The following interview is a conversation we had with Albert Owusu-Asare, CEO & Co-Founder of Cadana, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $7 Million Raised to Build the Future of Global Payroll Infrastructure
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right in today’s episode. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Albert, CEO and Co-Founder of Kadana, a global payroll infrastructure platform that’s raised over 7 million in funding. Albert, welcome to the show.
Albert Owusu-Asare
Hey, Brett. Nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
Brett
No problem. Super excited. I’d love to jump right in. Talk to us about Kadana.
Albert Owusu-Asare
Awesome. Let’s do it.
Brett
All right, so tell us, what are you building today?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah. So Kadana empowers the world’s largest talent marketplaces, HR companies, with specialized technology that allows them to launch compliance, cost effective, and reliable payroll around the world.
Brett
Can you give us an idea of the types of companies that would be your customers? And when you said that, my mind instantly goes to upwork.
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah, 100%. So there are sort of three categories of companies that we’re chasing now and in the near future. So the first is exactly what you said, which are talent market places. Right. So, like upwork fiverr, they are large global companies. They’re paying people around the world. They want to do so compliantly and effectively. So thats one profile. But another profile that we are looking into aggressively is what we call HR, SaaS companies. So think about your workday, your rippling, your lattice. These are companies that might be serving a jurisdiction such as the US, and they want to expand globally so we can help them do so in a cost effective manner and also in an efficient manner.
Albert Owusu-Asare
And then the third is maybe a category that’s a bit more explorative, and it’s something that we have on the horizon, but it’s a category we just call platforms. So it could be a financial services platform and just use an example. Let’s just say bill.com or Brex wanted to have a little tab in their app that’s pay people globally. We would power that experience for Bill.com or branch. So talent marketplaces, SaaS technology companies and platforms is sort of the way we think about our ICP.
Brett
I’ve done some work in this space, and I know a lot of founders are building in this general world, it sounds like you probably have a dilemma that they’re all up against. That dilemmas the buy versus build. With these customers that you’re targeting, how do you approach that conversation and convince them that theyre better off buying than building?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah, thats a good question. And its something we definitely face a lot. And look, a lot of these customers have different reasons for why they’re doing what they’re doing. So, for example, it could be a marketplace that was already relying on an aggregator service, right, for payments, and they found that, hey, the commercials are not really making sense or the user experience really sucks, and they really want to get from that. Right. It could also be like I described, a company that’s in a particular jurisdiction and they want to expand, but in all of these, there’s still uncertainties. Like, would it work? How much money do I want to spend?
Albert Owusu-Asare
And so our pitch to them is you can effectively use Kadana as a way to just go to market quicker, learn all the things you need to learn, understand where the actual opportunities are, and then later on, if it makes sense for you to build, we also want to be on that journey with you. Right. We can start off with a fully white label solution, and later down the line, we can actually give you granular API components to help you on that journey. So we kind of pitch it as there’s a lot to learn and it’s better for you to not spend a lot of money and time. And so that usually resonates with them as well.
Brett
Take us back to the founding of the company, early 2021. What’s the backstory here?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah, well, I’ll take it maybe one step back. The origin story of Albert and who I am is just a kid from Ghana. First time on a plane, comes to the US. I go to Iowa, of all places, Grinnell College, for school. So that’s the story for another day of just the cornfields and that ride being very terrible. I was like, where are the skyscrapers? Where’s the America that I sign up for? But anyways, after school, I ended up going to work at Goldman Sachs. Really did a lot of interesting things there. And then after doing that, I was part of a company, and I was the CTO for that company. That company grew to be a billion dollars in valuation and above. But as a CTO, we’re paying all these incredible people from all over the world.
Albert Owusu-Asare
They have the best experience working with them. They’re very skilled, they’re very talented, but it’s just a pain. They’re using PayPal to get paid. They’re using their nephews bank accounts in the US. It just didn’t make any sense. So we dove into that a little bit. I had worked in the american context for a while. I wanted to do something global, build a really global business. I said to myself, hey, why don’t we build a stripe like experience that really enables a lot of these payroll companies today to be able to scale efficiently in the world? And so that’s where the idea came about.
Brett
Let’s talk a little bit about your approach to risk. So I would think for most people, you work at Goldman Sachs, sure, you’re getting paid well, or you’re going to be paid very well. It’s a very good company to work at. You jump ship and you go and work at a technology company, that company becomes a unicorn, which I think most people would love to be in the C suite of a unicorn. And again, you leave and go and do a startup. How do you think about making these leaps? Cause that has to be pretty scary, making those leaps.
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah, it’s a very interesting question. I’ll say to an extent, I was in a bit of a privileged situation back in the day, right? You’re 20 something, no kids, you don’t have a family earning a decent amount of money. And so the framework really was just regret, minimalization. I wanted to make sure that I never look back and say, I wish that I took this leap, right. And so the risk framework for me was really minimizing regret. Right. And when I thought about it that way, I said, this is the best time for me to take this leap and learn what I need to learn and make the mistakes I need to make. And honestly, today still, I talked to my Co-Founder, and I say, I wish we did this way earlier, because life is now becoming complicated.
Albert Owusu-Asare
So, Brett, I’ll say it’s just minimizing regret and making sure that, you know, I had a bit of a stable backing, which I had at the time, to be able to just support myself, at least for a while. And hey, by the way, the one of the things I say to folks is I figured that if, God forbid, it doesn’t work out, I could always come back to where I was. And if that’s the thing that people have the privilege to have, I think that’s a very easy decision in most cases, in my opinion.
Brett
Yeah, no, that’s super useful insights for any Founder. I think that’s listening in here. Now let’s talk a bit more about the company’s early days. So what did the first, let’s say three to six months look like?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah, the first days of the company. So one of the things that maybe I didn’t mention is we’ve taken some detours to get to where we are today. We actually launched initially as an earned wage access product, believe it or not. And so we wanted to make sure that these workers internationally were getting paid faster. So that was really about just getting the first few users proven or disproving the hypothesis. And so early on, it was just really my network. I had to tap into my own network of folks that I knew in different countries and ask them to sign up and try the service. And after that you learn a little bit, you iterate, you use the feedback to improve the product. And then we go from there to where we are today, but happy to dive into any parts of that.
Albert Owusu-Asare
But that’s really how things were at the start.
Brett
What was it like making that pivot? Are you making those evolutions? Were those hard decisions to make?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah, they are. They’re not easy decisions. But I think that we always remind ourselves of really what the north star of what we’re trying to chase is. And I know it’s a very kind of loaded term to an extent, this idea of product market Fitzhen and we realized that it’s all about value. If you can actually provide real value, which may be the proof of that, is someone actually wants to pay for the service, then you can build a big business, hopefully. And so it’s just that perspective switch of yes, you may have a few users that may like this, may use it, are they willing to pay for it? And if you find a few users that are willing to pay for it, is this really a scalable business? Can you get thousands, millions of people to pay for it?
Albert Owusu-Asare
So we kind of went through that journey a lot of times it took a very deep amount of just introspection. And I think that North Star has really guided us, to shape us and led us to where we are today.
Brett
So for the current version of the platform, how long did it take from those early days in 2021 until you had your first paying customer? How much time had passed?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah, so we had some revenue along the way. Our problem wasn’t ever really no one wanting to pay. Our problem was, can we actually build a big sustainable business here? And so for this current version of the business, I think it’s about 18 months or so. When we really started this direction, were very privileged of being able to find our first pilot platform. That was, at the time, was just looking for exactly what we offered. So they tried us out, they piloted with just a few corridors. They loved it. We proved ourselves and then the rest is history from there.
Brett
Trey, when it comes to how you think about the tam here, just looking at the marketplace side, how many marketplaces are there?
Albert Owusu-Asare
It has such a incredible question, Brett, because it’s something we think about a lot. People often ask us if the market we’re targeting is large enough. And I honestly think that’s the wrong question. Right. At Kadana, we’re not just tapping into an existing market. We are creating infrastructure that could potentially pay every worker around the world. Right. And so when you build infrastructure, let’s just say like stripe, the time isn’t just the current landscape, it’s really the endless possibilities that developers and businesses will use the tools that we’re providing to unlock value. And so the reality is that the market will grow as the infrastructure grows. And the last thing I’ll say is, when you’re building a stripe, even the founders say it, they could not imagine the breadth of use cases that their customers today have come up with.
Albert Owusu-Asare
It always blows their minds. It’s the same. We’re really building a new global payroll network, and I think the real value lies in that foundational infrastructure and all of the awesome things that the developers are going to build on top of that. So we think its a big market and the marketplaces are just one area to start. Right? Were going to expand from that ICP to other ICPs and I think its going to be pretty big when we get a lot of developers integrating with Kadana.
Brett
What other ICPs are you really excited about?
Albert Owusu-Asare
We’re particularly excited about the HR SaaS software category, and within that is your established folks. Like I mentioned, be it a workday or a rippling, these are really large companies. They might want to expand. But one of the areas that brings me joy is that $3 million seed stage company that really wants to build a new global payroll experience, but quite honestly does not have the money to be able to understand what is the local labor law in Kenya, how do I remit pension in Brazil, how do I make this payment into this wallet in Philippines? That kind of company can now actually scale and grow. With a company like Cardano behind the scenes helping them, it will not be possible for them to really build a large company without raising hundreds of millions of dollars.
Albert Owusu-Asare
But I hope, and what we’re excited about is that we can enable those companies to scale a lot faster with less money. And so thats another area that were very excited about.
Brett
I think in the US theres a big conversation around whos a contractor, whos w two? Is that a conversation that you’re seeing happening in other countries as well?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yes, 100%. Its this idea of just how you classify these workers. So say you’re a Fortune 500 company, you found this incredible worker. I don’t know. Lets say on upwork you really want to be careful, right? Where are they based? How many hours are they working for you? What types of jobs are they doing for you? Are you giving them something like a laptop that might be classified as a benefit? So it’s very nuanced. And so the challenges these employers and these platforms are not able to navigate this complexity. Right. It’s a fundamentally complex problem of all these countries around the world and all the nuances around that. So part of what we do is just to help folks navigate that, those kinds of problems. And so, yes, classification is a big one for our customers.
Brett
When it comes to marketing, how would you summarize the marketing strategy?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah, it’s something that we’re still figuring out as a young company. But today our go to market has really been direct sales that we get our sales folks, which is predominantly me and our head of growth, together we reach out to folks in a very direct way. Our style is really to always punch above our weight. We want to showcase to our customers that we know what we’re talking about, we have the local expertise and sometimes what we do is we actually fly in where they are, we spend some time with them face to face. And so that’s one particular approach we take. But in terms of pure marketing, you know, when you’re selling an API product or a platform centric product, like ours, it’s kind of very hard to think through what marketing is, so we’re figuring it out.
Albert Owusu-Asare
But one of the things that it’s working is telling the story of the end user. It’s that person, right? Again, sitting in Kenya who might have been receiving their salary five to seven days later compared to their european counterpart. Right? It’s that person in Brazil who said, wow, all of a sudden I can get paid through pics. And that came in real time instead of just waiting a long time and having 5% of my salary chopped off. So we do a lot of branding around just the human experience that we’re given to our platforms, and then we highlight those stories of those individuals and we find that people can connect a little bit more to what we’re trying to do at Cardano that way.
Brett
What about the category? So in the intro, I said, you’re a payroll infrastructure platform. Is that how you think about the market category that you’re in, or what is your market category?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah, our market category is really that we’re in the global payroll space at large, and the section that we occupy is the infrastructure. When you think about workforce infrastructure, you think about payments, you think about financial services that one might want to give to these individuals around the world. That’s where we fit. So we think it’s one of those categories that is not really popular. We think about ourselves as defining a new category, and that comes with its own challenges. But, yeah, you’re right, it’s a global payroll infrastructure category.
Brett
When it comes to defining that category, how are you going to approach that? You know, how are you going to evangelize this idea and get the market to say, yes, I need a payroll infrastructure platform or a payroll infrastructure provider?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah, it’s a challenge because a lot of the times folks in the companies that we’re selling to, they know what they want. They just don’t know that there’s a solution out there that solves that. And so we’ve really come up with a framework of trying to identify these stakeholders that could end up being our champions, getting in front of them somehow. And sometimes this happens through investor introductions, it happens through just our network on LinkedIn, but it’s really us getting in front of them. At this stage of our company, we’re still very small.
Albert Owusu-Asare
But eventually, I think as we gather the logos and as we’re able to actually prove and get some credibility with bigger and bigger customers, I think that the story can now get out there a little bit and that people can actually understand, hey, for example, if company XYZ did this with Cadana, maybe I could also do that with them. Right. So that’s the approach today. It’s still a work in progress, but we’re figuring it out day by day.
Brett
As you reflect on this journey so far, what do you think’s been the most important go to market decision that you’ve made and take us behind the scenes on that decision?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah. One of the important go to market decisions, I think a couple comes to mind. It’s counterintuitive, but again, it’s this idea of the talent experience and how we can elevate that talent experience. Right. The conventional wisdom was just like, hey, who are you selling to? Maybe it’s the finance person at this company. They want to reduce costs, maybe it’s the HR person. But we found in a very counterintuitive manner that telling the stories of the human at the end of the whole flow that’s actually getting paid has been quite huge. Right. A lot of folks that we talk to, their eyes really light up when we tell them all the savings we’re giving to that human and all of the things that we’re doing for them.
Albert Owusu-Asare
So I think it’s really something that we leaned into just being able to tell those stories to these stakeholders. And of course, you always have to tie it back to what the buyer wants, whether it’s just something cheaper, whether it’s being able to build something faster. But I think the important thing that we did and we continue to do is not forgetting and telling that human story. And so we’re going to continue to do that. And again, I go to market at this stage of the business, I think it’s still been figured out. But that’s one thing that I think has worked well that we’re very proud of as well.
Brett
If you think ahead for the next twelve months, what’s the top priority or top couple of priorities?
Albert Owusu-Asare
I would say growth, isn’t it? Brett? I feel like from our seats as CEO’s, we’re always thinking of how do we grow the company. And for us we have some specific metrics and so we want to continue to grow our business. We want to continue to understand and have some predictability in terms of how our customers ramp up and then of course want to be able to explore more interesting ways of telling our story and getting our name out there. So I think the top priority is growth. And then embedded in that is all of these different go to market experiments that we have to perform as we go towards that goal.
Brett
In terms of funding, as I mentioned there, you’ve raised over 7 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Albert Owusu-Asare
I think the one thing that I’ve learned is it’s usually takes longer than you think, especially in this environment. It’s very hard. And I think one of the things that we’ve learned the hard way, which I think is a good thing for us as we move forward, is just to be authentic. You know, I think founders have a vision of what they’re trying to solve, and I think it’s a bit of a dating process of making sure that whoever you’re bringing on board understands that vision, because things oftentimes take a little bit longer. And so that alignment in that fundamental vision of what you’re trying to solve, I think is so critical. And so my advice generally is to lean in to exactly what you want.
Albert Owusu-Asare
If you have real opinions about how you think the company should be structured or how the market is going to perceive your product, I think you should lean into that, because a lot of the times founders may reverse engineer an outcome. I want to raise this series a or series b, and I need to show this and that and so forth, which are all important for the data room. But I think that you should make sure that you’re being authentic to what you’re solving and make sure that the folks you’re bringing on are fit. Right. Because if it doesn’t work out in that way, it’s a weird relationship to start when folks you’re bringing on have a different perception of what they’re signing up for. And so I just advise to be as authentic as you can throughout the process.
Brett
Final question for you, let’s end with a question on vision. So paint a picture for three to five years from today, what’s the world going to look like and what’s your impact going to be? And what’s that big vision?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Our opinion is that our payroll is going to be very ubiquitous. Our opinion is that it’s going to be embedded in a lot of different applications. And so the promise of global payroll is that talent is evenly distributed. Right. And so you want to be able to get to anyone in any part of the world. I think three to five years from now will become very easy for anyone to hire anyone from any part of the world. And part of what will be easy is that it would be embedded everywhere. I would imagine that Brex would have a tap to allow people to pay people around the world. Well, I would imagine bill.com would have that too. So you see ubiquity, you see more embedded payroll experiences, and you see hopefully a very easier pay experience to brilliant people around the world.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision. I really love this conversation. Before we wrap up here, if there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should we send them?
Albert Owusu-Asare
Yeah, I’m usually on LinkedIn, so you can find me. Albert Owusu-Asare on LinkedIn. And honestly, if you want to shoot me a message, albertanapay.com works as well. It’s been so good talking to you, Brett.
Brett
Amazing. Albert, thanks so much. Really appreciate it.
Albert Owusu-Asare
Thank you. Take care.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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