S8EP9 - Martin Sokk, Co-Founder & CEO @ Lightyear

Martin Sokk is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lightyear. He joined Hector to discuss his journey from product management at Wise (formerly TransferWise) to building a company revolutionising retail investing in Europe.

Martin shares how his product-driven mindset and relentless curiosity have shaped his career, offering insights into creating 10x products, scaling startups, and understanding customer needs through direct engagement. The conversation also dives into:

• Lightyear’s mission to transform Europe’s outdated and costly investing infrastructure
• The challenges and opportunities of building a pan-European fintech solution
• Lessons learned from Wise and the importance of fostering entrepreneurial talent
• The role of resilience in navigating crises and maintaining focus on long-term goals

Martin’s story is packed with actionable advice and inspiration for founders, operators, and anyone passionate about fintech innovation.

Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and follow The Riding Unicorns podcast on your favourite platform and stay connected with us on social media for more inspiring episodes! 🎙️🦄

Transcript

  Welcome to the riding unicorns podcast. This is a podcast, all about venture capsule and fast-growing startups. On Jane Springle. My co-host is Hector Mason. 

We're both VCs based in London. Whether you're a founder VC angel investor, or just curious about the startup ecosystem. There's something here for you. Every episode dives into unique topics related to tech and venture capital, offering valuable takeaways and actionable insights. We hope you enjoy the show and find something useful in each discussion. 

Let's get started.

 Martin, welcome to Riding Unicorns. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me.  Really good to, really good to be in touch. And unfortunately, it's um, it's just you and I today. James, can't make it, but I'm really looking forward to getting into the weeds of company building and what it takes to be a founder and all, all of that good stuff.

I think the best place to start is just you introducing yourself to our audience. You know, what, what's led you to the point you're at today? 

Yeah, like I'm lifelong product builder in one shape or form. I've been kind of involving myself trying to figure out like how to use technology to make life easier.

Faster, simpler, more  clear for people. I started from like in these days, maybe a dark side, a bank building, this kind of more processes, lower environments,  and pretty quickly at one point. I, uh, stumbled onto the small startup called TransferWise back then. And I, I think at that time, this life opened up quite a bit and I realized like what is the actual product management and how do you build something?

What has proper value, what's able to scale across the world and so on.  and after wise, we realized that Like currency transfers is a big business  investing is much bigger business and much more broken So it's time to go and solve that for Europe. 

Awesome.  Let's explore product management because I you know We speak to dozens of unicorn founders on here and loads of really successful operators and entrepreneurs all all kinds of businesses and  I think there's this  This idea that sort of being a product manager is it's kind of like being an entrepreneur but within a company You got it Let me hand over to you to, to hear what you sort of, what product manager means to you  and whether that's changed over time. 

Yeah, I think it's, there's like so many different variations of product management people. And  I, if I like split it roughly into two, then you have kind of U. S. View where product people are more  leaning towards marketing. And then you have like European people where product people lean towards operations.

So  it seems that In Europe, product people are able to build this kind of complicated systems in operation level and solve problems. All these problems, but they are struggling a little bit to create this kind of wow effect. And then in the U S often it's kind of vice versa. They're like really good at creating this wow effect.

And then they need people to kind of build this kind of operational side of the business.  So I think like in my head, every organization, every people should be in a way they like to be. But like for me, it's, it's kind of a combination of  But in the end, it's something what elevates customer experience, something was able to scale something.

What's, um, solve the problem in a way that it's incredibly useful for the company. So if I'm thinking about. Like we're building lighter at the moment. And there is incredibly difficult infrastructure and operational world behind the investment world. And then there's like front end, how do people interact? 

Doesn't really make sense to build this  thing. What maybe thousands of banks have been building already and make it a little bit more beautiful.  If you want to build a good product, then you should take a step back and like dismantle everything and try to figure out like what people really, really care about.

And this comes to this other cliche thing is a 10x product. And like, I truly believe that if you're able to take something and elevate it to different magnitude, then a lot of things get much simpler. Uh, So I think like product job is to A, figure out what customers want, find a solution for this 10x, make it happen and try to figure out how to scale that.

So it's like vague answer, but it's like a lot of things where nobody else in the organization does. 

Yeah. And, and what, what goes into that? Because it, you know, when put like that, it sounds like a very structured process, you know, spend a bunch of time with,  people who you think are your your, your ideal customers and learn about their problems and then build a product to solve the problems.

Like underneath that is a huge amount of complexity, you know, and, and  there are arts and skills and sciences behind each of those, the different steps in the process from asking the right questions, from reading between the lines and the answers.  these people give you to then having the creativity and imagination to translate those insights into into product and then making the product beautiful and yeah there's a huge amount of depth to it but  have you kind of learned that there's a best practice?

Have you, is there a sort of industry best practice in product management or does it come down to the individual's talent for it? 

Like, I think there's one best practice and people, everybody says that they're doing it, but like, people don't really do it, like go and speak to customers like really speak to customers doesn't really, help if you're just like observing what customer super person is doing and then you're  trying to translate that or somebody is talking to the customers and they're reading notes and all this stuff.

yes, it's somewhat useful, but like in the end you have to go in and ask hard questions from your customers or potential customers. And if you're spending enough time with these people and asking.  Uncomfortable questions and encouraging people to be honest with you, then pretty quickly you get somebody who tells you like, Hey,  this is really cool what you're thinking and doing and whatnot.

But like, I don't really need that because like, I'll have that. And that's the best answer because no, it's like, Oh, you have that? Like, what is that? Uh, Can you explain me like what needs to happen that mine would be better, whatever you have already? So something that I often do is that. We build a product.

So we first speak a lot of customers, try to figure out, get the sensation, what needs to be done. Then we try to do this kind of hard thing, build a product, and then. You go and try to, before you launch, you go and try to pitch that into financial influencers  and they often come in and say like, Hey, this is cool.

But like all these things, I don't get it. can you explain me some complicated things and you don't have an answers and whatnot. If you are doing that, then pretty quickly you get into the reality, what works, what doesn't. And that's scary because these people are knowledgeable, sometimes much more knowledgeable than you.

Uh, And they will dismantle your idea and the product and the baby. But you need to enjoy that because that's where the real answers are. And that usually helps.   people ask me about like, Oh, should I do some research and whatnot? And like, sorry for all our research people who are doing like amazing jobs.

But like you as a person needs to do that. Otherwise just like secondhand experience is still a secondhand experience. 

Yeah. And is that the idea for Lightyear?  Come about through this kind of process, this kind of customer discovery, like the unique insight that led to.  

Yeah, so before we start building anything, before we had an idea of what to do we did quite a lot of research and we realized people are not investing.

So we saw that people in the U S are investing and in Europe or not. So in us, like more than 60 percent people invest in Europe. It's like less than 20%.  So something works in the U S. that doesn't work in Europe. Then we start like going after like one person, another person, trying to figure out who are investing already.

So why they're doing it, how they're doing it, where they're doing it.  And a lot of them said like, they're happy with whatever they have. And like a lot of the reasons why they said that was they're living in an environment where there is not many challengers. So they don't see anything. They can't even think about it.

There's something really. Interesting, but different there. So for example price is like one element is that most people in Europe who invest who use a bank, they are like happy or come from the environment where the 10 euros, pounds, dollars per transaction is like normal. We had a weird thing with.

One of our investors who actually invested in Lightyear, who is a US citizen invested into Lightyear because he believes in us. But like a year later, come came back to us and said like, guys, like, I think I now get it because from us, they don't really think about that. You have 10 euros, 10 charge every time you invest plus other fees.

Like that's like, that's not there. Like the pricing is optimized out there. So the environment is. So drastically different. Sometimes we just don't understand. So in us, people ask like, why do you charge so much in Europe? People ask like, how can you charge so little? Like, what's the trick here? Like, is it sounds fishy?

I was like, no, it doesn't sound fishy.  the cost is not there. We're talking costs about cents, not about dollars or euros in a way. somebody told me like really well, that if you want to think outside of the box, then like the first thing, what you need to do is you need to really understand what's inside of the box.

And if you understand what's inside of the box, then you can draw all the chunk out and actually build something. What's like different.  

And where, where did the fascination sort of start for  you? You mentioned that you've always been a product builder and Do you mean from like very early, you know, where you always thinking about, you know, finding problems, solving problems. 

So for me, it's, um, it has always been curious, like how people are  doing work or how they're organizing their life. And then like, as. I think I grew up this in like the prime time of the technology age, like the first people got, like first normal humans got like computers at home. You start like programming and internet came up and all this stuff.

And you can see that a lot of things got much simpler, but like the first time I went to work in a bank, then it was like baffling for me that yes, there's a lot of technology, but banks don't use. A lot of it, a lot of stuff is still that they come together, they get an email maybe, and then they print out this email and sit in a meeting room somewhere.

And like, it's weird for me, like why people do that? So then you always try to figure out if that meeting is unnecessary, then can we remove that somehow? And is there a decision point, or maybe we can solve 90 percent of the problems like right away automatically and then maybe come together only for 10 percent I think it's a kind of little bit kind of curiosity in my head where I'm trying to figure out what is this weirdness, what I don't get it.

And is there an easier answer for this? And sometimes you just poke something. You try to figure out how far can you go? Sometimes when I picked up running, then I figured out, can I run like one kilometer and then can I run 10 kilometer? Can I run marathon? And it turns out that you can run quite a long, like at one point I managed to run 42 hours straight.

So it's a human body can do many things after that, like I couldn't run for a while. So, you can try to figure out what are the limits and often the limits are much further than you first expect. 

 So acting at like the curious mind is a starting point, right? And that's common across  pretty much all of the founders that we speak to on this podcast.

But then the, the other part is acting on the curiosity. Cause I think a lot of people You know, have it in them to be curious, but don't have the motivation or the drive to act on those curiosities and, you know, seek answers to the questions they're asking themselves and create solutions to them to problems. 

Where do you think, for you, that drive comes from? Do you, I mean, do you kind of agree with what I'm saying? And do you feel that there's some reason that you someone who is motivated to actually go and explore those, those questions.  

Yeah, I think it's hard, like I'm not philosopher. Like I don't know where the drive comes from, but like, for me, it seems that the life, what we're living is so easy.

 there are so many people in the world who are born into really unfortunate situations or  lot of. People in Ukraine at the moment have like a difficult situation in their lives where I just literally had a chat with somebody this morning is that they can't give me their address because they don't know if it's occupied or not.

It's like, it's crazy. But like we are living in an environment, especially like tech people you have such a strong demand for your skills and abilities and solve problems. And it's often really easy to find job if you want to kind of. Build something in this kind of tech world, then I think it comes down to this kind of Maslow pyramid.

Top layers where you start to think about like, okay, what do you want to do here? And like for me, it's like, I want to,  I'm like curious or on a level that I want to be learning new things. And like, I think in many ways, this kind of learning function is the most interesting for me. So you kind of try to satisfy this endless curiosity by learning.

new kind of angles and how other people operate and how far can you go? And I think startups are like really good vehicles for that because there's everything moves so quickly and you have no choice to learn something new constantly. So the moment you don't learn, then you fall behind. Then you can go and start working in a bank where you can make a decision, one decision a year.

And then prepare for the next year decision. But like the startup, you need to do like 10 decisions a day. And this kind of keeps you motivated and interested. And also often the world moves on. So you have new, broader spectrums to learn.  

I mean, the Maslow's hierarchy needs point is interesting. And I agree.

I think that. What, what strikes me is that there's just such a range of kind of how fast people want to move up the hierarchy of needs. You know, what, what, what's,  what I've observed is definitely that some of the most ambitious and successful entrepreneurs  want to kind of jump from the bottom to the top in like a year and managed to do that, you know, and, and, you know, for one minute they were struggling to put food on the table and were born to really difficult circumstances and You know, had to provide for their siblings because their parents couldn't afford to feed and educate them, for example.

And then, you know, they just go from like zero to a hundred and they're like, right, I need to solve everything. So they go found a business and suddenly they're rich and they can feed themselves and they can, you know. Start looking at the sort of high levels of life, I suppose. And, you know, they have a leisure time and all these things.

Like, compare that to  other people that we all, you know, see and love and spend time with, who  just move through those areas much more slowly. And I'm trying to work out why. There is that difference. Like, what is it about the people who, who go from zero to a hundred that makes them do that so fast and want to do that so fast, I 

think it's probably something to do with the nature like the type of the people and whatnot.

So something what I think I have learned. over time is that you often see this rags to riches really quick stories and whatnot. And in many times, these people are also somewhat kind of in same level as lottery winners. Not that it's, they got lucky, but more about that. You have a lot of people who took a lot of risk and failed as well.

And in other hand, you have many, many people who have been grinding for ages Before they're going to be successful. And that one day they're going to be successful. And people are like, Oh, you got lucky. It was like, dude, I've been doing this 15 years. And it's really, really hard.

I don't think it's luck in that sense. I see a lot of that actually around me. So there's a lot of people who try, sometimes try multiple different businesses, different ideas, and sometimes the world is against them and sometimes they, in the end, they're going to win and they know how to go from there. 

I'd like to think that there's a, that there's some sort of trust that we can all have in the universe where, you know, the people who really have the grit and are willing to grind, in some way, see success, whether it's they found a unicorn, probably not, or at least just, you know, work up through those hierarchy needs and create a much better life for themselves.

I  think people who put the effort in do tend to get that.  

Yeah, I have seen that so many times and it constantly happens. I think it's uh, for like many, many things is that, uh, this kind of, the more you put in, the more you get out. And sometimes it's not like super obvious and sometimes like the feedback is not going to happen right away.

But I think my, one of my favorite stories where is when we had one lady who was waitress in some cafe, joined,   and she was like this really angry one where couldn't really talk to people if she talked to somebody then like effectively she  Bite their head off and uh, this kind of it's, uh, but like, she was like really hardworking and I think it's like in four years or so she got  to lead like 200 people in five different countries.

Being like massive success in really complicated area. And like question is like, how do you get there? And I think there is like element of really, really hard work, but also like the environment where you are. So if you're in the environment, what moves slowly doesn't encourage you to kind of learn take this, like the old step out all this kind of levers, what kind of force you to do,  but like move in a different way.

then you don't, don't do that. I often have seen also like these people who put them into environments, which are maybe slow, they will create this fast, exciting environment because they're excited about this and to drag people along. And you can see that everywhere, like lots of. Rappers come from the same street effectively because they just having fun.

And over a while they got just so good.  it's like this startup mafia. I think PayPal mafia is like one of these famous ones. It's like, just like so many businesses come out of that. it's not so much just the connections or money or whatnot. There's a lot of money and connections out there, but like this ability to think and create this environments.

This is what it's kind of.  Self fulfilling  prophecy in the end, but uh, these people, if you are down, they will actually drag you along and in other time, they, you will drag them along. 

Yeah. And WISE is an interesting one because  WISE has become such a training ground for so many entrepreneurs now to, you know, so many companies have been founded by ex WISE employees.

to, I want to try and understand a little bit more about why that is, because not every company. Becomes one of these training grounds. You know, it's, it's certainly it's noticeable how many people have spun out of wise and started successful businesses. And there are a few other companies like that, but is there some, something culturally about the people who are drawn to wise, or is there something to do with the kind of culture that wise creates, that Really sort of promotes entrepreneurship and creativity and innovation or what do you think it might be? 

Yeah, I think it's a element of people are forced to take ownership make their own decisions to be successful in why you had to  not to do your job, you had to take a step further and really understand what's happening. And. Sometimes to do your job well, you needed to find somebody else in a different area and do their job or help them to understand or  like, try to find the other way so you can go on with your life.

This kind of elements also like really fast moving environment. We really smart people who came together. This also tend to attract same type of people like entrepreneurial minded people. So all this kind of. Kind of nurtures. I think this kind of entrepreneur mind. And at one, one point, these people kind of leave wise and think like, Oh, I would like to do something.

And, or, or I see the problem. And like, I know how to solve it. And I have seen other people to do it. And it's not this kind of outrageous thing that you're going to go and try to build a company for 500 million people, because you have seen something similar and it's like normalized for you. So I think it's Yeah.

It's like a type of the culture, what you're building, actually found out something really interesting quite recently where I'm born in Estonia and Estonia is really tiny country. It's like million people or so, but this thing has a really good startup scene. And like, there's a lot of unicorns coming out of this.

And. A lot of people around the world trying to figure out what's happening there. So recently I've spent quite a lot of time in Hungary and Hungary, Hungary has quite a bit smaller startup scene and they have been like asking like what's happening and like why one country which is actually smaller has a bigger startup scene. 

And I think it comes down to the kind of community and the community who's Giving back in the end.  So we had like, Estonia has this Skype effect. You had some guys built Skype, then they got some money, some connections, but also a lot of inspiration. Then after Skype, the, there's like one guy uh, who was Skype first employee decided to build another company.

And this company was called Transferwise. So David Henrik, Skype first employee founded Transferwise with Christo and built something really exciting there. And then one guy named Martin joined TransferWise at one point and like five years later decided to leave and build Lightyear. And now we have Skype founders invested in Lightyear, TransferWise founders and half of the management board invested in, in Lightyear and it's like money connections, but also like,  Like ability or helping us to think or like this advisory world is like, how do you do things?

And if you do that, then obviously like the various people around you  Start building cool stuff if people leave in leave from light year Like we are also looking opportunities if we can invest in them  Because it's not that  you are leaving and you're a bad person. It's like, people have different things in their lives, what they want to do.

And often entrepreneurial life is different. And sometimes you need to take risks. Sometimes you're in a good position, sometimes not. But if you're doing these investments and giving back, then this environment gets better and stronger and stronger. And it's much better for you as well. It's like cool to live in.

You can see people are  investing interesting stuff around you or building stuff and uh, that. Great like fulfills your curiosity as well. 

Yeah. No, it's super interesting And I think I think Estonia potentially has the highest number of unicorns per capita of anywhere. 

Yeah, everybody's counting differently, but yeah, it's a ballpark, right? 

Or maybe per startup founded or something like that. But look, tell us a bit more about light year and you know, that there are plenty of VCs who would say, and I'm sure this is something you thought about as well, but he would say that. The market is super competitive  and hard to differentiate, but you guys are succeeding.

You've raised a lot of money building an amazing team. So tell us a bit more about Lightyear and the journey and how much you've raised through which rounds and then onto the sort of vision.  

So let's start from the question, what you asked here. So the market is incredibly saturated and how do you differentiate? 

It's actually pretty insane how wrong is that question? I'd like, I'm getting it asked constantly. Why I'm saying it's wrong is yes, Europe has like 40, 000 financial institutions or something like that, which is a lot. But if you start to think about it, like where is the money? So Europe has, if you're looking into retail investment market, then about 19 trillion, trillion T  euros invested.

I'm considering UK as part of the Europe for this example.  It's a lot of money and almost all of this is in a bank.  So we can take any startup, any. Big name you can think of. They have investment world,  almost a zero market share.  So now we are in this situation where we have 500 million people in Europe.

19 trillion Euros invested already in a products which are incredibly expensive, clunky, looked like something built in year 2000. They probably were built in year 2000.  And you have an opportunity to build something what has a bigger impact than the whole U. S. market, which is in a population wise smaller, but like in the same time in the U.

S. this problem is proven that it's able to solve your, they're able to solve it. They're able to bring the price down. They're able to build the user experience up. but you have massive competition. So like really hard to get, like maybe in the U. S. To build like 10 percent better product. But in Europe, I'm able to build 10 times better product.

So I'm able to get the product market fit and grow to that. And the opportunity is huge here. So why is that? It took us for a while to figure out, but the trick is that I think a lot of people start to build  in a bit naive view. naive view in a way that they think about like most of the investments go to the U.

S. So I'd build a U. S. product.  Less interesting are the European markets and the local stuff. So I'm not going to focus on  that. The answer is that if you want to capture the actual long term investors who have like a bulk of this assets, what are already invested, You have to build local stuff, local instruments, local taxation, local language, currencies, the way local people think about it.

And you have to do that, not in like UK or Germany, but you need to do that in 30 different markets in 30 different times, which everybody has different regulatory governments.  in one way or another. So if you are able to do that, then you have a massive market. But people tend not to do that. They tend to focus a in the U S part or really focused on one market.

So we have seen so many examples that, yes, there is somebody in the UK, but they always fail to expand into like in Europe or like in any kind of neighboring countries, mostly because like simple things are you build your systems considering one market and not many companies are able to rebuild their systems to populate a lot of other markets.

So why is this one of the rare examples was able to operate like pan European or pan global in that sense, Revolut, there's a couple of others, but many, many others fail to understand that Brits and Germans and Hungarians are Why is it different? They have widely different needs and often this local needs. 

The stuff what you build in Hungary, it doesn't really matter in the UK and they don't even really care about, but you need to do that to actually capture this market. So this is our starting point. Like we see the wild opportunity here. Uh, what not many people are really thinking about it. And it's like in a global scale, massive problem, but we're able to solve, but it's also like good thing in a way that. 

Europeans are bankrupt in many ways. Like most Europeans today, if they lose their job they're in a really bad situation because their mortgage is higher than the government pension, what they're getting, or like they would get if they would go and retire today. So how do we get people into the position where they have financial safety?

So we are in a mission wise, in an incredibly strong position where we can build something, what makes people's lives actually better. And my thinking started from this concept where I saw that my mom and dad, they have no money. And obviously they were born in different areas. Era, nobody told them anything about investing and whatnot, but like, now it's time to change.

Now it's time to take this kind of financial responsibility on your hands. So all this stuff together, it seems rather obvious what you need to build. It's incredibly difficult, but there is really good thing. What you can build. You can make a lot of money out of this, but it's also if you build it, well, your moat is massive means that the next person to come in and say like, Oh, I'm going to build a taxation system in a 30 different markets is like, that's going to take some time.

So it's hard to challenge that as well. 

That's interesting. So, so you guys are.  Basically taking on the challenge of the, of building infrastructure for this kind of product in every country in Europe, or most of the countries in Europe. And, and that is, you know, and then once you've built that, which is the Sutton, which is something that no one else has under one roof, no, no other single company has.

You know, in the way that you built it, which, you know, tech first, modern,  therefore cheap. And then you have the sort of economies of scale that you can go to market to these people and attract lots of customers at a lower cost than any you know, any company could that operates only in one or one or two countries.

Is that broadly the play? And then you've got this huge moat, everyone uses you and,  Job done or talk to us a bit more about the vision and whether that is right. 

So, so the way do we think about it is we try to build a global and local product. So there's a global product is this kind of backbone. Do you have accesses to various different places?

What's the fee structure? How do you kind of see data? Data is often kind of global. Uh, can you analyze, can you see inside of the ETFs to have like, like if you're buying something, do you own it right away or you need to wait for two days for a settlement?  This kind of global components around it.

And then you have the localized view. The localized view is often extremely difficult. You need to go yeah, literally  this month we changed the law in one market to get like offer like tax advantage accounts because it wasn't possible before properly. Uh, in, uh, other markets you need to kind of change the licensing or whatnot.

So there's like, A lot of heavy lifting, what usually is like measured, like the process is measured like in years and years and so on. So how do we think about it is we try to launch as widely as possible with the global product. So global product goes everywhere. And then we look into the traction where we where people find our product useful.

And like, I'm mindful that like our product is not useful instantly everywhere because there's so much nuance in the product. But if I find organic growth and like markets or groups of people who. Are fascinated and have the value on the product, what we have already, then this is the place where we're going to put our, all our efforts and attention.

So we don't really do marketing before we have organic growth. We don't start building proper product. If you don't have a organic growth. And while we are building, if you see some market and group of people it works, we go in, start building next step, what they need and step after. So we go in and start like learning about like, what are the actual needs?

often we find out that, Oh, this market has some taxation because transfer tax or whatnot. So we need to go and solve these kinds of issues. We solve these, and often we can replicate some of these elements in the different markets as well. It means that local product gets better, but the global product gets a tiny bit better.

So if we do it enough times, the global product gets good enough that next place starts to get the traction again. So if you see that happening, so everything goes again. So, there are a couple of things, what we look into, like organic traction, C set or NPS, like the customer satisfaction. If we have technically proven, if you're able to push satisfaction high enough, that will start driving organic growth and then make sense to spend marketing and engineering money into that.

And this is the kind of cycle. Trying to keep it like us. Kind of rather machine instead of  guessing what works and what doesn't because it's, the market is huge. There's so many kind of things what we could build. And if we, something that I have learned pretty quickly is that me trying to guess what other people in other markets with other intentions want to do is like wildly off often.

Like we saw that in we launched uh, I think us market like Five or six times, because you think you understand the market, but You need to be a U. S. person to really understand the market and same for like Hungary and Spain and Germany. So you need to be a German person. 

Yeah, and Martin, did you ever worry that this wouldn't work? 

Yeah, like I think the problem is there. So problem is clear. I think solution is there. And solution is rather clear as well. I think the difficult part is the execution here because it's such a long project where it needs to, a lot of things need to happen in a really fast pace and these things are difficult.

 I think this year we achieved some weird things like central bank accounts in Europe, which like no investment firm really ever gets uh, but like you need to get that. To get the prices down into the proper infrastructure and so on. So a lot of these things need to happen, they have to happen in the right order. 

So that's the tricky part. So I think the biggest question for us is that in what order are we going to solve this massive riddle? And that kind of effectively reflects on the speed.  

And there are obviously ups and downs. Good days and bad days for founders. Like what, what is it that pulls you through the, the bad days and keeps you going,  whether, whether that's meditation or just to drive or, you know, solving customer problems. 

So it's, it's interesting. We.  We have operated three years and I think  we have had like seven once in a lifetime global crisis which is insane. Again, we're like literally like three months into building this Brexit killed our licenses. Um, Then COVID um, stock market crash, inflation war, like all these things happen and all this have like, you're building Top market solution.

All of these have like massive impacts there. I think there's not the one thing what keeps you going, but there is elements of it. We have amazing team. So I think that's like one of the key elements where you can. You have lots of passionate people who really want to solve this problem.

And most of these people are so inspiring that like just spending some time with them, like whatever is the hard situation, they will lighten your mood and like, actually help you to go forward. And the other is customers. Like we have  so much customer feedback. You really solve the problem.

For, for many, many customers and for many people who come and say, Hey, we started investing just because of you. You can see like material impacts, what you have done people's lives. So I think these two are like the basic two drivers for everything. What we do.  

Yeah, no, that, that makes sense. And the um, Oh, wow.

We're getting to getting towards time actually. But I do want to, I do want to ask you about you know, going back to the conversation we were having  around why is and how. A lot of people and Skype and and other companies where lots of people have spun out and started their own things. Is that something you think about when you're building Lightyear?

Are you thinking about hiring people who you think could be good founders one day? or is it more a product of their experience at Lightyear rather than, rather than the point at which they join?  

Yeah, I think there is, I don't think that they would be a good founder, but I'm trying to find people who have tried. 

So  I think like the most interesting is to kind of try to realize who are the people who are doing stuff, what they shouldn't do. It's so easy not to do stuff. It's so easy to just, I don't know, watch TV. But then there's like some group of people who have. Weird hobbies or extracurricular stuff. Like literally like this morning, I interviewed somebody who writes law law book or like, how do you help other people to understand some really particular topic differently?

Like he shouldn't do that. Nobody asks him to do that. It doesn't really get money out of it, but like, he's weirdly curious about that. And like, these kinds of people are.  Often what you need, because  if you have some experience in a startup or some other, and you have had success, then that doesn't really mean that you're going to be successful here right away.

Most of your experience, I would say is somewhat useless. Because there's so many things, what will happen and the decisions, and this is in particular, this company market and customers, what you need to relearn. So ability for you. Or like drive to learn these things is incredibly crucial.  The other thing is kind of the skillset behind it.

So if you're saying that you have done something, then like prove me like, what is this exciting thing, what you have done? And sometimes like, it doesn't need to be in the kind of realm, what they're doing right now. So I think in Lightyear, we have been more. Trying to hire the like a world class people.

So most of the people we have are like ex Robinhoods ex Wise. Like people have proven already, but have like lots of drive. In Wwise, I hired a person who I think he had like small business selling math books. Incredibly smart. And you can see that somebody has teach themselves math on the level that they're able to teach it to other people and build a business on top of that and have a best seller math book, which is.

Weird thing for you to have and you can see that that person has to go through some stuff and thinks differently. So I think that's the most curious thing in my head. These people often get far.  

I love that. We, we, we totally think about that all the time. Episode one, which where I'm a partner and we invest at pre season seed and. 

We think about people, iconoclasts, people who've done like, you know, challenging convention, people who just satisfy their curiosities, act on them. People who've worked in very different industries, have very weird hobbies, like, you know, diplomas in violin, and then. worked in three different industries and jump out of planes in their free time.

It's these kind of big, big minded people.  

Yeah, I think that's because none of this stuff is easy. And you are  self inflicting pain yourself somehow. And means that.  You have something what drives you forward on that. And and also like this kind of shows where the curious mind around it. So, yeah, I think  most of the life, if you want to do something different, it's a bit painful, so you have to have a track record for that pain already.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And Martin, we're getting towards the end now, but I do want to ask you a couple of questions that we always ask and. The first one is any future unicorn predictions. I don't know if you do any angel investing or whether you come across companies at the preceding seed still, but who, who do you think we should have our eye on as the next unicorn apart from light?

Yeah,  

it's interesting because I do occasional investments, but like literally the first angel investment, what I did became the unicorn.  That was Verif uh, Verif is doing um, ID verification KYC checks and whatnot, and incredibly successful. It's actually a weird story where the Verif's founder, Karel tried to get a job at TransferWise and we had such a messy situation that we couldn't take somebody from you just directly from university and uh, he took our homework. Figured out the problems, what we have, and went build like literally the business around that and the incredibly smart guy.  Uh, Weirdly enough, he's now investor in our business as well.  Again, comes back to the kind of community and keeping people close to you. I don't know, like, I think recent. A couple of years I've been like so busy building light years.

It's like hard to think about. I did one cool investment into open banking uh, startup called Montana, uh, which is I think index is also in their main investor there. So they're doing pretty well. But I mostly invest in super early stages. Just to,  if you have smart people with massive drive and  Like, let's see what's going to happen from there.

So it's more of a trying to support them in a business than investing, because I do believe that if you want to be successful in investing,  this has to be your full time job.  it doesn't happen randomly.  

Martin, you should quit while you're ahead. I mean, one, two investments, one unicorn.

That's, it's a good ratio.  Um, and then the other, the other thing I want to ask you about is if you were to have a dinner party and you can have three guests and they can be dead or alive, anyone anyone at all. 

I'm a big fan of like reading about people's lives and biographies, how they have decided to make things. Um, I think like one of the most interesting ones was story about how Nike got started. And again, this one of the stories, which is like outrageous that it's going to be successful and they have just like too much willpower to make it happen.

But like. Finding like, what is the drive for you? How do you think of like, because you didn't have any technology or any like strong advantage there, like how do you make this happen? And  if you have thought about like global scale There's some guy at some point in life decided that the most war ridden countries in the world, in Europe they should unify and create like European union, which is many times, like, if you're looking into the history, like most insane thing, there's like, all of these countries have been in a war in each other in one way or another.

 and now they're going to unify. So like, how do you come up with that idea and how do you make it happen? A lot of people can have wild ideas, but how do you actually make this happen? Because a lot of things need to happen somewhere in the behind the scenes to get all these people at the same page and actually sign the contract at one point.

So I think these are like most curious things in my life.  

So are there specific people that you would invite who? 

Who's the Nike founder? Phil Knight, I think  was the Nike founder. I think like maybe like in a somewhat like boring, obvious ones, like Mark Zuckerberg, which is, we can like or hate Facebook, but nobody has ever built such a dominant product in a world that has like so many users. And what's going on there?

Like, how do you. How do you go from being incredibly successful to the next order of magnitude like they have been doing it? So yeah, I think this is interesting.  

Awesome. Martin, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast and we've learned an awful lot from you. Um, We've gone deep on a couple of topics and we've covered you know, your, your mission for European domination in financial markets, which is really exciting.

And. Everyone who can access it should, should try light. Yeah, that was fantastic product. So, thank you so much for all of your insight and your time really enjoyed it.  

Yeah. Thanks Hector. 

    That's it for this week Thanks very much for listening To stay up to date with the latest episodes, please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform We also have a newsletter called reading unicorns which is another great way to get every episode direct to your inbox Please tell your friends about it and engage with us on social media