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3 1/2 years at @Adyen has flown by. You may be thinking - huh, Ady-who? Are they ad tech? Are they even listed on Robinhood? After years of minimal SV Twitter hype, I’m here to pull back the curtain
When I started there was only one @TechCrunch article on a sly Dutch unicorn working in enterprise payments. I knew not of payments, but as an economics nerd who loves the mechanisms of global trade (hmu to chat container ships) I was hooked fast.
I was surrounded by some of the most knowledgeable people in the payments space, who are eager to share what they know and collaborate on new ideas no matter your tenure or title. Sounds cheesy af, I’m aware - but it’s the reality
I started on the account management team helping a few of our global enterprise merchants scale to new markets and new methods. With their growth, I got to visit a dozen+ cities, meet local colleagues, test out payment methods in person.
6 months in I was allowed to rebuild a part of our billing engine that I thought could run better, for someone with zero technical experience this was huge. As we grew, we built out a product org in SF and I transitioned to focus fully on ecom optimization
The company moves a million miles an hour, across global time zones, seamlessly. I used to comb release notes every week, and it’s really not possible anymore to catch everything our teams build. You’ll hear a whisper of an idea one week and 2 weeks later hear that it’s piloting
We have a single payments platform, and more impressively a single culture that permeates our 20+ global offices. That’s special. Coming off a Swedish startup, I knew communication style was important to me. Read: Stockholm was not a fit.
“We talk straight without being rude” is a core part of our formula (the last part sometimes gets forgotten by Dutch developers), I’ve learned to drop my Californian compliment sandwiches in favor of speedy directness
I still get excited when I pay using one of our terminals, because it reminds me of the morning after my birthday three years ago when I was unspeakably hungover after a night out with colleagues in Amsterdam and I learned how to board and trouble shoot them. Painful.
It’s a special place to work, and we’re only scratching the surface in terms of merchants served, countries supported, and crates of Heineken consumed on Friday evenings on our HQ rooftop in Amsterdam
More hype: we do waffle breakfasts once a month for birthdays. AND OUR OFFICE MANAGER GETS CINNAMON ROLLS TO WAFFLEIZE
And no, even we aren’t in agreement with how to pronounce it internally. I go with “ADDYen”
