Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology
Riding Unicorns is the go-to podcast for anyone interested in venture capital and high-growth startups. Hosted by VCs James Pringle and Hector Mason, the show explores what it takes to build and back successful tech unicorns.
Each episode features candid conversations with top founders, operators, and investors—unpacking the strategies, challenges, and insights behind scaling category-defining companies. From fundraising and product-market fit to hiring, growth, and beyond, no topic is off-limits. Whether you're a founder, VC, angel investor, or just curious about the world of startups, you’ll find valuable takeaways in every episode.
Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology
Scaling from startup to £70M+ funding in 16 months with Paul Anthony, Co-founder of Primer & Colossal
Paul Anthony is the co-founder of Primer, a rapidly growing payment orchestration platform with over 200 employees and more than £70 million in funding from top-tier investors including Seed Camp, Balderton, Accel, and Iconic. His journey began as the first employee at a FinTech startup (now called Depay), followed by a stint at PayPal's Braintree division, before founding Primer to solve the complex payment infrastructure challenges he witnessed amongst enterprise merchants. Paul is now also a co-founder of Colossal, an innovative new venture that leverages AI and LLMs to help digital goods creators build customised commerce experiences through a prompt-based interface.
Key Topics Discussed:
- The Payment Orchestration Insight - How Paul's experience at Braintree meeting enterprise merchants face-to-face revealed the need for a unified payment infrastructure layer that didn't exist in the market
- Hypergrowth Challenges - Scaling Primer from a three-person team to Series B funding (nearly half-billion valuation) within just 16 months, whilst building a robust enterprise product during COVID
- Hiring Philosophy and Culture - Paul's approach of interviewing 20-30 people for every hire, treating "autonomy as a requirement not a benefit," and maintaining a "we're not a real business yet" mentality to drive innovation
- Product Development Approach - The importance of building POCs and technical spikes to understand how products "feel" rather than just look good on paper, especially when serving enterprise customers
- The Colossal Vision - Paul's new venture described as "Lovable for commerce," using AI to help creators build sophisticated customer journeys without technical knowledge, targeting the £400 billion digital goods market
Tune in to hear Paul's fascinating insights on building payment infrastructure for enterprise clients, navigating hypergrowth whilst maintaining product focus, and his bold new vision for democratising commerce through AI. This episode offers invaluable lessons for founders tackling complex technical problems and scaling rapidly in competitive markets.
