Andrew Jamison, founder of Extend, discusses raising $70M to build an AI-powered B2B spend management platform. Watch the full video — free, no account needed.
Andrew Jamison, founder of Extend, discusses raising $70M to build an AI-powered B2B spend management platform. He shares insights on securing funding and revolutionizing B2B payments with digital credit cards.
Trust verify is like a key part not just with employees but actually in partnerships and relationships. You build trust, but you have to verify that there is corresponding trust, corresponding engagement with those partners. And so you don't end up as the one taking all the risk without actually there being a counterbalancing piece of those parties taking. [music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the Dealmaker Show. So today we have an amazing guest you know a guest that you know it's it's been quite the journey you know close to a decade you know with his with his startup uh and again I mean obviously a decade in the world of startups imagine as in doc year say if you compare to corporate it's a lot we're going to be talking a lot about you know the the cycles we're going to be talking about the way to think about focus capital raising all of that good stuff that we like to
hear when it comes to building scaling financing and all the above. So brace yourself for a very inspiring conversation today. And without further ado, let's welcome our guest Andrew Jameson. Welcome to the show. >> Thanks Alejandro. Looking forward to the discussion. >> So originally, you know, from from the UK, you know, I would say, but with parents from Australia, from Sweden. So you had that interesting combination uh early on as part of your upbringing. Give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you, Andrew? >> Uh it was confusing. Uh it was confusing and I didn't really know where I was from. Uh and I had to assimilate actually to lots of different cultures uh very very quickly. It was very clear early on that that I wasn't French despite being in a French system. And then I went to the English system to go to boarding school and it was
really clear that I wasn't English uh because I spoke with a French accent. Um so it kind of creates an interesting uh play really where you sort of very much trying to sort of figure people out uh and trying to understand right the cultural differences and how to to sort of drive right that assimilation. And I think that's actually served me really well later on in life. It's a challenge in the moment but actually afterwards you realize understanding culture understanding how people react to different things actually is super helpful in driving engagement with people which ultimately drives trust and all these other things right critical in business. So bit of an Achilles heel when you're a kid because you want to be like everyone else but actually a great asset uh when you grow up. So tell us too about the sabarico and when you were traveling around too I mean you're talking about
cultures getting to understand people I mean I think that that's everything when you are in business right and when you're able to really listen listen for concerns listen to really for for after you've been able to understood someone what can drive that person given maybe like where they're coming from I mean what kind of perspective the travels the cultures you know how do you think that has helped you to being an entrepreneur >> well so I think the best part about traveling when you're young is you have no money. Um, and so you're stretching everything. And so again, you're engaging with different elements of society right across the board. I I I ended up going to Australia because my father's Australian and I was working as a storm and empacker, right, with people storing, you know, stacking boxes that you were sending out for shipments. I then worked on a sheep farm. Uh, and
actually worked there sort of in two different stints. once during the shearing season, once during the the sort of the castration uh period. Um and again working with people who'd never been more than four hours from the farm I was working on. And then I was coming from the other side of the world. Um and despite being Australian, for them I was very English. Um and obviously I sort of tried to deflect that and said, "No, I'm sort of really French because I know the Australian and and the Brits have a bad uh have a bad rap." Uh and of course what happened at that period is when the French went and shot down the Green Peace ship. So that didn't go down very well. Um but all in all look you learn I think you learn how to relate to people irrespective of where they come from what part of society they come from and again welcome to life right uh and more relevant probably still in inside of
a startup because you're really dealing with um with no brand and so you have to build that brand build that trust across the whole ecosystem. So I think really helpful in in in that guys as well. >> Now in your case you know you went to Bath for University and and right after that you know you you went into consulting. So why consulting out of all things? >> Look it's it's interesting for me consulting was just a way of discovering what I liked to do. Um and I had a choice actually. had a choice of joining sort of one of the three strategic consultants uh or actually going to work with a actually a startup in the SAP space. SAP was growing really fast in the in the mid 90s and um I remember my father famously saying to me it's like why would you go into strategic consulting you actually don't know anything it's not that he was wrong um and you learn different things right in
some respects the first couple years I sort of regretted it because I realized very quickly that strategic consultant you kind of learned about you know the famous 2 by twos 3x3's and how to sort of like present things and do different things I learned something very much more foundational going into consulting I learned about coding. I learned about sort of the logic of things and how you have to relate things back to the database and and how that whole piece has to work. Um, and then I learned actually a core functional skill which is accounting because I focused on finance. So I really learned two different core skills that actually have paid back again over time. They pay back and I think that's for me the most important thing to to do and learn when when you're in the early years is learn something and learn it really really well. >> What about the way that you relate it to
problems? Because in consulting there's a lot of grabbing big problems, breaking them into small ones. What about your relatedness to problem? >> Well, I I think consulting gives you entrepreneurship of the mind, right? It's kind of like you're always on your feet. You're always trying to stay one step ahead of the client, right? And you're trying to you don't also have the legacy of having been inside that company. And so to some extent, you're a bit of a free spirit and you can really rethink things. Now some of things are really stupid and and you're quickly told that but you you learn right how to to rethink problems how to look at problems completely differently um and that helps you to really sort of come up with real innovation in in my mind right you got to follow it through because the problem with with consultancy is you often don't get to the execution right so it's more
that's why I said it's like it's it's uh it's entrepreneurship of the brain because you're constantly being challenged to stay one step ahead of the client in a discipline that they clearly know better than you in some cases. Um and then I think you know when I later went into into enterprise well then you get sort of more uh entrepreneurship around execution and then you can meld the two together and I think that's where the startup world sort of really comes together for me is bring the best of the two together to sort of keep sort of driving things but for me consulting was was truly about being nimble. uh we were you know 50 people when I joined within five years we'd grown to 700 people organically and so I was suddenly finding myself flying to the US you know sitting in front of the uh one of the sort of boards of of of Polaroid uh talking about how they should think about their
systems from a finance perspective and how that should all roll up and how they can give them flexibility and how they get insights into right what was happening inside of their company and there I was I was 27 years Um, so it's a benefit of being in that small but really fast growing as you get pushed into many many things and I got a breadth that you wouldn't have gotten if I'd gone to one of the big sort of uh the big consultancy firms. You wouldn't have had that same ability to to straddle across so many different things. >> Now for you, you did your MBA at INSEAD and typically people that do their MBAs, you know, many of them they end up launching their own business, right? I think in your case you ended up going to American Express, but what do you think was there for you? Why were you avoiding starting a business? Look, there's I mean there's two parts to that. I think the
the first for…