“It took me fifteen years to become an overnight success,” said rocker Cheryl Crow. And so it is with most startups—years of hard work before breaking onto the scene,

Back in 2005, retail point-of-sale wasn’t particularly innovative. We didn’t have tablets—or, for that matter, an iPhone. Contactless payment wasn’t a real thing. And yet Lightspeed founder Dax Dasilva saw record-breaking growth for his simple, turnkey retail point of sale technology. Within a few years, he’d attracted the interest of deep-pocketed US VCs. And in 2012, the company launched the first tablet-based, interactive point-of-sale offering.

And in March of 2019, having acquired a number of complementary technologies and grown at a rate of over 1,000 new deployments a month, the company went public. In this candid conversation, Dax takes us through the startup roller-coaster ride that brought him here today.