The Thread Podcast

158 Episodes

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PayFac as a Service: Why Attach Rate Beats Basis Points, with Caleb Avery (Tilled)

2026-10-2322:22

Caleb Avery started in payments at nineteen, knocking on doors in Greenville, South Carolina, selling terminals to small business owners. That run, followed by years of consulting and angel investing in vertical software, led him to found Tilled, the PayFac as a Service platform that gives software companies the economics and brand control of a payment facilitator without the registration, underwriting, audits, or compliance headcount. In this episode, Caleb breaks down why the two default pa...

"Frictionful" Payments and Why Your Money Should Slow Down Sometimes (with Michelle Beyo, Finavator)

2026-10-1629:47

Kicking off our Future of Finance series ahead of Money20/20, Justin sits down with Michelle Beyo, founder and CEO of Finavator, president of Open Finance Network Canada, and author of the newly launched Mastering the Future of Finance. Michelle spent twenty years in telco, online shopping, and prepaid before running WeChat's first QR payment pilot in North America and realizing the future of finance was being built somewhere else. She walks through why she quit her corporate job, what Money2...

3X, Then 3X Again: How AI Broke the Job Application (and How Willo Is Fixing It)

2026-10-0929:28

Hiring didn't break all at once. It broke one year at a time. This week on the Thread Podcast, Justin sits down with Euan Cameron, CEO and co-founder of Willo, the global candidate screening platform built to make hiring faster, fairer, and more human. Euan walks through the year-by-year evolution from 2019 to today: remote work upending where companies hire, AI handing candidates a resume machine, employers responding with AI of their own, and application volume tripling, then tripling again...

Go-to-Network is Eating Go-to-Market, with The Swarm's Olivier Roth

2026-09-1823:05

Cold outreach is dying....so what replaces it? This week Justin sits down with Olivier Roth, co-founder & Chief Growth Officer of The Swarm, the go-to-network platform backed by HubSpot Ventures ($10M raised to date). The Swarm started as a network recruiting tool in 2021, but customers kept pulling it toward sales, and a category was born: go-to-network, using the combined relationships of your team, investors, advisors, and customers as the first motion in your funnel instead of going c...

The Voice Layer for Emerging Markets: Aethex AI's Co-founder and CTO Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa

2026-07-3118:42

Most voice AI startups today are thin wrappers on someone else's models. Ayooluwa Odemuyiwa went the opposite direction and built the entire stack. In this episode, Justin sits down with the CTO and co-founder of Aethex AI, who along with co-founder Mariama is building the voice layer for emerging markets across Africa and the Middle East. This is the AI that banks, call centers, and telcos use to reach the customers a human team never could, and it's already running 17,000 calls a day. Ayool...

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