I spent the first part of my career trying to be the best in the water, not the boardroom. I competed on the World Surf League circuit before I ever set foot in a corporate office. When that chapter ended, I didn’t have a business degree or a five-year plan, I had a deep, personal understanding of what it feels like to be a customer who’s been let down, and an instinct for brands that treat people right.
That instinct is what carried me for the next two decades, through the surf industry at Billabong and Hurley, into retail turnarounds at SurfStitch and P.E Nation, a stint transforming Gloria Jean’s Coffees, and eventually the CEO seat at Papinelle. On paper, those are wildly different industries, boardshorts, coffee, fashion, sleepwear. But underneath, I was solving the same problem over and over again. And it’s the problem that eventually led me to leave brand-building behind and start building software instead.
Every Brand Taught Me the Same Lesson, From a Different Angle
At Billabong and Hurley, I learned that a brand’s promise is only as strong as its weakest operational link. You can have the best product in the world, but if a customer’s order shows up late, or wrong, or not at all, none of that brand equity matters in that moment. All they remember is that you let them down.
At Gloria Jean’s, I learned how much complexity hides inside a business that looks simple from the outside. A cup of coffee looks like a small, contained product. Behind it is a supply chain, a franchise network, a customer experience promise that has to hold up the same way in every location, every day. Small breakdowns compound fast when you’re operating at scale.
At SurfStitch and P.E Nation, I was brought in during periods of real operational strain, the kind where growth had outpaced the systems meant to support it. That’s where the pattern became impossible to ignore. Every time something went wrong, a stockout, a shipping delay, a payment failure, we found out about it the same way: a customer told us. Not a dashboard. Not a system. A person, already frustrated, reaching out to complain.
By the time I got to Papinelle, I wasn’t just noticing this pattern anymore. I was actively looking for it, because I already knew it would be there.
The Real Problem Was Never the Products. It Was Always the Blind Spots.
Here’s what two decades of running retail and e-commerce operations taught me: the tools brands use to run their businesses, order management systems, ERPs, warehouse software, helpdesks, are almost all reactive by design. They’re excellent at recording what already happened. They’re terrible at telling you what’s about to go wrong.
That gap is where customer trust quietly erodes. A payment hold sits unresolved for six hours before anyone notices. A carrier delay affects hundreds of orders before the pattern is spotted. A stock discrepancy doesn’t surface until a customer asks where their order is. None of these are failures of effort, the teams I worked with cared enormously about getting it right. They were failures of visibility. You cannot fix what you cannot see, and most retail operations are structurally built to see problems only after a customer has already felt the impact.
I remember sitting in operations reviews, brand after brand, hearing the same conversation with different names attached: “We didn’t know until the customer told us.” That sentence, repeated enough times across enough businesses, stopped sounding like a one-off issue and started sounding like an industry-wide gap nobody had actually built a solution for.
You cannot fix what you cannot see, and most retail operations are structurally built to see problems only after a customer has already felt the impact.
JEVON LE ROUX
Co-Founder & CEO, Keeyu
From Brands to Software: Building the Thing I Kept Wishing Existed
When I left Papinelle, I wasn’t looking to become a software founder. I was looking for the tool I’d spent years wishing someone would build, something that could sit across the entire order journey, from payment through fulfilment, shipping, and returns, and catch the problem before it became a complaint. Not another helpdesk to manage tickets faster. Something that made a large share of those tickets never need to exist in the first place.
KEY TAKEAWAY
The missing piece was not another helpdesk for handling complaints faster. It was a way to detect post-purchase problems before customers needed to complain.
That’s what became Keeyu. Alongside my co-founders Tahir Rauf and Tracy Godtschalk, who brought their own scar tissue from operations at brands like Sportscraft and payments at Mastercard, we built an AI-powered agent that monitors the full post-purchase journey in real time and flags issues before they reach the customer. It’s not designed to replace the systems retailers already use, Shopify, ERPs, WMS platforms, carrier tools. It’s designed to be the intelligence layer that sits across all of them, watching for the failure points that fall through the cracks between systems that were never built to talk to each other.
We closed a $2.3M pre-seed round led by Rampersand to build this out properly, and the response from retailers has confirmed what I already suspected from years on the other side of the table: this isn’t a niche problem. According to Australia Post, one in five online shoppers didn’t get what they wanted last year, that’s roughly $13 billion in preventable churned revenue. Every operator I talk to recognizes that number immediately, because they’ve lived it.
What Building Brands Actually Prepared Me For
I didn’t set out to become a software founder. But looking back, every brand I helped build was quietly training me for this. Billabong and Hurley taught me that the customer experience is the brand, full stop. Gloria Jean’s taught me how fast complexity compounds at scale. SurfStitch and P.E Nation taught me that you cannot solve an operational blind spot by hiring your way out of it, you have to fix the visibility problem at its source. And Papinelle was where I finally stopped treating that lesson as a one-off fire to put out, and started treating it as the actual problem worth building a company around.
The tools I use now look nothing like the tools I used as a Regional Sales Manager at Billabong. But the instinct underneath hasn’t changed at all: build things that keep the promise you made to the customer, and fix the problems before they ever have to tell you about them. That’s the thread that runs from selling boardshorts to building an AI agent, and it’s the reason building brands, for me, was never really separate from building software. It was the research phase.