← Animal Spirits Podcast
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- [00:05]
Michael Batnik
Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about.
- [00:07]
Ben Carlson
Markets, life and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain.
- [00:28]
Life Abraham
Positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. On today's show we are joined by Life Abraham. Life is the co founder of Public, the serious investing app of the future for millennials and the great wealth transfer. And how many more buzzwords can I fit in here?
- [00:51]
Michael Batnik
I would call them. My thinking is they're like the, they're the, the middle ground, right. The more mature investor after you've just started out, then you become more mature and it's like, okay, I actually have some money, what do I do with it? Is that fair?
- [01:04]
Life Abraham
Yeah. I mean the, the, let's not beat around the bush. The, the 800 pound gorilla and the digital custody space is Robinhood. And what Public is doing is very different. Very, very different. I've mentioned before that my bitcoin unfortunately is stuck at Robinhood. I can't get it out for whatever New York regulatory reasons, I don't know. But, but so anyway, so I'm on the app frequently and, and it is very easy. It's very smooth. But that's all it is not. And for better or for worse, that's just, that's what it is. It's, it's an app where you could buy and sell stocks really quickly and it's, there's no friction. It's very easy. And for what it is, it's phenomenal. Public is different. Public is building more of a traditional but tech powered custodian where it feels very similar to, I guess, you know, lifeset. He views more. His competitor is not, not really a Robin, but more of a, more of a Schwab and, and Fidelity. And it does feel like that when you log onto the platform and you look at it, it feels like what a modern platform should look and feel like.
- [02:09]
Michael Batnik
Yes. Yeah, you're right. It feels like it's actually made recently because it was.
- [02:14]
Life Abraham
And because it was because the, the, the incumbents, the rails that they were built on are from, I don't know, the 80s.
- [02:20]
Michael Batnik
Yeah. And I don't want to step on too much of what of this talk. But talking about where they're going and the stuff they can do in the future. This whole, the whole idea of customization in the future, it's going to present so many opportunities for investors. It's going to also lead to some landmines because too much customization is going to be overwhelming for certain people. But the tools for individual investors that we're going to see in the years ahead, they already see. I always say every year it's the best time ever to be an individual investor. It's only going to get better and better from here.
- [02:50]
Life Abraham
Yeah, they have a lot of exciting things that we, we only scratch the surface of. So please enjoy our convers conversation with life Abraham. Life. Welcome. Thank you for joining us.
- [03:01]
Ben Carlson
Thanks for having me.
- [03:03]
Life Abraham
All right, let's start here. I don't think, in fact, let me not caveat it. I know that I have never heard the origin story of public. What was the inspiration for launching this company?
- [03:14]
Ben Carlson
Essentially Janik and I came together and what we realized was that that first generation of the kind of like neo broker apps that were out there, it was all very heavily focused on speculation, options trading, crypto only plays, CFD trading in Europe, et cetera. And that so to say that next generation Schwab has not really been built yet. Our thought was essentially let's go out and build something for people to kind of seriously build their wealth and give them the tools to do so. And that was a little bit like the initial kernel. Right. And then from there there were different features and ways of how we executed on that over time. But generally speaking that's kind of kernel stuck truth.
- [03:58]
Michael Batnik
Where do you even begin in this process? Because of all the different rules and regulations when it comes. Because there's got to be a lot of mountains that need to be moved to actually make this happen in the financial services industry.
- [04:07]
Ben Carlson
Yeah, I mean the very first thing is just you gotta be an actual broker dealer in the U.S. right. And so we actually acquired a broker dealer license as part of the founding of the company essentially. And that was that very first kickoff. We started off with just stocks in the early days and that's where it started. And then the core kernels also was we were the first to do fractional investing in the U.S. and so the ability to really real time trade fractional stocks and that obviously had these two aspects. Number one, a lower barrier of entry. Especially because it was a time before stock stock splits became cool again. And you know, Amazon and co were like two grand a share and stuff like that. And then on the other end also just from a mindset perspective like because this generation also grew up on things like crypto. Just the mindset of investing has always been much more of, you know, what's my allocation on dollar amounts and such was obviously fractionalization makes makes possible in the first place.
- [05:01]
Life Abraham
Ben and I were talking two weeks ago about the S tax report from Schwab and I had this realization which is like they're a look at their the investors on that their platform and how they're behaving. And I had this realization like there isn't one investor. We talk about like what the investor is doing and based on different surveys, based on different platforms, economists, hedge funds, retail, whatever. Like there isn't one consensus way that people invest. It is so different. So that you can craft any narrative based on any available data out there. All right, so with that said, how would you describe the. And I know again I just said it's not one investor, but how would you describe maybe the average public investor on your platform?
- [05:47]
Ben Carlson
The average public investor is like a buy and hold investor who basically keeps compounding their portfolio also just through the paychecks they're getting on bi regular monthly basis. And so they just keep adding to their portfolio. They have certain specifically names that they believe in very heavy also just single stock pickers, not just ETFs and such. And yeah, and they kind of combo that their portfolio over time. That's like the most general behavior we're seeing. And if you look at the space and you kind of look between the active trading platforms and the what we would call like investing platforms, and they all kind of merge in some regard. Right. We also have some options on the platform, things like that. But just from a core perspective on one side of the spectrum, where you're more on the speculative side of options, trading, futures and so on, even from a customer profile perspective, you have lifetimes of customers of two years or less. Right. So you have to kind of reacquire people all the time because people burn out all of their accounts, they churn and so on. And that is even just from a user behavior, but then also from a business model perspective, what those kind of platforms are kind of sticking in. And then on the other end, you have basically the portfolio of builder investing platforms. And in that world you have lifetimes of 30 years plus. And so for us, we're still a younger platform. Our lifetimes are like call it 25 years and so on right now. So the behavior is very different because people don't burn to their accounts because they're participating in less speculative behavior. And so those two sides are a little bit different. And obviously as these platforms grow over time will start to play in those sites a little bit. You see that with Schwab as well, right? Like, you know, literally bought TD and stuff like that, which is, you know, obviously way heavy active trading. And so, you know, over time you obviously play in multiple camps. But I think from the DNA of the company, you are in the early days in our, in our industry, I think you have to pick a side a little bit. And we were much more born out of the investing portfolio building side than we were born out of the active trading side.
- [07:53]
Michael Batnik
So how much competition do you feel among all the different firms? Because there are obviously different types of clients that are attracted to different types of firms. I would imagine that your user base skew is younger.
- [08:02]
Ben Carlson
Yeah, depends on what you define younger. Our average age is like 38, roughly, I think.
- [08:09]
Michael Batnik
See, I would define that as middle age. Michael still thinks that's pretty young.
- [08:13]
Life Abraham
38 is young. Come on.
- [08:14]
Ben Carlson
Like, I would call it very young, very young. Of course, I would call it like our base is really millennials. If you look at our age breakdown, the biggest bar is millennials.
- [08:26]
Life Abraham
We were talking about the Vanguard study, How America Saves Yesterday and Animal Spirits. And the big takeaway for us that is absolutely music to our ears is the auto enrollment and the amount that people are contributing and increasing on a yearly basis. You mentioned that your users, your investors are concerned about building wealth sustainably over long periods of time. You mentioned the paycheck aspect of it. So tell us more like how it sounds like their paychecks are connected to the platform, like, how are they using it? How is. How is the setup like talk. Talk about that.
- [09:06]
Ben Carlson
What we are seeing is a little bit two types of behaviors there. One is truly automated recurring investing. And we have a tool called investment plans on the app where you can just set it up, you define a certain strategy and just continuously at a certain interval that you define invest into those strategies. That's one. The other is really people putting money into, basically depositing their cash that they're getting through the paychecks and so on into the platform, leaving it more in high yield scenarios, high yield cash, bond account, things like that that we have, and then basically circle that out of that into mostly equities in most cases when they kind of see opportunities appear. Right. And I'm sure you've heard about this just like retail investing culture of the dip buying. And I think that's very specific also to that Kind of millennial and younger generation, because these people basically in most cases entered the markets after 08. And, you know, after the financial crisis, it took I think five and a half years or so for the S and P to recover. That was like the longest kind of dip that was there. But if you entered after 08, you essentially were in this like crazy super long bull market cycle. And most dips that these people have experienced were pretty V shaped, right? Like, they recovered fairly quickly. And so through that experience they've kind of adapted this kind of culture of dip buying. And so we see a lot of people kind of move things into cash and then circle that out whenever they see like a dip buying or similar opportunity in certain names that they're looking for and stuff like that.
- [10:43]
Michael Batnik
So what type of tools are investors expecting these days? When they come to you, what do they want to see that makes their lives easier?
- [10:51]
Ben Carlson
First of just multi asset, like generally speaking, people want to. It's not just stocks anymore. Even though, again, the generation kind of grew up on that a little bit. But I think that has changed a lot, especially also with crypto and so on. So multi asset is a big one. And I think the second part is that because it's so much more mobile now as well. And we were born mobile. That was the first platform that we launched on. Obviously, your investing app, your brokerage, is not just a place where you execute trades, it's a place where you follow the markets. And obviously we've done a lot of work with AI and different data sources and charts in the app and fundamentals on companies and all that kind of stuff where we essentially give people these sort of real time insights around certain names around the markets and macro in general and so on. And so they don't just open the app to check their portfolio and how it's doing. They don't just open it to make a trade, but they're also opening it because it's their window into the markets. And so I think that bar of your brokerage not just being the execution venue, but it's also the place where you follow what's happening in the markets. I think that is, I think, a more drastic kind of change, especially for this generation.
- [12:13]
Life Abraham
The platform gives you a lot more than some of the other digital apps where you're just swiping tinder to buy or sell a stock. How are you thinking about what is appropriate, what do investors want, what's too much? And how are you, how do you think about striking the right balance?
- [12:29]
Ben Carlson
That is essentially the Hardest part of the day to day. We always talk internally about this thing of balancing sophistication and simplicity. And there is an aspect where when you go too simple, it gets dumped down, which also means there are certain customers that will not really think it's for them anymore, you know, and on the other hand, you obviously have to make sure that it doesn't become too complicated. And so, like, striking that balance is always the kind of hardest piece. And honestly, this goes into the nitty gritty of just the product design of it and literally information hierarchy and stuff like that, and how do you access certain features in the app and so on. So it gets very kind of design nerdy in that moment. But, yeah, if you ask our product design team, I think that is the toughest challenge to always strike that balance because our user is, generally speaking, a little bit more sophisticated than maybe some new brokers in the space. And so our core demographic is really, call it like the top 20, 25% of millennials, Gen Z, Gen Xs. And so people that have money left over at the end of the month to put into the markets, people that have some savings, people that might inherit a decent amount of money and so on. And what comes with that audience also is that they are fairly financially literate. They are fairly literate on the markets, and so their expectations are a little different. And they care about things like can I trade my tax lots and stuff like that, because they're sophisticated enough to care about how to measure taxes around it, how to read a company's balance sheet, et cetera, et cetera.
- [14:03]
Michael Batnik
So you mentioned the AI piece. Where are we going in terms of the tools that you can think are coming in the years ahead with this?
- [14:10]
Ben Carlson
Yeah, I mean, we are big believers that AI is going to play a massive role in portfolio construction and management. And we recently launched this thing called generatedassets.com, which currently lives as an own site. But we can essentially turn any idea that you have in form of a prompt, into an investable index. And so you can be like, we're on a podcast. It can be like, oh, give me an index of companies where the executives run the podcast. And then it basically looks for that and turns that into an index and gives you those companies, tells you why these companies were added, gives you a little reasoning of the information that it found about these companies, of why they were added. Based off your prompt, it gives you sort of weighting on that. Gibbs comes up with a name, a description for it, and so on. And then soon those are going to be available in public. And I think what that really does, for example, is the first step to, number one, really disrupt essentially ETFs, because they become super customizable and essentially infinite in creation.
- [15:06]
Michael Batnik
So although you can add as many rules as you want to something like this, say, hey, I want it to be tactical. So every month I want, if, if these stocks are in a downtrend or these are an uptrend, go long these are short these, or sell these or whatever, you can add all these types.
- [15:18]
Ben Carlson
Of rules, you two layers to it, right? The first layer is just the, the first creation of the index, which is like, what is your definition of why a company should be part of the strategy? And then the second layer, and that comes a little later, is exactly what you're saying is being able to set up trading rules and stuff, right? Like the one that I was talking about because it got kind of viral on Twitter. How much it outperforms is the. What was it? Buy the close, sell the open. All right, just do that every day. And apparently that performs really well historically speaking. And so there are things like that that you can set up at some point as well, where right now we're looking more as set up basically your own type of etf, so to say have Texas harvesting built in, have some customization built in and so on. And that essentially runs on like an own direct indexing engine that we have built internally, which runs on that fractional layer that we have, which makes it.
- [16:10]
Michael Batnik
Possible and the technology makes it easy. So there's not a ton of operational heavy lifting for you. If you have all these thousands of different strategies operating at the same time.
- [16:18]
Ben Carlson
It is all on the tech layer. And that is exactly what's kind of the beauty of it, where, you know, if you want to spit up, spin up, you know, 100,000 ETFs tomorrow, it's going to cost you a lot of money. It's going to be a massive team to manage that. It's going to be huge legal work, et cetera, et cetera. And you know, there's certain regulation around of like, how much, you know, quarterly rebalancing, et cetera, et cetera. If that is all managed on the tech layer, you can go fully custom. And so you could even be like, you could even do things like, I want the top 50 of the NASDAQ 100. And by the way, because I want only tech companies, take out Costco and that becomes your version of qqq. So to say that you have edited to your Liking and to your strategy that you can then run. And then you have the bell symbols like Tesla's harvesting built in and things like that.
- [17:14]
Life Abraham
So you said this is a separate website.
- [17:17]
Ben Carlson
So this is right now living as an own site because it's just like a preview, a little bit of the index building and then within the next few months that's going to launch in the public app and then it's all investable and whatnot.
- [17:27]
Life Abraham
Okay, so I love that idea. Obviously customization is a huge trend in the industry. How difficult or easy is it going to be for somebody like me that has absolutely no experience on the technical side of things?
- [17:41]
Ben Carlson
Super easy. It's literally, it's a free form field. You can type in. Give me companies with low RPU but large user bases, for example.
- [17:52]
Michael Batnik
So it's just literally just a prompt that you can type in.
- [17:55]
Ben Carlson
It's literally just a prompt and it.
- [17:56]
Life Abraham
Would show you the list of companies and then you would basically say, yes, that looks right.
- [18:00]
Ben Carlson
Correct, correct. And you can change weighting. You can see why these companies were picked. You can add things if you'd be like, oh, I think you're missing this one company. You can just tell it and it might add it to it.
- [18:09]
Life Abraham
Oh, I love that idea.
- [18:10]
Ben Carlson
And so you can completely customize it and whatnot. And obviously the other piece where we're like seeing AI really play a massive role is that I do believe it's also going to disrupt financial advisors to some extent.
- [18:23]
Michael Batnik
We've been talking about this a lot. I want to hear your take.
- [18:26]
Ben Carlson
Yeah, I think there is an aspect of two things, right. If I can go on like a little rant for a second, then, you know, so first off, what's going to happen with the great wealth transfer is not just a transfer of wealth, it's also a transfer of relationships. And the average Asian financial advisor in the country is going up every year. Younger people are not becoming advisors anymore. That industry is kind of consolidating and so you have less advisors handling more clients and the advisors getting older. Now there's going to be moments where their clients are suddenly going to become drastically younger because. Because that wealth will trickle down and basically get inherited by those children of their original clients, so to say. And those younger people are going to have opinions on what to do with that money. These are people that grew up self directed. First, they grew up with investing accounts earlier in their lives. They grew up with social media content, on podcasts, on finance. They're way more financial literate early in their lives. And so they are way more confident in their abilities to manage their own portfolios. And so they're going to look at their financial advisor and be like, yo, Chad, I really like what you did for my family here, but let me take a third of this or half of it and manage it myself. And I would really love your take on the future of glp. One drugs and the guy will be like, glp what? And that's where it's going to start. And so it's not just a transfer of wealth, a transfer of relationships. And so I think a lot of these relationships are going to deteriorate and then a lot of those funds are going to move into platforms like public. Obviously. That's our thesis, of course, you know, speaking my book here. And so I think that is really number one. I think the second is that the more literate you are, the more you will also be skeptical on advice that someone is giving you because you have. Because it's easier for you to poke holes into stuff and to see certain things. And that means also that AI doesn't necessarily have an own book. And so what that means is that AI you can maybe trust a little bit more. Obviously, AI can be fed with bias by a human when it gets set up. But generally speaking, if an advisor gives you some advice, does the advisor need a new boat or is this really the best thing for you to invest in? And so there is some of that skepticism that I think comes specifically with the younger generation that is more financially literate. Potentially that will open up more opportunity for AI alternatives in financial advice. And also, just guidance doesn't have to be advice always. Right.
- [21:11]
Life Abraham
Love it. So are Ben and I in trouble?
- [21:16]
Michael Batnik
My take is that I just think this totally strengthens the DIY case because there are, listen, there's a lot of people who follow our content, who are DIY people who really love consuming our content and they are totally in the spreadsheets and, and they love doing this themselves. And I think for those people, the tools are going to be massive. And I think especially the people who have been overlooked by advisors before, I think that is a huge growth opportunity of people who just have never. Who have always wanted to try something and reach out, but have never. Well, I don't have the assets or I don't have the know how or I don't know who to reach out to if they have the applications of AI to ask questions and not feel like an idiot. I agree, that is going to help. I think it's going to help way More people on like the middle lower end even than the higher end in terms of numbers.
- [21:58]
Ben Carlson
And on the super nerdy other end it's like we just launched last week like a full API access to your account. And so now public you can get access through API to your account, you can trade through API, you can use it to extract your data and put into some spreadsheet that you like, basically like full API access to your account. And that is not just for hardcore algorithmic traders and so on. That is also because this whole idea of vibe coding where you basically use AI tools to actually program a little bit yourself, that is becoming much more of a thing and it's becoming much easier. And so the sense of that, the hardcore ness of knowing how to program in order to run certain strategies that you like or extract data from your account to get more insights on it and so on, that is democratizing more and more now as well with AI. And so suddenly things like well I want some, I want some access to the, to my API keys becomes a way more broadly, you know, normal thing in the future.
- [23:06]
Life Abraham
Speaking about what the future generation is going to want or maybe the current generation, but the one that is going to get a lot of wealth in the future. There was an article in Bloomberg last week about alternative investments. Everything from collectibles to private stuff and everything in between. You brand yourself as a platform for the serious investor. Does the serious investor actually want all of these different buckets of investing?
- [23:36]
Ben Carlson
I think the general answer is yes. I think the issue is that the instruments that most alternative investments are offered to are still a little tricky for broad based, for like, for like the like more general public. And number one is liquidity. Just the notion of, you know, if you invest into an SPB of SpaceX or into a private credit fund or whatever, it's just harder sometimes to get out. And so you have to be a little bit wealthy enough to, you know, have enough funds as part of your portfolio that you can like literally stash away for a few years, you know, for these things to mature and whatnot, forever for you to get some money back. And so I think that from an instruments perspective is just still tricky to get it to a point where it has really broad adoption. But generally speaking I would say yes to a lot of people have to what we have learned. We used to have more alternative assets on the platform and we had that through this regulatory framework Reg A which essentially you turn any alternative asset into a sort of mini publicly traded company and therefore turn it into actual TRADABLE securities. So you could take a piece of art or you can take, we took music royalties of a movie and stuff like that and turn that into these investable assets. Now the issue with that is though, that's one of the reasons also why we stopped doing this by the way, is that these assets have a very fixed aum, essentially. And so let's say you are buying into the track royalties that we had, for example, and the Schweg royalties was an asset that was called 5 million bucks. Now that is just 5 million bucks. And so now people would get a piece of this. And the issue is now that the float in this is so low that if you make it essentially a borderline regular trading liquidity on that, that because the float is so low, you are artificially ending up pumping prices. And then you get to this scenario where people are sitting on because they might have been formed enough, because they might, you know, we just thought it was cool or whatever and suddenly they're sitting on a super inflated price of an asset. And at some point liquidity will dry out because you can't find someone who will actually want to buy, you know, at anywhere close to this highly inflated price. And so you have this issue of this inflated pricing that goes up because the float is just so low. And I think that's also a little bit we're seeing now with that tokenization. You obviously saw our dear friends at Robinhood launching this tokenized SpaceX and OpenAI stocks and stuff. And that's essentially the same thing. It's like behind the scenes it's some SPV with some shares that they bought secondary or whatever from that company. And then that token I would assume will be freely tradable. But because the float on that token will likely be very low, there's a high risk of these things to just inflate very much. And so suddenly the valuation of OpenAI, for example, in form of this token.
- [26:46]
Life Abraham
Is 3 trillion exactly.
- [26:48]
Ben Carlson
It will be like multi times of what the actual variation of the company is. And so these things are tricky, right? And there are obviously there's things like I know Goldman, for example, runs like, you know, placements of private shares and pre IPO companies and stuff like that. And like, you know, like, like private banks like that, for some rich clients, they, they do it and essentially where liquidity only happens when there's an official new mark and then they transact at that new mark, you know, but again you have to wait for that to open, etc. The system is still tricky to make it broadly available. I think it's okay working for people that have the money and that can wait to get liquidity. I think it is tough still to make it happen broadly for retail investors who might not necessarily have, you know, the means to stack away a few thousand dollars to not and not have an access for, you know, potentially a few years.
- [27:38]
Life Abraham
So it sounds like you are not hopping on the tokenization bandwagon, at least not today.
- [27:43]
Ben Carlson
Not. Not today. Not today. I think there's, it's. Yeah, I feel like there's. There's more to figure out.
- [27:50]
Michael Batnik
So to say we were talking about this. Do you think that some of these private companies are going to be kind of against this? Because you said it could mess with the valuation and the looks and maybe they don't want to see daily marks on their valuation.
- [28:06]
Ben Carlson
There's an obvious regulatory arbitrage here, right. Where if you want to buy private shares on that company, you have to be an accredited investor. You will, as part of being a credit investor, you will have to make a decision based off the information that you received about the company if you want to make that investment or not. Public companies are public companies. They're called public because they publicly have to disclose their financials and so on. And that is part of giving everyone the same access, the same information, the same chance to make the right decisions for that investment. That is not happening in private investments the same way. And that's why you have things like accreditation laws. And if they're done well or not, that's a whole other topic. But there is something around. If you want to make private companies more accessible for retail investors, then you also kind of need to do a little bit to make sure that these investors are informed. Well, and that is just not necessarily happening right now. Right. And so that's the other tricky piece. And so suddenly, and then the tokenization is essentially a way to go around things like accreditation laws. And again, right now it's not launched in the US Anyway, so that's not necessarily happening yet. But it's a little bit of like a regulatory arbitrage because then you have certain jurisdictions or countries that have, you know, certain regulation around cryptos that might not have thought through yet how a token might be used as form, as a wrapper of a private investment or wrapper of a somewhat custody public stock or whatever, you know, and, and so there is some regulatory arbitrage that also creates risk for the people that invest into this stuff. Right.
- [29:38]
Life Abraham
Life, you mentioned earlier, like going the, being the, the schwab for millennials. One of the things that Schwab offers is banking services. Well above and beyond just the investing portion. Do you plan on expanding horizontally into adjacent areas of money?
- [30:00]
Ben Carlson
Yes and no. So we always say that we're an investing platform and that is our focus. And so we're not going to become like our plans are to be like the MONEY super app tomorrow, like mini Fintechs or so. But how we look at expansion is really things that go off you investing. And so to give an example, you know, internally we're working on things like credit line around your portfolio. There is two ways of why a user would take money off the platform. One, because I want to put it into something else. So we got to ensure that we have all the investment offerings that people want so it stays on the platform for us are the pure business reasons, of course. And then on the second piece, you might need the money to spend and the mind to spend is then like, cool. So what are other forms of liquidity than just selling your stocks or so to get that money to spend? Credit line, obviously margin is a way to do that too. And that's also where things like credit cards and stuff can come in in the future. But we look at it really much more from the perspective of what are the tools around your portfolio to basically make a little bit smarter decisions around your portfolio, not necessarily to be your primary bank account next. Right. Credit cards is a good example. Like if you want to compete in the credit card space, it's incentives galore and you're essentially banking on becoming someone's primary card and you're competing against Amex and whatnot and Chase, Sapphire and da da da da da. That is a very different game to play. And so when we get into the card space and we will at some point, we will look at much more about from perspective of like, here's one way for you to get access to the funds in your account. But we might not say look at it from perspective of like, the goal is to be your primary card. And so there's like, there's like nuances like that of how we kind of view the world.
- [31:43]
Michael Batnik
Do you view like your competition in terms of like it's eat what you kill kind of thing and we're against them, or do you think that there's just enough people that are going to want what you guys do that you, you can kind of just focus on your own core competencies and not worry about what the competition is doing?
- [31:58]
Ben Carlson
I think you kind of always still have to look at your competition. I mean it would be, it would be naive not to, to be very honest. But when we look at our competition, we much more look at like Schwab Fidelity, you know, vanguard to a certain extent. Like, you know, like those are the ones that we steal assets from and we steal customers from much more than a Robinhood for example, you know, and that's what we see, like we see most acads, like most account transfers come from Schwab and Fidelity and so on. And that's really where we see athletes come from, etc. And then again I think the, the other piece is really more of like if you look at the GR wealth transfer, most of the funds will actually travel from advisors to self directed. And that I think is actually the much larger opportunity because if you look at where, you know, you know, people in the US have their investments, it is the majority still held with investment advisors. Right. Like that's where most of the assets sit. And so for a company like ours, that's obviously where a huge opportunity is life.
- [33:01]
Life Abraham
Last question for me. I'm curious to know what it's like running such a fast growing company that has raised a lot of outside money. I know that there is a lot of excitement involved, but also certainly pressure and all that sort of good stuff. So what's that like?
- [33:20]
Ben Carlson
It's awesome. It's super fun.
- [33:25]
Life Abraham
All right, so, so maybe maybe specifically some of the biggest challenges. Like what is, what would you say is the thing that. Not maybe not like a specific thing, but just something that somebody could take away. Like what is it like leading such a, such a large, fast growing company?
- [33:39]
Ben Carlson
Focus, Focus. I think is the hardest, hardest, hardest, hardest thing. There is this awesome definition and sorry to quote an Apple person here, that's the most cliche thing you can do. But there's this great thing that I think Jordy Ives once said where it's like, and I'm kind of slaughtering the quote now, but it's essentially focus equals sacrifice. Focus is not doing the things you wouldn't do anyway. Focus is seeing something that is a great idea that you really should be doing that would be amazing for the business, but you're not pursuing it because you're focused on something else. And that sacrifice in your day to day of like taking the amazing ideas that shiny objects that are always popping up and putting them on the sidelines and not going after them, I think that is in the day to day one of the hardest things.
- [34:31]
Life Abraham
Love it. Yeah. Especially with what you're doing. There are, I'm sure there is no shortage of ideas of potential distractions. So staying focused on your core competency and ultimately what what the customer really wants is is a great place to end it. So life really appreciate the time for people that want to learn more about becoming a serious investor or maybe leaving some old legacy tech behind. Where do we send them?
- [34:53]
Ben Carlson
You got send them to public.com and then also we have a great concierge service. If you're someone that has, you know, call it 250, 500 grand or more on their account, you know you can get your dedicated account manager as well. Some of you actually know the name of we pride ourselves to actually provide great service and not just a ticket that goes into Nervana and then obviously play with generatedassets.com it's just super fun and all that stuff is going to live within the public app very soon too. A lot of things to come.
- [35:21]
Life Abraham
Very cool. Thank you for life. Appreciate it.
- [35:23]
Ben Carlson
Thanks.
- [35:25]
Michael Batnik
Thanks to life. Remember check out public.com to learn more. Email us animalspiritscompoundnews.com and we'll see you next time.