Meet The Disruptors: Craig Attiwill Of Peloton Technologies On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
Simplifying a process may be all it takes to begin the disruption. The ultimate example here is McDonalds decreasing the options available to the customer, which — in turn — simplified the manufacturing process and ultimately led to the creation of the largest restaurant chain in the world. McDonalds disrupted the traditional restaurant chains by finding greater efficiencies rather than operating the way others had for more than 20 years.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Craig Attiwill.
Craig Attiwill is the Founder & CEO of Peloton Technologies, a fintech that enables all business payments in one platform. Prior to founding Peloton, Craig held senior engineering roles at Sierra Systems, Visiphor Corporation — which supplies software products to the criminal justice system — and BAE Systems, one of Australia’s largest defense contractors. Craig is a technologist with a background in both the public and private sectors, which has been key to his success in building an innovative, user-friendly and secure payments platform.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I was a consultant for a long time, working in various industries including technology. Because I am also an engineer, most of my career has been sorting out other people’s messes! I was the guy they would assign to the project that wasn’t going very well — to get it back on track. I have a knack for understanding the parameters and inputs and carving a path to implementation and, as a result, an outcome.
That set me up well to be a disrupter in the fintech space because payments are messy! I can assess and understand the mess, reverse-engineer it, and basically come up with a new model that’s disruptive to every other model that’s out there. That’s exactly what we’ve done with Peloton.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
40 or 50 years ago, it was easy to have your business finances in one place… the bank. When the payment channels expanded with a swath of new providers offering alternatives, such as credit cards and new money transfer options, the banks actually exited a lot of the channels because they couldn’t succeed across that breadth of services.
As a result, business owners ended up having to get these services from five to 10 different places. It had become a nightmare of silos and fractured services. So, Peloton came in to disrupt that — to stitch it all together. Quite quietly, I might add. We were in the background, building the platform, testing it out, building up the relationships, and now that it works, we scale.
For the first time in Canada, business owners can access real-time insights of the entire organization’s ingoing and outgoing payments.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
It’s hard to admit, but when we first started offering foreign exchange, I performed a transaction in the wrong direction. We set up to buy Canadian dollars instead of selling them. I made friends in the FX department of the financial institution pretty quickly when trying to get that transaction reversed!
That one mistake made it clear there was a need to do better with the user interfaces for these types of screens. That’s exactly what we did when the time came for us to enable self-serve currency exchange in our portal. The process is now very clean so that users can’t repeat the same mistake I made!
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I’ve had a few mentors throughout my career and the one story I’ll share today is about one of my most recent and current mentors — John MacKinlay, the Executive Chair of Peloton’s board.
I know that one of the biggest fails for an early-stage company is not securing investment or not having enough capital to sustain growth. But, I didn’t go to an Ivy League school. I wasn’t around a lot of people who were involved in the investment community. I had learned everything I knew from the school of hard knocks. Meeting John, who has a wealth of knowledge and experience in the investment world, has been fantastic, and I’ve learned so much from watching him in the hundreds of meetings we’ve had with growth equity and venture firms. I gain new insights in every interaction we have. It’s extremely important as a Founder CEO to understand how to approach each firm, who to follow up with and, just as importantly, who not to follow up with.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Compact Discs are a great example of why disruption isn’t always good. They completely disrupted music and data storage industries, yet had no common manufacturing process and most didn’t even last 20 years. I think we can all agree, in retrospect, that records were more than fine for the music industry, and they last well in excess of 100 years with proper care. CDs came out and basically disrupted everything. We all bought them, and now, if you left them sitting in your car on a hot summer’s day, they probably won’t work at all. We created a lot of waste in creating CD’s and the associated players only to do it all again 20 years later with the MP3 player.
When disruption is positive, it creates better long-term experiences. It’s about positive impacts, not just positive outcomes for a short period of time.
Can you please share 5 ideas one needs to shake up their industry?
1 . Focus on impact — not just outcome! If you want to make it stick (sustainable) you need to!
The most obvious is the internet, but instead let’s go with something that existed prior to the internet, which was further enabled by the internet: The credit card. There are both positive and negative outcomes associated with credit cards, but you cannot deny the impact that the credit card has had on modern society. Credit cards have disrupted the way people pay for goods and services in most countries and completely impacted the way we pay when travelling in foreign countries. I often say to people “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a specific number that you could quote to pay for things, and it works anywhere in the world? You’d no longer have to lug around different currencies or keep exchanging them at every border.” They say, “Yes that would be great!” I remind them they have one and it’s called a credit card!
The long-lasting positive impact of a credit card is that it addressed a very cumbersome and globally challenging problem shared by every single traveler.
2 . Think outside the box! Apply your own lens and filter to what you read.
Brawn GP, led by Ross Brawn, is a prime example of innovative thinking in the realm of Formula 1 racing. In 2009, when Honda pulled out of F1, leaving the team on the brink of collapse, Brawn stepped in and bought the team for just £1. Instead of seeing this as a setback, Brawn and his team of designers saw it as an opportunity to think outside the box. They focused on a section of the car not covered by new regulations, adding an extra hole in a diffuser at the rear. This double-diffuser innovation gave them a significant performance edge, leading to domination in the early races of the year. Despite running out of development money, the team managed to secure both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships. This remarkable journey from near-collapse to championship glory exemplifies the power of innovative, outside-the-box thinking.
3. Take it and twist it! Build on something that’s already working.
This is a wild example, but we all know how cats nearly broke the internet. So, how do you bottle cats breaking the internet? Imagine building a product with a built-in camera that squirts your cat every time it jumps on the counter. Counter Cat… get it? It instantly uploads the video footage for sharing on social media where everybody can go to enjoy watching cats do backflips off the counter after being squirted. That’s a disruptive idea that’s built off a solid foundation. It’s definitely going to be disruptive to most people’s workdays.
4 . Get to the same result for less!
Automating processes can help the bottom line, but you can also discover new ways to achieve the same result, which is really the message here. When companies grow into large businesses, they tend to adopt a lot of overhead, become slow and cumbersome, and they may even get bogged down due to rapid acquisitions and integration hell. Ultimately this leads to more product lines and services, which leads to higher prices. This presents an opportunity for new, focused players to produce just one competitive product or service, but efficiently streamline its manufacture or delivery — enabling the same result for the customer at a more affordable price and — in the process — disrupting a giant!
5 . Just because you’ve been doing it wrong for 20 years doesn’t make it right!
Simplifying a process may be all it takes to begin the disruption. The ultimate example here is McDonalds decreasing the options available to the customer, which — in turn — simplified the manufacturing process and ultimately led to the creation of the largest restaurant chain in the world. McDonalds disrupted the traditional restaurant chains by finding greater efficiencies rather than operating the way others had for more than 20 years.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
I guess I should build Counter Cat!
Joking aside, we are going to scale Peloton and bring it to more businesses. And we are going to enter new markets, including the US in 2025.
Personally, there is so much to explore in AI, large language models and blockchain. As a technologist, those themes are in my future for sure. Potentially marrying all three into the stock market or real estate. It will be interesting to see where I go when capital is not a limiting factor!
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
I am great at reading the start of many books! One that actually captured my attention the whole way through is Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus. It tells the story of how we are headed towards a world with just a couple of mega corporations. It’s basically a likely story that is articulated in so many futuristic movies where just two or three entities are fighting for supremacy. Clearly, not a happy end point for humanity. We need the framework to help many businesses survive and thrive. I feel good about what Peloton does in that regard. It’s our intention to support a wide array of small businesses. That’s the backbone of a healthy economy and happier civilization and I want to do more to help us be better off before my time is up.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favourite quote is: “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” I like it because it’s not a quote from anyone in particular — let alone anyone famous for their quotes. It’s just a life observation from many. To me it’s not just about learning quickly from your mistakes and moving on. It’s also remembering that others have likely made these mistakes, and the result is not going to be any different for you. You can avoid the expensive learning process by reading up on how others have failed and not repeating the exact path they took.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Change the metrics used to measure business growth to one that incorporates ethics, morality and well-being.
How can our readers follow you online?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/craig-attiwill/
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
