Prins: Adyen only had engineering and sales roles for a long time
Roelant Prins (Roland Prince) · How to build a $18B+ success story far far away from Silicon Valley with Adyen · Jun 19, 2019 · at 9:29
Roelant Prins, CCO of Dutch payments giant Adyen, explains Adyen's early lean operational structure and product-first mentality during a fireside chat with Felicis Ventures founder Aydin Senkut.
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“We started a company with engineers and a few salespeople, and for a long time, that's the only Two major roles we have in the company.”
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More from Roelant Prins (Roland Prince)
Prins: Adyen replaced intermediary banks by integrating directly with Visa and Mastercard
“We took the step to integrate directly with Visa MasterCard, really replacing the banks, the processing systems, and really, yeah, trying to eliminate the role banks play in payment handling, by going directly to these Visa MasterCard networks.”
Prins: Direct card network integrations increased Adyen's payment approval rates by 2-3%
“Making small tweaks to that suddenly changed the responses. So we were seeing two, three percent more approval rates.”
Prins: European tech companies get 10% the attention of US domestic startups
“If you are a European company, there's just 10% interest compared to a U S company. It's just much less interesting in general. So it's really hard work to get on that radar.”
Prins: Adyen never builds anything without a confirmed customer
“We never build anything if we don't know which customer will use it and when.”
Prins: Adyen operates without a fixed product roadmap
“We don't have a roadmap because we just know what we're working on. And we have big themes that we're working on, but we really want to keep the flexibility that we can make changes all the time.”
Prins: Adyen deliberately avoided launching consumer wallets or proprietary payment methods
“And a specific choice we've made that we never want to be at the forefront. We never decided to run our own wallet or run our own payment methods. We always made a very clear distinction, a very clear focus. Our role is to help merchants grow.”