Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology · Riding Unicorns Productions

Scaling from startup to £70M+ funding in 16 months with Paul Anthony, Co-founder of Primer & Colossal

August 13, 2025·55 min·3 clips

Primer reached Series B in 16 months after Seedcamp, Bolderton, and Iconiq backing.

1. Riding Unicorns: Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Technology focuses on Paul Anthony’s path from payments infrastructure to Colossal’s creator-commerce plans. 2. Paul Anthony is the co-founder of Primer and the founder of Colossal, and the hosts know him through Primer, Colossal, and angel investing together. 3. The episode asks how a founder who scaled Primer quickly is applying the same product instincts to a new business built around digital goods and music creators. 4. Paul’s first job was as the first employee and first developer at DecoPay in the UK in 2009. 5. He says DecoPay had one of the world’s first retail finance payment methods in the UK and Europe while Klarna was just starting. 6. He describes a checkout flow where customers printed a credit application form and mailed it to the bank. 7. At DecoPay, he was asked to build a real-time credit scoring engine because the banks had no internet-based systems. 8. He says that experience pushed him from senior engineer to CTO over about seven years. 9. He then joined PayPal for about 18 months after following a sales colleague. 10. At PayPal and Braintree, he met large merchants face to face and repeatedly asked engineering teams to describe their payment architecture. 11. That merchant work led him to see a missing layer for payments, which became the basis for Primer. 12. He says Primer was started in January 2020 and then COVID changed the company’s operating assumptions within a few months. 13. He says the team was only three or four people when the pandemic hit and the shift to remote work changed the pace of the business. 14. He says Primer reached Series B within the first 16 months after Seedcamp, Bolderton, XL, and Iconiq invested. 15. He argues that enterprise payment infrastructure cannot behave like a lean startup because large merchants need robust systems before they replace Stripe or Adyen. 16. He says VC rejections often came from a lack of market data, while the eventual backers were high-conviction investors. 17. He says startup culture at Primer required telling people “we’re not a real business yet” and assuming the team was wrong every day. 18. He describes hiring as a heavy-filter process, often interviewing 20 to 30 people for each person hired, and says autonomy was a requirement. 19. The conversation is direct, founder-to-founder, and moves between technical detail, fundraising, hiring, and product philosophy. 20. Listeners who like payments, B2B SaaS, and founder operating lessons will get the most from this episode; listeners who want light startup anecdotes may skip it.

As heard by us

A founder-led look at payments, autonomy, and building a tailored commerce stack.

Paul Anthony's conversation keeps its attention on the practical side of commerce: why payments are hard, why broad platforms can fall short, and why Colossal is built for digital goods sellers who need a more specific stack.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Hear how Primer scaled fast, then why Colossal is built for digital goods sellers.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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