn’t, wasn’t compelling enough. Even with those bit not being huge, you know, price jumps and then you’ve got, you know, you need to have some real killer content to make these things viable. And that’s also, you know, part of the challenge.

Paul Spain:
So, yeah, I guess I’m not expecting a whole lot of excitement in this space over, you know, the immediate future anyway. And as you say, there’s significant pushback on the wearables, you know, particularly from a privacy perspective. And, you know, I think there have been significant issues raised there as well in terms of, you know, some of the content that has, you know, ended up coming from meta glasses sort of wearables, whether. Yeah. In circumstances where that footage should, should never, ever see the light of day and ended up getting viewed, which. Yeah, so, yeah, probably some big lessons there and maybe those will inform the direction of future products.

Cam Richardson:
I think so. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
A couple of other things just sort of, I guess, tapping into the AI world. The Academy for the Oscars. The Academy has ruled that AI generated actors and fully written AI scripts are now ineligible for the Oscars. New rules require human authorship and performance, reflecting industry concerns over consent credit and the growing role of generative AI in filmmaking. Look, to me, this makes sense. It’s not saying that AI can’t be used within the filmmaking process, of course, it already is and it will continue to be so. But I guess defining what is and isn’t appropriate for awards eligibility, I think is one of those levers that can be turned to encourage appropriate balance. How do you feel about this?

Cam Richardson:
Well, I think it’s a smart angle for them to score some points with the actors and writers, producers, directors. There is a growing sentiment probably against the over aification of everything. And the Academy just going, hey, we’re drawing a line. It’s going to score some points. My gut feeling is it’ll move again in a couple years as well. As the question of what counts as human made seemingly keeps getting messier. And now in the future it might be like, well, it got signed off by the original actress or the actor, they could use their likeness. And then it’s like, well, we got clearance from this thing to write in their style.

Cam Richardson:
I don’t know, I feel that the, the cat’s out of the bag here.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. And, and I, I guess in a, a sort of related vein, Taylor Swift has filed for trademarks on her voice and on her likeness. And the understanding is that this move so sort of aims to, to give her sort of stronger control, you know, over her identity rights in a world where, you know, generative AI is increasingly mimicking, you know, public figures and well known figures. And, you know, of course we know that there are, you know, Music tools, music AI tools as well as just text to speech and video generation that can give you a fake Taylor at the drop of a hat. So this is pretty understandable just purely from business perspective. And of course she’s been very successful financially when it comes to the business of Taylor Swift and making it a success.

Cam Richardson:
Absolutely. She’s always been quite aggressive on an IP stance and to the point of, I remember a few years ago I had an idea for a clothes service that measured you and then produced clothes that fit you directly. And I thought actually if we just call this tailor T A I L O R Swift inevitably be pulled into a legal fight that could be a great marketing stunt. Better ideas ended up prevailing, which is probably appropriate relief. But that, you know, she’s into her credit as well. I mean she’s, she’s forged a lot of this path herself. I know that even like artists like Dolly Parton are also trademarking this, but also, also making it like fully uploading all of their intonations and tone and everything so that they can have, they can produce songs beyond the grave. And it’s a fascinating time.

Cam Richardson:
You know, there’s, I still think we haven’t seen the full weight of AI enter the music industry, but there are little things here and there.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s probably enough on the news front for today. Keen to delve into hear about Paysquad. Now we’re experimenting with a new, little bit of a new sort of segment format on startup. So I’m gonna fire to give you some sort of quick fire questions and then if we’ve got time after that might delve in for, you know, to hear a little bit more about, about Paysquad. So first up, maybe you can just break down in very sort of short form what Paysquad does.

Cam Richardson:
Great. So Paysquad helps people pay together. Right. At checkout you’ve always been able to pay. Now at checkout you have recently been able to pay later, but you’ve never been able to pay together right then and there. And now you can with Paysquad it helps reduce that impact that we’ve all felt of one person having to front the whole cost for your group and then chase people to pay you back.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. So how big is that problem of people potentially wanting to pay together? That’s the problem you’re trying to solve?

Cam Richardson:
Yeah, some of the friction involved with paying together pretty small. 30% of Gen Z share the cost of something every day and 60% of millennials and Gen Z share the cost of something every Week. And it’s a fast growing payment trend that’s only being driven further by our cost of living crises, our digital connectedness, and many other factors as well.

Paul Spain:
So describe what, what the solution is from Paysquad.

Cam Richardson:
Cool. So our three big verticals right now are retail, ticketing and travel. Let’s imagine you’re going to a super rugby game, you’re buying six tickets for you and your friends. You want to actually sit together. One person is having to front the cost for all six seats they’re paying, and then begins the arduous task of chasing people to pay you back. With Paysquad, instead of purchasing the whole thing, you just pay for your seat and then we generate you a link that you can share with those same friends in a group chat. You share it anywhere in the world. People then can come in and claim their ticket.

Cam Richardson:
And when it hits 100%, the order goes through automatically. And from the merchant side, they’re now connecting not just with the person that made the original purchase of the six tickets, they’re able to connect with each and every fan that’s coming to the game. And so there’s a data angle for them and a high value conversion opportunity there as well that extends really well to group gifting for the 21st. I think the real Genesis story behind Paysquad was at my 21st in Christchurch. My friends filled our place with smoke and rolled out a three wheeled motorbike as my gift. And I remember just being absolutely shocked. I asked them, how on earth did you do this? We were kind of struggling students at the time. They said, cam, everybody at the party chipped in to get this for you.

Cam Richardson:
And that framing there of realizing how much more is possible when people do things together is the core idea behind Paysquad. And I became the guy that was always organizing group payments and running into all sorts of friction and realized that we were still using the same tools to pay together that we were using 10, 15, 20 years ago. And that there was a real opportunity at checkout to have some dual sided value created.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Wow, that’s great. What a great story. And yeah, when you think of getting a gift like that that everyone’s contributed to, that is totally not the norm today in most scenarios. And whether it’s sort of gift registers for, you know, weddings and 21st and the like, yeah, you probably end up with much better results if everybody’s able to, or, you know, groups of people are able to put together and get something bigger or more memorable rather than a, you know, whole lot of little things. And I can imagine for myself also, you know, you’d probably be a bit more willing to chip in a bit more, you know, knowing that you’re gonna, you know, be gifting something that’s really epic. So it’s great for sure.

Cam Richardson:
Some of the recent feedback we got is like, man, pace code’s like addictive and that is awesome to watch the little wheel go up to 100%. We just had one where 19 people got together to get a brand new camera for their friend and you know, they’re all like watching, oh, who’s going to contribute next? Oh, we’ve got 10 hours till the deadline. It’s, it can be quite fun.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, fantastic. Now, when it comes to startups, one of the challenges is that, you know, it takes a while for revenue to, you know, often sort of match up with overheads and, you know, there’s, you know, approaches of, you know, that vary from being bootstrapped and sort of self funding through to, you know, going out to friends and family and venture capital to fund these things. What’s been your track and how’s that looking so far?

Cam Richardson:
Yeah, for sure. Look, I think in the age of AI hyperscalers going from 0 to 100 million in revenue in a year, there is some sort of unprecedented growth opportunities. They tend to then kind of fizzle from that point. But it’s a fascinating time. In terms of our journey, I’d say we’re mostly bootstrapped. We did have friends and family round of 150k NZD with backers from Anthropic AI and Sustainable Fintech Fund out of Australia and an amazing New Zealand fintech investor as well. It’s been a bit of a journey for our business, as you mentioned, you know, the cost outlay and the volume piece that we have, we need to drive pretty significant volume to create the value that we’re aiming for. And so plugging that with some investment has been super important.

Cam Richardson:
We’ve also turned down about four offers of investment and really that was just mainly looking for operational and value alignment as well, not just capital. Often you can read term sheets and there’s some interesting hooks in there. And just to be real, I mean, we have also been rejected as well. We haven’t just been receiving all these offers and turning them down. So it definitely goes both ways. But it’s a great opportunity and more than ever you can achieve so much more traction and distribution on far lower costs now than ever before. And so that’s the shifting expectation for investors right now. Which I think is valid.

Paul Spain:
So how have you been using your resources, your time, your team, AI and funds to sort of. Where are you getting sort of the biggest progress out of?

Cam Richardson:
We’re really fortunate to be a global Shopify payment partner. We’re the first pay together option on there. So expanding within that ecosystem has been really good. We’re also seeing huge opportunities in the baby category and in ticketing as well, particularly sports ticketing. Next week I’ll be heading off to Australia for a player based commerce event. We’ll be unpacking four different ways that professional sports teams can connect with multiplayer payments. And in terms of on the day to day, it really is about expanding within those. A big part of our distribution is connecting with the best merchants that are well aligned with the group model.

Cam Richardson:
Sizable. And we’ve got a team of four right now, pretty lean, based out of Invercargill, Auckland, Melbourne and New York. So reasonably distributed. And then have a whole heap of other nodes that are just big fans of what we do or advisors and things like that. A lot of our stuff is just refining workflows, onboarding workflows, outbound workflows, internal product workflows, and we do lean pretty heavily on Claude Cowork and Claude Code for a lot of that in terms of really building out core features as well. When we talk to merchants, we acknowledge that one of our key propositions and the head starts that we have over incumbents or even fast mover or fast followers is this proprietary data that we have of talking to so many merchants about group payments and hearing what they really want from it, and seeing pay squads form and seeing how fast they are and how like the size, composition, the occasion, who the micro influencers are, all this sort of stuff. And so just optimizing the product to be even better for that and with the whole vision of helping people do things together that they couldn’t do solo. And we’re really fortunate to have as part of that team the first US Afterpay employee who helped launch that market before they were acquired for $35 billion.

Cam Richardson:
And he did some of the biggest deals with Urban Outfitters and Macy’s. And so learning some of his tactical and strategic insight is invaluable. It’s exactly the sort of thing that you need when you are coming up to merchants in retail ticketing and travel verticals who have their own goals in mind. They’re looking to what you can offer them and being able to really clearly package that and demonstrate that they are at the centre of your ICP is awesome. So that’s probably the least succinct answer, but that’s a quick overview.

Paul Spain:
Yep. And what would you say? Yeah, the biggest lesson that you’ve learned in your startup journey with Paysquad to date.

Cam Richardson:
There’s a thousand very trite or overdone things that you could have, but conviction will carry you a lot further than hype is what I’ve realized. I share my kind of goofy story about the motorbike because that was the initial excitement, but it’s been a deepening conviction over time that’s kept me in the. In the trenches, as it were, here in the startup world of realizing actually this is not about me trying to make a quick buck. This is me helping the younger generation who are increasingly indebted, like, have diminishing buying power, but also are quite isolated. This is an opportunity to actually help them do things together, to define friendships even and help bring a bit of unity in our divided times. And it just means you’re able to take the knocks that you get, and that’s the truth that you go back to is like, oh no, I’m not doing this for my own ego, not doing this for huge sums of money. It’s like, actually there is an impact here that I can’t ignore that is driving me every single day. That’s the core of it.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. And is there a future sort of milestone or goal that’s coming up for you in the future that you can share at all?

Cam Richardson:
Pay with friends option at every checkout is one of the big games. But for us right now, we’re really excited to be going through an absolute step change. We’re onboarding over a billion dollars in merchant footprint, gmv. So in terms of the total cumulative size of the merchants that we’re bringing on in the next month sits at about that billion dollar mark. And that is well over 10x what we’re currently doing. And we’ve never had such aligned merchants finding us on ChatGPT, on Google search because we are quite a novel solution with virtually no direct competitors. It has been just brilliant to see that happening. And I think that’s really going to set a standard and put us out there a lot more.

Cam Richardson:
I was going to say put a target on our back, but in a more positive way. It’s going to put us out there so that more people can understand the opportunity in group payments and the benefits that are far more than what originally meets the eye.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. That’s great. Anything else that you want to share about Paysquad Cam, there is a

Cam Richardson:
tendency to think about, hey, how can we unlock AI from a product level, from a business level to unlock more funds? And so I definitely shunned away from ever having an AI angle to Pay squad. And it’s only been recently that I’ve been getting a little more excited about the agentic future of group payments. And I only share this to say, basically, we didn’t want to just slap an AI sticker on Paysquad, but when you come into a certain problem in front of you, like, how can we get more variety of products that could be purchased with PayScore? And how can we have groups coordinate even quicker? And the best answer that’s out there is AI is some sort of agentic flow. And that feels a lot more natural. Right. You’re like, okay, this is actually the technological direction that we want to take things. Not so we can grab some VC bugs or go rah rah, we’re AI now. But actually to solve the core problem that you’re trying to solve, it was just a far more pure angle to it and it’s worth mentioning.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So what might that look like? Break that down for someone who’s curious to sort of understand it more.

Cam Richardson:
Sure. We’re in the early stages of really coming in with some agentic protocols in commerce that will allow agents on behalf of individuals or on behalf of groups to be able to connect the dots to checkout so that you’re not having to go through, enter all your details, select your payment method that your agent can just do that for you. And then if you imagine a group of agents all representing individuals within a

Paul Spain:
group

Cam Richardson:
that have perhaps done something together. So they’ve gone to a super rugby game two weeks ago, now they want to go to another one. It really is just an authorization, a thumbs up. Yeah, we all want to go boom, you go and make the purchase for us, and suddenly all those tickets are in your accounts ready to go, as opposed to, all right, guys, quick, I’m going to go book them right now. I’m going to chase you up to pay you back. That is a significant amount of legwork that’s taken out there. And it extends to so far beyond that to AI being able to identify who you’re most likely to want to invite to contribute. Hey, this seems like something that your mother’s birthday is coming up again.

Cam Richardson:
Here are some of the things that she has on her wish list. Some of that stuff is really just going to make the whole group payment space a lot easier.

Paul Spain:
Fascinating. There’s a lot more we could probably dive into on that topic and I’m sure there’s, there’s a lot more in your head in terms of the things that you’re thinking, but we’ll leave it there. That’s fantastic. And for those that are wanting to find out more, where do they go? To hear a bit more of the Paysquad story

Cam Richardson:
from a founder perspective, Feel free to connect on LinkedIn Cam Richardson on there, Pace got on there as well. And then working on Instagram, get Paysquad and try to get a little bit better at X. I know that New Zealand’s not super massive on it, but I do love some of the community elements on there. Some of the founder networks can be quite good. So that’s where to find us.

Paul Spain:
Good stuff. Good stuff. Well, that’s great. Well, thanks for joining us on the show. Thanks also, of course, to our show Partners to Fortinet, Workday One New Zealand, 2degrees, Spark and Gorilla Technology. That’s us for this week. We will of course be back again next week with another episode. If you’ve been listening in, have a look.

Paul Spain:
We do have video streams as well now. Or if you’re watching the video, make sure you’re also following us on your favourite audio platform as well. That’s us for this week. Paul Spain signing out and we’ll catch you on the next one. See ya.