Andrew Davies

Paddle

Experimentation (zero-to-one projects, including AI & automation)
Ecosystem (building relationships & supporting the early-stage startups)
Evangelism (using research and data to help empower others to succeed)

Chief Innovation Officer

Paddle takes care of the payments infrastructure for thousands of SaaS, AI and App businesses, so they can run, grow and scale internationally without headaches. It's your all-in-one billing, subscription & tax compliance platform - saving you time, money and precious dev resources. 

Deloitte Tech Fast50 for 5 years in a row. Over $95m raised. And only just getting started.

Chief Marketing Officer

Ninety CIC

Ninety is an innovation consultancy, delivering a proven and award-winning new change model for large insurers. We help clients including Zurich, RSA, AXA and Allianz and have won 'Consultancy of the Year' 2019, 2020 and 2021 at the Insurance Choice Awards.

Non Executive Director

YOYABA

Helping the leadership team as they build a leadership position in the DACH region for their Revenue Marketing services.

Advisor

Scalewise

Scalewise connect ambitious tech start-ups with a diverse pool of revenue experts. They inject businesses with the exact support they need at every stage of their growth. Core services include hourly coaching, project delivery and fractional leadership.

Scale Expert

Lands Road Ventures

Advising, investing and problem-solving with various high-potential startups.

Director

Sales Impact Academy

I teach the Account Based Marketing Course and the Analyst Relations course - both for B2B Marketing Professionals. Sales Impact Academy is a community and live learning platform for sales and marketing teams. They have created a unique combination of peer-to-peer learning and support coupled with live classes that will ensure you are creating and executing a world-class go-to-market strategy.

Account Based Marketing & Analyst Relations Coach

Optimizely

Led the brand, demand and digital teams at Optimizely (formally Episerver), following the acquisition of the startup I co-founded. We integrated 5 acquired businesses, rebranded the whole company, and saw considerable sales and pipeline growth through this period.

VP Corporate Marketing

Idio

Responsible for:
 - As CMO, devising and implementing marketing strategy (ABM, Analyst relations, Content, Demand Gen etc)
 - As co-founder, building the team & making Idio a healthy and fun place to work
 - Making tea/coffee & whatever else needs doing

We sold to www.episerver.com, backed by Insight Venture Partners

Co-founder & CMO

thrudigital

Leading creative strategy and sales activity

Co-founder & Business Development Director

Deloitte

Strategy and Operations Consulting - Technology & Media Business:
Projects including BBC/Siemens and internal RFID project

Auditing & Assurance - Technology, Media & Telecoms:
Clients including WPP Group, Vodafone Group, Epson Ltd, Trinity Media Group

Scholar / Associate Auditor / Associate Consultant

Serving the team at Paddle as Chief Innovation Officer. We provide the complete payments infrastructure for 5000 software companies. We have been ranked in the Deloitte Tech Fast50 for 5 years in a row, have raised over $295m, acquired ProfitWell, and are only just getting started.

Previously was VP Corporate Marketing at Optimizely (formerly Episerver), after it acquired Idio. My role included leading global strategy and activity for Demand Gen, Brand, Digital, ABM and Content. The business serves 8000 customers and is named as a leading Digital Experience Platform by analysts including Gartner & Forrester. During my time at Optimizely, we integrated 5 acquisitions, rebranded the entire company, and grew pipeline and sales significantly.

Previously, I co-founded Idio, serving as CMO and also leading people ops. We built the business from scratch to a market-leader in B2B personalization, with a superb team spread across offices in NYC, SF & London, and enterprise clients including Pegasystems, BNY Mellon, Fitch Group & Pure Storage. Through this process, we raised $13m+ from institutional investors including Notion Capital as well as a range of angel investors.

I sit on the board of Ninety, an agile digital transformation consultancy which serves the insurance industry, including Generali, Axa, Allianz & Zurich. What's even more awesome than its client-base is the fantastic team, and the fact it is a social enterprise. 90% of distributable profits are given to alleviate global poverty.

I also advise, support & invest in early-stage startups, helping them problem-solve around proposition development, people & teams, marketing strategy, funding, and whatever else helps them go from zero to one.

At university, I co-founded a few startups, including thrudigital, a social-media development agency based near Kings Cross in London, which served clients such as Universal Studios, No. 10 Downing Street, and Sky. 

Early on, I gained early experience with large multi-nationals such as Deloitte (working in Audit and Strategy Consulting for Tech/Media/Telecoms clients) and Reuters (Equities Analyst). 

I graduated with a First Class Honours degree from Warwick Business School. Also studied on exchange at Richmond University, VA, for 1 year.

I love the startup process, have a bias for action, enjoy working with people who solve problems rather than create them, and relish being the underdog. My career goal is three-fold: always to be the dumbest person in the room, always to be on the side of the disruptor, & always to encourage, serve & value those around me.

Paddle takes care of the payments infrastructure for thousands of SaaS businesses, so they can run, grow and scale internationally without headaches. It's your all-in-one billing, subscription & tax compliance platform - saving you time, money and precious dev resources. 

Deloitte Tech Fast50 for 5 years in a row. Over $95m raised. And only just getting started.

Loving the diversity of startups at Slush. From massively-scaling businesses like Lovable, to just-launching-now startups like Kima. 

Highlights so far: 

- Lucy on how Airwallex took 9 years to get to $500m ARR, and then just 1 more year to double to $1bn ARR (just, wow...)

- Luc and Nathan on training the next generation of basketball players through computer vision (yes, I braved the AI feedback, demonstrating my somewhat rusty shots)

- Sven on empowering millions of musicians globally (loved seeing your office, and my son will love the branded plectrum!)

- Goran on their slow and steady approach to bootstrapping the best colouring app on the Appstore (Apple Design Award, Editor's Choice etc)

- Alexey on building the future of football analytics for clubs, fans and players worldwide (so cool to see the global ambition - especially ahead of next year's World Cup in North America)

And of course catching up with conference friends like Claire, Asif and Christopher!

A few more meetings, then I'm running home!

Chief Innovation Officer @ Paddle. Formerly @ Optimizely; Co-founder @ Idio (acquired 2019). Startup advisor & NED. Here to help you scale your software business better, faster, safer.

Imagine growing from $1M to $200M ARR in just 12 months... Only to be dragged through the news for not paying VAT (yet). Last week, that happened to Lovable.

Stories about VAT usually don't get much attention, but this one did, probably because it had all these ingredients headlines are made of:

1) Entrepreneur vs government debate
2) US vs EU debate 
3) Fair vs not fair debate

The discussion mainly revolved around these 3 themes, but I think these are the wrong discussions to have.

If you're a founder, the real enemy is not the government, not a news outlet who goes after their country's fastest-growing company, not another founder who might be able to get away with less compliance headaches because they're in another country or because they're a hyperscaler…

The enemy is the complexity of selling globally.

Every software company is now born global. So from day 1, you're selling into 10, 20, 100+ countries. Each one of them has the right and necessity to decide who pays what tax for which products, and how consumers are protected.

As a founder, you just have to accept that and start solving it as early as possible. Otherwise, the complexity only compounds as you scale.

The good news is, this is a solved problem.

I’m not talking about hiring an entire team of tax consultants and setting up entities in each region. I’m talking about 2 much superior alternatives:

✅ AI-driven tax tools like Sphere and Anrok which automate a lot of the complicated tax computation and remittance in many regions (but notably, don’t away the liability of compliance). They also don't help with the growth side of the equation... local payment methods, currencies, conversion optimisation, retention mechanics etc. 

✅ A Merchant of Record like Paddle, where you shift that entire burden of compliance to someone who makes it their business model (and we have 6,000+ AI, PLG SaaS and consumer app companies that do this to grow faster whilst staying compliant everywhere)

Tax compliance doesn't have to be taxing. We’ve seen these challenges a thousand times, and solved them once and for all. 

I'm cheering for Lovable and all builders, and at Paddle, we'll continue with our mission of handling the-not-so-fun side of business (billing & tax compliance - as well as growth mechanics like localisation, conversion and retention) so the builders can stay focused on doing what they're best at, building.

Heading to Slush next week — one of the most electric gatherings of founders, builders, and investors anywhere.

If you’re a consumer/prosumer founder scaling globally, I’d love to connect. And if you are investing in them. 

I’ll be there meeting teams who are figuring out how to turn breakout traction into sustainable growth across markets. Looking forward to seeing Marcus, Kamil, Tendai, Flyer One Ventures, TRMNL4 and many more.

And I'm looking forward to the stage content, including Runway, Lovable, Lago, Guillaume from Anthropic and Jan from n8n!

Drop me a message if you’ll be in Helsinki — always up for a good conversation about product-led growth, global expansion, or the next wave of consumer innovation.

My last trip to India showed me why its AI/SaaS community keeps outperforming ecosystems with more capital, and more favourable home markets…

1,000 founders in the room last March at SaaSBoomi in Chennai…

The founders I met had deep technical talent and weren’t waiting for perfect timing or funding… 

They are building, shipping, and selling before many others have agreed on their ICP. They learn fast because constraints force clarity. And they treat global distribution as the default, not a late-stage expansion plan.

And the community density is unmatched. It’s a national operating system where founders share numbers, playbooks, and hard-won lessons without ego.

So next week, I’m over in Bangalore for AIBoomi ☀️ - a focused event for AI founders! I’ll be looking forward to learning from those I meet... and getting a break from the cold spell in the UK... ❄️ 

Thanks to Aditi, we will also be hosting an evening reception - on the Cross Border Playbook - along with AWS, Xflow and Efficient Capital Labs. We have a few spots left. 

Let me know if you want to meet!

Shoutout to Avinash Keerthi Denada Manik Anand and many more!

Great to meet some of the Czech (and Slovak) founder community last night in Brno. Thanks to Whalebone for hosting, and Customerscore.io for picking up the bar tab. And of course, Leonard Eldić for organising.  

So good to hear the opportunities and challenges first hand… and to enjoy the famed Czech humour 🤣😅

We dived into the GTM models that are being broken and reshaped as we speak: product market fit… market channel fit, channel model fit, and model market fit. And shared stories of focus and speed. 

Everyone founding here has serious grit, smarts, and a massive desire to scale outside of their borders. 

🛫

On that note… now onto Berlin for Business of Apps 💪🙏

A reception and fireside chat this evening, a workshop tomorrow… and several customer and prospect meetings in between.  

If you are around, do come say hi!

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If you're a founder of a 'habit-forming' app, Q5 (late Dec to mid Jan) campaigns will probably outperform your BFCM campaigns.

In Q5, fewer advertisers compete for attention (lower ad costs), while users are looking for new devices, gift cards and setting New Year's resolutions (higher user intent + usage + retention).

(e.g, in Q5 2024, Health & Fitness apps saw 38% increase in installs and a 10% rise in sessions)

If you play in the habit-forming realm (productivity, learning, fitness apps, accountability buddies)...

Try these 3 things:

✅ Test creative and messaging while CPMs are soft and attention is cheap. It’s the lowest-risk time of year to break your own playbook.

✅ Tighten activation, not just acquisition. Q5 users arrive with intent - make sure your onboarding and first-use loops catch it.

✅ Rethink monetization. Web payments and off-store checkout are giving apps more control - better attribution, higher margins, and 85% more reachable users.

The momentum you create in Q5 spills over to the entire next year…

So if you want the best possible 2026, Paddle’s Lucas Lovell and RevenueCat’s Ed Shelley are hosting a workshop on Nov 18th, unpacking how best app teams approach Q5.

You know where to find the registration link 👇

Even before Slush is done, next week is ready... 

If you are building a cool product in Czech Republic, come join us in Brno for this meetup - Vojtech, Lukas, Zuzana and Leonard :) 

Otherwise see you in Berlin for Business of Apps later in the week!

One thing I have learned about AI-native founders... 

... they are massively overwhelmed.



Everything is possible. How do you prioritise?

The foundations change every week. How do you build to last?

The competition comes from everywhere: partners, customers, incumbents, upstarts. How do you position?

I have massive respect for those building right now. There will continue to be some big winners. You only have to be right once. And of course, some big losers. Those who get overtaken, left behind, or that build for a market that never really existed.

So what I really love is meeting AI-native founders that have found a way to cuddle with the chaos. To balance life and family around the state of constant flux. To hustle all day long, but down tools when its over. 

I learned the hard way, early on, that its about the journey - not just the destination.

It feels like things are moving faster than ever. Yet I'm pretty sure this will be the slowest they'll ever be. 

I've noticed that most AI-native founders I meet are excited. And overwhelmed. The best have found good ways of dealing with that. Sustainable ways... at least for a year or two. Many haven't, and are just chasing the next update - paranoid that others will beat them tomorrow.

So after another week, with yet more shifts in the market, competition, customer behaviour, underlying tech... I keep coming back to a simple mental model to stay steady through it:

1. Anchor. Keep the core steady: our purpose, the customer value, relationships, cadence. When you establish what won't change, you are better able to handle anything that does. 

2. Sense. See what’s really changing. Look beyond our category. Try and imagine where things are going, not where they are. Run small experiments instead of big bets. The goal isn’t certainty... it’s clarity.

3. Adapt. Build for movement, not stability. Tiger teams, short-term initiatives, fast feedback. The companies that win aren’t always the best predictors, but they are usually the fastest learners.

Change isn’t slowing down, it’s compounding. So, I want to learn how to move through it with rhythm, not resistance.

​>​>​> At Slush this week ​>​>​> Chief Innovation Officer @ Paddle. Formerly @ Optimizely; Co-founder @ Idio (acquired 2019). Startup advisor & NED. Here to help you scale your software business better, faster, safer.

Martin Mignot (Partner at Index Ventures, $15B+ under management): "It's easier to be born global than to become global"

This is a perfectly articulated version of the shift Paddle has been seeing and supporting for years.

In the last 5 years, startups went from thinking 'just hire some sales reps in US and move upmarket'... to most successful software companies being global from day 1.

A lot of factors made this possible. Covid paved the way for remote work. The rise of PLG. The state of permacrisis pushed businesses to look for 'pockets of growth' in markets that grew when their home markets stagnated. And AI has enabled consumer-grade innovation that is distributed globally from day 1.

Martin goes deeper and suggests there's 4 archetypes of (particularly) US expansion:

1) Telescope 🔭 

Marketing-led, global from a single location in Europe; U.S. is large but not dominant. For instance mobile or gaming companies.

2) Magnet 🧲 

Sales-led, U.S. is dominant; European start but quickly shift heavy presence to the U.S., senior leadership often relocating. Example: enterprise software / cybersecurity.

3) Pendulum ⚖️ 

Balanced presence, U.S. ~half the business, Europe remains important; build teams on both continents. Example: companies like Spotify.

4) Anchor ⚓ 

Europe remains dominant geography; U.S. presence grows but remains secondary. Senior execs stay in Europe. Example: fintech firms that build big in Europe before going serious in the U.S.

This week, this is what I'll be diving deeper into at Slush.

On Wed, Guillaume Princen (Head of EMEA at Anthropic) and Fabian Hedin (Co-founder of Lovable) will unpack how global demand shaped their earliest product and GTM decisions: 

- how to recognise real pull
- how to design for scale from day one
- how AI and PLG are changing the “when, where, and how” of going global

I hope to see you there. Until then, stay global!

A few observations about AI-native startups:

1) Speed is everything 🚀 
Building never stops, features are launched in days/weeks (not months/quarters), decision making is lightning fast (no committees, minimal/flat hierarchy)

2) Distribution-first 📢 
Most are building on the same foundational models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) = deep innovation isn't their moat, so they've nailed distribution: positioning, founder brand, ecosystem marketing, community building, superior UX…

3) Most are product-led 👩‍💻 
They're building for the end user, there's minimal friction, product growth loops fuel a lot of growth (virality, sharing, collaboration loops)

4) No buy vs build dilemma 🗑️ 
They'd rather use whatever's out there than reinvent stuff. There's just no time/focus for that. 

5) Industry outsiders 🆕 
Most AI-native founders are first-time founders without industry experience, attacking old problems with new tools and fresh minds.

6) Founders are exhausted 😫 
Everything moves at the speed of light, so the founders and their teams are always on. We may not like 996 (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week), but it's the reality for most of them.

7) PMF is a treadmill 🏃‍♀️ 
Trends and markets shift faster than ever, so AI-native companies keep reinventing themselves every few months. Product-market fit is no longer a finish line.

8) Born global 🌎 
They're going for the global market from day 1. The old playbook of gradual market expansion is no more, and they're figuring out tax & compliance implications of selling globally from day 1.

9) Pricing/monetization got the attention it deserves 💵 
Negative gross profitability is real because they're all paying 'rent' to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc, so pricing became an important growth lever and a lot of them introduced value-based pricing models.

------

AI-native startups are also the fastest growing segment at Paddle.

We've already remitted millions in taxes on their behalf, and have never seen such market pull for the Merchant of Record model (tl;dr we handle all payments, tax & compliance for them, no need to build a payments stack from scratch).

It seems like they're adamant about staying 100% focused on the main thing and ignore/delegate everything else.

H/T to Kyle Poyar and High Alpha for the slide from last year's State of SaaS Benchmarks Report.

If the 'easy website builder' category alone is a $2-3B market, how big could the Vibe Coding category become?

Building sites is an obvious use case, but people vibe code so much more:

- Home planners
- Client portals
- Internal tools
- Chrome extensions
- Native consumer apps
- Calculators
- Product prototypes
- And a lot more…

And that's before we get onto proper enterprise use cases. Microsoft say 30% of their new code is AI-generated, and a quarter of the last YC cohort said 95% of their product's code was AI-assisted.

(Lenny shared some great examples, check the comments 👇)

I've loved playing around with a few ideas (no, not sharing here, yet...), and internally at Paddle we've built prototypes of new ideas, calculators, decision-making tools...

So if vibe coding apps…

1. Can steal a solid market share from existing categories (like website builders)
2. Can be used for many OTHER use cases
3. Can create a new market of their own by anyone with 'an app idea' to build it…

Vibe coding's gotta become 100x the current market size of what existed before.

A $50B market at least. Probably a lot more. 

Oh plus it is the 2025 'word of the year' as announced by Collins Dictionary... that's gotta another $B...

taplio

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