Fintech Leaders
00:00:00 · Kamran Zaki, Miguel Armaza
[00:00:00] S0: Definitely always looking for great companies in general. But if they have global applicability, then I think that's one even more exciting, but also selfishly makes the opportunity even bigger. When I joined PayPal in 2004, when we would go to talk to large financial institutions around the world about partnering with them, we used to have to spend the first half hour educating them on what PayPal was. [00:00:35] S1: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fintech Leaders coming to you from New York City. I'm your host, Miguel Armaza. I'm a co founder of Gilgamesh Ventures, a venture capital fund that backs early stage fintech entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed this conversation, I invite you to leave a review on Apple or Spotify so more people can learn about Fintech Leaders. In this episode, I interview Kamran Zaki, partner at Iconiq Growth and former COO of Adyen. Iconiq Growth is a multi billion dollar fund that has backed dozens of amazing companies, 27 of which have IPO ed, and together they comprise a market cap of over $1,500,000,000,000 Some of their fintech investments include Adyen, Chime, Ramp, Robinhood, Monzo, and bill.com. We discuss what it means to be a value add investor and VC, lessons from Adyen, the keys and challenges of building a truly global company, taking Adyen public and lessons for company leaders looking to IPO in the coming years, Kamran's take on stablecoins, trades and patterns of great leaders, and a lot more. Kamran, welcome to Fintech Leaders. Delighted to be welcoming you all the way from California.
00:00:35 · Miguel Armaza, Kamran Zaki
[00:00:35] S1: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Fintech Leaders coming to you from New York City. I'm your host, Miguel Armaza. I'm a co founder of Gilgamesh Ventures, a venture capital fund that backs early stage fintech entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed this conversation, I invite you to leave a review on Apple or Spotify so more people can learn about Fintech Leaders. In this episode, I interview Kamran Zaki, partner at Iconiq Growth and former COO of Adyen. Iconiq Growth is a multi billion dollar fund that has backed dozens of amazing companies, 27 of which have IPO ed, and together they comprise a market cap of over $1,500,000,000,000 Some of their fintech investments include Adyen, Chime, Ramp, Robinhood, Monzo, and bill.com. We discuss what it means to be a value add investor and VC, lessons from Adyen, the keys and challenges of building a truly global company, taking Adyen public and lessons for company leaders looking to IPO in the coming years, Kamran's take on stablecoins, trades and patterns of great leaders, and a lot more. Kamran, welcome to Fintech Leaders. Delighted to be welcoming you all the way from California. [00:02:08] S0: Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me back. I had the pleasure of doing one of these with you a few years ago when I was still with Adyen and so great to be back with you.
00:02:08 · Kamran Zaki, Miguel Armaza
[00:02:08] S0: Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me back. I had the pleasure of doing one of these with you a few years ago when I was still with Adyen and so great to be back with you. [00:02:16] S1: I'm the one who's very honored. So thank you. By the way so around that time you were with Adyen, you were the COO it's a big company of course Adyen and now you've gone to a role where it's a much leaner team. I want to start by hearing about what is it that you miss the most about your day to day at Adyen?
00:02:41 · Kamran Zaki
[00:02:41] S0: That's a great question. Honestly, the people. If you take a step back, I was with Adyen for almost ten years and left them last summer. I think it was a great company. And when we had done our session on Adyen, one of the things we talked a lot about was culture and how that was critical, not just from a people standpoint, but it was so central to how we ran the business, how we made decisions, how we empowered people. So I'm still in touch with a lot of my colleagues. Luckily, a lot of them are in the Bay Area or come through here pretty often. And, honestly, that that might be a good segue to maybe your follow on question. That was a very important part of why I chose the Giant, the team at Iconiq. I'd known them for about a decade as well. They were early investors at Adyen. And in addition to having a great track record in terms of actual investment, I also found that they have a very strong culture. It's a great team. And that was really important to me after what I'd been lucky enough to experience on the Adyen side. So I miss the people, but I really cherish my new colleagues and friends. You know, the other part is obviously there's a difference between being an operative investor. And, you know, I think like anything, it's yin and yang. There's great positives on both sides and there's something you miss and eat. So overall, I think amazing experience at Adyen and really thrilled to be having an opportunity to now on the other side with Iconiq.
00:04:01 · Miguel Armaza
[00:04:01] S1: So thinking back on those days when you were on the board of Adyen and Iconiq Growth was an investor, what was it about Iconiq and also other investors that really stood out as value add? Because of course everyone wants to get there, everyone wants to, every investor wants to be regarded as a great investor, a value add, not everyone gets there. What was it for you that stood out?
00:04:30 · Kamran Zaki, Miguel Armaza
[00:04:30] S0: I think a couple of things, In general, what you want as a company from your investors is one, that they're with you through thick and thin, right? It's usually easy in the good times, but every company has bumps along the way. And you wanna make sure your team and your investors, right, are with you on that journey and are supportive. I think two, it's investors can help in a few different ways. One is through introductions, right, to potential customers. Two is if you're looking for executive talent or additions to your board once you're further along helping with those types of things. And then the third is obviously every company goes through different stages of growth and inflection points and potentially making introductions to other great founders or companies who've been there before you and how you could leverage their learnings and expertise. And I think that's what I found in many of our investors, but especially in Iconiq and back to, you know, the culture, the people, they call it the uncommon care. Right? How do you go above and beyond and how do you make sure you're earning the right to be an investor and continue being an investor for the long term? Then it'll pay back hopefully with how do you then take these great investors and how do you help them generate uncommon outcomes and then how do you help them pay it back to the society by introducing them to the next generation of great investors per se. [00:05:53] S1: Now that you're on the investor side, how do you find yourself spending your days?