Old Street tech founder Christian Owens has a hybrid American-Australian-Englishaccent, but tells me he’s from Corby.
Where’s the accent from, then, I wonder? Family from overseas? A childhood abroad? “Nope, I’m solidly from the Midlands,” he laughs.
Perhaps the mid-Atlantic twang was picked up from YouTube, for Owens was partly schooled by the video website, which helped teach him to code at 13. The accent is not YouTube’s only legacy.
Now 29, Owens has spent a decade at the helm of Paddle, a payments infrastructure site he set up with co-founder Harrison Rose which has unicorn status with a $1.4 billion valuation.
Turnover exceeded £26 million last year. Paddle is not Owens’s first row into entrepreneurial waters: he was paid to build websites (selling relatives’ wooden furniture and featuring local restaurants’ menus) as a teen, then set up a software promotion business helping companies offer their apps in discounted bundles.
“It really took off: it was turning over £4 million a year and I was making enough money to convince my parents that I could leave school after GCSEs — I was captivated by being able to build stuff on the internet. By comparison, anything at school felt boring.”
Owens met Rose chatting online — and they worked together from their respective parents’ homes for two years before meeting face to face.
“We were selling individual invoicing software to hundreds of thousands of individual SMEs all over the world, but we were wasting so much time on taking payments, form-filling and dealing with currency fees. Then we started getting VAT demands from all over the world and had to spend all our time hiring local accountants to file tax returns… I thought, there must be an easier way!”
That way was Paddle — the duo decided to build a company specifically for others who were selling their digital products, “to take away the burden of having to do all this boring stuff so they can focus on building a killer product”.
There were hiccups: when the pair moved to London (when Owens was 18, in 2012) to launch, the first piece of post at their new Shad Thames HQ was a legal notice informing Paddle it was being sued over the name.
The pair had spent $120,000 on the Paddle.com domain — so “the first thing we did as a new business was spending £200,000 acquiring this company just for its trademarked name. It was extremely scary at the time but now it’s turned out OK.”
“OK” might be an understatement: from an initial £150,000 backing from MyVoucherCodes founder Mark Pearson (“we met on Twitter”), plus self-funding from Owens’s previous businesses, Paddle has raised $293 million from investors including KKR, Kindred Capital, FTV Capital, Notion and 83North.
“It didn’t take long for us to start getting sign-ups. While [rivals] like Stripe and Chargebee can handle your payments or your billing needs, we’re the only platform that offers such a holistic set of tools for SaaS businesses: payments, invoicing, billing, tax, compliance, localisation, metrics and more.”
Owens promoted (or demoted?) himself from CEO to executive chairman in May — “I wanted someone else to help run the operations, so I can focus more on products, engineering teams and spending time with customers.”
Has he ever felt at a disadvantage having left school at 16?
“No — the challenge is to surround yourself with people with the same hunger for learning and the ability to develop,” he says. “That ability is not related to formal education or qualifications: having left school after our GCSEs and A-levels respectively, Harrison and I were technically the least qualified people within the business.”
Last year saw Paddle’s $200 million acquisition of US software firm ProfitWell — “sealing the deal was an intense and risky process — we had to go out and raise the cash beforehand amid an economic downturn — but we’re incredibly happy with how [it] turned out.”
Now Paddle has 320 staff across offices in London, New York, Boston, Salt Lake City and Rosario. What is Owens’ ambition for the business? He points out his new CEO took his previous company “from 100 people and £100 million revenue to 4000 people and $4 billion revenue” as well as an IPO.
He’d like more of the same, then?
“I want to create a quite-large, independent company,” he says — atypical to hear such restraint in an American accent, but Owens is keeping it Corby.
