Gerard Fitzpatrick, Director of Engineering at Wayflyer, joined us in our third podcast episode. Gerard holds a PhD in Astrophysics, with his academic work centred on studies of high energy atmospheric phenomena with the Fermi Gamma ray burst monitor. He’s also worked for NASA and the European Space Agency (how cool is that!) and unleashed his mind power for a while in the field of data science. And now he has taken his scientific prowess to Wayflier and looks to create great things in the field of e-commerce. This, in fact, is what we chatted about in this episode of the Silicon Roundabout Podcast.
In his own words, Wayflyer “is in the business of helping e-commerce companies grow” through financing and analytics. He added, “Analytics provides the confidence to spend and finance provides the capital to spend.” Wayflyer’s novel approach, which they call a “merchant cash advance”, helps e-commerce ventures scale, especially when faced with the need to ramp up inventory and marketing. They must be doing something right because the company has grown around 5 – 6x what it was at startup. It grew from a single customer to now having hundreds of them within the last 12 months. And all of this happened within the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic!
Of course, Gerard acknowledges that it wasn’t all smooth sailing getting to where Wayflyer is right now. In fact, he mentions that even while the pandemic has helped the company grow as fast as it did, it does present many difficulties in figuring out the new consumer behaviour patterns. This has made it challenging to understand markets and project future growth. The real challenge, though, Gerard says, is keeping up with demand and the growth while at the same time maintaining the culture and discipline that helped the company grow, in the first place.
SPOILER ALERT! Gerard also mentions several tech roles that need to be filled.