The Culture Architect: Scaling People, Culture & Leadership
In this episode of the HR Leaders Podcast, we speak with Alexander Nicolaus, Chief People Officer at Paysend and author of Startup Culture, about how to intentionally design company culture as you scale.
Alex shares how his global career shaped his approach to building high-performing teams, why behavior-based hiring beats resumes, and how Paysend is scaling to a billion-dollar business with a lean team. He unpacks how founders can embed values from day one, use clear behaviors to drive performance, and avoid retrofitting culture after growth creates dysfunction.
🎓 In this episode, Alex discusses:
Leadership habits that prevent burnout and sustain long-term resilience
Why founders must build culture early rather than fixing dysfunction later
How startups can intentionally architect culture using behavior-based principles
The global people journey and lessons from leading teams across Europe and Asia
Building talent systems with bar-raiser hiring, performance management, and equity incentives
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Alexander Nicolaus 0:00
Everybody always says, look at past behavior to indicate future performance. Like interviewing, we interview on strength based, I don't look at what someone's done 10 years ago, because in the industry, we are working in something you've done 10 years ago is not relevant, right, to a certain extent. Of course, if you went to good university and you went to good companies, it should have clearly gives me an indication that you know you've done something well, but when you interview with us, it's a reset button, because I want to look at your strength and what are you going to bring us going forward, just because you've done something in the past, are you still going to be hands on going
Alexander Nicolaus 0:42
forward? You
Chris Rainey 0:47
Hi. It's Welcome to the show. How are you? My friend? I'm very well. Thank you for having me. How was the lovely, rainy UK weather? I think
Alexander Nicolaus 0:53
there's always a nice reality check when you're in England that you're expecting the summer that it never really comes, but it goes very quickly. How long you been in there? You're used to it. Our shows by now. I've been in the in the UK now for over 25 years on and off. Wow, you haven't picked up any of the UK accent or anything. I try to keep the German accent when I can, although my wife, who's from Hertfordshire, oh, really, yeah, my wife's English tries very hard to English size my English.
Chris Rainey 1:19
No, stay. Stay how you are, stay how you are before we jump in. Tell everyone a little bit more about your background and the journey to where we are now.
Alexander Nicolaus 1:26
Well, first of all, thanks for having me. Chris, so Alex Niklaus, as you probably can tell, German accent. That's because I was born in Germany, but I was brought up in France, where I spent all of my childhood and my schooling, which is why I always joke around in my football odds at any competition between Germany, France and England. So good old, you choose how whatever is working best. You're like, okay, absolutely, yeah, I've got three different flags. I've got three different shirts, but deep down near German. But grew up in France, where all my family still lives. You still don't have so you don't have a French accent whatsoever, either. No, that that disappeared quite quickly because I went to an English school France. Oh, I see that's where I think that the whole confusion comes. And I'm not a linguist, it's just I happen to have picked up the three languages because I was sort of living and breathing. You speak all of them fluently. Well, you know, I think if you spoke to a French person that wouldn't say I'm fluent, and the same for my wife, who says, you'll be fluent. Yeah. So no. So grew up in France. My whole family still lived there, but I went to an English school, which then led me to study in the UK. Ended up at Reading University, and from there on, you know, a couple of things happened. I met my now wife very early on. It's actually our wedding anniversary today. Oh, 18 years she forgot, so I just want to put that on on record. Oh,
Chris Rainey 2:47
my God, listen, listen, I've never said this on air, but you've just opened up. Me and Natasha, both of us forgot our 20 year anniversary, and the only reason we found out is Natasha's aunt did a post on Facebook and tagged us in saying congratulations. And we both just looked at each other, and I was like, oh my god, I'm glad we both forgot, because that could have been a disaster.
Alexander Nicolaus 3:11
But I think, I think two things, right after 15 years, I think you're allowed to forget. But there's also two dates. There's, I think these, the civil ceremony, and then there's the wedding itself. So I always remember the civil ceremony, which is today, which then always prompts my wife to, then remember, Oh, of course, I will, you know, give you a card in four days time when it's the wedding. So, you know, it's a little joke that goes on for us. But yeah, I met Nikki very early on, just after university, when I started working in the city, and because she works for the foreign office that sort of started our journey in a lot of different countries around the world, before I went into consulting, and then with big corporates and then with startups. So that's sort of the very high level, but I can go into
Chris Rainey 3:55
where was the intersection of your journey in HR,
Alexander Nicolaus 3:59
oh, that's a good question. So I think that came much later on. You know, when you leave university, you try to be as useful as possible. So you end up, you know, going into professions, either a graduate scheme, or you go where there is in a research because that's what you really learn at university. You learn how to look at data, analyze it, and then come up with reports, right? So I started really becoming a researcher within consultancy firms, and that I did in London, and then I did it in China for a couple of years. But I think the underlining theme there was I always wanted to be around people, and I think doing pure research or analytics or being just around finance and numbers is something I was quite good at, but not excelled in, and it wasn't something I was enjoying. So this is where then I decided really to take down the path of becoming a search consultant. And that's where I spent my first part of my career doing executive search, because I really enjoyed the interaction with it, with candidates, and also there was a lot of selling. And deep down, you
Chris Rainey 4:55
know, some of the best sales people I know, that's why they started. I
Alexander Nicolaus 4:59
like, you know. The end, you sell something. You know, I was selling a job, and now I sell an organization. So I think that, you know, the the love with people and the interest with that came from the beginning of, you know, just following some some ideas around, you know, where my best at and what do I enjoy, which I think is a piece of advice I would give anyone when they start their career. But the consultancy, you have to make a choice. And if you want to become a partner, it goes very much down to, you know, bigger sales, and you need to commit to a location, and I think you need to commit to an industry and a sector, and you need to do that over 20 years, and then you become partner, and then you're quite, yeah, I'm not saying I would have made that, but that's the career choice you you had to do then. And because I grew up in lots of different countries, lots of different languages. We were living in China, for me, that was too linear, and I always felt like I wanted to maybe go to the client side. So actually, one of the clients we were working with said, why don't you come in house? So that's where my in house career started with Willis, and then with Barclays, and then with djago Land Rover in China and finishing off with Accenture in Singapore. So there's a good stint of eight years with big corporates doing international roles, but all in house. So I was just taking my skill set from a search consultant in house, saving the money, but also for me to get more sort of interested in, okay, and what's HR. And there's more than just hiring. Clearly, there's the whole portfolio overall within that. And then once I ended up at Accenture, I had a bit of an allergic reaction not to the company itself, because I think, you know, all of these big consultancy have a place in the world, yeah. But for me again, the the other cross point came again between, do I want to continue this and then end up maybe a global head of TA, because that was the end point you would get to. Or do I try to go wider and figure out total rewards, performance, development, analytics, tech stack within HR, employer branding ATS systems? Because if I did that, perhaps I could move into like a CPO role, but it would have taken me much too long to make that career change, you know, after 15 years of working, if I wanted to stay in the corporate world. So this is where I said, Okay, I'll do 180 not 360 just 180 completely different direction. And that's when I joined grab in in Singapore. And similar to yourself, they started in an industrial estate, a little bit where they had all their their their their offices. Because it wasn't so much about the the outside, it was was what was happening inside, which is so important, right? Yeah, because there's a lot of times where individuals look too much at what looks good from the outside, but forget what's really important, right? And I think that was the first lesson I learned with grab. Is it wasn't so much the brand wearing suits, and it was the individuals themselves, 100% both co founders from Harvard. They could have worked anywhere, but they saw a niche in the market, a problem that needed to be solved. And if they can do it, surely, you know, I can also join them. And I think what they convinced me with is that, you know, you can really choose the pace at which you want to grow your career, and if you want to learn all the different sort of elements of you know? HR, it's really up to you.
Chris Rainey 8:03
Yeah, you don't have to wait five years. Let's see your point or like, because what you if you did that in a corporate setting, traditional, large corporate would have taken you so long, right, correct? Whereas in a startup, you're straight in the deep end and you're managing all of those things exactly straight away. And that's kind of what happened to me when I joined or started our business. I'm like, I am CFO, I am it, I am market, I am sales. And all of a sudden, what would probably taken many careers, or many you know, to obtain that information you kind of learn the hard way. You jump out of the airplane and build your parachute on the way down, which is and also, so it is so it's so exciting, it's hard, but it's so so motivating, exciting to do
Alexander Nicolaus 8:46
that. And I think if you put the exciting before the hard, it works, right? Because it is hard, it's not easy, yeah, but if you don't like it and it's not something you want to do and it goes against your grain, then you're not going to enjoy it and you want to appreciate the startup experience. Whereas for me, I was ready to do that, and now, being at pace, and which is my third startup, you know, I'm no looking back. I don't regret the decision of having left the corporate side of things and moved into, well, not my third startup, but at the time, it was at grab, you know, you really did pick up some of the areas of the portfolio. Then circles life called circles. Now hired me, my first head of people and cultural So again, another progression, and then pace, and hired me as the chief people officer. But it was all sort of a progression, but it happened over, you know, 10 years, which would have taken me, I think 25 years, probably I had done it elsewhere. I'm probably not qualified to be a chro for a big what
Chris Rainey 9:39
is qualified to a whole new conversation. Yeah, isn't certifications. I can tell you that qualified
Alexander Nicolaus 9:45
from an from an outside in, yeah, I might feel like I could probably, you know, take on those challenges, right? But from an outside in, there's probably certain career tracks you have to do to become the HR, right? Whereas, you know, Chief People Officer is again a different terminology, I think, which. Highest, probably more to startups, or to, you know, Series A, to Series C. That's not being adopted, though, by larger it has actually, right? So that's, that's lean methodology. The you know, they're basically taking a lot of the learnings and lessons from startup into large degree, be move quickly, be more agile, etc. I wanted to touch on your the multicultural background, like, how has that shaped your worldview and your your how you approach the role of
Chris Rainey 10:29
CPO? So
Alexander Nicolaus 10:30
I think if you are, if you want to become a CPO, if you want to work in HR, I think your ability to, you know, to connect with other human beings, you know, in person or through online channels, the ability to have the understanding of what they want to say, so the listening, the empathy, to really understand what they're looking for in the workplace, I think you get that by being exposed to a lot of different scenarios, and having been in China, having grown up In Europe, having covered the US and Latin America, Africa, not so much, but Asia. For over 10 years, I think you got a much better understanding of the questions to ask in order to get the right information, because everybody looks at it differently. And also, I think the listening part is really important, because the more you're able to listen and really understand what they want from work, from their role, from their career. I think the better you can shape advice, and I think the better you can design the organization that you're working for and make sure that the individuals you hire and want to retain and develop thrive in that environment. But if you don't have that understanding, or you don't have the skill set to ask the right questions or to you know, to understand what they want in order to be their best at work. Makes it harder. It's not impossible, but makes it harder. So I think, having been exposed to so many different ways of working, different cultures, different religions, even, I think that put me in good stead, you know, to at least ask the right questions and to listen properly. Yeah,
Chris Rainey 12:00
is there? Because a lot of leaders I speak to when they first jump into a role, they go on that sort of listening tour globally, is there? And they, many of them, tell me, there's no way to to shortcut this. It takes time to listen. Build trust with leaders. Make sure you show up on on site, whether it's a manufacturing site or I literally spoke to sutra the other day. Ai, I'm in the middle of a mine, because she went down into the mine to really understand what is the work that those workers do in the mine as well, to truly connect. You know, what advice would you give to HR leaders on how to practically go about doing what you're describing? So I
Alexander Nicolaus 12:39
think it's probably a two prong approach. One, clearly there needs to be time in person, but I think you should not underestimate the the capability of the world we're in and using the digital tools available, right? Whether it's video recordings, whether it's slack, whether it's monthly town halls or weekly interaction, I think both have to run in parallel, because the reality of travel and and going to places is an opportunity cost of extracting work, right? So I think you need to figure out where your time is best spent, where your biggest hubs are, where perhaps the biggest conflicts or the biggest issues on you start there first, right? I think if I went to a new organization, I wouldn't fly to, wouldn't go to the area where everything works well, because for that, you know, I can see there. I can do that. I can do that later, right? And I can use a different types of communication for those individuals. But I would go there where I think there's the biggest sort of, you know, challenge, or the biggest rebuild. So I think you got to be quite careful and how you organize yourself. 100% of just going to two places, you'll become the individual who is never in one place. Because I think, especially in our world of startups, execution and delivering and still, still being hands on is very important, and I think that speaks louder than how many visits you do. Did that shock you the
Chris Rainey 13:59
because I speak to many CPOs. They weren't. They're not. They weren't fully prepared for how, how, how hands on they need to be. Oh, weeds, and that's why I
Alexander Nicolaus 14:06
didn't. I didn't. I was surprised by the question, no, absolutely not. Is actually what I preach. You know, for me,
Chris Rainey 14:12
because you went from that large, like corporate, because many of that like I spoke to the CHRO recently, from a 40,000 plus employee company, and went straight to startup, and she she quit after three months. And I said, You know what happened? Right? And she's like, I just didn't realize the amount of work, because she's so used to having a big team of teams that now she's doing payroll, she's
Alexander Nicolaus 14:35
doing hiring, and she's doing everything. And I don't think she was. I think a lot of leaders I speak to, they're not, they're not quite prepared to go. Then they've got the founders dynamics. There's a whole nother thing right to deal with. So yeah, I'll break I'll break it up in sorry, no, screw out, nowhere. No, no. There's two responses. Rather, the dynamic with with founders which, which was very different than working for a corporate line manager or CEO, and also the amount. Work. I think when you move into a leadership position within the startup, you become a servant leader, which means that the team doesn't work for you. You work for them, and it's your ability to get them to be motivated, for them to solve their own problems. Because if you, if you try to do everybody's role, it's not going to work. So clearly, there is a phase of debating, first three months, first six months, wherever you go, I think you got to be all in 110% right to set yourself up. And that comes in different flavors. But I think over time, it's about your ability to have your team, to be so motivated, right, to know what they need to do without you asking them to do it, that you then become the problem solver to for them, right? And you work for them. So I spend all of my time really solving challenges and problems, not just for my team, but for everyone in the organization. I might be the chief people officer at pace and but equally, I'm part of the exco, and I work across all dimensions of the organization, whether it's finance, whether it's marketing, whether it's engineering, whether it's risk and compliance, because as a leadership team another organization, we're there to make pace and successful. So you get involved in everything. And again, it's about helping others, you know, to solve their own problems, not to do it for them. And I think if you can't do that, and then, by design, it's very difficult, and then I can see in you, you will burn out because you don't have big teams. Yeah, you know, we have around 350 people at pace, and we've committed that we will never be over 500 and we will we're in line to achieve 1 billion revenue in four years time. So we want to get to 1 billion revenue dollars with 500
Chris Rainey 16:37
people. Wow. Why? Because by this, that's what everyone's going to be asking right now.
Alexander Nicolaus 16:42
Because by design, it forces you to think much harder about who you keep and who you hire. We only have 150 more headcounts available. It changes the whole view. It totally does everything, actually. So we want it. We want to get to, you know, we look at revenue per head count, not how much they have to generate, like a sales person, but we want to look at with 500 people. We want to yield 1 billion in revenue. Those 350 people we have now, there will be replacements over time, right? Because as the company grows and people might not be able to keep up, which is okay, but we're there to help nevertheless. But everybody knows this is how much head can we have left. So everyone you hire, please make sure that their bar raiser. That
Chris Rainey 17:23
changes our whole conversation, doesn't it? It does when you when you have that as
Alexander Nicolaus 17:28
because it allows you when you bring your individuals in, we adopt the Amazon concept a bar raiser, right? So anyone who joins Payson, yeah, it needs to be at least better than the average of the team. And we have similar process, but we have the pace and way we do it a little bit differently. But the whole idea is everyone knew that joins. Everyone who's in the business needs to be excited by that person joining. Because how do we learn? I'm not a big believer on learning and development tools, and we can come to that in AI for me, you learn through the new individuals who come in right, who really have a new perspective and who are going to raise the level at what we operate in, you learn much better from people than you learn from systems right processes is just the way of doing business.
Chris Rainey 18:10
The best lessons I've ever learned was, for example, in sales, was sitting next to the best sales people, of course, and shadowing, mirroring them, having conversations with them. That was better than any sales training. But I ever got,
Alexander Nicolaus 18:21
of course, and if you want to do a 4x revenue growth in four years time, in the in the multipliers we're looking at, and the hundreds of millions, you can only get there if you hire the best from the best, right? But then, so let's say we achieve that right, there will naturally people who won't be able to keep up. So as much as we look at hiring bar raises. We also manage low performance, and we're quite open with that. So if any individual doesn't hit the expect minimum expectations, you know, we try to help them to get back on track, but it's an open program that we have, and we've now come to a point where people even accept to talk about the times where there might have been under expectation, really? Yeah, and they go into that
Chris Rainey 19:04
psychological safety in the workplace when you have that approach, because we
Alexander Nicolaus 19:08
told them like we are people first organization, but we can't just keep individuals in the business who are not at least achieving minimum performance, right? So by design, you need to give them regular feedback, you know? So we have, by design lots of ways so an individual knows whether they're meeting expectations and if they're not, we put that on like date, like weekly one to ones, that was that look like. So weekly one to ones is Bau right? But I think on a monthly and quarterly basis, we have reviews where individuals know where they stand right through their line managers giving them feedback. It's not the official PDF performance development review, that happens twice a year, but we have sort of, you know, mid, mid review checks where individuals get nudges in terms of look. You need to recalibrate here, because, you know you are, you know, falling perhaps below minimum expectations. But that's okay, because we have plenty of examples where, and we don't judge why someone might it might be personal. Reasons it might be the wrong role, or you've been in the position for too long, right? Let's ascertain, is it because your skill level has dropped, and we need to help you with that? Is it a behavior thing? Let's also help you with that, right? And I think pace senders know that, and I think they're okay with it. Not all improvement plans lead to individuals staying. Some of them, you know, exit, but we talk openly about it. I think being really authentic about your culture is important. And
Chris Rainey 20:31
it also it sounds like, I mean, I can only imagine you're also talking about this during interview process. So people know what they're getting. They're signing up for
Alexander Nicolaus 20:39
interview process every month during the town halls. You know, it's messy of the culture. It is part of it is part of the culture. It's how we designed it, and it gets developed, developed delivered by myself and my colleagues, right? But it's in the way that's not, we're not trying to use the improvement plan to exit individuals like other organizations might, because they don't want to pay out, you know, certain redundancy plans. You know, for us, it's a genuine approach. Whereas we're very clear in terms of the growth that we want to achieve, we're very transparent that, you know, we want to make sure that we want to bring in the best individuals to join, and everybody within the organization needs to at least meet minimum expectations. So you could say there's 10% who don't meet expectations, and then there's 10% who are the new hires, and there's everybody in between. So a lot of time is spent with all the solid performers, all the ones who, you know, the 80% in the middle, so that we can then focus on real coaching and invest some money on that. But whereas in most
Chris Rainey 21:32
companies, they actually do the opposite, right? So you have higher performers, and they're like, actually, let's spend money trying to get all of these people up to the performance you want, and you're like, No, actually, double down and invest again. That's just part of the message, clear message that you're sharing internally, but that in order to have a performance first, then people first, at the same time, there's a challenge there, obviously, right? I mean, because it's, it's all so I'm assuming you and the team must have to be very clear on the KPIs. Yes, we're very, super clear. Because in order to have to list the work, people have to have very clear metrics about what does good look like. Totally. So every single role,
Alexander Nicolaus 22:17
yes, yeah, it's, it's been, it took us like nearly five years. I mean, I joined in 2020 it's been similar to yourself, a journey over eight years. You know, for us, it's been a journey over five years by design, you know, step by step. You know, we built it this way, but we're very clear on the OKRs. OKRs as our methodology. We have five company OKRs. We have our financial targets. These are shared on a monthly basis. Everybody knows exactly where we are, and everybody knows how their work impacts one of the five OKRs. Okay, we don't have OKRs in all of the teams, because I feel that methodology is too stringent to have it in all the lower sort of levels. So we have OKRs from an exco level and n minus one, but below that, everybody can use their own ways of measuring success in their teams. Do you empower the managers? Totally. Okay. We totally empower the managers. But at some level, we report back to the board and our investors. You know, we need to have these OKRs, and they're very clear, and we don't deviate from them. These are five, and these are the five we're doing this year, right? And I think by spending more time upstream, can you share some of them? I mean, they're down to some of our consumer business targets, some of our enterprise targets, some of people targets how we want to grow the network. So they're quite in combination, yeah, they're combination quite industry specific, overlaid with some financial targets as well. And then we have our, you know, PXE has people and culture have their own sort of, you know, own metric, but doesn't have to be put down to the key five, because otherwise there's too many, right? Yeah, but deep down, and we just had our latest engagement survey, and I think 90% plus of PACE senders know exactly what their role is in the organization, right? And it makes it much easier, because then you can really, when something doesn't go according to plan, you can really focus your time on that 10% and leave the 90% alone, which also allows us to do flexible working.
Chris Rainey 24:09
Yeah, that's another thing you mentioned when we first met. It allows you to have that flexible way of working. Is there? I can imagine, as someone in my previous company, I used to get quite frustrated when the company was saying, it's a nice way. I would be frustrated as a high performer that we would hold on to a lot of low performers, wait for years, and I would be like, Why is this person still here? Like in a nice way possible? It could be a lovely person, but it used to demotivate me, because I want to surround myself with, to your point, with someone who's going to help elevate me that I can learn from and like bounce off. Is there a sense within the culture amongst employees that they're part of something special, because, because of that, that we're holding ourselves accountable,
Alexander Nicolaus 24:56
of course, and that's why we've decided to only be 500 100 ever, because people know this is an exclusive organization to be in, but at the moment, there's only 350 of us to come and join pace in. Is hard, because we want people who are better than the ones we have to be part of your interview process. And so there is a pride and an excitement to be at pace. And engagement levels are really high. Our attrition is low. You don't need to be in the 1000s to achieve the financial metrics that we're achieving. You need so many people, when you don't have a design on how to get the best out of people, but if you have 350 people who are the best at what they do, and you've got the right org design, and they're firing in all cylinders, trust me, you can get amazing results if you have three times that number, I have so much more work. Because the more people you have in your business, the more issues you will have. It's the degree of separation, right? If you're on your own, you know at some point how much 100% you can do. There's two of you with your business partner, you know how much the two of you can do. But once you get over to the hundreds, you lose track of the of the yield that everybody can get right. So I think that's why the design and the process needs to be there to help you. So for us, everything is engineered in order to get the best out of that. And I'm not a believer. To tell individuals to work from nine to five. Who am I to say, Chris, you come, please start at nine. You might have kids, you might want to do a run. I much prefer you to come in at 1030 feel you've done the exercise you needed to do, and then do your the amount of hours you need. If you can only do six hours, you need to get home again to do some family life, then you'll have no problem joining a call at 9pm and even if your wife or your partner will be fine for you to join that call, because you've done other things right. But if you try to have a work life balance. It means you're trying to equal something out. Need a blend. Need a blend, absolutely right? Yeah, but the blend can only come if you truly enjoy the mission you're on. I mean, I
Chris Rainey 26:50
was up till 3am last night, and people were like, that's crazy. Why I was, like, so excited, because I'm building a new well being program that I'm working on, which I've been so excited to build. And like most people will be like, that's crazy. I'm like, I was, I didn't even know it was 3am because I was so in the work or so excited to do that. I don't know I came in today at 1030 because I needed some rest from that, of course. But I'm not going to limit myself. And I say this to shame early on when we because when we first started the company, we put those guard rails on ourselves. We carried those traditional ways into a startup, because I've been working out here for 10 years, and I remember saying to the team, just because you're here nine to five doesn't mean you're actually doing work right. Doesn't mean that you're adding value. Like, just because you're in the office, that doesn't equal outcome. Like, I remember, like, everyone looking at me with blank face, like, what do you what are you talking about? I was like, we're not paying people to turn up, and just because you're here early and you leave late doesn't mean you actually added value to the
Alexander Nicolaus 27:47
business. No value is added by delivering your accounts.
Chris Rainey 27:51
Yeah, that's what I mean. And like in the past, it was you were valued for turning up to AI to a location, which is kind of like I can imagine when my daughter's older, Robin, she's six now, I'm sure she would say, so wait a minute, daddy. People used to travel in nine to five every week, every day, like Monday to Friday, into an office to do work. It will be foreign to the next generation. That's how we used to do things, because it was carried over from the Industrial
Alexander Nicolaus 28:18
Revolution. Agree, but I think we shouldn't lose some track on having some human interaction, right? It just needs, oh, no, I want that basically intentional, correct? It needs to be intentional. Yeah, it definitely needs to be. And so we still have the FOMO events. So rather than trying to ask people to come into the office, we make sure that we organize things in the office so that people come themselves, yeah, and they realize that, you know, human interaction like we're having, that's why I wanted to come into the studio today. You know, is so much better if you can then online. And clearly, online has lots of benefits, right? But utilize those benefits, right? So if you're going to be online and working from home, maybe that's time when you do more reflection, more thinking work, yeah, whereas if you come into the office, try to do it, you know, when I go into the London hub, it's not to sit down in an office and do my calls, right? It's to speak to everybody there, right? And utilize, sort of my my skill set of listening to people how they are, how they feel, right? But I don't have to do that every day. If I do it once a week, that's plenty, right? And if I do it in all the different offices, that's plenty, right? And then I just compliment that with the online follow ups on that, right? But you got to figure out how you work differently depending on the channel that you use, right? And I think that mix is very powerful.
Chris Rainey 29:33
Yeah. I love the fact we just went down this rabbit hole, by the way, yeah, we didn't have any of these questions plan. This is great. This is exactly why this human like this interaction is important. Agree, tell us about the book. When, like, you know when, when, when? What was the inspiration behind the book? What inspired
Alexander Nicolaus 29:51
the book is my own little startup project, because it was an argument I had with my
Chris Rainey 29:57
wife. Course, that a lot of good things start. Yeah, although
Alexander Nicolaus 30:01
we didn't meet on an argument. But hey, but yeah. The point was, I, when we were living Asia, I kept complaining that in any airport bookshop that I went, I could never find a book on startups or culture. And my wife always goes, Yeah, of course, no one wants to read that. It's boring. She's not in she's the opposite. She's a civil servant. She doesn't she doesn't understand the world that I work in, but she knows it makes me happy. So you know, all good for you. So I said, but look, I could write a book, and she's got you would never write a book. You can't write a book, you'll never publish it. So, you know, that's like a challenge. That was a challenge. And so that was January 2020 and it was published in November 2020, so it took me, no way less than a year to publish the book, write it. Wow. And you self publish, or you publish with self publish, because at the time it was COVID. And also, I think with self publish
Chris Rainey 30:55
is even more of a challenge, because you had to learn everything about how you self publish, which is a whole another,
Alexander Nicolaus 31:00
which I guess is to my earlier point around it was my own startup project, because once you figured out that the why, how is easy, because I knew that I wanted a book want to prove my wife wrong. But secondly, in parallel, we had already decided that we wanted to return to the UK, having been in China and Singapore for over 10 years, and I didn't just want a CV, because I felt just sending a CV, having not been in the UK for 10 years, would get diluted big time. So if I can come up with a book that's a genius idea and send it to VCs, PES founders, amazing. I can tell them, hey, not only do I have a CV, but this is my playbook on why I think culture is important. And the little story behind it is that our current co founder read the book. No way. It worked, and it did work, and hired me at the back of it. Wow. So you go everyone. They got published in November 2020 and I started in pace, then in December 2020 who's it for? So it was actually for founders, in order to really make them understand and believe that if they invest in culture early on, it has a huge advantage later on, rather than trying to retrofit, because it tends to be called HR, right? And it tends to be more AI, administrative, compliance, a little bit and reactive. Let's get funding right? Let's get the marketing, let's get compliance, and then let's do but then I think if you do that later on, too many behaviors have already happened. The culture happens. Also. You've got some bad hires, well or good hires, bad hires. Things have already happened, but not by design. So sometimes you get lucky and it just works. But I think if you want to be have a method behind it and a design it's much better to think about it early on. And our co founder had that idea, you know, he really wanted to invest in culture and people early on, so it really resonated with him. So they had just closed series A that we were about to close Series B, and I was actually one of the first sort of exco members to join, and we've built the culture design or a playbook before. Really, we had our CPO and Chief Product Officer, finance marketing, that all came afterwards. So I think that was a key distinguisher, why I think pecent is doing quite well now, because it's five years in the making. So it was for founders. It was also for investors, because at the time, I felt maybe I can do more of an advisory type role coming back to the UK, so utilizing the book to maybe be a fractional HR leader, but I didn't even have time, because within four weeks of publishing, you know, I was already working for pace and out of Singapore in four weeks, pretty much, yeah, I mean, I got it to the right people. I got some early copies out to headhunters as well. So I sent it out to to key heads. That's an interesting way of doing it, by the way, and and I think, and it's fine, I'm not offended. I think most people haven't read the book, and it's a little bit of a secret there, right? I think just by going for the effort of writing the book, they
Chris Rainey 33:47
took the call, of course, yeah, of
Alexander Nicolaus 33:49
course. They take the podcast.
Chris Rainey 33:50
Kind of does the same thing for me. Like, people just take my calls because they see the podcast, and I'm like, Have you even listened to it? And, like, a lot of times they just, I don't think they have and they just take the call no 100% because I always say, how, like, how I've done 1000s of these calls. I'm like, what was your thoughts on the podcast? And then I can tell they don't. They know of it, and they see the following in this area. And
Alexander Nicolaus 34:14
the funny thing is, sometimes I do interview candidates for PACE then, and they go, Oh, I loved your book, Alex. No, you haven't. What did you love about it?
Chris Rainey 34:21
I made that mistake one time where I went through an interview and they asked me, you know, what's your favorite book? And I just said, some book. And they were like, what was the main takeaway I had already? I'm
Alexander Nicolaus 34:32
not offended. Yeah, my mom probably bought most of the copies anyway. So that's
Chris Rainey 34:36
what's the key like for the HR audience listening right now. What are some of the things that you share in the book that you think really will resonate with them, that they could use within their organization?
Alexander Nicolaus 34:47
So I think try to think more about behaviors and values. So Payson has been based and built on behaviors, not values, because values in a global, distributed workforce can mean many different. Things to many different people from different industries, if I take a value of integrity, would mean something very different to an investment banker in the US versus maybe someone in Asia, because integrity means different things, behaviors, if you are very clear about them, are things you can hire against which we do. So you know, a lot of our hiring process is based on behaviors that we want, would like to see in individuals, because we have seven cultural principles at pace and which are behavior based, and we use them in all of our decision making. So you links that. You link those cultural principles directly to behaviors. It's all based on behavior. You map that out in the interview process, yes, interesting because behaviors you can assess against, behaviors behaviors you can give feedback against, and behaviors you can develop. I can't develop your value of something. It's very subjective, but a behavior I can build on. Like we have a behavior of ownership that's not really a value. I mean, maybe some people call it the value, but we have another one, by the way, ownership, and it's a very clear behavior, entrepreneurial, totally. And we have all our job descriptions, all our job architecture, you know, every role within the organization at different levels. You know, we mapped out what ownership means at that level, it means something different when your customer service agent to someone who is a pace and leader, clearly, but it goes back
Chris Rainey 36:18
to your point. Now, everything you're saying is like further making me understand what my role is in the bigger picture, in the organization, what the role and value do I bring? And if
Alexander Nicolaus 36:28
you want to progress within pay, send, clearly, it's on impact and performance, but that's only 50% of your PDF. The other 50% is based on your behaviors.
Chris Rainey 36:37
How do you I wish I could I have to talk to you offline about something, because we feel they're quite that's quite a gray area, though. So how do you measure against that part behavior? Yeah, like, I mean,
Alexander Nicolaus 36:50
like, it's very clear. Like, we we mapped them all out, so it's very clear the kind of behavior that we want to see at different levels. And you
Chris Rainey 36:56
get, how do you assess for that, though, is it through, like, doing a 360 that that person's doing? Yes, like, what's, what's the
Alexander Nicolaus 37:01
way one on one, like line manager and individuals, then we collect 360 as well. But behaviors are tangible. You can really give examples on that, right? If it's just value, are you documenting that through we have our own sort of proprietary system in terms of how we collect, we collect, how we collect, okay, but I'll just throw in questions. We're interested in no no, because we share, but we these cultural principles. They've been with us for the last four years, so it doesn't happen overnight, right? But they're everywhere in terms of how we make decisions. They are on our Slack channels, on how we thank people. I'm having showed these cultural principles. You know that they are based against some of our decision, on some of the objectives that we want to work on? Right? We're high in integrity, right? We're high in achievers. We are, you know, customer first. Some of them might overlap with values, but for us, they're very clear. They're behaviors, because only on behaviors can you give someone a real example. Look, you know, you know that that project you've done, yeah, you know, you said there was an issue with it, yeah, I agree. But really, you should have dealt with that. That's not the level of ownership we want you know for your role. If you want to program become a pace and leader, for example, if you see a problem like that, you need to take ownership of it and close it. It's like, Ah, okay, I understand, right? So individuals really understand how they could progress because of their behaviors. It's also from a hiring point of view. It's very important from an upstream, sort of selection point of view, and we will only want to hire individuals to join pace and when they know about the kind of behaviors that we enjoy working with, because if you don't, we're not going to change, and that's okay. So pace and is not for everyone. I think it's an amazing organization that's extremely welcoming, but it's also a high performance Yeah, so it's high performance, culture, culture as the people, it's the mindset, it's the behaviors, values, to a certain extent, high performance of the productivity and the profitability. You put the two together, you know, we assess that with behaviors.
Chris Rainey 38:53
Do you as part of this is, is, and I've seen in other companies operating similar way. You have the approach of, you know, radical candor, yeah? And we in order to be able to,
Alexander Nicolaus 39:06
so I love all of these terminologies, you know, the ways of saying, the why, the how, you know, the world from Simon, and then, you know, the practical can there and so forth. We just try to package it a bit differently, yeah, because I think if, but they all mean the same thing. So obviously or not, feedback, but feed forward, it's the same idea, right? So we're just changing our performance and development review to be more feed forward, because I think if you meet expectations, then let's not spend too much time about the things you've done in the past, good or bad, right? I mean, we probably thank you enough for the things you've done well, but let's just look at, how can we double down on the things you're doing well? I think if you if you look
Chris Rainey 39:46
so important, by the way, because everyone still focuses on feedback. Why is that so important?
Alexander Nicolaus 39:51
Because why look backwards? And everybody always says, um, look at past behavior to indicate future performance. Like interviewing, we interview on strength. Based, you know, I don't look at what someone's done 10 years ago, because in the industry, we are working in something you've done 10 years ago is not relevant, right, to a certain extent. If you had, of course, you've been to good university and you went to good companies, it should have clearly gives me an indication that, you know, you've done something well. But when you interview with us, it's a reset button, because I want to look at your strength, and what are you going to bring us going to bring us going forward, just because you've done something in the past, are you still going to be hands on going forward? Because we have to your earlier point. We have a lot of 20 plus year experience corporate finance profiles who want to work in the FinTech because it's it's the cool thing to do. It's the new Yeah, but do you know how much hard work it is? You're going to go back 15 years in terms of the kind of way learn everything, yeah, on Learn to relearn.
Chris Rainey 40:44
Unlearning is really, I might explain, more difficult than than like I've I found in the past, it's like easier to hire someone who just has a growth mindset and to learn than to have someone re unlearn something is way harder it
Alexander Nicolaus 40:58
sounded, but it's very satisfying, because you don't just because you if you unlearn, doesn't mean you're unlearning what you know. You're just being open minded.
Chris Rainey 41:06
Yes, the word unlearn is not probably the best word, but
Alexander Nicolaus 41:11
in that context, right? To unlearn, to relearn, it's just you got to be open to individuals doing something a little bit differently and but we do want some of your input, right? We do want someone to have an opinion, but not to be stubborn about it. Takes humility, it does. And I think the ego is definitely hit in a small organization, because there's only, there's not many of us, right? And we have very good people working for us, yeah, at all levels, and there's no room for that, right? We're all part of the same mission, which is, makes it quite unique,
Chris Rainey 41:41
yeah? How do you avoid burnout in such a high paced, uh, environment? So I think I'm personally
Alexander Nicolaus 41:49
so, um, from a company perspective, it's really important to show progress. You know, I think you can't just expect individuals to work really hard for 12 months and then do the big reveal at the end. Ah, we've hit our targets, I think you need consistently weekly and in monthly and quarterly, show everybody the efforts, what they have yielded, right in all aspects, because that's really important, because if you leave it for too long, it's very hard to be self motivated. I mean, some of us may be at the more senior level, because we have equity in the business. You know, we're like duras or bunnies, you know, we're motivated all the time, right? Because we see the bigger picture. But you want to motivate everyone, because it's infectious. But for that, I think you need to be able to showcase your progress in terms of some of the commitments we've made. Number one. Number two, you need to get together socially. You got to make it fun and enjoyable, right? We get together whenever we can, on the monthly basis, after the town halls, but by purpose. One good social get together once a month beats all the little infrequent, you know, half hearted get togethers doing during the week, just because people come to the office every time. You also have more to talk about. You're actually really excited to see your colleagues who you and see on the screen. So we make more of an event on the monthly basis, rather than a lot of them, you know, get together on a weekly basis. Although, if you're in the in the hub, we call it a hub, not an office, and there's about that, because,
Chris Rainey 43:06
yeah, you're coming together as a hub, right,
Alexander Nicolaus 43:09
correct? We really move away from a lot of the stigma terminologies. That's what we call it flexible working, not hybrid or remote. Because flexible, remote working, we give our own definition
Chris Rainey 43:19
of, what did you say? One of the others, it kind of puts it in a box, yeah? Office, immediately. Office,
Alexander Nicolaus 43:24
no, it's not work. It's a mission, right? It's not an office, it's a hub, right? It's by design. We're very word
Chris Rainey 43:30
office now just needs a rebrand, right? It's like, yeah, like, as soon as you say office, it just, but it
Alexander Nicolaus 43:35
does because, because we don't force people to come into the office, we have guidelines that it would be good for them to come in for various reasons, to meet in teams, but that's why it's a hub. It's a place to collaborate, to meet your like minded colleagues, who all they're trying to do the same thing as you trying to grow the organization. So I think, yeah, make sure you show them progress and make them part of the bigger picture you go to you know, being a pacer needs to be high performing needs to be enjoyable, right? And I think you need to see that you're progressing as well. So I think the third point would be sure, there's burnout, perhaps, and it's hard work, but if you're progressing, it's important to do a retrospective. So it's not so much about feedback. So I think when you give individual feed forward advice in terms of how to get better. That's one thing, but it's always good to do a retrospective and to see how far you've come. And when you look at terrible
Chris Rainey 44:27
at that, I need to get better at celebrating and looking back, because otherwise you don't appreciate
Alexander Nicolaus 44:32
No. And that's what, that's what, what frustrates me sometimes is that everybody always says, I want to learn more. I want to have more impact. You know, I want to learn, learn, learn. But why don't you just look at the last things you've done in last 12 last 12 months, we've actually paid you for that learning. You actually it's much better to come to us than doing a degree in business, because what you've done the last 12 months, I promise you would have been a better learning than if you invested in debt. You'd be in debt to begin with, and we pay you for the learning, right? Yeah. So sometimes, you know, when people do leave pace, and we sort of say they graduate from pay, send, I
Chris Rainey 45:04
like that again. I just, I mean, I really, I mean, yeah, it just was a different emphasis. And you have a many
Alexander Nicolaus 45:09
boomerang not to, not too many, just wondering, because
Chris Rainey 45:13
of the nature of what, how you're structuring everything. So
Alexander Nicolaus 45:16
we had a few, they haven't really worked out. I guess once you move on, I know I kind of get, I feel any I'm not against it, but we've had a few. It hasn't really worked out for whatever reason, but we hadn't too many, but we do celebrate people moving on. Honestly, there's a four year cycle in a startup, right? Just linked to the equity you get, right? So it's, you know, if you do at least four years, you know, you
Chris Rainey 45:42
do this, join and get equity used to
Alexander Nicolaus 45:46
so I made sure that, when I joined, when we at the beginning, to over index on equity, because owner best well, because ownership is not just the behavior. It's, well, it is a behavior, but it needs to be behavior in terms of how you make decisions as well. So if you want to, if you want to be a company that gives ownership, then why don't we give equity to everyone? So that was big, a big this, this alignment with external stakeholders as well. But in the last four years, most individuals at pace and got equity. Because I think if you are early hundreds, it's great to incentivize everyone. Of course, there comes a point you can't keep diluting. Of course, right? So it's getting a little bit harder now. So certain levels now still get equity if they get higher on a level, yeah, but the others based on performance. So we still have some equity available, but it's based on performance, not just given out. Why? I'm not surprised. It's based on performance. Well, because, you know, it's getting the equity now, when the valuation is higher, is worth more, obviously. And I think when you start off, I think we should learn a bit from our US counterparts, that if you want to safeguard your salaries a little bit, it's good to be able to constantly compensate your total rewards package with equity, which is not the norm here. So much in the UK is using it, right? No, but that's because, also, there's a lack of education in terms of what the equity actually means. You know, how it vests and what it can give in people in the US, know, but there's also more success stories of, you know, companies either getting bored or by Nvidia, yeah, or doing a secondary round, every single employee in Nvidia became a millionaire. Well, look at Revolut. I mean, they even gave Revolut, yeah, that's a great example. But aren't enough examples where for people then to really appreciate that the equity is worth more than cash, but it's only worth more if you stick at it, right? And it's great motivator, yeah? But, but for that, you need to educate your employees in terms of the performance, what the share price is, how much it's growing, right? You don't want to keep it in the secret black box, because if they can't value it, then they'll go back to the usual. I want a bit more base salary. You know? I want a bonus. I want better benefits.
Chris Rainey 47:54
AI could talk to you forever. We've already gone for an hour. We didn't even get through half the questions. But I'm glad that we went down this rabbit hole, and I'm super fascinated by is anything that we didn't cover, that you really want to talk about, that we should have, that we think
Alexander Nicolaus 48:06
that, I think there's just one question you asked in terms of burnout, and then just from a personal perspective, and I think that's perhaps an advice, not an advice, but maybe I can just say what I do, and maybe it might help individuals listening. But I think really important to have something outside of, I wouldn't even call it work, but the main mission that you're on and to have time for yourself to a certain extent. So I do a lot of running. It combines mindfulness and also, you know, activities to certain extent, but having a hobby or something that's truly yours, I think is really important. I mean, clearly there's family time, and that takes a big priority, and making time for that, then you have your the mission that you're working on that takes a certain amount of time, but I think having something for yourself is also not to be neglected. And then there comes the whole aspect of health. So I think if you combine a hobby that also has a health aspect, I see yourself. You have an aura ring. It's my wedding ring. I do wedding ring. Okay, you got a garment? Okay, yeah, I've got my garment. So I think there's a lot of things you can wear that can give you those every
Chris Rainey 49:15
morning, I'm like, How much sleep did I have? What's my health score? So we,
Alexander Nicolaus 49:18
so we help pace senders with that. So we invite a lot of external guests. Oh, do you Yeah, we've had some really cool individuals. We had Kenton cool, who climbed Everest 18 times he came and spoke to us, because that was linked to, how do you get motivated every year to climb Everest? And he physically does it. And a startup, it's the same idea. So rather than giving advice or telling pace centers what to do, because I can't tell them what to do outside work. Inspire them. I can inspire. I can story tell. I can show them examples. We had fighter pilots come and talk to us. We had astronauts come and talk to us. So we've really invested time in getting you know individuals. We had a sleep expert come and talk to us recently.
Chris Rainey 49:58
Who was I want to be hard ass. I. I love this stuff, and because of the stories I used to bring in Andrea Huberman next, yeah, bring him in. That'll be good.
Alexander Nicolaus 50:06
So that so that helps. So make time for yourself, because as a leader of the organization, you're the one who has to come wake up every morning be excited about the mission. You know, I come into the office on cause I'm always excited, you know, I've I'm always full of energy, but it doesn't happen, because it just happens, right? You work hard at it, you know? You work at your sleep. You make sure you're healthy and and I think that makes a difference, because then you energize everybody else. But that's the role of the of the leader. I think it would be my final message of a servant leader within the startup, you got to bring everybody up with you
Chris Rainey 50:44
in like 30 seconds, for anyone watching who wants to be part of that. Why part of that 500 what message would you give? Would you give to them?
Alexander Nicolaus 50:53
Well, I Well, first of all, have a look at our website. At pay send. Have a look at being, you know, a challenger who's just sat at some, you know, celebrated the AI anniversary. We've got 10 million customers, you know, we're 100 million plus revenue organization. We're cash EBITDA positive. And we do, we're doing that with 350, people. And a little secret is that there's only five people in people and culture, including myself, really. So everything that I've just mentioned in the book, plus the book, but all the hiring we do every year, we don't use any agency. Everything is then in house. It's no surprise, given everything you just shared, only two of us that do the hiring, myself and one other person. You've hired every single person in house. We use agencies for some confidential roles. What company was it?
Chris Rainey 51:39
Was it like Amazon? The first 500 were like, hired. There was humble startup. It was, I think maybe Amazon, like the first I was Oracle. There was workday. The first 500 people were hired by the CEO.
Alexander Nicolaus 51:53
So I interview most of, I would say, I interview everyone at some point in the stage. I don't always do the final interview, but we as well, it's more than three this just shows an example that you don't have to be a big team. I used to have much bigger teams, but if you have the right people in your team, the yield you can get. And then we could go down utilization of tech systems and AI that definitely has its place, but we can deliver a high performance organization that delivers the financial metrics that I just talked about. You know, having an engaged organization of 350 people, with just five people in PXE, so maybe not the best message, because
Chris Rainey 52:30
some you're going to be getting some messages on LinkedIn after
Alexander Nicolaus 52:33
this, I think. But I think it takes time, like I understand that there is legacy ways of working, which makes it hard. The great advantage we had is that we don't have that we built it in a way that works, right? So I understand it's not. You can't just retrofit from, you know, 50 people back down to 10, right? It's difficult to understand, but it's just an example to show that if you design it in a certain way, you can get a huge yield in terms of the output.
Chris Rainey 52:58
Yeah. And lastly, where to where can people find you if they want to get you personally or grab a copy of the book? So
Alexander Nicolaus 53:04
yeah, startup culture.co.uk, for the book. I try to keep it up to date, but I don't have too much time to be on social media. Otherwise, LinkedIn, you can always message hyphen culture. Sorry, yeah, startup hyphen culture, the code that you're making sure yeah, I'm not the best self promoter. And then LinkedIn, of course. Yeah, I'm I'm not as active as I used to be, just because it's a full time and I'm not looking to go anywhere. So I think, but I like using LinkedIn just to connect and see what individuals are doing. So yeah, please connect with me
Chris Rainey 53:33
on LinkedIn, and everyone listen as always, wherever you're listening or watching, those links will be below anyway to make things easier. But thanks so much for coming. It's good to see you, and I like super excited so having everyone's feedback from the podcast, and there's so many great takeaways, and I appreciate you coming
Alexander Nicolaus 53:48
on Cool. Thank you. Cheers. Bye.
More from the HR Leaders Podcast
Alex Nicolaus, CPO at Paysend and author of Startup Culture.