Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology

S6E14 - Henry Irish & Donald Gillies, Co-Founders @ Passfort (acquired by Moody's)

Sep 6, 2023

Henry Irish and Donald Gillies, Co-Founders of PassFort, discuss their experience as CEOs, building a strong founder relationship, navigating the impact of COVID-19, and life after the acquisition. They also share their plans for their new venture, Platformed, and reveal their ideal dinner party guests.

47:14

Episode guests

Donald Gillies

Henry Irish

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Episode notes

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Size the VC's check relative to their fund when taking investment and consider the alignment and commitment from the investor.

Take a holiday after closing a funding round to recharge and reflect before diving into execution.

Deep dives

Three Pieces of Actionable Advice

1. Size the VC's check relative to their fund when taking investment. Consider the alignment and commitment from the investor. 2. Take a holiday after closing a funding round. Give yourself time to recharge and reflect before diving into execution. 3. Spend money conservatively and be disciplined. Avoid unnecessary expenses and focus on maximizing value creation.

Introduction

2min

Post Passfort Plans and Startup Clichés

2min

Building a Strong Founder Relationship

15min

Navigating the Impact of COVID-19: Pivoting to Profitability and Managing Cash Flow

3min

The Importance of Transparency and Problem Solving in Startup Culture

4min

Life after the Acquisition

15min

Ideal Dinner Party Guests

5min

Donald Gillies and Henry Irish are the Founders of PassFort. They enable regulated financial services companies to rapidly onboard customers then manage risk and compliance standards throughout the customer lifecycle. Their integration model enables them to ingest datasets from any provider and interoperate with any system. They help you build a data ecosystem, with pre-built connectors to more than 25 data providers and growing.

PassFort’s dynamic orchestration of customer due diligence (CDD), enhanced due diligence (EDD), Know Your Customer (KYC), Know Your Business (KYB) and anti-money laundering (AML) workflows puts the weight of compliance activity on automation and our risk engine, not your customers.

Donald and Henry join James Pringle and Hector Mason in this episode to share about creating a strong relationship foundation as CEOs, building a high performance culture, life after acquisition and exit, & so much more.

Don't forget to like, subscribe and follow The Riding Unicorns Podcast on our socials and your chosen podcast platform to stay up to date! 🎙️🦄

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