Introduction

On this episode, Ashu is coming to you from London, where he’s spending the summer. His guest is Christian Owens, founder and CEO of Paddle, a B2B payments infrastructure platform. Christian is a fascinating fellow. He dropped out of high school at 16 to run his first software company, which he scaled to $5 million in revenue — not a bad lemonade stand! He started his second company, Paddle, when he was 18 and, in the ten years since, he’s scaled it to a unicorn with over $55M in revenue. In this wide-ranging conversation, recorded in person at Paddle’s offices, Ashu and Christian cover everything from Christian’s brief and wondrous career, to how to scale an enterprise company when you’re starting as a complete novice, to what the current economic environment means for “growth at all costs.”