5 years aye4fin – What a ride!
Letter from the Founder
At the end of 2015, I was in a challenging position, considering my next step in life: Either joining a corporate or becoming an entrepreneur. After careful consideration (first contracts made it not exceedingly tricky) and some family alignment (“I’ll give you six months to make this work”), I made my decision.
Before even hiring the first employee or accepting first clients, I had already set some fundamental principles in stone, which are still indispensable today:
- Purpose: Our daily work needs to fulfill a purpose; helping clients and people. Just making money should not be enough.
- Challenge: Never shy away from a challenging and ambitious topic. So, we set our focus on payments and platforms.
- Look beyond borders: The world is more extensive than just one country, one perspective, or one expert.
- Exit: Having a drink and a laugh in twenty years of battles and adventures with partners and friends is the ultimate exit-scenario.
- Humility & curiosity: There are so many great people, industries, and technologies to explore. We will stay humble and curious to learn, understand, and transition our knowledge into value for our clients.
Looking back at the past five years, we have been privileged to support great and challenging clients. We were (and still are) fighting hard for them to design new value propositions or improve their performance to be the best it can possibly be. We have created treasured and trusted partnerships. And, unfortunately, also had numerous painful experiences with plans falling through or simply not working out as intended. Nonetheless, or maybe especially because of some negative experiences, the organization has developed into a team of great minds with focus and a clear game plan.
Planning for the future is an interesting exercise as we know that roughly 50% of all scheduled activities will fail in some way or another. I am just not sure which half. Even So, we promise to resume to
- Fight for our clients.
- Be our own worst critics to continue learning, experiencing, and failing.
- Look at fascinating trends and develop offerings that will help our clients implement them.
- Start new and exciting partnerships and activities.
- Work hard in a healthy environment where failing is embraced as long as you do not run against the same wall several times.
The world is full of challenges that need to get solved. Therefore, I will leave the final words to Jeff Bezos: “It’s always Day One.”
Let’s work and get challenges solved, just as we did on Day One!
Kind regards,
Tom
ride!