From Marine Biology to Fintech: How John Lunn is Revolutionising Payment Processing with Gr4vy

In this exclusive interview, StartupReporter speaks with John Lunn, Founder and CEO of Gr4vy, about his journey from marine biologist to fintech pioneer, building a remote-first company during the pandemic, and creating a culture of accountability and trust.

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John Lunn’s career trajectory is anything but conventional. From studying marine biology to becoming one of the earliest employees at PayPal UK to founding Gr4vy, a cloud-native payment orchestration platform, Lunn has consistently been at the forefront of payment innovation.

With experience at Cybersource (later acquired by Visa) and a 14-year tenure at PayPal, Lunn brings decades of fintech expertise to his latest venture. StartupReporter sat down with him to discuss the challenges of building a startup during a pandemic, his approach to leadership, and the future of payment processing.

The Journey to Gr4vy

Can you tell us about your journey before founding Gr4vy?

John Lunn: I’ve always been in payments pretty much since I left university. Back in 1997, I joined a payments company right at the beginning of the Internet—Cybersource, probably the first Internet payment company. Not many people bought things online at that stage, which was the beginning of the dot-com boom.

At that stage, the problem was that most people made payments with machines that you swiped back and forth, and we were trying to make that digital. We eventually got a system where you could enter a credit card into a website and pay. Those were super exciting times—dot-com boom, dot-com crash, all the rest of it. That company, Cybersource, ended up being sold to Visa later for a lot of money.

The next problem that was apparent to me was that if you wanted to sell books online, for example, you’d have to put your suit on, put your tie on, go to your local bank, and talk to a bank manager and say, “Hey, I want to sell books online.” And they’d go, “What’s online?” So the problem was that you didn’t have a store as a small seller, and the traditional bankers didn’t understand it. That’s when I joined PayPal because I saw an opportunity to open up commerce to everyone—an opportunity for people to be able to sell without needing to go through the old systems.

I was at PayPal for a long time and did a lot of different things there. I joined when there were about 36 people; when I left, there were 20,000 people, so it changed as a company. But while I was there, I realised the next problem that we needed to solve: online payments had boomed, but the complexity of payments was being forced onto the merchants.

When you start, you might integrate into a PSP like Stripe or Braintree, and then six months later, you’d integrate with PayPal and Affirm or Klarna. Then you’d go international and have more integrations. So merchants were having to build payment teams to handle all these integrations to different payment types. The bigger you got, the more complex it became, until you ended up with companies with 300 engineers working on payments when essentially your business was selling music or renting apartments.

It struck me as crazy that everybody was building the same thing—basically a router to send payments. They were all building independently with custom code. So why don’t we just build a tool that does that? That was really the genesis of Gr4vy—let’s plug that gap.

You studied marine biology. What similarities, if any, do you see between that field and your work in payments?

John Lunn: Well, it’s called Fintech, so technically, it’s got fins! But seriously, when you study science at university, they teach you how to think. They teach you how to come up with theories, hypotheses, theses. They teach you to evaluate things and work out different ways that might happen.

I think scientific training is very useful for entrepreneurs. It means you can go in with a thesis, set up what you need to test to see if it works, and if it works, great, you have a business. If it doesn’t work, you try something different. There are a lot of similarities between scientific training and entrepreneurship that I think make it a great way to train.

Building Through Challenges

What was the biggest challenge you faced in the early days of Gr4vy, and how did you overcome it?

John Lunn: There are many challenges, but we started during COVID. That was quite a challenge. We started from our sofas in our houses—that’s where Gr4vy began. I fundraised without ever meeting a VC in person, which was interesting and challenging.

We had to build a team 100% remote from the beginning, and we did a good enough job that we’re still 100% remote. But there was no model for this, right? We had to invent it as we went along. We had to work out the tools to do that. We had to work out how to build a culture or a Gr4vy team without meeting in person, and we basically had to do it while sitting by ourselves on our sofas.

We also made mistakes. We started too heavily on marketing—marketing our product before we had a product. I think that’s where you can get a little overexcited. We learned a lot at the beginning, and I think it’s really helped us become a better company.

Because I have experience in this industry from having done it a few times before, that did help us not make the obvious mistakes. But the world changes. Since we started Gr4vy, we’ve had COVID, we had a global recession, and now we’ve got tariffs. It’s not been the easiest time to run any business, I would say.

Milestone Moments

What milestone are you most proud of reaching with Gr4vy?

John Lunn: I think with all Fintechs, there is one anchor client that gets you kicked off. For PayPal, it was eBay; for Cybersource, I think it was probably Buy.com at the beginning. Every Fintech has an anchor client. If you look at Plaid, they had Braintree and Venmo. That’s how those companies grew.

If you’re doing enterprise sales, which is what we do, selling to very large customers, it’s hard to get your first one because what you’re doing is you’re a 30, 40, 50-person startup or even smaller, and you’re trying to sell to a company with more lawyers than you have employees. You’re going into those deals, and you’re going to get that pushback of “You’re so small. We’re unsure we can work with you because you’re too small. How do we know you’re going to be around in two years?” That’s a real challenge when doing enterprise.

The thing that’s made me proudest so far is we don’t get those questions anymore. We did that by getting that one big anchor client, which for us is the Woolworths Group in Australia and New Zealand—the biggest supermarket chain in that area. They selected Gr4vy, they’ve gone live with Gr4vy, and that gave us the legitimacy that has allowed us to grow with all our other clients. So now, when we meet a very large company, they don’t say, “But you’re so small.” That makes me super proud, and that’s a challenge that’s really hard to overcome.

Building a Culture of Accountability

What are you proud of in terms of the team you’ve built at Gr4vy?

John Lunn: We have had an extremely loyal team. From the early days, we’ve had very low attrition of people leaving the company. I think we’ve created this culture of accountability. We don’t say your boss will shout at you because you’ve done a bad job, but you are accountable for everything you do to everybody else in the company, and everyone will hold you accountable.

We won’t say “you messed up” or “we all hate you,” but we’ll say, “Hey, you could have done this better. Let me help you.” That’s the culture we’ve got here—everybody is accountable for what they work on, and accountable not to their boss but to everyone else in the company.

That’s created this amazing work culture where if you need help, everybody volunteers to help, and that means there are very few silos. Even if you’re in sales and you’re struggling, an engineer will jump on a call to help you with what you need to do. Marketing will work with any other part of the team because it’s about accountability. We’re all in it together, and we hold each other accountable.

What practical steps would you recommend for companies that are just starting and want to build a similar culture of accountability?

John Lunn: It’s about trust, 100% to do with trust. Hire people who are trustworthy and hire people whom you can trust. It’s not obvious—I think as a young manager or perhaps an inexperienced founder, you will often feel very paranoid about whether everybody’s doing a good job, and you need to let that go. You really need to let it go.

Trust people to do a great job; if they don’t, correct them. And if they don’t get it, get rid of them, frankly. But don’t tell people how to do a job because you, as a founder, will burn yourself out 100% since you don’t know everything. You might be the CEO, but you don’t know everything about finance, you don’t know everything about accounting. You don’t know many things, so trust the people you’ve hired to do a good job and let them get on with it. Get out of their way.

Very early in my career, one of my senior managers said to me, “Your job as a manager is to get obstacles out of the way of the people that work for you. It’s not for you to tell them what to do. Just get things out of their way so they can do the best job.”

As a founder, you do everything when you start with just three people. I forget who it was, but someone I saw speak relatively recently said, “Your mission is to give away something every week or every month. Give away a bit of your job to someone else.” Do that with trust. Sometimes people won’t do as good a job as you, but that’s okay because they’ll learn, and then you won’t have to do it, and you can work on other stuff and grow the company.

How do you assess trust when hiring? Is it a gut feeling, or do you have specific questions?

John Lunn: One of the questions—actually, my wife gave me this interview question, and if I tell you now, everyone’s going to know the interview question, but I’ll tell you anyway—I always ask people in an interview: “When is the last time you apologised?”

That really gets people to open up. It can be “I apologised to my kids” or “I apologised to a colleague,” but understanding why they apologized and how they frame it—you can really get down to how someone works by asking that question.

Advice for Fintech Entrepreneurs

What advice would you give to entrepreneurs just starting out who want to innovate in the fintech field?

John Lunn: The first piece of advice is don’t come up with a solution and then look for a problem. I’ve seen that a lot, especially in early blockchain where everybody wanted to do everything on the blockchain, and sometimes it really made no sense at all. The same applies to some of the AI stuff at the moment—just because AI is cool doesn’t mean you have to use it for everything.

There’s a big difference between a company and a science experiment. In a science experiment, you’re trying to learn something. In a company, you’ve got to make money. So start with a problem, don’t start with a solution. Find out what the solution is to the problem using all the tools available to you.

The second thing is, be really aware of regulation. Fintech is highly regulated for very, very good reasons. People care about money, and unlike lots of startups where “break things, move fast” is the mantra, you can’t do that in Fintech because if you break things, you go to jail. So be aware of what you can and can’t do, and what you’re allowed and not allowed to do, because there are many areas in Fintech where there aren’t startups because the regulatory burden is so high that you’re not going to make it as a startup.

Make sure you have a good lawyer who is aware of the regulations, because there are a lot of them. And unfortunately, now with deglobalization, it’s getting more and more complicated. Different countries are putting in different regulations, and you’ve really got to understand your market and what you can and can’t do legally.

How do you evaluate if a problem is worth solving?

John Lunn: Go and ask people. Go and interview people. Before we wrote a line of code at Gr4vy, we went to talk to merchants all over the place. That’s how we ended up with the product the way it is. We asked them questions like, “If we do this, would you use it?”

But not in a general way—if you ask 100 different clients what they want, they will give you 100 different things, and you will end up in a mess. Phrase the question differently: “If I did A or B, what would you prefer, A or B?” That will help you crystallise.

When we were starting, we were trying to determine if we should build Gr4vy as a SaaS or a cloud company. Everyone in payments generally builds a SaaS, but the more we talked to merchants, the more we realized the SaaS wouldn’t work because a SaaS is a single point of failure. So we realized we had to build the cloud, and we learned that by interviewing clients.

One of the good ways to describe this is that whenever you watch American Idol or those shows, there’s always someone who comes on who really can’t sing, and you wonder how they got there. It’s probably because people around them told them they could sing. If you live in too small a box, you end up in an echo chamber. Get out, talk to different people, talk to different merchants.

And one of the biggest things: if they disagree with you, don’t get angry about it. You need to know that. Don’t get angry if they don’t believe what you’ve got is going to work. They’re either very wrong or they’re right. I’ve been wrong many times—I thought PayPal was a terrible idea when they came to see Cybersource at the beginning, and I said we shouldn’t give these guys a merchant account. And then I ended up working for them for 14 years.

You can be wrong a lot, but you learn—you learn from people’s bad reactions and people’s good reactions. Do your market research before you go in and build lines of code.

The Future of Gr4vy

What’s next for Gr4vy? Any ideas about expansion or product development?

John Lunn: We’re focused on growing the business. Of course, we’re expanding quickly. One of the things I’m very excited about this year is that we’ve rolled out what we call an “insights engine.”

If you think about a payments team, you have different people doing different roles. One of the roles is a payments analyst—someone looking through the data, trying to work out what’s going on with credit card processing. We’ve rolled out a tool that allows you to see all your data in real-time, compare it, drill into how things are doing, find problems, and find solutions. Because Gr4vy is real-time, you can fix them and deploy the fixes immediately to production.

Our merchants are already loving it because they can find things they didn’t even know were issues. They can find money lying around that they’re losing by doing things badly, or they can make little tweaks to improve their processes.

That’s just the first stage. The next stage is what we’re calling the “payment consultant” (these are all TBD names, by the way), which is the AI that sits on top of this that will start to identify problems and tell you where the issues are, rather than you needing to find them.

I’m excited that we’ve now reached a scale and a size where we have a significant amount of data, and these models are starting to come in to help payment teams manage their payments more efficiently.

Personal Insights

Which book, movie, or song has truly changed how you see life?

John Lunn: I’m a sci-fi geek. I read a hell of a lot of sci-fi—that’s what I do for fun. There are a lot of sci-fi books that have influenced how I think about the world, and I actually think some of the best research you can do as a techie founder is read sci-fi.

Sci-fi talks about the future without repercussions. It talks about what the future might be, and that stimulates your brain to start thinking about how that could happen and how you would be involved in it. There are obvious things like “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson. Still, a British author called Iain M. Banks wrote a series called “The Culture Series,” where AI has become conscious and has decided that instead of being evil, it’s going to work with humans and look after them.

There are bad things that happen in these books, but AI is part of the world, and I think that got my brain spinning early on about what the future might look like. If you’re worried about how AI might change the world and you want a good read, you should read those because they’re very positive books.

If you could have dinner with any three people from history, who would they be?

John Lunn: That’s a really difficult question. I would probably have Richard Dawkins there—I’d like to sit down and talk to him. One of them would be my wife because I like to have dinner with my wife every day. And I think Alan Turing—I would really like to talk to Alan Turing. What he went through personally, but also the way he thought—I’d really like to understand how his brain got there, and I think he would have very interesting perspectives on things that I’m not sure ever got talked about outside his personal life.

What life events have shaped you the most as a person or as a founder?

John Lunn: There’s a lot of luck in life, and I think as a founder, it’s being lucky enough to work with certain people who inspire you to be your best self.

The CEO of eBay when I was there, a guy called John Donahoe, who went on to ServiceNow and then to Nike—he was truly inspirational to me on how to be a servant leader. He would walk into a room of PayPal employees, and he would say to the execs, “I see you guys all the time. I’m going to go and talk to that group of engineers in the corner.” He’d take his notepad and write down what they were saying because he wanted to really understand how that team was feeling and what they were working on.

For me personally, I was doing fun innovation stuff, and he came over and said, “This is amazing. I’m going to support this. I’m going to give you what you need. I love this.” And then he opened his door and said, “I want you to come and see me once a month and sit down and talk to me about what’s going on in the world.” For a CEO of a massive company to take that time to talk to people many layers below you in the infrastructure—that really taught me that servant leadership is the way forward. It has definitely heavily influenced how I manage and how I lead people.

Moving to the US was also a big life event for me. But generally, I was just really lucky. I got into Cybersource because I couldn’t get a job as a marine biologist. I taught myself to code. I got some books, did the Microsoft course from paper books, got myself certified, and then I applied for a job and was lucky enough to get one in a payments company.

There’s a lot of luck in life, but I believe you make your own luck. Lucky people aren’t lucky; lucky people are just those who take opportunities.

Rapid Fire

• Coffee or tea? – Coffee.
• Dogs or cats? – Dogs.
• Summer or winter? – I’m from Switzerland, so that’s really hard…summer.
• Fiction or non-fiction? – Fiction.
• Sweet or savory? – Savoury.
• City life or countryside? – Countryside.
• Comedy or drama? – Drama.
• What app do you use the most? – Slack, probably.
• What’s your go-to productivity hack? – Email in the morning. Classify it before you read it.

What would you like to wish the readers? – Be brave, do exciting things. Be brave. Don’t regret your life later on.