Shadowing Practice: Inside the Future of Payments: Adyen CEO - Learn English Speaking with Video

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So we say winning is more important than ego.

We have very strongly a culture where the whole company wins and the whole company should celebrate that.

There's nobody who can just say like, hey, that was me.

We have to do it as a company.

Welcome to another session of Talks at GS.

I'm Cliff Marriott, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Peter van der

Dos, who is the co -founder and co -CEO of Adyen, one of Europe's leading fintech companies.

Well, thank you for having me.

Thank you for coming, Peter.

So you've built Adyen to transform the payments landscape.

The company has grown from a startup in Amsterdam to a global company with operations in six continents

and a market cap of $45 billion.

You have two decades of experience in the payments industry before founding Adyen.

You were co -founder and chief commerce officer at BitBit, which was acquired by RBS in 2004.

Let's first just dig into your origin story, the Adyen origin story.

The company is actually named, I guess in Dutch, is Start Again.

What did you see in the market that gave you

that idea to start a new company? the original idea was

that we had this payment company which was a layer over existing bank network

so we were partnering with acquiring banks who would run their systems

which connected to the payment methods like visa mastercard or local method

and we worried at the time how long we could run such a model being dependent on being

so dependent on banks so that was the reason why we sold,

then I agreed to stick for two years with the company.

And then after those two years, we saw that there was so little innovation that we thought like, wow, there is an opportunity.

But when, if at the moment that we sold, if you would have asked me to sign that I would never work in the payments industry,

I probably would have signed it because there were no plans at all to start again, which is Atien in Sranam, a Suriname language.

But at the time, you also could, as a non -bank, become a direct acquirer for Visa and MasterCard.

And we thought, wow, we can basically build a system which takes away, which does all layers in one and then get to a higher quality.

And at that time, the assumption was that acquiring systems are boring.

And then we felt like, no, if we really invest in it, you can make a difference.

You can make a difference in acceptance rates.

You can make a difference in performance.

There is an opportunity.

So what was the process like leaving RBS?

Did you just leave one day, start up the next day?

Did you have the idea?

I left exactly after two years as agreed.

I think you could read that contract both ways.

If you agree to stay for two years, you also agree to leave after two years.

And then I went on sabbatical to Brazil with the whole family because I thought if I don't do it now, I'll probably never do it.

So we lived on a small beach.

My main goal in life was to get bored, to get that feeling like, hey, I'm on the beach and I'm really, really bored.

It took a while before that happened.

And then my co -founder called me and he's like, maybe we should do something again.

And how quickly did it take for it to start to take off?

you felt like you had something new you had something

that was working and maybe what was that secret spark at

that point in time with hindsight it all looked like plain sailing

but it was really really hard because we did something

which i wouldn't advise to any other person starting a company

usually company starts with with working with merchants with the detail

that large companies don't care about and from

that you sort of shape a product and then you slowly move up market

but what we were doing is we were building a system

which outperformed but the small merchant didn't care because

if you do 10 transactions per week

and it's five percent better you cannot measure

that the large ones cared about it

so as a startup we were dealing with large merchants

so in 2008 i was talking to amazon hey what about this

and of course amazon then doesn't say like yeah why don't you do brazil

and mexico for us that takes time yes so it took us a

while to find a company which would roll out globally and it turned out to be my city deal

which was from the somewhere brothers oh yeah okay they were uh

they were very good at doing american concepts uh in europe it later got acquired by groupon Yeah.

so then we had group on as a merchant and they were

so fast in rolling out that they really needed the payment company to keep pace

and that helped us with volume and at certain point

that was more than 50 percent of volume of the company then after

that things became easier and very quickly we had many large customers

and we didn't have that dependency anymore on a very small group of merchants.

And you do the credit processing better.

So when I first started meeting you,

the key differentiator was we will basically allow for the merchant to close more transactions out of 100 than the competing company.

Was that the key driver of your success in terms of building the company?

Yeah, we could provenly do that, which is pure authorization rate. So

if you buy something online why does your transaction gets uh gets turned down

it's related to running fraud systems how do you make sure you don't do false positives

because it's not just about authorization rates in transactions

that you send in but it's also identifying what looks like fraud

but it's not typically in those days it were the flower shops

that were suffering because it were always people from abroad

that were ordering and then it all looked not aligned

because the origin of the cart was different than where the

person was ordering the flowers was sitting was different than where it was being shipped

so that's a part of the business

which of course totally got disrupted by ai yeah

so we are each

and every transaction currently runs through ai to be very exact

in flagging fraud to be very good at also allowing transactions

which in a rule -based system would look like fraud

and another component that got added to it is um least cost routing

merchants became way more aware that there are some payment methods

which might be a bit riskier but have lower costs and

when do you offer them and when don't you offer them

so least cost routing became a thing and it's also sometimes value dependent

which method works well fixed fee method

if you have a high value then that's of course cheaper

100

and for a low value the other way around

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so the business became more complex

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so now you're doing 900 billion dollars of transaction processing per

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year as of last year your clientele includes tech companies like spotify facebook Netflix, eBay, et cetera, et cetera.

104

What propelled that growth from starting off with my city deal

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and then moving into those big merchants and then to the business that you have now?

106

We've always been very focused on what we do.

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We don't interact with consumers.

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We only help merchants.

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We are invisible.

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Many of you might not know us

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and we want to be in the background we are very deep on a single problem

112

which is helping merchants to accept consumer payments

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so i think it's a combination of the focus in

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and having the patience to go very very deep into a

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product where a lot of the companies around just wanted to build a shell over what's already there

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and make a quick win and a quick splash

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and we were actually intrigued in really trying to solve the

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problem rather than than blowing up a balloon as you would

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say how did the business grow with each of the merchants

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we started to have traction with the out of our u .s office with u .s companies

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but we didn't get their u .s business

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so you would do a european business

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or a latin american business for u .s for u .s brands

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and then typically only after getting traction there we would also get us domestic traffic

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but we measuring merchants by legal entity that we work with

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so for us an uber could be measured by a legal entity in europe

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so then we flag it as european traffic

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and not as the the head entity of the company

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so that's how it works you can win traffic in countries

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so winning the customer is not related to where you have the traffic in the most simple culture

131

you have one team that wins and then one team

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that celebrates and at the end therefore we have very strongly a culture where the whole company wins

133

and the whole company should celebrate that

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because you win as a salesperson in the u .s

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and its account managed maybe uh out of uh out of the netherlands

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or out of france um that is more complicated than

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if it's all on the national level

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so we have uh it requires a culture where you really share your winnings together

139

and where you cooperate very very intensively together

140

you cannot work with small units we're going to get to culture in a second

141

because i think that's one of the very very unique things about your company.

142

Let me go to your IPO in 2018.

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That was also a critical year in terms of banking license, expanding the product suite.

144

As I observe Adia and you, it has been about simplicity of focus on certain products.

145

Has it been difficult to scale to new products away from your core?

146

How has that gone?

147

For us, if you look at the IPO,

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it's a logical step for highly regulated business and as a financial services company we have banking licenses

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so to also have the regulatory pressure of the public markets

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that all sort of fits together so

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that wasn't a huge the a huge difference if you look at how the market is evolving

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of course we now have more products than at the time

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when we were more a single product company for us at the time it was online payments

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and in -store terminals if you now go to say a citizen m you see our terminals

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if you go to nike you see our terminals

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so we're both online and in store and make

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that work together right now we have extended that to financial services

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so loans small loans to mid -size merchants um card issuing

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so you see that the portfolio gets wider over time

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and we use our banking licenses to do

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that small merchants we don't sign up directly but through platforms

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so we support platforms in in signing up many small sellers

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so if you go to a yoga studio

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that yoga studio will be on the platform and then if

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that yoga studio has our terminal

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then people say like wow why did you sign up my logo yoga studio well

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we didn't sign it up we signed up the platform on

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which the yoga studio runs

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so we need to be able to onboard large amounts of smaller merchants

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and we need to give them services because for such a yoga studio

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if your if your coffee machine breaks maybe you want a loan of a few thousand

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and that's exactly what we can do

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because we have all the data we can do the assessment

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so for us that's very effective to to give a loan there because we can do it at a relatively low cost

175

Where do you think you are on that journey?

176

Are you 10 % of the way there in terms of expanding products or a little bit further?

177

No, we are early on that journey.

178

But we have all the building blocks to do it.

179

So I would more say we're very well positioned to expand there than that we currently totally capitalized on that.

180

That's great.

181

I want to get to that.

182

Maybe that's a good segue to the next question.

183

I mean, the payment sector has been highly consolidating over the last few years.

184

So a number of companies that you sold your previous company to,

185

those types of companies, the old merchant acquirers have merged and spun out and bought things.

186

You have been steadfast and focused on your platform.

187

Do you see more consolidation in the space and are you happy with your kind of focus on your platform?

188

I tend to look very much at our own company

189

and to talk to our merchants to hear what's the next thing on their journey and take inspiration from that.

190

So we don't implement what they need, but we look at the common denominator and that's what we implement

191

so that you get a scalable business because

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if you fall for the trap of custom -made solutions at a certain point you cannot help all your merchants

193

because you're veering off your strategic path but

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if you listen to okay this is a problem

195

that this merchant has which is

196

if we solve it for this merchant we also solve it for others that's the way we go about so

197

if you ask me for a view about what do you

198

think is happening in this industry our focus is on the new the new players

199

they have a small part of the market

200

and the vast vast majority is still with the incumbents

201

so our focus is let's make sure

202

that the delta between what we can deliver

203

and what the incumbents deliver is maximized so that we are the one

204

that everybody's moving to of course we have about a third of the company is engineering

205

so that means that we by now have a large group of engineers working on this

206

so yes as a smaller company it's more difficult to compete with

207

that we've been very very disciplined in not going through acquisitions

208

so we have one platform one stack so our overhead is way lower than

209

if you compare that to other companies who went through acquisition processes

210

and are constantly into migration processes now so let's get into kind of innovation

211

and ai what is changing in the payments landscape in terms of how people are buying goods

212

and how are you adapting to that

213

There are a few trends in the payments and what you see is that merchants all became very,

214

very educated on payments.

215

So companies are increasing their standards and are increasing measuring how good you are, which is both an opportunity and also,

216

of course, something which we're always up against.

217

There is a huge scale, so there is way more than when we started

218

if you look at now that the the deal size

219

that we have access to is is enormous there is a demand for other services

220

if you want to

221

if you want to win in this market what we do is we talk about the online world combining

222

that with the physical world

223

there's an endless need for really understanding your shopper being able to identify who it is

224

and being able to identify do i have in my shop now somebody who's a recurring customer

225

or a first -time shopper having that history at hand

226

and being able to give a customized treatment to

227

that shopper on the spot that is still the holy grail

228

that everybody is investing in makes sense anything about payment methods i mean has

229

that started to change i would say people will want to hear about crypto for example being used

230

The payment methods which are in demand for the large merchants that we have are not in the area of crypto.

231

In countries which are very unstable, then that makes more sense.

232

Whereas now it's a complication if you add crypto to it.

233

So there has been no demand from our merchants at the moment.

234

So our merchant group is large international, often listed companies.

235

Yeah, that's interesting.

236

Having spent some time with Adyen, you're not the type of company that goes and talks a lot about AI,

237

AI, AI, and all the great things you're doing.

238

I also suspect under the hood there is quite a lot going on.

239

You mentioned it briefly earlier on about how AI is involved in every one of your payment kind of approvals.

240

There are a few areas which are intriguing.

241

And so for one, all transactions for us run through AI to optimize for authorization rates,

242

to optimize for cost, to identify potential fraudsters.

243

So in that sense, we are a huge AI user.

244

A part of the business that's really different and which I find complicated is that for anti -money laundering,

245

anti -terrorism financing

246

so the whole kyc part of course there we use a lot of ai as do the fraudsters yeah

247

so there's there's a bit of a competition going on there

248

where the old rules to make a fake password is quite easy with ai

249

so a traditional check like send me a photocopy of your

250

passport might not be as useful anymore as it was in the past

251

so whilst that that's a game changer because think about it

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if we sign up a platform they could have 500 000 sellers

253

so you have to bring 500 000 sellers through kyc

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if you can do that in a highly automated way uh

255

which we can that's that's an enormous game changer in uh in in functionality

256

what i do hope is that the european regulators also uh keep up with

257

that pace because

258

if they there has been a case in the netherlands where

259

a neo -bank was fighting over whether they still should ask

260

somebody who opens a bank account what the intended use of the bank account is

261

that might be in an AI age not the best check and maybe a little outdated.

262

So it requires also for the regulator to really understand what you can do with AI

263

and to understand how to keep the pace with where the business is going.

264

Great.

265

So let's move into culture.

266

And you mentioned some of the things already on culture.

267

When we first started meeting, you talked about hiring people with a certain type of skill set and culture,

268

and the fact that the founders and then I think the management team have to interview every candidate.

269

How important was that to building the culture that you have now, that hiring formula?

270

We're actually still doing that.

271

So every employee

272

that is hired somewhere goes through a final interview with a few people out of the global leadership team

273

and the idea is as a manager

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when you're hiring you're solving for a problem and it can be

275

that you are very busy and you think like hey maybe this person is

276

six and a half on the scale from one to ten

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but i want to add that person to my team

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that at least i'm less busy from a philosophy point of view we see

279

that as a deterioration of the level of the team

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and therefore the attractiveness to hire the next person

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because you want to play tennis with the top players

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and not with uh with the other league

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and that's part of the the fun that we promise that we give to you if you work for Adyen, a high density of quality people.

284

So in a final interview, it's nice because you get to interview a person, but you don't directly feel the pain.

285

So it's easier to hold the high standard and to make sure that you don't dilute on that.

286

That's the idea behind it, that you have more an outside, more an independent view on is this a good addition?

287

Is the motivation right?

288

so that's why we do it to keep the culture

289

and how much of that is personality fit cultural fit versus brains effectively

290

or is it a combination you don't get to a final interview

291

if you didn't if you didn't make it through your case to your coding test

292

so that means that you are that you are likely a smart person

293

so what we are testing more for is for the cultural fit and things.

294

If you look on our website, you could find Altian Formula.

295

And that are things, cultural things that we hold people to.

296

One of the things is we expect you to be more focused on winning as a company.

297

So we say winning is more important than ego.

298

The reason is we are in so many countries.

299

And as I was just explaining, sometimes you win H &M, you win them in Sweden and they roll out in the US.

300

So there's nobody who can just say like, hey, that was me we have to do with as a company.

301

So I was going to ask about the Adyen formula.

302

You have a global workforce in more than, obviously more than six continents, but then with 115 different nationalities.

303

How much of your employee base is based in Holland versus externally?

304

And then how do you keep the culture the same?

305

Is it really that hiring process or is it a continuous cultural investment that keeps that culture going?

306

We have a little bit less than half in the Netherlands, I would say.

307

And so the Netherlands is still very important because that's where the majority of our engineers are.

308

We do a number of things around that culture.

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In every assessment we look at cultural fit.

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But we do various things.

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We have everybody together at least once a year

312

to make sure that those global teams see each other not only over Zoom, but also face -to -face.

313

But there are slight interpretations of it because, of course, an office, I mean,

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even the San Francisco office is slightly different than a New York office.

315

And each office is within its own cultural boundaries.

316

I don't expect that we have a single culture.

317

That's not a realistic ask.

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So what are the big things that you're looking forward to for both Adyen

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and for the sector in general over the next five years or so?

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I think the next big thing is capitalizing on the global element of our business,

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on the opportunity that we have with having everything in one place.

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Because of that, we can build a lot of products which will help us in the next phase, in the phase where the market is going.

323

So that's actually what I'm looking forward to.

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And I think that right now we are very well positioned to harvest on all the decisions

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that we took in the past.

326

Great.

327

Well, that sounds exciting.

328

Really appreciate you coming, Peter.

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And thank you very much for all of your great answers.

330

All right.

331

Thank you.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Inside the Future of Payments: Adyen CEO”. This video has 331 sentences and 3931 words to shadow. The speech runs for 23:57. The speaker talks at a natural 164 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
merchant noun	/ˈmɝt͡ʃənt/	A person who traffics in commodities for profit.
transaction noun	/tɹænˈzækʃən/	The act of conducting or carrying out (business, negotiations, plans).
hire verb	/ˈhaɪɹ/	To obtain the services of in return for fixed payment.
yoga noun	/ˈjoʊ.ɡə/	Any of several Hindu or Buddhist disciplines aimed at training the consciousness for a state of perfect spiritual insight and tranquillity; especially a system…
founder noun	/ˈfaʊ̯n.dəː/	One who founds or establishes (a company, project, organisation, state, etc.).
solve verb	/sɒlv/	To find an answer or solution to a problem or question; to work out.
fraud noun	/ˈfɹɔːd/	The crime of stealing or otherwise illegally obtaining money by use of deception tactics.
terminal noun	/ˈtɚmɪnəl/	A building in an airport where passengers transfer from ground transportation to the facilities that allow them to board airplanes.
acquire verb	/əˈkwaɪɚ/	To get.
formula noun	/ˈfɔː.mjʊ.lə/	Any mathematical rule expressed symbolically.
pace noun	/peɪs/	A step taken with the foot.
expand verb	/ɪkˈspænd/	To change (something) from a smaller form or size to a larger one; to spread out or lay open.
dependent adjective	/dɪˈpɛndənt/	Relying upon; depending upon.
entity noun	/ˈɛn.tə.ti/ [-tʰi]	That which has a distinct existence as an individual unit, often used for organizations which have no physical form.
seller noun	/ˈsɛlɚ/	Someone who sells; a vendor; a clerk.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
sign up verb	To add a name to the list of people who are participating in something.
go through verb	To travel from one end of something to the other.
look forward to verb	To anticipate, expect, or wait for, especially with a feeling of approval or pleasure; to be excited or eager to.
roll out verb	To deploy or release (a new film or software, etc.); to launch (a product or service), especially in a gradual fashion across multiple regions.
run through verb	To summarise briefly.
blow up verb	To explode or be destroyed by explosion.
fit together verb	To put the appropriate parts of (something) into a whole; to combine pieces that go together to create a finished object.
keep up with verb	To manage to remain beside or just behind someone or something that is moving away from one.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

Did you just leave one day, start up the next day?
Did you have the idea?
We've always been very focused on what we do.
We don't interact with consumers.
Where do you think you are on that journey?

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	you've built · has grown · We've always been
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	be joined · was acquired · is actually named
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	BitBit, which was · company which was · again, which is

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 43 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, you're, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: transaction /tɹænˈzækʃən/, authorization /ˌɔːθəɹaɪˈzeɪʃən/, innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, acquisition /ˌæk.wɪˈzɪʃ.ən/, traction /ˈtɹæk.ʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: entity /ˈɛn.tə.ti/ [-tʰi], authorization /ˌɔːθəɹaɪˈzeɪʃən/, complicated /ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/, innovation /ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/, acquisition /ˌæk.wɪˈzɪʃ.ən/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like merchant, transaction, hire.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Inside the Future of Payments: Adyen CEO - Learn English Speaking with Video

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實戰練英文｜黃仁勳：你們要加油，不然我會拿走所有機會，然後我會變很有錢｜德國沒有下一個機會了｜投資德國高峰會｜長文、註解、大字版、中英對照

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View From The Top with Roelof Botha, Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

Key vocabulary in this video

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Sentences worth repeating

Grammar in this video

Pronunciation to watch

How to practise with this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?