Careers talk: Ed Lea, CEO of Paddle

The payments app founder talks innovation, user experience and why it must be easier for consumers to pay with mobile
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Ed Lea, CEO of Paddle
Ed Lea is CEO of Paddle Photograph: Paddle

Hi Ed, can you tell us a little bit more about Paddle and why you founded it?

Paddle is a mobile payments app for e-commerce transactions. New methods of payment seem to be launching everyday, however more often than not, these new products are more cumbersome than the processes they intend to replace.

My personal background has been heavily focused on using mobile, and specifically smartphone apps, to improve user experiences. Paddle takes that philosophy and applies it to online payments. Its sole purpose is to make the process of paying on the web and on mobile quicker and easier.

I founded the business based on observations that, compared to shopping in a physical store where no one has ever not completed a payment because it's too complicated, online transactions are often abandoned (or not even started) because of long, over-complicated forms. Paddle side-steps the whole form-based experience by storing customer's payment and delivery details so they are securely accessible via an app on their phone and uses these to complete payments in less than 10 seconds with a couple of taps.

By making payments easier, we hope consumers will be less frustrated and more inclined to make a purchase, thus increasing revenues for retailers.

What does an average day look like for you?

For the past couple of months I've been focused on the commercial side of the business. My background is as an engineer so this throws up new challenges for me every day.

We've got a really great team at Paddle and I make sure I stay involved in all of the day-to-day product decisions, but I'm in the fortunate position where I can now trust that team to continue making improvements and implementing new features while I step away from writing code every day.

My time is now split between meeting prospective retailers, working with customers who are adopting Paddle, talking to intellectual property lawyers, doing interviews with journalists and discussions with some of the biggest global payments powerhouses.


Bringing a new product to market always has challenges. Our biggest has been convincing established, and often conservative, organisations that a small, young startup can dramatically improve revenues of their online business. More recently I've had to switch technical expertise for more commercial ones, so learning a new skill set around those commercial goals has been a new and exciting challenge.

What first made you want to work in technology?

I did a computer science degree at Manchester University around the time the dot-com bubble was bursting. Living in rural Shropshire before university I was aware of the internet, but the subtleties of what was going on in the US passed me by. I just really liked programming computers to solve problems.

When I graduated I joined a startup based in Manchester where I was given a fantastic opportunity to not only write code, but also lead a small team, be responsible for product releases and go into the field and work in sales. The first three or four years of my career gave me such a breadth of experiences, all anchored by software engineering, that there was never a question of doing anything else.

Paddle is just over a year old now – what do you think is the key to a successful startup? What lessons have you learned?

When successful founders are asked this question the answer always includes some reference to building a strong team, but there's a good reason for that! Hiring the best possible app development team was my goal when I started Paddle and I've been fortunate to be able to do that. Hiring the right people is essential, especially when you're a startup and every pound counts. If you make a bad hire it can cost the company dearly, both in terms of finances and progress of the product or service in development.

The quality of the people behind Paddle is what makes us successful. That's not just the immediate team who work on the product, but also our investors and advisors. A startup is all about the people. That then defines the culture of the company, which in turn is apparent in the products that the company creates.

What in mobile development has got you excited at the moment?

I was fortunate enough to spend a week in San Francisco recently at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. Spending that much time in the close proximity of some of the best app developers in the world is an energising experience. While the headlines from the conference were mainly focused on the updated user-interface to iOS, there were a couple of smaller announcements that attracted very little attention.

The most interesting for me was what Apple is calling 'iBeacons' – a Bluetooth based technology for very specific location based services. Rather than using GPS to locate a person in an absolute location, referenced by longitude and latitude, iBeacons allow an app to know when the user is in the proximity of an arbitrary point of interest. Apple gave the example of a museum app that would know which exhibit a visitor was standing in front of so it could provide details of the artwork.

Where do you see mobile payments in the future?

Because of the sheer number of mobile payment solutions emerging, it's inevitable we will see some fall by the wayside, while others will be consolidated. Ultimately though I think we have to reach the point where consumers are offered a single, coherent mobile payment product.

For mobile payments to become ubiquitous and replace plastic cards and even cash, it has to be easier to pay with mobile than not. That will largely come down to user experience and still requires further innovation.

I don't think it's unreasonable though, as a consumer, to expect to be able to make payments using the same mobile device in a physical retail location, peer-to-peer (send money to my friends) and online. At the moment each of these three channels are developing in isolation. As the market matures they must converge.

Ed Lea is CEO of Paddle – follow the company on Twitter @paywithpaddle


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