Built to Last: Adyen's 20-Year Edge | Pieter van der Does (Adyen) & Jason Karaian (NYT)

1. Reusable infrastructure outlasts predictions

• Adyen's founders and first four employees had worked together at a company they sold. Starting Adyen—whose name means “start over again”—they wanted to do things the right way. Van der Does says they listen closely to merchants but choose needs that scale across merchants and point toward the future. Twenty years of custom solutions would leave Adyen stuck; “after 20 years of discipline, you actually have something that really resonates with merchants.”
• Rather than predict the future, he says Adyen builds a flexible foundation that can be filled in as merchant needs emerge.
• Karaian asks how to distinguish durable trends from hype. Van der Does recalls mobile commerce being discussed for at least seven years, perhaps longer, before the iPhone. In the years before mobile payments took off, Adyen was doing three transactions per week. A mobile-payments company built before the iPhone would have failed: recognizing a trend does not tell you when it will take off.
• His approach is to consider the impact if a trend picks up and what to develop then, rather than jumping on the hype. He recalls people urging him to get on top of the metaverse; it has not materialized so far, though it might. He judges whether Adyen has the right stack, not the timing.

2. Platforms define Adyen's route to smaller merchants

• Against the impression of “plain sailing,” van der Does recalls that five years in, one customer accounted for 70% of Adyen's volume, though not its profit. Losing that merchant could have changed the outcome.
• In 2017, he thinks, Adyen signed eBay through its service for platforms, helping establish its U.S. presence and demonstrate its commitment to platforms. Rather than sign up small restaurants directly, Adyen can serve a platform for pizzerias that signs up the smaller merchants. Adyen eventually dropped SMB sales to focus on large companies and platforms serving those markets.
• Embedded finance extends what vertical SaaS platforms can offer smaller merchants. A platform may see a yoga studio's payment patterns and, if it needs a coffee machine, offer a loan repaid from a portion of incoming funds. For a seasonal business, repayments need not be an enormous draw during the low season.

3. AI feeds today's products before agentic commerce matures

• Adyen first built online payments, then added point-of-sale terminals and banking licenses. Van der Does describes those as two layers: payments and banking licenses that let the company operate independently of banks. Dynamic Identification adds a third layer, using AI to analyze transactions and feed into product quality. Adyen now offers card issuing, bank accounts and loans alongside payments.
• Merchant priorities have shifted from accepting payments globally to choosing which payment methods to present and what is financially opportune, avoiding fraud, optimizing routing costs and raising authorization rates. Van der Does says it is extremely important for Adyen that all transactions run through AI.
• Dynamic Identification can recognize a merchant's bank account from prior interactions and avoid asking for proof again. It can also recognize a shopper and let a transaction through even when its features might trigger fraud in a more static system.
• On agentic commerce, Van der Does says unresolved questions remain. Adyen may be a payment-details provider merchants rely on, but the shopper's identity and the contract authorizing an agent to buy for a given amount must be clear; “that won't be us.” He says people tend to overestimate short-term impact and underestimate long-term impact, probably here too, and Adyen need not time adoption precisely. He says he does not need to call whether AI is in a bubble.
• Asked about other exciting technologies, he says he prefers to let merchants and the market decide. Adyen once supported Bitcoin without a major announcement, then quietly switched it off when merchants were not using it. It tracks stablecoins and has people working on them, while prioritizing shared merchant needs. “I pride myself on not being very visionary.”

4. Talent retention supports Europe's engineering advantage

• Van der Does says attracting the right people is central to building a successful company. Until recently, every hire's final cultural-fit interview involved one of seven directors; as that took too much time, a few additional people began sharing the responsibility. Candidates also complete a coding test or business case. He wants a high density of talented people in an environment that attracts more talent.
• Van der Does is “gung-ho” about starting companies in Europe. Just before COVID, his co-founder chose to start another company in the Netherlands. At Adyen, Amsterdam helped retain engineers long enough to go deep into payments, build a bank and connect directly to all payment methods. He says that kind of long-term commitment to one company is less common in San Francisco.
• His European regulatory complaint concerns differing national interpretations, which complicate rolling out services across Europe. Regulation can also protect local interests in ways that burden companies competing globally, even where workarounds exist.
• Capital allocation brings another constraint. After several weeks in San Francisco, he heard investors considering investing only in AI and some LPs saying funds were only allowed to invest in AI. If that trend continues, non-AI startups could find it harder to raise money.

5. Market demand and survival guide investment

• Van der Does says newer payments players collectively have a single-digit percentage of the total addressable market, with most still held by incumbents. He is focused on Adyen taking a big part of the market still to come. Today's choices about services, investment, partnerships and positioning will shape who captures the 90% he says will migrate to more modern companies.
• For startups, even one-in-100 survival odds are “probably still optimistic.” He asks whether this week's work improves the odds to one in 50 or one in 25. An HR framework may or may not be necessary today; “micro-celebrity syndrome” can make peer recognition feel like success while the odds of survival remain against you.