Building a 100 year company with Ross Chaldecott, co-founder of Kinde

Lessons from Atlassian, Campaign Monitor & Shopify

How to approach building a 100 year company

Raising a $10.6 million seed round

Why the best designers are the best problem solvers. 

Kinde’s ambition is a reflection of its co-founder, Ross Chaldecott. Ross believes every founder has the potential to unlock the future of human achievement - and that everyone should have the tools and the opportunity to participate.

Ross breaks down this ambition with vivid clarity in our interview today, explaining the power of “have[ing] the biggest purpose that we can possibly imagine, which is to create a world with more founders”.

Episode Highlights from Ross:

“One of the big things (I learned at Atlassian, Campaign Monitor and Shopify) and we think about it a lot at Kinde as well, is building a 100 year business. It forces you to think quite differently, you stop thinking about how we solve just today’s problem, you think about how you solve it for the long term.”

“One of the things that Mike and Scott and Atlassian did so well is giving people that space to experiment, to play, to learn, to try new things, and to fail if they needed to. Failure was never something that was penalised, failure is just a sign that you tried something different.”

“The reality is that it takes time to build a platform… And so what we cannot do is kid ourselves that we are gonna build out the whole platform because that's when we're five years in the garage, never getting any customers. And so what we've had to do is look at the product that we're building towards and say what is the most sensible, smallest piece that will bring exponential value to our customers, and go and build that thing.”

“The best designers that I've ever worked with, spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about and understanding the problem and understanding the solution. And then a very small amount of time on actually executing that… The best designers are the best problem solvers.”

“How can we enable as many people as possible to go out there and change the world? Founders are fundamentally the people who are changing the world.”

Learn more about Kinde here