Christian Owens

Records of the UK’s Companies House give his full name as Christian Bailey Owens, born in June 1994, of British nationality, with England recorded as his country of residence.⁠[1]

A 2023 profile in Prospect states that he grew up in Corby, a town in the English Midlands, where his father worked at the local British American Tobacco factory and his mother was a secretary.⁠[2]

Accounts of when he took up computers and programming differ: Gizmodo wrote in 2010 that he got his first computer at seven and a Mac three years later, on which he taught himself web design; in a 2010 Mixergy interview he said he began teaching himself to build websites at about 12, or perhaps 11, and that when he asked his parents how to make a website they replied that they would not know; Prospect writes that he taught himself to code at 13 by reading an 800-page book; the Evening Standard writes that he was partly schooled by YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry, which helped him learn to code at 13; in a 2019 Notion Capital Q&A he said he taught himself to code at 14 by talking to other software developers and to people building apps he liked and by taking apps apart to understand how they worked; and on The SaaS Podcast he said he discovered the internet at about 12 or 13, perhaps a little younger.⁠[3][4][2][5][6][7]

Prospect writes that he went door to door in Corby making websites for local businesses before moving into selling invoicing software; the Evening Standard writes that as a teenager he was paid to build websites for relatives’ furniture sales and for local restaurants’ menus. On The SaaS Podcast he recalled that his first client was a local Indian restaurant, and that the work was more like typing the menu up online and putting a phone number next to it; in another episode he said that he was then making websites for people for the equivalent of about $50 to $100.⁠[2][5][8][7]

In the Notion Capital Q&A he recalled that a customer asked him for an invoice and that, finding QuickBooks cost about £8 a month and not wanting to pay that, he built his own invoicing tool; on The SaaS Podcast he said that after seeing a subscription invoicing product priced at about £10 a month he built his own invoicing software, which later added time tracking; in another episode he said that once he had built this invoicing software for freelancers and time-based billing he had no idea how to sell it and had no customers. In the 2010 Mixergy interview he said they had built a video recording app, Dream Capture, and an invoicing application for small businesses, which was their best seller.⁠[6][8][7][4]

Gizmodo wrote in 2010 that in 2008, at 14, he started his first company, Mac Bundle Box, which negotiated discounts with developers and sold limited-time bundles of Mac OS X apps worth about $400 at retail for a tenth of that price, unlocked an extra app once enough people had bought, and gave a percentage of sales to charity; the article also noted that the model closely resembled MacHeist’s. In the Mixergy interview he said that MacHeist paid developers a lump sum to be in its bundles, whereas his business paid them a percentage of what each bundle made, and that he designed the site himself in Photoshop, coded it in HTML and wrote the payment and licence delivery in PHP.⁠[3][4]

In the 2010 Mixergy interview he said that the first bundle held 15 apps, sold for $49 with a retail value of about $550 and brought in about $40,000, and that the second brought in about $110,000, adding that these figures were from memory. He agreed that the roughly $1 million over two years was sales, not profit, with about 60 percent going straight back to developers; he also said he had spent probably about $50,000 on advertising in the first year, that his mailing list was then just under 50,000 people, and that developers were recruited almost entirely by email; he said they had never had a contract with any of the software vendors, later adding that until about six months earlier they had never signed a contract with a developer or vendor.⁠[4]

In later interviews he gave larger figures, which also differ from one another. In one episode of The SaaS Podcast he said that around 2008–2009 Mac Bundle Box ran promotions with five to 10 Mac software developers who each cross-promoted them to their own customers, with his business taking 50 percent of the overall promotional revenue; the first promotion sold about $400,000 in its first week, annual revenue was more than $2 million and less than $5 million, and about a year in, its customers and mailing list numbered 500,000 to 600,000 people. In another episode he said the business was inspired by Groupon, that the first bundle sold about 20,000 to 25,000 copies for more than $1 million in gross sales, that the minimum any participant received was about $50,000, that later bundles averaged about $200,000 to $300,000, that the mailing list grew from nothing to about 400,000 subscribers within 18 months, and that payments at first ran entirely through PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry, with local merchant acquirers in countries that did not support PayPal.⁠[7][8]

In the 2019 Notion Capital Q&A he said that at 15 he launched a business bundling business software with his invoicing product, which made about $300,000 to $400,000 in sales in its first week and $2 million to $3 million in revenue in its first 12 to 18 months; in a 2018 UKTN interview he said this first software company grew into a £3 million to £4 million business in 18 months; the Evening Standard wrote in 2023 that the software promotion business was turning over £4 million a year; Foundation CapitalFoundation CapitalFoundation Capital is an American early-stage venture capital firm founded in 1995, with offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco. It invests in enterprise software, artificial intelligence, fintech and crypto, and was an early backer of companies including Netflix, Solana and Cerebras.Open the full entry’s 2022 podcast page says he scaled his first software company to $5 million in revenue; and his Turing Fest speaker profile states that he created his first software business from his bedroom at 14 and grew it to more than $1 million in revenue.⁠[6][9][5][10][11]

On The SaaS Podcast he said that eventually almost everybody had a daily deals company; the business was later run by someone else and still exists under a different name, but it “sort of fizzled.”⁠[7]

Prospect writes that his parents begrudgingly let him leave education at 16; the Evening Standard writes that he left school after his GCSEs; Startups.co.uk in 2015, his Founders Pledge profile and his Turing Fest speaker profile also say he left school at 16, Founders Pledge adding that he did so to work on a number of startups and Turing Fest that he decided to quit school at 16 to focus on building startups after his first software business passed $1 million in revenue; he himself said in the 2018 UKTN interview and on The SaaS Podcast that he dropped out of school at 16. A City A.M. article writes that he quit school at 16 after his GCSEs to found Paddle. An article published by The Family in 2019 says instead that he left school at 15 to found his first business.⁠[2][5][12][13][11][9][7][14][15]

In one episode of The SaaS Podcast he said his parents agreed to let him leave school if he could prove that he could make about $100,000 a year; in another he said that at about 15, going on 16, he let his parents know he wanted to quit school at 16 and focus on the business, on the understanding that he would return to education if it stopped working.⁠[7][8]

Companies House records show him as a director of The Dream Network Limited from June 29, 2010; the company has since been dissolved. In the Mixergy interview he said that they registered a company called The Dream Network, and the interview page’s introduction states that he founded The Dream Network, a group of businesses including Branchr Advertising, The Dream Apps, Hur.ly and Mac Bundle Box.⁠[1][4]

In the Mixergy interview he described Branchr as a contextually, behaviourally and geographically targeted pay-per-click advertising service; he said he had partnered about a year earlier with another entrepreneur, Mark Bao, on Branchr, holding 55 percent to the partner’s 45 percent, and that the partner was then starting another advertising company, Adaptance; the host, Andrew Warner, described the partner as another kid launching companies. Gizmodo wrote in 2010 that Branchr distributed 300 million ads a month on more than 17,500 websites and iPhone and Android apps and had made $800,000 in its first year; The Register wrote the same day that Branchr placed ads in mobile sites and apps, had sold £500,000 of advertising in its first year, and that the companies employed eight adults in the UK plus sales and technical staff in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry. Startups.co.uk wrote in 2015 that after leaving school he became involved with Branchr Advertising, which secured contracts with William Hill and Myspace.⁠[4][3][16][12]

In the Mixergy interview he said that the staff he had hired were mainly support and customer support people and that he was not a fan of interviews, résumés or CVs, and that in those years he worked from the minute he got home from school until he went to bed.⁠[4]

On August 13, 2010, Gizmodo published an article by Jesus Diaz (crediting SWNS at its end) saying that Christian Owens, a 16-year-old British teenager from Corby, Northamptonshire, was inspired by AppleAppleApple is a public technology company founded in 1976 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Its business includes the iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, and services such as digital content, payments, and cloud storage. The company builds its product system through in-house hardware, operating systems, and services.Open the full entry’s chief executive, Steve JobsSteve JobsSteve Jobs (1955–2011) was a technology entrepreneur, Apple co-founder, NeXT founder, and investor and former CEO of Pixar. His career spanned personal computing, digital music, smartphones and animated films, with an emphasis on product design, user experience and multidisciplinary teams.Open the full entry, whom the headline called his hero; it wrote that Mac Bundle Box made about £700,000 (roughly $1 million) in its first two years, that Branchr employed eight adults, including his 43-year-old mother, Alison, and that his next goal was to make £100 million with Branchr, with all the money reinvested in the company. He was quoted as saying: “There is no magical formula to business, it takes hard work, determination and the drive to do something great.”⁠[3]

The Register published an article by Bill Ray the same day saying that, by negotiating limited-time discounts on Mac software and selling bundles, he had brought in £700,000 over two years, and well over a million pounds including Branchr, and that he planned to keep working on Branchr until it was worth at least £100 million; the article pointed out that most of the revenue was passed on to others, so “there aren’t any millionaires yet.”⁠[16]

On August 16, Mixergy published Andrew Warner’s interview with him under a headline saying he had made his first million at 16. When Warner asked whether he had hired his mother, he answered no: “That was a misprint.” Asked what inspired him about Steve Jobs, he said: “His ability to make a great product, one after another.”⁠[4]

Companies House records show that Paddle.com Market Limited was incorporated on August 8, 2012, and that he became a director on August 14, 2012. On The SaaS Podcast he said the company started in August 2012; FTV Capital’s 2020 announcement states that Paddle was founded in 2012 by British co-founders Christian Owens and Harrison Rose; BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry wrote in 2022 that he founded Paddle at 18.⁠[17][18][7][19][20]

On The SaaS Podcast he said that at 17 he emailed about 30 software vendors he had worked with, heard the same pains around payments, billing, tax and fraud, and decided to start Paddle; he hired someone to run the bundle business and moved to London. In a 2022 Maddyness Q&A he said that in 2012 he had just left school to grow his second software company, that complex operational work such as taxes and payments took up most of his time, and that Paddle, a software company for software companies, was built to “scratch our own itch”; in the 2018 UKTN interview he called that back-end work a “massive headache”; and in the Notion Capital Q&A he said: “I didn’t want anybody to be in the same situation I was.”⁠[8][21][9][6]

In his 2023 announcement on leaving the post of chief executive he wrote that he started the company in his bedroom; Prospect writes that Paddle began life in a room on an industrial estate at the edge of Corby; the Evening Standard writes that he and Harrison Rose moved to London in 2012, when he was 18.⁠[22][2][5]

On how the two co-founders met, the Evening Standard writes that he met Harrison Rose online and that they worked together from their respective parents’ homes for two years before meeting; in one episode of The SaaS Podcast he said Harrison Rose had helped organise the bundle partnerships; in another he said that he had been supposed to hire Harrison Rose’s best friend, who took another job, and that he and Harrison Rose first met on their first day in the office.⁠[5][8][7]

The Evening Standard writes that Paddle started with £150,000 of backing from Mark Pearson, founder of MyVoucherCodes; on The SaaS Podcast he confirmed the host’s figure of $150,000 to start Paddle, and said that there were about four people on the first day and two again by about the ninth; he said he had then meant to hire someone very junior to help him with all the administrative work. The Family’s 2019 article says Paddle had been angel funded through its seed rounds and that two supportive angel investors, Mark Pearson (MyVoucherCodes) and Mark Evans (Balderton Capital and Kindred Capital), were invaluable in preparing for its Series A; it adds that the Edinburgh law firm Harper Macleod had advised Paddle since its founding and also handled the Series A and later fundraises. In the Notion Capital Q&A he said that Paddle was sued for trademark infringement before it launched.⁠[5][7][15][6]

On The SaaS Podcast he said Paddle began as a software marketplace launched in early 2013 that made only about $800 in gross sales in its first two months; independent developers, however, linked the buy buttons on their own sites straight to Paddle’s checkout page, and those sales grew while traffic to the marketplace fell; around mid-2013 they shut the consumer marketplace and concentrated on infrastructure such as checkout, billing and taxes, which he said was not really a pivot. In another episode he said the first version took about six months to build and that customers really wanted the underlying commerce engine of checkout, recurring billing and payments, which became Paddle’s product within the following six months. The Family’s article says Paddle started with the vision of being “the Amazon for software” and later pivoted into an e-commerce platform for software businesses; TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote in 2016 that the platform launched in 2013.⁠[7][8][15][23]

In the Notion Capital Q&A he said that at first the only way Paddle knew how to go to market was to talk to Mac and Apple developers, that attending WWDC, Apple’s developer conference, for the first time was one of the big inflection points, and that Paddle later described itself as “the no1. provider” of e-commerce infrastructure for Mac and Apple before moving on to selling to companies that build software for businesses; when the company had seven people he made his first senior hire, a chief financial officer named Hugo, at a time when its last month’s revenue of $26,000 had included $22,000 from its largest customer, which had just been lost; he warned the candidate that revenue was expected to fall to about $2,000, and the candidate still accepted. The Family’s 2019 article is an interview with the chief financial officer, Hugo Grimston; Companies House records show Hugo Guy Sylvester Grimston as a director of Paddle.com Market Limited from August 28, 2014, to April 28, 2022.⁠[6][15][18]

On September 16, 2015, Startups.co.uk named him, at 21, to its Young Guns 2015 class, calling him its youngest member; the article states that he started his first internet company at 14 and founded Paddle in 2012, at 18, serving as its CEO, that Paddle offered app developers a single dashboard for analytics, payments, communications and marketing, had worked with hundreds of small businesses and developers since launch, was backed by £1 million, and had a multi-million turnover.⁠[12]

On January 20, 2016, UKTN, reporting on the technology category of Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe unveiled the previous day, wrote that 14 UK-based companies featured and listed “Christian Owens, CEO and founder of Paddle”; his Turing Fest speaker profile also states that ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry named him to its “30 under 30” list in 2016.⁠[24][11]

On June 21, 2016, the Thiel Foundation announced the 29 members of its 2016 class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, selected from more than 6,000 applications; each fellow receives $100,000 to learn by doing rather than by following conventional paths like college. He was among them, listed from London, in software. The announcement describes him as founder and CEO of Paddle.com, which builds infrastructure for software companies to help them deal with complex issues such as payments, taxes, localization and analytics.⁠[25]

TechCrunch described Paddle in a 2017 headline as “founded by a Thiel Fellow”; Bloomberg called him a former Thiel Fellowship winner in 2022, describing the fellowship as giving about two dozen college-age students a year $100,000 grants on condition that they drop out to start companies; his Turing Fest speaker profile states that the Thiel Foundation named him a Thiel Fellow in 2016 and that the programme supports those who learn by doing rather than by following conventional paths like college. Prospect wrote in 2023 that becoming a fellow of the programme launched by the PayPal founder Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry provided some much-needed community; he said: “It’s a really lonely thing, building a company.”⁠[26][20][11][2]

Companies House records show him as a director of CALQ.IO LTD from September 6, 2016; the company has since been dissolved.⁠[1]

On September 28, 2016, TechCrunch wrote that Paddle had closed a $3.2 million Series A led by BGF Ventures with participation from Spring Partners. The article states that Paddle had 400 paying customers, had grown 350 to 400 percent over the previous three years, processed about one million transactions a year, counted SaaS companies as about 80 percent of its customers, and charged a flat 5 percent plus $0.50 per transaction, and that the money would strengthen its engineering and customer support teams. He said that growing software companies were “completely underserved in this market” and described Paddle’s aim as being the “operating system” where customer data and tools sit.⁠[23]

The Family’s 2019 article gives the round as £2 million from BGF, then a new fund, raised almost exactly four years after Paddle’s founding; Paddle began the process while it still had more than six months of cash in the bank, received a handful of term sheets, and chose BGF both because it was a new fund and because of its good relationship with Harry Briggs, who had kept close to Paddle since working for Mark Evans at Balderton Capital; it took about five months from first meetings to money in the bank.⁠[15]

On December 14, 2017, TechCrunch wrote that Paddle had raised a $12.5 million Series B led by Notion Capital, with existing investors BGF Ventures and Kindred Capital participating and the independent Mac software developer MacPaw joining; Paddle had earlier acquired MacPaw’s DevMate. The article states that Paddle had 40 staff and planned to reach 100 by the end of 2018; he called the existing software stack “prehistoric” and said the aim was to “transform the way that software is sold.”⁠[26]

On November 17, 2020, FTV Capital announced that it had led Paddle’s $68 million (£52 million) Series C, with Kindred Capital, Notion Capital and 83North participating, bringing Paddle’s total funding to $93 million (£72 million), with the money going to expansion in the United States and globally and to product, engineering, sales and marketing. The announcement states that Paddle had 140 employees and more than 2,000 software companies as customers in 245 countries and territories, with average annual revenue growth above 175 percent over the previous four years and revenue doubling in the past year. He said: “The beauty of the SaaS model is that if you build a great product, you can sell it to anyone, anywhere in the world.”⁠[19]

He later said on The SaaS Podcast that this roughly $68 million round was raised in about April or May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, probably at a much lower valuation than they could have obtained a year later.⁠[8]

BusinessCloud writes that Jimmy Fitzgerald joined Paddle as president and chief operating officer in 2021; before that he had spent about 10 years in senior roles at ServiceNowServiceNowServiceNow is an American enterprise cloud software company founded by Fred Luddy in 2004. It initially entered the enterprise market through IT service management and later expanded its workflow platform to employee service, customer service, security, and artificial intelligence applications. The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2012 under the ticker symbol NOW.Open the full entry, and earlier worked at SignalDemand and at Siebel Systems, later acquired by OracleOracleOracle (Oracle Corporation) is a U.S. enterprise software and cloud computing company founded in 1977 by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner, and Ed Oates. Starting with relational databases, it expanded into enterprise applications, cloud infrastructure, hardware, and industry systems, and broadened its product range through acquisitions of companies such as Sun Microsystems, NetSuite, and Cerner.Open the full entry.⁠[27][22]

TechCrunch wrote in May 2022 that the previous October Paddle had announced an alternative to Apple’s in-app purchases, planning to charge 10 percent on transactions under $10 and 5 percent on those over $10, compared with Apple’s 30 percent; about 2,000 developers, representing $2 billion in app store volume, had signed up, and a launch planned for December had been held off amid Apple’s dispute with Epic GamesEpic GamesEpic Games is a video game and software company headquartered in Cary, North Carolina, founded by Tim Sweeney in 1991, known for the Unreal Engine game engine, Fortnite and the Epic Games Store, and widely noted for its antitrust lawsuits against Apple and Google.Open the full entry. The 2022 Maddyness Q&A also states that Paddle announced an alternative in-app purchasing system for iOS developers in 2021.⁠[28][21]

On May 10, 2022, Paddle announced $200 million in Series D equity and debt financing at a $1.4 billion valuation, led by KKRKKRKKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) is an investment firm engaged in alternative asset management, capital markets services, and insurance. Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis, and George Roberts co-founded the firm in 1976. Its managed funds invest in private equity, credit, and real assets, and its subsidiary Global Atlantic operates retirement, life insurance, and reinsurance businesses. KKR listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2010 under the ticker KKR.Open the full entry through its Next Generation Technology Growth Fund II, with FTV Capital, 83North, Notion Capital and Kindred Capital participating and debt from Silicon Valley BankSilicon Valley BankSilicon Valley Bank was a state-chartered commercial bank founded in California in 1983 and headquartered in Santa Clara. It was the principal subsidiary of the holding company SVB Financial Group, and its clients were concentrated among technology and life sciences companies and venture capital firms. In March 2023, after it announced a securities sale and a capital-raising plan, it suffered a massive run, was closed by California regulators, and was placed into receivership with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. U.S. regulators invoked a systemic risk exception to protect all of its deposits, its deposits and loans were then assumed by First Citizens, its parent entered bankruptcy reorganization, and the regulatory reviews and litigation that followed the failure continued into 2026.Open the full entry, bringing its total funding to $293 million. The release states that Paddle served more than 3,000 software companies in more than 200 markets, had grown from 140 to 275 staff with offices in London and New York, and had more than doubled its revenue growth since November 2020, and that the money would strengthen the platform and expand it internationally, including an alternative in-app purchasing system for iOS developers. He said: “2021 was a fantastic year for us, but we are only just getting started.”⁠[29]

TechCrunch, reporting on the eve of the announcement, called him a Thiel Fellow and gave Harrison Rose’s title as chief strategy officer, credited with building Paddle’s sales ethos; he said they had expected growth to tail off after the pandemic peak but it had not, partly because everyday people were using more video conferencing and because of the explosion of streamed media and other virtual consumer services: “Suddenly everyone needed our B2B tools”; of the company’s name he said: “It’s not a reference to anything, just a name we liked”; and of Apple he said that it had built a full set of commerce tools for these businesses without letting customers choose when to use them or how much to pay: “There has to be an alternative to cover all that as well.” On The SaaS Podcast he said the Series D, of roughly $200 million to $210 million, closed that April; the Evening Standard wrote in 2024 that the round valued Paddle at £1.1 billion.⁠[28][8][30]

On May 24, 2022, Bloomberg wrote that Paddle had bought ProfitWell, which focused on pricing, revenue recognition and metrics for SaaS companies, for more than $200 million in cash and equity; it was Paddle’s first acquisition, the deal had closed, and the combined company had about 330 employees. He said he had known ProfitWell’s chief executive, Patrick Campbell, for about five years, called the addition “heavily complimentary,” and said growth at the software companies Paddle served had gradually slowed. TechCrunch wrote the next day that Boston-based ProfitWell had more than 30,000 customers, that Patrick Campbell would become Paddle’s chief strategy officer and co-founder Facundo Chamut its chief product officer, and quoted him as saying that both companies aimed to “do it for you,” rather than just help customers solve problems.⁠[20][31]

On The SaaS Podcast he said he had decided about two years earlier that acquiring ProfitWell was a good idea, that talks with Patrick Campbell had run for a few weeks around November of the previous year, and that the two companies had very similar missions and products that were “heavily complementary.” BusinessCloud gives the deal as worth more than $200 million, while UKTN writes that Paddle spent £160 million acquiring ProfitWell.⁠[8][27][32]

On July 26, 2022, Maddyness UK published a Q&A with him. It states that Paddle’s customers included BlueJeans by VerizonVerizonVerizon (Verizon Communications Inc.) is one of the largest telecommunications carriers in the United States, formed in 2000 through the merger of Bell Atlantic, one of the “Baby Bells,” and GTE. Headquartered in New York City, it operates a nationwide wireless network, Fios fiber broadband and communications services for businesses and government, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.Open the full entry, MacPaw, Framer and TailwindLabs; that ProfitWell’s employees in the United States and Argentina had joined Paddle; and that during the pandemic the company adopted a “digital first” approach with remote work as the default while opening a new London office, and ran a “Navigate” scheme with AirbnbAirbnbAirbnb is a travel platform for booking stays, experiences, and services, co-founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk and headquartered in San Francisco, United States; its Class A common stock trades on Nasdaq under the symbol ABNB. The business began with hosting guests in the founders’ home in 2007, then joined YC’s Winter 2009 batch, and gradually expanded into local experiences, services, and boutique hotels.Open the full entry letting employees work from anywhere for six weeks a year. He credited Paddle’s success to a culture of dissent in which employees are encouraged to tell him when he is wrong and he actually listens.⁠[21]

On July 27, 2022, Foundation Capital released episode 41 of its podcast, hosted by Ashu Garg and recorded in person at Paddle’s offices; the episode page says he dropped out of high school at 16 to run his first software company and started Paddle at 18, building it over the following ten years into a unicorn with more than $55 million in revenue.⁠[10]

UKTN writes that at the start of 2023 Paddle announced an 8 percent reduction in its workforce.⁠[32]

On April 20, 2023, he announced on Paddle’s website that after 11 years he was stepping out of the role of chief executive into that of executive chairman, to focus even more deeply on product and strategy, the things he had loved most about building Paddle, and to spend more time with customers and the product teams; the chief operating officer, Jimmy Fitzgerald, became chief executive that day. He wrote that Paddle had become a business “approaching $100 million in revenue,” through which thousands of companies had together sold billions of dollars of software, that it was the right time for him to “pass the baton” of day-to-day operations, and that Jimmy Fitzgerald, who joined Paddle in 2021, had had an “extraordinary and outsized impact” on the business.⁠[22]

UKTN writes that he had been chief executive for more than 10 years; BusinessCloud writes that he had been chief executive for 11 years. Prospect also gives April as the month he stepped back as chief executive, while the Evening Standard wrote in July 2023 that he moved from chief executive to executive chairman in May, and the Evening Standard wrote in 2024 that he had recruited a replacement chief executive in May 2023; a City A.M. article writes that he stepped down as chief executive “last October” in order to focus less on operations and more on products and customers, and describes him as “Now 28.” Prospect writes that Jimmy Fitzgerald is about two decades older than he is, and quotes him as saying that the title of executive chairman “means whatever you want it to mean, in tech companies these days.”⁠[32][27][2][5][30][14]

On July 4, 2023, the Evening Standard published Lucy Tobin’s profile of him at 29, stating that Paddle’s turnover had exceeded £26 million the previous year, that it had 320 staff across offices in London, New York, Boston, Salt Lake City and Rosario, and that its investors included KKR, Kindred Capital, FTV Capital, Notion Capital and 83North. On learning, he said the ability “is not related to formal education or qualifications” and that the challenge is to “surround yourself with people with the same hunger for learning”; he also said: “I want to create a quite-large, independent company.”⁠[5]

On December 6, 2023, Prospect published Josiah Gogarty’s profile of him (in its January/February 2024 issue), calling him a 29-year-old tech entrepreneur. The article states that Paddle handled online payments and legal compliance issues for thousands of software companies, with customers including NordVPN and the popular game Geoguessr, and that his co-founder Harrison Rose had left Paddle just under two years earlier and now advised it only “around the edges.”⁠[2]

The Evening Standard wrote in 2024 that in February 2024 Paddle paused its plans for a payments system rivalling Apple’s, after Apple changed its fee structure in response to the EU’s Digital Markets Act; Paddle said the changes were unlikely to produce the fair playing field it had hoped for.⁠[30]

Companies House records show that he resigned as a director of Paddle.com Market Limited on April 18, 2024. The Evening Standard wrote on May 1, 2024, that company filings showed he had resigned as a director, and so as chair; he said he had “wanted someone else to help run the operations,” so that he could focus more on products. Paddle said he had moved from being a board member to being a board observer and continued to be involved in company and product strategy.⁠[18][30]

The article put his share of the 2022 valuation at around £100 million, and gave Paddle’s 2022 revenue as £49 million, nearly double the year before, with pre-tax losses more than doubling to £33 million and 320 staff across five offices. The Evening Standard’s July 2023 article had given Paddle’s 2022 turnover as more than £26 million. A City A.M. article estimates his net worth at £101 million and gives Paddle’s annual revenue as about $100 million (£79 million).⁠[30][5][14]

Prospect wrote in 2023 that he had a house in Bath with his girlfriend and commuted from there to the London office a few days a week; it adds that he did not rule out moving to the United States himself, noting that the weather in CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry is really nice. On The SaaS Podcast in 2022 he said he was in the process of buying a house in the countryside that had not been lived in for many years.⁠[2][8]

The Evening Standard notes his hybrid American-Australian-English accent, though he says he is from Corby. In the 2010 Mixergy interview he said he played guitar and paintball and had given up much of his social life for his business, working nearly every spare hour, including weekends, holidays and summers.⁠[5][4]

On The SaaS Podcast he said that this was the only job he had ever had, that he writes everything down and makes lots of notes, using the note-taking app Bear, and that he recommends The Hard Thing About Hard Things. At the end of another episode he said he was banned from Twitter and invited listeners to find “Christian Owens” on Instagram.⁠[8][7]

In an episode of The SaaS Podcast recorded when he was 24, he said Paddle’s own revenue was “just north of 10 million,” with hundreds of millions of dollars in gross sales, and that it had 140 employees; he said about 75 percent of new business then came from outbound sales and 20 to 25 percent from inbound marketing begun about a year to a year and a half earlier, and that the company’s lead assessment could predict a SaaS company’s monthly recurring revenue with about 85 to 90 percent accuracy. He said Paddle had tried to hire sales representatives who were effectively founders, able to handle every part of the sale, and should have formalised its sales process much earlier.⁠[7]

In the Notion Capital Q&A he said: “Hiring has been and remains to be the hardest thing we do.” He said he looks for people who are absolutely better than him at what they do and for leaders crazy enough to think the company can deliver on its vision.⁠[6]

On The SaaS Podcast in 2022 he said Paddle had about 370 to 375 employees, had raised about $300 million in total and had revenue “approaching” $100 million; in its first push upmarket the senior enterprise sellers it hired all quit after about six to nine months, when it had no way to demonstrate the return on investment, and in a second attempt it understood much better the buyer who would actually be buying Paddle at that point, stressed the immediate return on investment, and added enterprise features such as two-factor authentication, export and audit functions, after which it signed Verizon’s BlueJeans, Fortinet and ServiceNow. He said he tries to spend as much time as he can on product, especially the bigger future bets, and enjoys work such as finance and planning for the next year; he named “go slow to go fast” as the best business advice and the ability to listen more than you speak as the key founder trait; he called himself “the biggest pragmatist,” saying a business has to be a real business from day one, that the bundle business made money from day one and that the invoicing software and Paddle also made money; and he said rolling up small, profitable SaaS businesses appealed to him.⁠[8]

Prospect writes that he contrasts the United States, where founders are celebrated and failure is not stigmatised, with Britain, where you become a “villain” once you reach a certain level of success and society encourages people to play it safe; he is optimistic about London’s tech scene, saying people are tempted over from Silicon Valley precisely because the city is not a monoculture, that as a hub for AI development London is “definitely in the top three, if not number two,” and that many notable US companies, including Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry and OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry, have opened offices outside Silicon Valley in London.⁠[2]

He is a member of Founders Pledge. On the organisation’s member page he says: “The Founders Pledge made it incredibly simple for me to start the process of giving. Our goal with Paddle is to change an industry, by being a part of the pledge, we can help change the world.”⁠[13]

Paddle: Official website: https://www.paddle.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[33]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianowens/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]