PAYSTRAX KickOff is our annual company-wide event – the one time each year when the whole team comes together in person to realign, strategise and get ready for the year ahead. For 2 days, we close our laptops and come together in one place.
The very first KickOff, eight years ago, looked rather different. Back then it fit inside a rented apartment in Vilnius: our two co-founders and the first few hires, working out what the company was going to be. All these years later, those same people are still with the company, which says a lot about how far we’ve come.
This year’s KickOff was our biggest yet – more than 160 of us, up from around 100 last year, travelling in from all 6 of our offices across Europe. We chose Birštonas, a small spa town in southern Lithuania. It sits in pine forest on a bend of the Nemunas river, and it’s quiet in a way that’s genuinely hard to find, which is exactly why we chose it. Our base was Vytautas Mineral SPA, with mineral pools and saunas for the downtime between sessions.
The theme was a retreat: recharge first, then get ready to kick it off!
Day 1: Strategy
For a lot of us, KickOff began at 6 in the morning, on a bus, which brought back a few school-day memories.
Buses left the Vilnius and Klaipėda offices and drove south to Birštonas. It might be an early start to a company event, but there’s nothing quite like an early coach ride for getting to know a colleague you normally only see on a Teams call. By the time we arrived, most of us had properly talked to at least one new person.
Once everyone had arrived and found some coffee, our Group CEO and co-founder Jóhannes Ingi Kolbeinsson opened the conference. He spoke honestly about where PAYSTRAX stands today, what the year ahead looks like, and the challenges and opportunities in front of us. It was the right way to set the tone: open, direct and focused on where we’re heading together.
Then our Group Strategy Director Donatas Voveris took the wheel and led an AI workshop. AI this, AI that – most of us already use it in our daily work and personal lives, but how often do you actually get to play around and explore the fun functionalities that never come up in the day-to-day? Turns out, not much! That’s why the workshop opened with our AI & SRE Lead Simonas Razminas showing us what today’s AI tools can really do. He ran through a series of examples that were genuinely eye-opening, some clearly useful and some just good fun, like a “Knowledge City” that turns internal documentation into an explorable 3D city and quick ways to test a product idea without an engineer. The point was that these tools have moved fast, and the best way to understand them is to get hands-on rather than read about them.
So we did… We split into 16 teams, each handed one of our three company values – professionalism, ambition or fun – with a single brief: build something around that value using AI.
What the teams came back with was the best part of the day. There wasn’t a single dull presentation in the room. Some groups took a practical route and used AI assistants to tackle real bottlenecks we run into in our day-to-day work. Others leaned into the fun of it. One team built a game called KYC, which for this occasion stood for Know Your Colleagues; another built a game called “Job Swap,” where you try being in someone else’s shoes for a bit, while another created a whole song about PAYSTRAX. More than anything, it was a good reminder of how creative this team gets when you hand them an open brief and let them run with it.
After the workshop, our C-level team sat down for a live Q&A with no questions off-limits, which is quickly becoming one of our favourite KickOff traditions. Then the tables have turned, with a quiz where the rest of us had to guess some personal facts about our leadership. We came away knowing quite a bit more about them than we did that morning.
By the evening we’d earned some downtime and spent it exactly where you’d guess – in the spa!
Day 2: The FUN
The morning started early for some of us. Simonas Jončiulis, our Head of Transaction Monitoring, coaches running in his other life, led an optional morning warm-up and friendly run. More people turned up than we’d expected (at 7am, no less!) and were rewarded with Birštonas at its best: misty, still and completely quiet. While everyone else caught up over a long breakfast.
Then came the sports tournaments, which is where the word “friendly” quietly disappeared. We played tennis, dodgeball, beach volleyball and relay races, with only symbolic prizes on the line, and still everyone threw themselves into it completely. There was plenty of trash talk, and more than a few scores settled with colleagues on the court. All in good fun, of course. Mostly.
In between the sport, we made time to sit down and think. Ramunė Dirvanskienė, a neuropsychologist and associate professor at Vilnius University, gave a talk on the neuroscience of motivation – how we motivate ourselves and others, and why smart people sometimes make surprisingly poor decisions. For a team whose work comes down to good judgement under pressure, it was a fitting and genuinely useful session.
After a full morning of sport, you might expect the energy to drop. And yet… it didn’t.
The Wild West-themed orienteering game sent our teams out around Birštonas to tell a story through photos, armed with a set of props and a lot of imagination. Everyone got competitive all over again, and the results were as creative as they were ridiculous. Those photos will be doing the rounds internally for a long time.
The two-day event ended with the biggest celebration of all, complete with a Sparkling Disco dress code and the KickOff awards. We handed out the sports trophies and crowned the winners of this summer’s Walk15 challenge, “The Great PAYSTRAX Expedition: The Search for the Lost Transaction.” Over the summer, 86 colleagues across eight teams walked more than 50 million steps between them, chasing a transaction lost somewhere in the payments system. Team BALANCERS came out on top, with over 8.1 million steps.
The absolute highlight of the night, though, was our Partner Sales Manager Luis Villarroel, who also teaches dancing – he got the whole room up doing salsa. People who had spent two days insisting they don’t dance were, by the end of the night, dancing. A live band and a DJ took it from there.
Recharged, and ready
We left Birštonas tired, but in the best way – the kind of tired that comes from two days spent with people in person rather than on a screen.
A lot has changed since the very first KickOff. The company is bigger now, spread across six offices, with far more going on. But the reason we do this hasn’t changed at all. Once a year we step back, reconnect and remind ourselves who we’re building PAYSTRAX with. Then we get back to work, ready for whatever the payments world has in store.
Now, off to the best part – putting all this great energy back to work, until we come together again next year!
