Reflections on my first year at Lendable

After his first year as CTO at Lendable, Patrick Myles reflects on his career shift to B2C fintech, his learnings from scaling a startup engineering team, and the challenges of growing a team while maintaining culture.

I can't believe it's been a year since I joined Lendable. How do I feel on reflection?

My primary feeling is how refreshing it is to be back in a role that has scope to make impact across the business, not just a technology leader. I'm loving the B2C side of fintech, finally being closer to the customers/users - shortening the feedback loops which can be painfully long in B2B2C.

It's been incredibly rewarding and stimulating working with an awesome exec team. A great mix of very smart and driven founders, talented people who've grown and developed with the business, and a few battle-scarred oldies like me!

Finally, and most importantly, I've been blown away by not just the technology, but especially the engineering team I inherited from Paul Pamment (founder CTO), and loved how they've adapted and grown as we've scaled fast this past 12 months. It's a tough gig following on from a founder CTO, but the team have made me feel very welcome and it's been a blast!

What am I proud of achieving in my first year?

• Tripling the size of the engineering org to over 70 engineers, helping the company more than double overall headcount as we scale.
• Building out a talented and outcome-driven engineering leadership team. They are a fantastic mix of existing people and new hires (including both ICs and Managers) with a structure designed to enable us to scale the engineering org to 250+ in due course
• Helped us close our first major funding round (of £210m, with a great new investor partner, OTTP) which has cemented our triple-unicorn status.

What have been the highlights of joining when I did?

• We're growing in many dimensions: exciting new products, technologies and geographies.
• I arrived just as we launched a major consumer fintech product for car finance - Autolend - and have seen it grow to profitability in record time.
• I was involved from the start of the build-out of our expansion to the US - which is launching very soon - watch this space!
• I've helped seed an exciting new consumer finance product, using a new tech stack (still in stealth-mode - due to launch in Q4).
• Spending an amazing week with the whole company in Turkey for our annual disaster recovery offsite was a great experience and helped bring us even closer together.

What have the challenges been?

• I've had a lot to learn about consumer finance - more than I realised. I wanted to get stuck in and contribute on the product and tech side, but I'm glad I took the first couple of months to listen, learn and (mostly) resist the urge to meddle. That investment of time is paying off now.
• Hiring great engineering talent in London is tough, despite our pedigree in the PHP community and 5* Glassdoor rating! Diversifying our tech stack and building a graduate/junior programme are two strategies we're using to help, but there's still a long way to go. On the flip side, we've scaled our remote hiring fast, and found some incredible talent across Europe to help us grow as fast as we have.
• Nurturing the unique culture that defined Lendable - whilst adding enough process and structure to make us a success - is a typical scale-up challenge. It's one I've risen to in previous roles, yet I forgot the huge amount of focus, acceptance of failure and collaboration energy it requires, which can be exhausting at times. But so rewarding when it all clicks.

In summary, it's been one of the most exciting years of my career. I'm so excited to see what our inspiring Lendable team can achieve over the next year and beyond!

Oh, and we're always hiring amazing talent as we continue our growth journey… If you're looking for a new challenge, especially in tech or product, I'd love to chat to you. Full list of open roles here