The Pagos Founding Story: How to Start a Company by Accident (and Why That Might Be Better)

The Pagos Founding Story: How to Start a Company by Accident (and Why That Might Be Better)

The mythology of startup founding features dramatic moments. The late-night epiphany. The bold resignation. The co-founders shaking hands. Pagos had none of that.

Instead, Klas Bäck and his co-founder spent months having casual conversations about a payments data problem. Someone should fix this, they agreed. The conversations continued. Then one day, they realized they’d already started.

“We had just one day where we looked at each other and like I guess we are actually doing it now because somehow we had already passed into a world where were building and doing and we hadn’t really made a decision until after the fact,” Klas recalls.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Klas Bäck, CEO and Co-Founder of Pagos, a payments operations platform that’s raised $44 million in funding, revealed how this accidental commitment might be a better way to start companies.

The Problem With Decisive Founding Moments

Traditional founding stories emphasize the decision. The moment when you commit. When you burn the ships. There’s narrative appeal—it’s clean, dramatic, decisive.

But it creates unnecessary pressure. You’re supposed to have conviction. You’re supposed to be certain this is the right problem, the right time, the right co-founder.

What if you’re not certain? The traditional narrative suggests you’re not ready. Wait until you know.

Klas’s experience suggests the opposite. You don’t need to know. You need to start building.

The Conversations That Became a Company

The origin story doesn’t begin with a founding moment. It begins with observation. At PayPal, Klas’s team faced a recurring problem comparing vendor performance.

“We could not have that conversation with a single one of our largest customers without months of comparing data,” Klas explains. “What are you looking at? That data doesn’t look real. Are you sure that’s your right data?”

If PayPal couldn’t efficiently compare vendor performance, the problem was structural.

Klas and his co-founder started discussing this. Casual conversations. Someone should fix the payments data problem.

These weren’t strategic founding discussions. They were problem observations. But observations repeated enough become questions. Questions become hypotheses. Hypotheses become experiments.

At some point—neither could identify exactly when—the conversations evolved from observing problems to exploring solutions. Not formally. Just incrementally, as curiosity compelled them forward.

The Gradient of Commitment

Most founders think starting is binary. You’re either doing it or you’re not. This forces a moment of decision that may not match how conviction builds.

Klas’s experience reveals a different pattern. Commitment isn’t binary. It’s gradient. Observations become conversations. Conversations become exploration. Exploration becomes building. Building becomes momentum. Momentum becomes commitment.

“We hadn’t really made a decision until after the fact.” The commitment happened through accumulated action, not through a decisive choice.

They started building not because they’d decided to start a company, but because the problem was interesting. The building created momentum. The momentum carried them past the point where stopping made sense.

Why Momentum Works Better Than Decision

When you commit decisively before you start, you’re deciding with the least information possible. You don’t know if you can build the solution. You don’t know if customers will care.

When you let momentum carry you into commitment, you’re deciding with progressively more information. You’ve started building, so you know feasibility. You’ve talked to customers, so you understand demand. You’ve worked with your co-founder through actual challenges.

The accidental founding model reduces risk. By not forcing the decision early, you gather evidence. Each step validates the next. Each conversation, each prototype, each customer interaction either strengthens conviction or reveals why this might not work.

“At the end of the day you just got to go for it,” Klas explains. “Like, hey, not everything is perfect. It is a startup, it is understood and ideally you get everything right, but sometimes you don’t. And then how you fix it and how you manage it matters a lot.”

The Alternative Narrative for Uncertain Founders

Many founders struggle with pressure to have dramatic founding stories. They know the problem is worth solving but can’t point to a single crystallizing moment. They feel like imposters for not having burning conviction from day one.

The Pagos story offers permission for a different path. You don’t need the dramatic moment. You don’t need unwavering conviction. You don’t need perfect clarity.

You need curiosity about the problem. Willingness to explore. Discipline to keep building even when you’re not sure where it leads.

“I think sometimes people just sitting in their own company and like, hey, thinking about all these scenarios without going out and talking to people and then you may be way off versus what people are actually looking at,” Klas notes.

Analysis paralysis is real. You can spend years thinking about whether to start without ever starting. The alternative is to start thinking by doing.

When This Approach Works

The accidental founding model works particularly well in certain contexts. When you’re solving a problem you experienced personally, you start with domain knowledge. When you’re still employed, you can explore without financial pressure. When you have a co-founder, conversations naturally become exploration.

Klas had all three. He lived the payments data problem at PayPal. He had stability to explore. He had a co-founder to process the opportunity with.

More founders have these conditions than take advantage of them because they’re waiting for the dramatic decision moment that may never come.

The Permission to Start Without Deciding

The most valuable insight from the Pagos founding story isn’t tactical. It’s psychological. You’re allowed to start without deciding. You’re allowed to explore without committing.

The dramatic founding moment makes for better mythology but worse decisions. It forces commitment before you have evidence. It mistakes conviction for clarity.

Starting by accident—letting momentum carry you from curiosity to exploration to building to commitment—means you’re deciding based on what you’ve learned through doing, not what you imagine before starting.

Sometimes the best way to make hard decisions is to not realize you’re making them until momentum has carried you past the point of no return. Not because you’re avoiding the decision, but because you’re gathering evidence through action that makes the decision obvious in retrospect.

That’s how you build a $44 million company by accident.