David Erasmus

Two years ago I attended a Charity Hack at PayPals office.

It was really fun and we designed GetGiving

I learnt about PayPal’s Adaptive Payments system in its Alpha release and realised that a Mobile Payments revolution was on the way that would change EVERYTHING.

With so many companies trying to become your mobile wallet it can be hard to know which basket to put your eggs in.

I decided 2 years ago that PayPal would probably win due these factors………

- They have Appox 100 Million users unlike finance startups.

- Their brand is built on primarily on commerce unlike Google.

- They are still young enough as a business to innovate. unlike the Banks.

- They are platform agnostic unlike Apple.

- They are approachable and have committed to empower developers to create the future through X.com

- There is no barrier to signing up for small businesses unlike PDQ services.

So I threw my eggs in their basket and have never looked back.

After Apple blocked our donation app. We went back to the drawing board and designed Givey which is a FAR deeper reaching product so I am pretty happy they forced us think harder to solve the Mobile Social Giving problem.

We also designed Mosho and TouchCart from the lessons we learnt hoping that our bet would pay off……

Thankfully PayPal  are beginning to make big strides into the real world.

With a REAL  pop up store in Manhattan to showcase their new innovations like the one John Lunn showed us the other day at the PayPal offices in London that brings a whole new meaning to the term window shopping

And then the icing on the cake was this morning when my good friend @LukeAndrews sent me a picture of his bill from Pizza Express from the other day, which no doubt he cashed in on the Taste London card

So PayPal is getting out of the building and out of eBay and this is only just the beginning.

My guess is to get on board or get out of the way.

I have made many terrible guesses about the future but I still back this one.  :-)

It has been a really interesting couple of weeks @ Cubate.

I started my first meetings with VCs and began to put our embryonic business into the furnace to see if it got incinerated.

I actually really enjoyed it, the VCs I met like Alliot from Octopus Ventures are just quick, smart people who need to understand within 10 minutes what you are doing, why you need help and how they will get their money back quickly.

VC meetings are not suitable for complicated visions or weird company structures.

The Power of getting out of the building and refining your business ideas through conversations with smart people is absolutely invaluable.

In our case nearly ALL the smart investors I have met have really latched on to the Social payments we have been exploring with Givey and soon to be Mosho. They believe this is where our niche value lies.

Through these conversations I have increased the visibility of Social Payment innovation within our model.

Here is another cool example of some guys doing a great job of extracting REAL WORLD VALUE out of Social media.

Pay with a Tweet – Case Study – OMG version from Leif on Vimeo.

In short once you have a good idea and have got it to a place of “Tangibility” so others can see it go and chat to AS MANY smart and some not so smart people to find out what they think and then……….

Reiterate, Reiterate, Reiterate both your product and your communications.

Don’t believe your Product girl or your Marketing guys, they are both as vital as each other.

On Monday I had the privilege of delivering a speech after Steve Moore CEO of the Big Society Network and before the PM David Cameron at the Launch of Nick Hurd’s Launch of the Giving White Paper.

It was the day we launched Givey – The giving identity that allows Gift Aided donations through Twitter and other social apps.

It was a landmark day for all that have been involved in the Givey journey, it was the day we switched the light on and went past go.

Following the ‘Lean start up’ mentality with blood sweat and tears along with a list as long as my arm of amazing people who have given of themselves needlessly to make this needed innovation a reality we managed to get to live day without significant external funding.

Later in the day I checked Givey’s PayPal account to see the following….

We only take 1.25% of donations so this balance represented approximately the first £80 raised through the system.

Now 92p might not seem a lot to you given that my team and I have invested 18 months thousands of pounds, leveraged every relationship we have and cried many tears, but for me it is the moment that we WON.

Turning £00000000.92 into £92,000,000.00 is simply an issue of moving the decimal place.

Now it is live, people can touch it, they believe it and my job is almost complete as there are FAR more competent people than I fit for growing this vision into all it can be – Joe Crome is the man to watch out for.

This is an amazing video from Derek Sivers Via TED

When you watch it look at the length of time between each ‘stage’ of the movements growth.

Our first stage took me and the team 18 months and it produced £1.

What is the betting that stage 2 will take less time and produce at least £2?

This was arguably the most important pound I will ever generate.

Don’t get blinded by NFC payments.

There are going to be many other crazy uses for NFC

Like Lockitron the Y-combinator backed start up.

I am just wondering when they are going to let us put the chip in us?

I am scared about when they are going to force us to have the chip in us.

I wonder if I will take it or not.

What is next?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13308452

Maybe? Any other thoughts?