Why I joined Juni

Two months ago I opened a new chapter in my professional career by joining Juni, a young startup from Sweden. I believe that evaluating an offer from an early-stage startup is very similar to investing in an early-stage startup: it is very risky but can bring a high reward if everything goes well. The only difference between a prospective employee of a startup and a VC is that a professional VC usually places at least 10 bets on 10 different companies hoping that at least one of them will bring a 10x return. As an employee, you only have one bet(no pressure at all :) ).? Here I will explain the reasons why I believe Juni is the right bet at the moment.

As usual, there is no silver bullet, meaning that different answers might be correct in different circumstances. That’s why it is essential to define what you are looking for. Interestingly, my main criteria haven’t changed much in the last 3 years. In addition to 5 criteria that I defined almost 3 years ago, I would add only one: having a possibility to have an impact. So let’s get started.?

Juni is solving a big customer’s problem.

Technology has disrupted a bunch of different industries from taxis and selling books to dating and traveling. The only industry that was immune to new disruptors was financial services due to the high level of regulation in the industry. But after the 2008 crisis regulators decided that we needed a change and started to promote competition in the field. After that, we saw a huge number of new startups across the world starting to provide different financial services. It started with the most obvious problem that everyone experienced on a day-to-day basis: personal banking. We also saw a rise of startups that are good at solving one particular customer problem: cross-border transfers(Wise), stock market trading(Robinhood, Trade Republic, …), crypto exchanges(Coinbase, Kraken, …), and payment acceptance(Stripe and Adyen) just to name a few. The newcomers provided mostly the same services but digitally, better and cheaper.?

Juni is taking the next logical step in this development: on top of providing the same financial services, it helps its customers to take better financial actions, simplifies their lives, and eventually changes their lives. All of this is impossible to offer to everyone at the same time and that’s why Juni has to focus on a specific customer niche. Samir and Anders decided to focus on e-commerce businesses and there are several reasons why I like this.?

First of all, e-commerce is already a 13 trillion market that is expected to grow like crazy in the following years. Although the market is huge existing banks provide e-commerce businesses only one-size-fits-all solutions. The great validation of this is the success that Juni had even as a beta product. It’s hard to convince someone to trust a new financial provider and it’s even harder if your product is in beta. When customers move their money to a beta product it means only one thing: they desperately need something better than existing solutions.?

Second, I believe that it’s easier to make money providing services to businesses than to people because businesses simply have more money and they are more likely to pay for services that provide them value.?

Juni has a great chance to succeed in solving the problem.

Quite often you can hear that ideas nowadays are cheap and the success or failure of a company is decided by the execution. There are two main reasons why I believe that Juni is able to execute successfully.?

The first reason is a great combination of the founding team that Juni has. First of all, it’s not your classical team of founders in their twenties that many magazines are writing about. The data shows that the most successful founders are somewhere between 35-45. That makes sense because to be able to execute you need to have some experience. Juni has the right mix of skills among the founders. Samir has experience in managing e-commerce companies which helps him to understand customer problems and to manage Juni better. During our interview, I really liked how laser-focus he was on customer problems. Anders has a long history as a software engineer. I like to see one of the founders being very technical because modern companies must be technology companies first of all, and a tech founder guarantees that the voice of technology is always present at board meetings.?

The second reason is the truly remote-first approach that the company took. To be able to successfully execute the vision a company needs to have great professionals at every position and competition for the best talent is fierce. Juni is well-positioned to win this competition because it’s able to hire people across the world. Employer of Record gives the company flexibility to hire people in countries that most companies are not able to. That’s a huge advantage in the current market. Also, the remote-first approach helps with diversity. Understanding that diversity is important became conventional wisdom. But most companies mean diversity as a situation where people live in the same city, go to the same office, and speak the same language but have different either sex, religion, race, or sexual orientation. I believe this understanding is wrong in a way that countries, where people live, are more important for diversity than other factors. Geert Hofstede tried to map cultural differences by running surveys around the globe. He found that people of different religions living in the same country have more common culture than people of the same religion living in different countries. Employer of Record helps Juni to hire truly diverse employees.

Juni is making the world a better place.

Juni is impacting the world in two ways. The first is via its customers. If Juni succeeds then building a new e-commerce shop will be easier and cheaper meaning we’ll have more e-commerce businesses. The more e-commerce businesses there are the bigger choices consumers have(even those in remote locations) and the lower prices for consumers are. The second way Juni is impacting the world is via its employees. By hiring people around the globe Juni creates equal opportunities in different countries and different locations. On one side it allows employees to live where they like to live and to be happier because of that. On the other side, it helps to develop remote locations and developing countries.??

A fast-growing startup is a place to be if you want to maximize your learnings and impact.?

A company's growth has usually two dimensions: growth in customers and employees. Many software engineers like to build systems that scale to millions of customers but only if you are working for a fast-growing company you can see if your system really scales to millions of customers and which of your assumptions were wrong. It’s hard to learn without this feedback loop. The second dimension, growth in employees, forces you to be more explicit about your communication and information sharing because something that works for ten employees won’t work for a hundred or thousand. Last year Juni was recognized as the fastest growing fintech in Europe. That makes it a top company to learn right now.?

Another thing that makes Juni a unique place right now is the possibility to build a financial companion almost from scratch. At existing banks, you can learn how banks work but only by building a bank from scratch, you can learn why various functions are important and better understand them.?

Juni is building a great culture

There are two things that I particularly liked about Juni’s culture: being truly remote and transparent.?

You might think that being remote is not unique after the pandemic and many companies say that they are hiring remotely or even claim that they are remote-first companies. When you hear this I would recommend you to dig deeper to understand what it means for the company. In most cases, you realize that there is a huge difference between hiring remotely and being truly remote. If you plan to join remotely a company a big red flag for you must be if the company has an office and a big percentage of the total workforce go there. There are a few problems that might make your life harder as a remote employee for an office-based company. First of all, is limited career progression. I have heard several times something like “we hire remotely but Tech Leads/Engineering Leads/Engineering Managers/… must be in the office”. Even if the company doesn’t have a strict rule office-based employees might still be high in the promotion queue because top management knows them better. That means that in this case, you won’t have any possibility to make the next step in your career and if you’d like to progress you would need either to find a new company or move to the company headquarter. The second risk is your day-to-day experience. If most of your colleagues are office-based you might miss some important discussions because they happen around the water cooler. Another mistake that many teams repeat is when all office employees go to a meeting room and a remote employee is present only on a screen that no one in the meeting room pays attention to. And they are not doing it to intentionally hurt the remote employee, it feels weird to some people to be in the office and to have an all-remote meeting. In some cases, your office bases employee doesn’t even turn their cameras on, which means that they see each other every day but you never have the chance to do it. All this makes you feel like a second-class employee even if the company claims that it is remote-first. The third issue is socialization. You as a remote employee and your office-based colleagues have completely different needs and possibilities for socialization. That’s why they know each other well and you even after a few years won’t have a chance to get to know them personally. For those reasons, I would recommend joining a truly remote company rather than an office-based company that hires remotely. Juni is one of the truly remote companies that are still very rare. It has no limit on your career growth as a remote employee and a big part of the leadership team is outside of Sweden. The company hosts an onsite in a new location for the whole company every quarter to have a chance to spend some time together.?

Another important trait of Juni’s culture is transparency. Do you like to see investors' updates? You’ll get them. Are you missing the company’s profits and losses? You’ll get them. Would you like to know why someone left the company? You’ll be told the exact reasons why he was fired. I love this approach when employees are treated as adults that can handle even bad news without any sugarcoating.

P. S. If you’d like to work in a transparent company and are passionate about building financial services for e-commerce businesses, feel free to check our careers page or drop me a message.