One on one with Wagestream CTO Portman Wills

In this episode of Fintech Thought Leaders, QED's Head of Early Stage Investments Bill Cilluffo speaks with Wagestream CTO and co-founder Portman Wills.

Tune in to learn:

[1:07] An introduction to Wagestream, a super-app for frontline workers.

[2:28] How Portman thinks about his North Star -- the concept of a social enterprise business that helps those who are less fortunate but still pursues a profit.

[6:10] How moving schools 14 times in 12 years helped shaped Portman’s independence and resilience. 

[14:02] The Wagestream origin story – the moment Portman and his co-founder learned about the concept of earned-wage access and why they knew it was a problem they wanted to tackle. 

[20:36] Why Portman’s trip to Notting Hill in 2017 framed his perception of how people change their social calendars based on their pay schedule.

[23:07] Validating Wagestream’s theory that workers would want to be paid on their schedule – at hundreds of restaurants, ice cream trucks and boutiques in the shadow of Windsor Castle.

[27:00] Getting unexpected market research by cold-calling the UK government directly. 

[30:42] Forks in the road – the one thing Portman got 100 percent correct from Day 1.

[33:46] Over-indexing on how popular their product would be at launch. Just because it is a no-brainer, it doesn’t mean every B2B enterprise company will want to sign on the dotted line right away.

[37:49] The ability to take complex problems and distill them down to the one core question. The importance of solving complexity by minimizing inputs. 

[41:18] Get comfortable with failure. The entrepreneurship journey is never easy and never linear. Get knocked off the horse, get back on.