S1E2 - How FinTech was Built on Products and Passion - Einar Gustafsson
Einar Gustafsson, a name that should mean something to many of us because Einar is an absolute talent in the world of product management, but also a name that means a lot to me and the history of FinTech, even if the history of FinTech doesn't know it. You see, Reinhard Gustafsson is one of the minds and the architects behind some of the most successful wins from Finnovate back in the day. Company, him and I used to be early employees of called Meniga. We shipped the industry in our time and the stories we tell today are from back then. You'll notice we don't go into too much tea, so to speak.
Duena:There won't be very, hot piping pieces of gossip from back in the day, although Inner and I, could probably spend weeks with a pint of non alcoholic beer talking about those stories. But we've learned a lot, we've built a lot. We were there when fintech was built. We were there when banks changed into digital money. We made some things happen together.
Duena:We've come up with the term of emotional banking together back in the day. You'll hear that story from being on a plane somewhere towards Australia. There are names of some of the people that we have worked with being mentioned, most of them fondly. But this episode is really just the walk down memory lane from those days of extreme innovation and the genuine drive for building propositions that would help people's lives and create genuine and true money moments, which is what Einar and I, and the people helping us build the future of digital were after back in the day. And so we invite you to come on over and listen to us just going down the memory lane.
Duena:And then hopefully in another episode, Einar and I will start spinning some of the bins as well, if we remember any. But for the most part, we worked, we worked hard, we had a lot of fun. We built the future of money and these are our stories.
Duena:Hello everyone and welcome to Tales from the Syndicate. I have an incredibly special guest today and we don't yet know how we're going to release this. It might be my first guest, my third, but very, very high up because Inar has been the beginning of FinTech to me and the beginning of the journey that it started back in gold's 2000 and I want to say 02/2008, 2000 and gold's or might, I don't want to give our age quite right away. But welcome to showing up. There would be a cutesy intro about yourselves that would urge people to have seen your accomplishment more than anything, so fear not they know how awesome you are.
Duena:But thank you for accepting the chat to us and scared some of the tea from the crib. Well,
Einar:thank you, Duena Happy to be here and great to see you again after all the laying
Duena:eyes on each other after all these years. Almost. We we obviously orbit each other digitally. No one would think one was not remained quite close and over busy yet, but we have met just as our own kids were being entering the world, actually. We were we were reminiscing about this.
Duena:Right? Yeah. Yeah. Pretty 20 Right.
Einar:Twenty ten, I guess.
Duena:Fourteen, fifteen years ago now. God. Right. No. No.
Duena:No. That's I was I was I was pregnant with my little one, so it would not be quite that yet. We're not quite that. That's right. Yeah.
Duena:You were pretty much
Einar:when you joined the company. That's right.
Duena:And maybe it entering before me in the room when I joined the company. That's actually an amazing thing that I haven't really heard of many people getting a job when they're that pregnant. So I hope that more open up and do that. At that time, we just wanted to get one done. So hats off to our CEO and visionary at the time.
Duena:I'm sure you would be listening at some point.
Einar:Yeah, Definitely. Maybe it's a Scandinavian thing, but, like, we didn't really think of it. I mean, we we just needed somebody great on the team, and and the fact that you were having a pregnant at the time wasn't a blocker.
Duena:Just we
Einar:can wait. Also remember your maternity lasting too long. Did you only take, like because we lived in Sweden at the time. It could have taken, like, a year or even two. I think it took me, like, two weeks.
Einar:We were
Duena:like, Very, very well civilized child that kindly didn't didn't bother our prefinnovate efforts much at the time. Yes. He did. Yeah. But to be fair, when the visionary scouted us both, the visionary in question being our former CEO at the time of many, Georgiou, Vixen, you guys should go look him up.
Duena:When he did need of he did say to me, like, I'll be honest with you, much as I'd love for you to go away and cook some jam, we're going to be needing to push this company earlier than the child being in preschool. So of course, now we knew that we're making this happen together. And quite frankly, we wouldn't have had it any other way. I think you and I have had quite some nights and flights around the world looking at our kids through cameras, photos, and various Zoom courses. Skype course.
Duena:There were no Zoom course back in the day.
Einar:Exactly. Yes. Yeah. A Skype course. I I think I calculated once.
Einar:I think I flew to the moon and back in total.
Duena:They have that amazing app. What was the name of it? Whatever. Of it was tips of the Oh. So it should just calculate.
Duena:And then at one point, you and I found we had a different account that we hadn't even queued it. We had another 500,000 flights.
Einar:Yeah. Yeah.
Duena:So we we traveled the world together. We didn't quite explain this to our listeners, but Dana and I were part of this company building financial technology very early when the idea of financial technology was only just going about. We were part of these foundational blocks. I would say you can read more about the decals of our lives and our fight back then in my book, Emotional Banking, that of course document an episode that I don't know if Einar remembers or not. Namely how did we end up with the idea of Evolution Viking, Einar?
Einar:So if I recall correctly, of course this is 2013 or 2014, you were on a flight to Australia, you were speaking at the Next Bank Sydney. I know we had a quick start in Dubai, the flight was late or something, we had to run through the airport, but I was reading a book at the time called Designing for Emotion by Aaron Walter, who's one of the, at least not but recently, head of design for Mailchimp. It was a great book, lot of interesting stuff. When we set out with this company, we always wanted to make finances easy and fun and engaging and not just being a database dump from a table set of data from a bank's systems. And we hadn't really prepared ahead of time for this particular talk.
Einar:We just wrote the whole presentation on a plane, no Wi Fi or anything. We did draw some kind of inspiration from that book. I'm pretty sure that the emotional part of it is heavily connected to that book's name itself. Think you had it with me on the flight, and we might have even included some samples from the book as And well this then we finished it up in the hotel room, like quite late. I think we did a decent job.
Einar:Like, heavily heavily tackled that, but I think it
Duena:I almost remember the second when it landed on us. This is not right. We cannot stand by as banks are ignoring people's feelings. This is about the emotion in banking and the title of our emotional banking presentation. The people had slightly rolled their eyes when they saw that title back in the day.
Duena:They did for many years afterwards, I'll tell you that much. But the sentiment was coming from that. We were creating technology that necessarily going to empower a great user experience unless people understood user experience is on the front end. This, for anyone listening, was from a company that was building the guts of the system. We were making the back end of the software and not the front end.
Duena:So, yeah, I know and I arrived at the idea that emotions are what counts really in this banking sphere of ours. And how else are we gonna power them unless we have the data properly sorted, which is what we were doing at the time. What has what has happened to you to arrive before this moment in primarily met in fintech? How did you arrive at the trendy understanding from software retail user led guy that I met in 2010? What was your journey until then?
Einar:I started in, well, working online in the internet business, what you might call it, somewhat early on, like last century, I guess. It was first like properly paid job, probably in the 2000, building website here in Iceland for a company, loved the industry, and was so exciting, so many things happening. I started as developer, but I really wanted to hone in on my design skills. So I actually left Eisenhower to move to New York to go to a design school. At the time it was called multimedia, it's a blend of technology, blend of design.
Einar:And at that time I read a book by Jacob Nielsen, which is called Something Like Usability, something of that sort. And it just dawned up on me, like, why are we building all these things that people can't use them? And when I came back home from New York after a few years, I actually got a job at a bank as like a front end developer slash designer. And this particular organization was just growing quite fast. They really had the empowered teams back then, like technical team.
Einar:There was a business side as well, but the technical team, we had like a great nice office location, kind of got to do whatever we wanted to do, and there was just so much trust in us building the right solutions. So we started really thinking about user experience, usability, accessibility, like very early on. I think I personally hand coded it online back in the world that was like properly accessible web standards based, like HTML, CSS driven back, this is 02/2003, so very early on. But then I gradually moved more into the business side, as well as the bank was growing, it's the Icelandic financial wonder, where we thought they were the best in the world. And this particular bank grew overseas as well.
Einar:And at some point in time, we had like offices in 10 countries, we're buying other banks. And somehow I was made like an executive director for Global Leader and Strategy, what do that means at a fairly early age, think 26 at the time. So we were managing all of the online banks and the websites and markets calculation, savings, and helping people grow their assets. Of course, then the financial crash came, I just stayed on with the bank. I mean, the bank technically survived, of course, it became a small Icelandic bank again.
Duena:More but nimble, and smart.
Einar:Actually, yeah, kind of. But at the time, there was not really much growth, we were more focused on helping people that had gone through the crash. People lost a lot of money, also lost a lot of faith in the banks. And so a lot of what we're doing is trying to help people survive, save their houses and such and such, and thinking out ways to modify loans, because there's a lot of loans in that foreign currency that had the value of the Icelandic currency had crashed quite heavily. So we went from owing, like your markets kind like doubled overnight or even tripled.
Einar:And so quite a few people were in a really bad situation. And actually right before the crash, we had a small internal project going on, which we called The Phoenix, where we wanted to were actually looking at companies like mint.com taking inspiration from Google and Apple and all these great companies, building really awesome user experiences. Like, how can we build an online bank that is more modern, that's like a great search and provides valuable insights? So this project, of course, was killed with the backing crash as But Exactly. We still had this idea in the back of our eyes, we really want to do this.
Einar:Right now, we can't really get the funding to actually build this, but this is still something that we felt was exciting and needed for the market. I guess sometime in 02/2009, there was just a lock on our door, and these two entrepreneurs came to see us, and they're like, hey, we have a business idea. That basically had a mock up built in Excel. We kind of want to do this with patent data, analyze your transactions, give you visuals on your spending behaviors and patterns, and do some analysis and suggestions, you know, like this is what we want to build. So they basically ask for like, if you are willing to pay us a relatively low amount of money, then we can go ahead and build this.
Einar:And I think they actually went to all of the banks in Austria, but not many, but like really big banks. The other two said no, we're like, hell yes, we'll give you like this small seed funding, because I'm not really investing in them, and it's prepaid for the solution that they were going to deliver. So this was George, the founder and CEO of Meniga, and Auschwitz, the CTO and founder of Meniga. So they came back in, I don't know, three months, six months with a product. They just went ahead and built it.
Einar:So I was actually in charge of integrating this into the online bank. So I got to work pretty closely with them and came up with all kinds of ideas for the, like, improving the search and interface, and because they're really smart technical guys, the solution worked great, there was just the they didn't really have a UX or a design person working for them full time. There was a guy that came in and did the logo and like basics of the UI, didn't really have time to like think everything properly through, because they were like, getting smarter with my fun team. So was a lot of back and forth, was giving them some ideas and really enjoyed working with them because they could deliver really, really fast. And then in the 2010, was actually on holiday, I kind of made a decision, because I was also going on paternity leave, so it like a four month block of me being away, that maybe it's time that I do something else.
Einar:I've been in this banking, doing banking stuff for like seven years. It's great to write, it's not as exciting anymore, because there was no global growth, less development, at least on my personal side. So I actually saw that they had advertised for a role of VP Product. I had never heard of a product manager before, to be honest. Had been personally involved That's in that right.
Einar:With all kinds of different titles, like team lead, development leads, project manager, I don't know, like director, webmaster.
Duena:Because it's
Einar:read the description, it's like, hey, this sounds kind of cool.
Duena:Residential guys is what they call Yeah, it
Einar:exactly. I think there were like three people that applied at that point, it was like a tiny start up, there were like three or four people working out of modified schoolroom that had to be turned into some sort of incubator or like a startup foundry. But they just got funding, they got like a million dollars from a local VC. Like, fuck it, I'm going to do Polar Laukwitz,
Duena:What have to beat that I think here, no worries.
Einar:So I'm going to leave my very comfortable, fairly lucrative banking job and join this startup that has only one client, basically me, the bank that I was working for. And then I knew that you were not paying them tons of money. But I had believed in the founders at this point. Auske's brother had also joined, who I'd known quite well throughout the years, because me and him, Kanto had like similar roles while he was in this other bank. So we were competing on hiring people and getting awards, so
Duena:This an you know, they're amazing, I didn't even realize that it's hilarious because it's an absolute pirate of how Georg and I, meanwhile, were competing in the same, in an existing industry. We were, yeah. We were he was looking for a company called Mice and Men or Saturn. I was reporting for a company in Sweden called Weird Solutions, and we were both selling IP address management for a few years before we invented many guys. It's Gilani.
Einar:So he was saying in a way, then was just but he was always like a nice guy.
Duena:He's an amazing guy. Hope to have him on develop real insight one day, and I hope everyone understands the episode if we get him to tell us some more stories, Oscar has the most.
Einar:Definitely. So I joined the company. I think you joined.
Duena:Right. And you'll never forget that you are an employee. Right. We did. And the rest is history.
Duena:Because what followed is essentially
Einar:Pretty much.
Duena:Is it three years with it? Four years? I don't even maybe more. Five years of being on the road practically as as Saina was alluding to Admir where Shinselff and I were a team for a long, long while precisely explaining what what we're doing to to banks around the world. And whilst doing that, growing the the the the need for for for doing any of this.
Duena:Because what we were practically selling was avant garde for most of the banks that we were meeting, right? We were a Northern European product of ours, which was thought to categorize your bloody transactions and how to do something with them on the front end when you care about your consumer. But what maybe escapes people, and I did say it in the book number of times, I think it's really interesting is we read through what I call product led era, the companies that were making the products, then ourselves, the back bases, even some parts of the FISs of the world and so on, those were the companies that were practically driving the discourse in terms of strategy, simply because they were making the software. They were the much shorter feedback loop to an innovation cycle that banks had no access to. And these were the days, green walls of fake grass in innovation labs.
Duena:These were the wild, wild days of things like '20 So 10/20 in fact, our CEO, for Complex, for anyone listening, was hired us both because the push in his eyes was, and we'll have to give it to him, this is his strategy that this amazing product he had made in Iceland had now become of age, and it was time for it to become seen by the word. So he brought it to this massive stage for that the artist and enthusiasts would know the name of called Finovage, which back in the day was a different show than what I have surmised it may be today. But what did we do next day? If you want to walk us through the story.
Einar:So we came to Finovate, so we had actually gone to Finovate in New York. So at least me and George, I don't know if you had started at that time, was like September 2010, and we saw quite a few companies present, including including, what's the name of the Spanish competitor of Maniga. So anyways, so so we so I I sat there, saw this saw this demos, and I'm like, wow, these companies are amazing, these products are beautiful, like we have so much work to do, how can we ever compete, right? And then we went to Finowit, but at the time we were building this new product as an add on to our core solution, and this is what we took to Finowate, and just crossing fingers that these other companies, or Strange as a company, were hoping that these other competitors would not have gone and done something even better. I remember we were almost the last company to go on stage, and I had spoken to Simon Taylor during lunch just briefly, and I saw him post on Twitter, because there was like so many companies doing similar things that we did, I don't know if they were the to come on stage.
Einar:And I saw him swear on Twitter before we went to stage, not another like personal finance management solution, like we've seen too many, they're all so boring. When we got down from stage, the first thing I see was his tweet, like, this is amazing, I want my bank to adopt this solution. And that just took us from being like a tiny small startup run from a school, classroom in Reykjavik, we put up like a single customer, to a, I don't know if you recall, I mean, they were trying to contact banks try to get a meeting, like they wouldn't even We were over answer
Duena:there overnight, didn't we?
Einar:Overnight, we got the past of show, and the booth was so crowded, I mean, we were like three or four of us standing there, and we didn't even know what to do. We were bombarded by all of these customers or potential customers into the people coming in and talking to us, getting a demo, and so
Duena:they're actually saucing the the architect of keeping people in the seats to see your demo, but I believe so.
Einar:Think it
Duena:might even be that Brett King will say that he did because all of these people were names that were cheaper international scores on Twitter. But yes, sign my blessing. There's been a number of people who have influential in ways that they don't know to at least keep people in the room to see what amazing thing we have made. And then yes, we were rock stars. It was insane.
Duena:We hit the road right afterwards. And I think those first few weeks, you and I must have done two international trips a week since we're redoing that same Finovit demo on two porky bags.
Einar:Yeah, and this was basically on repeat, then after each Finovit demo, so annually, and we always set up a team to do some new innovation, especially for Finnovate. We wanted to do a product launch, really. So building on the infrastructure and the innovation engine that we are built, like what can we use this data for? And so after each turn, generally got an award, ambassador show, least in some cases. And then all of these banks wanted to just come and visit and showcase this again.
Einar:And like at that time, I recall when we were in Amsterdam seeing the ING Innovation Lab, and they had a huge Innovation Lab. This was early on. When I saw it, was amazed. Like, there are so many companies here and all of this new technology that they're playing with, and But
Duena:yeah,
Duena:today, we can give think one which is Tashla, and maybe we should throw back and think about that one a little bit. So we saw because of where we were placed, right, as being the early employees, you know, as capital was taking the market so early on doing such a cool product, we saw we a lot of the moves. And by the moves, mean innovation, Seattle versus the innovation ingenuity of real places that were doing real things. So we've also seen exceptional entrepreneurs. One was mentioned earlier at the time.
Duena:Simon was I think Simon was in Barclays at the time. Indeed. Yes. In fact, many of the days that we would we would would drop here. Simon Alessandro Hatami was one of our massive meetings back in the day when he was a banker and we were an aspiring software provider.
Duena:I mean, the things we could tell people over a beard. But all of these people may have been in different positions, but what they were all doing is figuring out kind of where does it all land in terms of digital. We were practically the first to use the Telomiv SynTek by we obviously, and have to bow down to the people that wrote the books that you and I had. So of course we have to mention the titles of before we say anything else, but when we arrived, if you wish, this was such the dark ages of FinTech that there were maybe 20 reports, I mean, exactly, there were not 20 reports, there were maybe five reports in total with on the topic of technology in banking out there, some of which are written by people that are still names in the industry. Tessa Cohen had written a report, if you remember.
Duena:Is it Ron that had written the brand of snark hadn't yet been built. He was writing pure report, but we were taking kind of knowledge from that. And then obviously Brett's book was possibly the first out there to put digital out clearly and criticism. But that was the atmosphere of everyone trying to make your best they could, of writing about it, of building, because the need for there to be a lot of change on the delivery side and on the consumer side and on the strategy side. The need for PEEK was very clear to everyone, I would say.
Duena:So there were magical times. But it also allowed us, and I think that's important to say, and I don't know if you said it the same way I did, an in into the organizational mire of why technology and innovation wouldn't move as fast as it would like to. So what would you say is the number one culprit as to why organisations don't do better if they are big and old?
Einar:So I've given this a lot of thought, and this is really why I left FinTech. So of the people in this position within these big organizations, and I don't know if the size of the time actually matters. I mean, we sold to Commerzbank and Banco Santander. Mean, these are huge banks, but they had big believers internally, people of influence that were able to push for solutions like ours to be implemented. And they're working in digital within these organizations.
Einar:They come to the shows, they see the demos, they see the potential, and they have a vision, and they are our believers, and they really like what can be done. But that's kind of where it stops. When you need to go back to the CFO or whoever, the head of IT, who's in charge of the actual expenses, like we want to bring in this innovation type thing that costs the benefit. If it's not a purely financial benefit, and the willingness to actually innovate with these solutions kind of gets killed. So everybody wants to innovate, but then it's a big bang, so we just kind of don't.
Einar:And then if you do implementation, don't do it fully or properly, so you only get half the value or even less. So I had got Because I was tired in the end after like six years traveling and running around, and I mean, the company grew so fast. It was an amazing time, I mean I learned so much, I met so many wonderful people, I worked with so many great colleagues. I was just exhausted with the travel, I mean my kids were crying when I was leaving to jump on a plane again, often with just an hour's notice, Hey, can it be in Warsaw tomorrow for a meeting, like, to the airport? But it was also the fact that, regardless of what we did, not everything that they were building was being adopted.
Einar:There was a claim for the willingness for it to be adopted, but it was not always done properly. Was kind of sad that I'm not seeing what I'm building
Duena:The being seatbelt passed out loop was way too great in many ways. And I I say what you're in in your in your, obviously, adventure and frustration, and we we have the same lived experience. But kind of when I when I first arrived at this idea of human debt, I knew that that's something that without having to work, it's something that you and I have felt every day in every organization, because the only people that we've ever met who had become the engineers of these massive changes and the architects of these systems had practically been entrepreneurs fighting against masses of human debt around it and trying to assuage politics and trying to find ways in which the bureaucratic mammals wouldn't notice the innovation is being, I mean, courts, the stories. Do you remember thinking of Strands whose name we forgot to think that they were our most bitter competitor, that we lost knights over at you and I. But anyway, do you remember when there was a story that the World Bank was telling us that Strands was asked to actually, and we were asked and they said, no, they screen scrape the data of the actual bank because they were not allowed access to their own back end by their powers that be.
Duena:That's the environment in which some people still manage to get innovation over the line. So obviously they became our heroes, but we kept seeing the fight. Many of these people are super burnt out themselves and they're super, they fluffed things themselves and they're doing other things. I do have this personal theory that those years of extreme innovation that we have produced has probably rinsed us really well, of us, and we're going to need a minute to take it a lot easier and reframe like you have done and many of us have. So that could have been part of it.
Duena:I think what was extraordinary back in that day, and I think that one of the things that they now can speak about and it's hard to explain otherwise, is there was a sense of building big things with a lot of molded behavior. But maybe it's just because you're Icelandic, I think. I've had the owner of so many guys to meet a good 10, a few tens, and say hundreds of Icelandic people, maybe hundreds. And that's significant. That's a proportion.
Duena:That is 8%. I am very proud of my knowledge of the people. And indeed, they are a very special type of people that have talk in everything and they're also very fair. Do think that that's part of why technology and innovation comes easier to you?
Einar:There are many elements to the Icelandic mindset, and I I think we we share many things with our neighboring countries. And I actually think of The US as a neighboring country, but it's kind of right in between Scandinavia and The US. So I think the biggest benefit that, you might call it some other words, but because we are a small country, if we need to get something done, we can generally just knock on a door or call somebody who knows somebody and the door has been opened. That's kind of the Icelandic mentality. We don't use surnames.
Einar:Politics are relatively minor within organizations, so we don't really have this buffer. Like we will go out, meet with somebody like the head of something from Commerzbank and tell them, yeah, we can support 10,000,000 users with like billions of data points sorted across, they're like, we hadn't done it before, we'll just figure it out. And then we did. So we are extremely resourceful, and we just get things done. But in a way, you could say it's also kind of foolish, but I think there are other countries that would never, Germans to me, I mean, they're like awesome people, but they are, it's kind of like a yes or no.
Einar:Like, can I do this? Like, no, we haven't done it before. So they might not overpromise, but in small country, mindset, cylinders, we just like,
Duena:would say that's very revenge. That's just being contagious. Areas at the same time.
Einar:I guess. It's a country that has to be has had to been throughout all the years and centuries, had to be very innovative to be able to survive on this island. I mean, there are volcanoes and dead water, and there are no trees, we can't really build houses, and the only way to get off the island is on the road. True,
Duena:true, good point.
Einar:At least that's in my mind, but you will find these types of people everywhere, of course.
Duena:One of the stories, most, I mean, there are hundreds of stories of Iceland I'd love to tell, but maybe not today, all of them. But the truth is that there is an overall feeling of warmth you get in the middle of a very inhospitable place. As soon as you go to Iceland and you know a couple of people, just genuinely good hearted human. And on top of everything, the thing that I have honestly always struggled with, if the fact that they are, if any minus, is overly modest, and that's maybe a little bit of an insular mentality that I've noticed in with Australians as well and other places where people, other than the English, who quite frankly can use a serious dose of that. Everyone seems to believe that they are less than they are.
Duena:So I think, you know, thought I've met such incredible innovations, such amazing women that have done very solidly sustainable things. There are a number of names that you may meet all this podcast as well. We have a couple of guests later on. But no shouting from the mountains about the the many wins of the technology and innovation arena in in Austin, but there should be. There should be a lot less more difficult.
Einar:Well, this is also why we we hired the head of sales, not from Iceland, and we we wanted the lousest person in the room, so
Duena:we Right, hired that's you mean. It's easier when someone else thinks their places than if you do it yourself. That's very, very true. But again, very, very lucky to have worked with yourself, Tanner, and it's one of the pride to enjoy of my career. I've learned a lot from you.
Duena:We've learned together. We've learned about humans. We've learned about this horrible human that we found everywhere, but that if you have your mind in the right place and you really want a technology that goes to humans with other humans in teams that are empowered, then you're going to get that. So thanks for talking to us and keep these ones short because let's face it as anyone in the financial technology is going to be listening to us. They ain't got the time.
Duena:They have to still figure out the point of Bitcoin. So with that, we'll talk to you next week. Thanks a lot, Einar, and see you soon, hopefully.
Einar:Same here. Bye. Take care. Bye.