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Fintech Leaders
Renaud Laplanche on Building Upgrade to a $7.3Bn Giant, Reinventing the Credit Card, and Shipping AI-Native Products
00:41:24
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- [00:00]
Renault Laplanche
Being a public company is just part of growing up and it's logical evolution. It's almost as hard to succeed in a small market as it is in a big market. So we might as well increase the potential payout of success. You want the bullseye of customer segment for your second product to be as close to the first one as possible so that the customers you already acquired with the first product will be interested in the second one. So BNPL, as I said, 25% of our revenue but 75% of our user acquisition and that ability to lower the acquisition cost on personal loans and credit cards gives us almost 50% greater efficiency than other companies in the space.
- [00:43]
Miguel Armaza
A new line item for you is now token spend, especially from the engineering teams.
- [00:48]
Renault Laplanche
It is a cost for sure, but it's still a much lower cost than humans. And also I think it's good that there is a cost because it's also forces us to be disciplined about when to create agents, when to deploy them, when to use them. So there was a moment where we had at least 15ft waves crossing over because there is a wind direction and the current directions were different. We had across the sea pretty high waves and we were going. I mean we had runs over 40 knots at night.
- [01:18]
Miguel Armaza
Wow.
- [01:18]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, that gets pretty scary.
- [01:19]
Miguel Armaza
Welcome to Fintech Leaders. I'm Miguel Armaza and over the last six years I've recorded nearly 400 convers with the top leaders in fintech. I also co founded Gilgamesh ventures, a fintech VC where we've backed almost 50 companies around the world. In this show we extract how the best builders and investors in fintech think what they've learned and how you can apply some of these lessons to your own work. If you enjoyed this conversation, I invite you to leave a review on Apple Spot, Spotify or YouTube. I sat down with Renault Laplanche, CEO and co founder of Upgrade, a 7.3 billion fintech gorilla in the US since 2017. The company has originated over $45 billion in credit to consumers and has served over 7.5 million people. They have crossed over a billion dollars in annualized revenue and have been cash flow positive for years. Renault also founded Lending Club and took it public in what was the largest tech IPO of 2014. He is one of the most accomplished fintech builders and entrepreneurs and someone I personally admire Outside fintech. Renault is an avid sailor and and holds the Guinness World record for the fastest sailing crossing between Newport to Bermuda. Renaud, thank you for doing this. Welcome again to Fintech Leaders. But in fact, it's been a while. I think it's been over three years since we last spoke or around there. So a lot of new things have happened. I'm excited to chat. Thank you for doing this.
- [03:11]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, thank you for having me back.
- [03:14]
Miguel Armaza
So I actually don't want to start talking about upgrade or anything business related. I read that you almost qualified for the Barcelona Olympics for sailing, but instead you went to business school. Maybe I don't know the full story, but can you share that story?
- [03:35]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, you know, it's one of the long series of bad decisions that I made of focusing on business rather than sailing. So. So I was part of a team and a sailing program in the south of France where I grew up. I actually went to a specially designed school curriculum where we grouped the entire academic program over three days a week so we could be sailing for four days a week.
- [04:02]
Miguel Armaza
And was the sailing also part of a class?
- [04:04]
Renault Laplanche
No, sailing was, yeah, was just like four days of sailing. But that class was pretty much exclusively for sailors because it was in ye, which is like this very well known, famous sort of sailing sort of area in the south of France where they do the sort of Olympics qualifications as well. And yeah, and it was going well. And so I won a couple of French sailing championships, the national championships. So yeah, the next step was going to be, I was going to be the Olympics. And yeah, I just couldn't combine just the academic program in college and later business school with the demands of practicing and training every day and actually staying in the south of France as opposed to moving on with my life and doing something more business related or more academic. So yeah, I chose the academic path.
- [04:59]
Miguel Armaza
So tell us about competitive sailing. Because I am not a sailor, I've never competed in sailing. I don't know much about it, but from what I understand, it's all about reading conditions and making game time decisions. Right. I guess a lot of that can apply to the intuition that you've built in business. But maybe tell us a bit about what makes you or anyone good at sailing and how have you applied that to the business world?
- [05:27]
Renault Laplanche
That's right. There are so many similarities between sailing and business and life. I mean, it's a great school of life. It's because you're right. There's the tactical aspect of making sort of instant decision based on imperfect information and constantly changing conditions on the ground or in the water in this case. But there's also a lot of preparation and planning that goes into it. So knowing what the sea, wind and current conditions are going to be that day talking, like getting up early and talking to local fishermen and knowing that there's a good chance that the wind is going to shift 10 degrees at 11am when the temperature goes up and there's a thermal wind. So all these things that go into lots of planning, lots of data gathering, talking to different sources of information and sort of like synthesizing all that information into a game plan, but then knowing that no battle plan survives the first contact with the enemy and knowing that however perfect the game plan seems to be, there's going to be a lot changing in real time.
- [06:40]
Miguel Armaza
But you didn't start with a focus on business school. You actually started as a lawyer. Right. And outside of the US you don't need a degree before law school. You go straight into law school after high school, right? That's what you did.
- [06:56]
Renault Laplanche
That's right, yeah. So yeah, it's a bit different in France, but yeah, you go, you choose kind of a path pretty early on and you're straight out of high school, you can decide to go into law, medicine or any other, any other field. So yeah, got my law school degree and then immediately after that I went to business school.
- [07:15]
Miguel Armaza
Something I read in French, I speak a little bit of French, but I can read it. And I read, I think it was an old interview that after law school you went to business school and I guess this is where your interest in business and investing started. You actually co founded an investing club at age 22 with someone who's in New York, Matt Turk, who later was your co founder in your first company. Do you remember about those days?
- [07:43]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, that's right. I forgot most of it, but I do remember that part. And it was actually in law school. So Matt Mattor is also a French trained lawyer. We actually started our. I went to Clary Gottlieb and he went to another law firm and yeah, we were at law school together, started that investment club. Did very poorly at the time, but learned a lot.
- [08:10]
Miguel Armaza
But that's the best way to learn right now let's talk a bit about the business side. So upgrade. Obviously the story continues, but it's doing fantastically well. I think your last valuation was around 7 billion, right? You've been here before, right? You built Lending Club, took it public as a public company CEO, you know, there are demands that don't exist in the private world. Is that something you want to do again and if you would, what are the lessons that you've learned?
- [08:52]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I wouldn't say I want to do it again. It's more, it's part of the job. I think as of being a public company is just part of growing up and it's a logical evolution and some pretty big companies have stayed private longer now and there's clearly more liquidity in the private market than there used to be 10 years ago. But I think you still get better and more predictable access to capital, to cheaper capital. You can issue convertible debt at near 0% as a public company. I think your project is probably more important in fintech than anywhere else. But you project an image of durability and transparency that you don't necessarily have as a private company. And so when you're dealing with large banks and with the government, with large financial institutions, I think acting as a public company and having all that again, transparency of information, availability of financial information and sort of signal that you're in for the long run and you're not trying to sell the company and do something else. I think it matters. In those high level strategic partnership discussions,
- [10:06]
Miguel Armaza
some fintech companies are getting ready to go public. For the CEOs of those companies, what's your advice?
- [10:13]
Renault Laplanche
Be prepared to live your life a quarter at a time, which isn't always easy or fun, but at the same time try to find the right balance between that, the reality of reporting earnings every quarter and long term company building. It's obviously hard to set up these expectations for the long run. It's also hard to communicate well with employees because you end up with thousands of employees who very often have the vast majority of their net worth invested in a single company stock. And as much as you want to tell, don't look at the stock price every day. It's a distraction. Just focus on the long run, focus on the fundamentals and the stock price will follow. It's human nature. We have so much invested that they're going to look at it every day. And so it's good to recognize that and manage it as best you can and really explain to employees that they probably have a lot more information than the people buying and selling the stock. So they shouldn't get their cues from the market. It should be the other way around. They know what they're doing, they know what the company stands for, they know the quality of the product they're putting out and the market is going to do what the market does and it's going to go up and down. But it's really important to get everyone focused on the long run.
- [11:39]
Miguel Armaza
Upgrade has gone from being a mono product to a multi product. Company at this point I want to talk about some of the specific products, but before we go there, help us understand the process of actually deciding which product to launch next in a world in financial services where, you know, it's not an infinite number of products, but there's plenty to choose from. Right. So how do you work with your team to actually decide which product to launch next?
- [12:18]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, yeah. So I think first I'd say it's really important to build the platform right from the get go to support that multi products long term strategy. I think there's a big learning from lending club where we probably stayed monoline for too long and really stayed focused on the personal loan product. So at Upgrade we really wanted to build, build a bigger platform with a bigger agenda and I think the ability to help consumers in many aspects of their life, whether it's sort of daily products like checking and savings account and debit and credit cards, or more occasional products that are very useful in life events, bigger occasions like buying a car, renovating their home, going on a trip. And so we, even though we started with personal loans because we knew that product so well and we thought we could use that knowledge of the market and the players and the consumer to get to profitability and scale faster starting from what we knew and expanding from there. So even though we started there, we knew we wanted that multi product experience and that rich all encompassing experience for our customers. So we designed the platform as a multi product platform and it has some impact on engineering architecture. We really design it in a way that's very componentized, where each component is self contained. It's like microservices. It has its own document repository and it has its own, it can operate on its own and then connects with the other components through internal APIs. So building it that way really helped us reuse a lot of code and make it very efficient to build and test and develop products because you could really reorganize components in a different way to build a new product. And so for example, between our first product, which was a personal loan and the second product, a credit card, it's a very different user experience. Yet the code base is 70% identical. So there's a lot of engineering efficiency that comes from that design. So that was important. But in terms of knowing where to go next, I think we have a bias for big markets. Right. So it's almost as hard to succeed in a small market as it is in a big market. And so we might as well sort of increase the potential payout of success and really try to create some adjacencies, right? So same idea of being efficient and reusing things we already have. I think for us the ability to cross sell was really important. So you can think of adjacencies along like two axes. There's product adjacency and customer adjacency. And so ideally, if you start the base and then you go up or to the right on either axis, you don't go too far to the right or too far up and try to maximize these adjacencies. So that product adjacency basically sort of minimizes execution risk and facilitates speed to market because again, you don't have that much to build from the first product. And then customer adjacency really facilitates cross selling. Right? You want the bullseye in terms of customer segment for your second product to be as close to the first one as possible so that the customers you already acquired with the first product will be interested in the second one. So these adjacencies were really, really important.
- [15:54]
Miguel Armaza
Speaking of your second product card, you've had some harsh words for credit cards in the past. What specific product and design decisions did you take for the upgrade card to ensure that it's not just another card like in the market as the ones you've, you've kind of criticized in the past?
- [16:18]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the design brief was how do we make a consumer friendly credit case credit card that actually works for consumers and that doesn't work for the bank, doesn't try to keep people in debt indefinitely. So clearly the repayment schedule matters a lot. So we designed a card initially, this very simple product, it was an installment card, right? You spend on the card and then the balance would turn into an installment plan that consumers would pay down every month at a fixed rate with fixed monthly payments. Very easy to budget for a very predictable repayment schedule and a higher payments monthly payments than what you would typically get with a credit card where it's way too easy to just kick the can down the road, make a small minimum monthly payment and pay the interest, but really not pay down the principal very much. So that was the initial design brief. And then from there we kept building and kept finding new ways to be helpful to consumers. So one thing we found, for example, is a lot of consumers end up using credit cards for their wrong reasons, right? So for like everyday expenses. So we have no intention necessarily to use credit. So we're going to buy a cup of coffee instead of using their debit card, which would be the most appropriate instrument we're going to use a credit card because there's more rewards on the credit card so we can get more miles, more points, which is all good, except what happens in that case is a lot of people just build up that credit card balance for the wrong reason and end up not paying it in full at end of the month, right away, and then start carrying a balance and get into credit card debt that way. So we said let's create a card, we call it one card that basically has the same functionalities as a debit card and a credit card. So we call it pay now or pay later. And you choose which one it is. You can set some rules and say everyday expenses. So less than 50 or 100 or $200 pay now expense and more than that is pay later. Or you can set a monthly limit. Right. So I want to spend $500 of the money I have in my account and beyond that it's going to be a pay later. So you can design, really set it up any way you want. But in either case, whether it's pay now or pay later, you get the same cash back rewards. So there's no incentive to get into debt just to get the reward. And it's also easier way to manage your expenses where you have all your expenses in one statement in one place, you can look at it online from the same provider. So your entire financial life into one place. And it's a lot easier to manage that way.
- [19:07]
Miguel Armaza
Yeah. And credit card debt at the national level in the US has reached 1.3 trillion. So it's obviously a huge asset class I mentioned to you. I'm interviewing Max Levchin in a couple days. He's said that about half of credit card balances revolve.
- [19:27]
Renault Laplanche
That's right.
- [19:28]
Miguel Armaza
Does this corner of our industry, does it have you a bit worried?
- [19:33]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah. No. And that's a, I mean that's a problem we've been trying to solve since I started in fintech 20 years ago. And frankly I haven't done a great job solving because when I started there was 800 billion in credit cards. So I'm 500 billion in the red. But that's also why we are still of designing these products that really help consumers either stay away from credit cards entirely or refinance their credit card debt at lower rates or find a better way to manage it and maybe sort of charge more on their on the debit side on the pay now option and less on credit.
- [20:11]
Miguel Armaza
Another expansion strategy for you has been acquisitions. At least there's one that I'M closely aware of and that's uplift that you've rebranded. Maybe share a bit about that process and how has the integration gone? Obviously it's now become an important part of upgrade.
- [20:30]
Renault Laplanche
Right. So we always liked the BNPL space. So we were strategizing about our market entry strategy and really sort of ran into uplift. So that's, that's almost like the perfect entry strategy for us because we were focusing on travel bnpl which really placed to our strength because it's a, a typically a larger aov, larger average order value than retail BNPL and longer term. So we think of some of our competitive advantage in terms of ability to underwrite loans and in terms of the capital formation of the capital markets part of it and funding larger loans. So you don't need any of these capabilities for a paint for like typical retail bnpl, but you do when, when you, you're sort of taking your family on a cruise, it's a sort of $10,000 expense and you're going to pay it back over two years. That really becomes a full loan that needs to be underwritten that way. So you have these larger, larger ticket items. Longer duration is really the corner of BNPL we specialize in. And specifically uplift came with sort of long term distribution agreements with a lot of large airlines cruise line. So very defensible strategy there. So we think as a standalone business, it was a great business. When we acquired it, we more than doubled the size of that business. So we're really happy. It's 20 to 25% of our revenue now. But what we sort of discovered over time. So I wish it was a strategy, but we just got into it by sheer luck was in addition to being a great standalone business, it became a great acquisition strategy for us. BNPL typically has much lower acquisition cost than personal loans and credit cards and it's also lower margin and lower LTV because it's smaller loans. Right. So like most loans are not the $10,000 cruise. I mean the average flex pay. So average BNPL loan first is about $1,000. So still higher, much higher than the average BNPL and average retail, but lower than almost everything else we do. But so what we ended up getting with BNPL is a lot of customers, smaller ticket items, but great ability to cross sell other products. So that turned into a ecosystem where we're getting very low acquisition cost and can then cross sell higher margin, higher LTV products like personal loans and credit cards which typically are very high cac. But here we can bypass the Entire acquisition cost of personal loans and credit cards. So that model has generated great yield for us. So BNPL is, as I said, 25% of our revenue, but it's 75% of our user acquisition. And that ability to lower the acquisition cost on personal loans and credit cards really gives us almost 50% greater efficiency than other companies in the space that focus on personal loans. So we spend about 22% of our marketing of our revenue in marketing, where the average for so far upstart learning Cloud is closer to 35%. So we're getting lots of marketing efficiency out of that model.
- [23:52]
Miguel Armaza
I think Peter Thiel says with M and A, it's either a complete success, huge success, or a complete failure. There's no in between. And it definitely sounds like this is going to be a very positive one. It's also taken you to new countries, right? I believe it has some Canadian exposure through Uplift. Will we see more international expansion? How do you think about Upgrade beyond
- [24:20]
Renault Laplanche
the U.S. yeah, possibly. I mean, I think the U.S. consumer credit market is so large that there's a strong incentive not to do anything else. Obviously Canada is a special case because. So we inherited some Canadian operations from, from Uplift and that really gives us a launch platform for other upgrade products in Canada, which we're, we're hoping to, to do in the next 12 to, to 18 months. So, so I think we're focused on that first and, and then we'll start thinking of other, other countries and what makes sense.
- [24:55]
Miguel Armaza
I remember a couple years ago you mentioned to me that your customer service team had become far more productive and efficient with obviously the advances of AI tooling. This was, I believe, 18, 24 months ago. We've moved from just customer service AI tooling. Right. Especially in financial services. It's a complete revolution happening. How are you approaching it from the upgrade point of view?
- [25:28]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, no, it is a incredible transformation in terms of productivity gain and just like things we can do now that we just couldn't do 18 months ago. So suddenly we've seen productivity improvements across every aspect of the company. I think engineering is probably one of the most impressive sort of transformation where a lot of engineers now are sort of cloud code orchestrators and they sort of run multiple agents at once and are still very involved in design, architecture, code review, obviously qa, but getting good not just at coding, but also at writing the right prompts and setting multiple agents in parallel that do a lot of the work on their behalf. Obviously the ability to vibe code has transformed other parts of the companies. That now behave a little bit like engineering. So product managers can now, instead of writing specs, we can just like make a prototype and show exactly what we have in mind that way and be a lot more efficient. We've seen a lot of aspects of the business that are getting sort of automated really, really fast and really people sort of enjoying it and embracing it and realizing that they can outsource the most boring part of their job to AI and focus on the more interesting part. It does come with things to look for and be aware of because, for example, right. I mean, the ability to vibe code probably multiplied the amount of code generated the company by 5 to 10. And often that code is being generated in a way that isn't automatically falling into the code quality and monitoring and SOCKS compliance framework that we have in place for engineering. So making sure that code gets loaded, logged, monitored, qaed, there's proper code maintenance that could be done like as a. I mean we're building an entire sort of code maintenance framework where there's a sort of level one maintenance that's being done by the people who generated that code in the first place, but then engineers who level two support for that code. So a lot is happening there and it's generally, I'd say 90% positive. But there are these like little gotchas that you need to be aware of and need to be managed.
- [28:02]
Miguel Armaza
Obviously there are efficiencies to be gained. A new line item for you is now token spend, especially from the engineering teams. They seem to be insatiable in many cases. What kind of impact are you seeing there?
- [28:17]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, it is a cost for sure, but it's still a much lower cost than humans. But it's good that there is a cost because it also forces us to be disciplined about when to create agents, when to deploy them, when to use them. And some problems are best handled and solved by an agent, others might not be. There might be a different automation framework that's not agentic and could work better and could be deployed at a lower cost because there's not going to be the same token cost as the one associated with an agent. So all this needs to be orchestrated carefully. But it's yes, generally having a very positive impact on having on both productivity, but also creativity and employee morale. And it's really allowing us to do things we didn't know would be possible. So beyond just productivity tool, we're actually launching in the next few weeks our first release of native AI product. So it's basically a refi agent. So it's a refinancing agent that takes into account our customers debt. So how much you're paying, how much you owe on your mortgage, car loan, credit cards, personal loans. And it's constantly going to look for lower rates on your behalf. It's going to scour the Internet until it finds a better option and will allow you and really brings back some very tangible actionable options and can tell you, okay, if you refinance this particular balance and you're already pre approved because I applied on your behalf and you can set it up that way, obviously you don't have to and it's a soft pool so it doesn't impact your credit score. So it can do all these things on your behalf and brings you back an opportunity where it's going to say, hey, you can refinance that particular loan, save $22 a month. Would you like me to go ahead and finalize the process and you can then like go do it and transfer the balance on your behalf and really go through the entire entire process on your behalf. I think that's a kind of AI solution that's truly generating a lot of value for consumers because particularly in a lower rate environment or declining rate environment, everybody should be refinancing everything all the time. And obviously there are frictions and there's inertia and time involved. So I think a lot of people would refinance their mortgage because it's a big, big ticket item, it's going to save you hundreds of dollars, possibly a month. So it's really worth investing your time with the smaller balances like your auto loan, your credit card, your personal loans. Maybe it's only saving you $18 a month. And so if you're going to have to work a lot harder for this, you might not go through that process. But if it comes to you frictionless and with no effort. But it's free money, I mean I would do it for $20 a month.
- [31:16]
Miguel Armaza
And also sounds like a great way for you to increase your arpu, your average revenue per user. Because then if they have a loan with an external provider, you can help them refi obviously with a better rate internally. So that also increases your relationship with the customer.
- [31:34]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, no, I think so. I think it's like doing something useful for our customers. So building a lot of goodwill and continuing to further that relationship, but also acquiring new users. I mean we really expect this to be a new user acquisition tool where the vast majority of the loans will be refinancing wouldn't be upgrade loans. It would Be competitors, loans.
- [31:53]
Miguel Armaza
Right, right, right, right. Speaking of kind of loans and financing, you've built quite a sophisticated network of capital providers. Right. You're not a charter bank as far as I know, but you've built a network that actually allows you to have a very competitive cost of capital. What was your approach to setting this up?
- [32:19]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, so it's something we've been very sort of deliberate about is trying to drive down the cost of capital. Because when you think of the cost of credit really like two major components. One is the cost of operations, how much it costs to originate loans and service these loans and acquire customers. And fintech companies are generally pretty good driving down the cost of operations. Operations because we have no branch network and we have very modern technology stack and we generally operate at a fraction of the cost of traditional banks. But typically, historically banks have had a lower cost of capital. They are funded for deposits or through the Fed window. It's a very low cost of capital. And so make sure we can really deliver the best possible deal for our customers. We had to work on bringing the cost of capital down. And one way to do that is really to sell loans to small banks and credit unions because they then borrow their cost of capital. Your cost of capital becomes their return requirements. And particularly with credit unions, they're not for profit, they're tax exempt. So they have the lowest cost of capital there is. So when a bank is going to be looking for a 4% return on assets that a credit union sometimes is going to be happy with 3%. And so we invested a lot in building that sort of network of hundreds of community banks and credit unions that effectively give us a very low cost. Probably the lowest cost of capital varies for the high end of credit. Right. Because it's obviously near prime or subprime loans wouldn't be appropriate for small banks and credit unions. So they're focusing on sort of prime and super prime. And then we have other type of investors, including our own securitization shelves, so we can access the securitization markets directly and get a attractive cost of capital. Also for the sort of part of the credit spectrum that requires sort of taking more risk than a small bank would, but also features a higher return for investors.
- [34:23]
Miguel Armaza
Who are you going after? And I ask this because some founders are very public about this. I interviewed, for example, the CEO of Ramp, Eric Gliman, and they're crystal clear they're going after Amex, Right. Or they want to get to that scale. And it's very, very clear. Do you have A framework like that, are there a couple companies or. That's not how you look at it?
- [34:45]
Renault Laplanche
No, no, not really. I mean, we're really focused on Morpheus of the positive aspect of delivering value for consumers. We're not necessarily sort of taking to train to steal that customer from someone else. Not trying to compete particularly hard against any particular player out there. Really focusing on, okay, how do we create value for our customers, how do we help move their finances in the right direction, get into responsible products or more affordable, that will help them make good financial decisions and really get closer to their financial goals.
- [35:19]
Miguel Armaza
So before I let you go, we're going to go into a rapid fire section.
- [35:24]
Renault Laplanche
Okay. I need to think fast.
- [35:26]
Miguel Armaza
60 seconds or less. What is a book or a couple books that you enjoy recommend often that had have had an impact on you?
- [35:36]
Renault Laplanche
I have a short memory so I'm going to talk about the book I'm reading now. Fascinating. It's called the Price of Mercy and it's nothing to do with fintech. It's a book about the sort of criminal justice system. It's written by a sort of public defender. It's fascinating. I learned so much about how, how unfair and biased the system is and what can be done today to make it work for everyone.
- [36:00]
Miguel Armaza
I'll check it out. That's one I haven't heard before. You set the, I think the world record sailing between Newport, I guess Rhode Island.
- [36:11]
Renault Laplanche
That's right.
- [36:11]
Miguel Armaza
To Bermuda, averaging 27 knots and beating Steve Fawcett's 15 year record for more than 15 hours. Right. How was that experience?
- [36:22]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, it was a fantastic experience. I mean like going after Steve Fawcett. Any Steve Fawcett.
- [36:27]
Miguel Armaza
Riker.
- [36:27]
Renault Laplanche
I mean, the guy is a legend, obviously. So that was even more special. But yeah, no, it's so Newport, Bermuda is a really big sailing race. Everyone who's been sailing on the east coast knows and wants to compete or has competed in that, in that race. So having that particular record is very special. It was a combination of all the planning and the good decisions I talked about earlier, but also just sheer luck. I think we had wind conditions and current. I mean, the Gulf Stream was particularly strong at the time. We had conditions that occur, frankly once every five years. So I'm hoping we can keep that record for a pretty long time because you need not only a faster boat, but you also need to get that faster boat going in those particular conditions.
- [37:13]
Miguel Armaza
As they say, you had the wind at your back, right?
- [37:15]
Renault Laplanche
Yes, exactly.
- [37:16]
Miguel Armaza
Do you always sell with the same crew?
- [37:18]
Renault Laplanche
Not always. I Think during that particular record breaking program in 2014 and 2015, we had a great, great group of people, eight of us, two co skippers, myself and Ryan Brimester and yeah, we did all these. So we broke three records at the time. So Newport, Bermuda via Trans Pacific race and the sort of English Channel between Britain and France. But the two of those have been improved since. So the only one standing is actually Newport, Bermuda.
- [37:49]
Miguel Armaza
Do you have a favorite place to sail?
- [37:51]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, I love the Caribbean. It's usually good wind, I mean you got the trade winds, so it's pretty predictable wind. You know you're going to get like force like three or four every, every day. Pretty constant direction, warm water, warm weather, very, very nice.
- [38:08]
Miguel Armaza
Did you ever had a particularly scary experience while sailing?
- [38:13]
Renault Laplanche
Oh yes, so many. So I mean that particular record run from Newport to Bermuda was also pretty scary because it's almost 24 hours, so half of the race is going to be at night. And as I said, the Gulf Stream was particularly strong. So there was a moment where we had probably at least 15ft waves sort of crossing over because there is a wind direction and the current directions were different. So we had a crossed sea, pretty high waves and we were going. I mean we had runs over 40 knots at night. Wow. Yeah, that gets pretty scary.
- [38:51]
Miguel Armaza
I was going to ask you a leader that you admire, but I actually read one of your past interviews, you mentioned a French entrepreneur, business leader, Xavier Neal. Why do you admire him? Maybe tell us a bit about him.
- [39:05]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, so I think he's one example and there are many, many others. But one example who really got extremely successful as an entrepreneur multiple times, built multiple companies, but also achieved a great transition from being an entrepreneur to being an investor and really used that as a way to certainly make more money. That's part of it. But also really give back and really help other entrepreneurs be successful. And I really like the arc of that career.
- [39:36]
Miguel Armaza
On the topic of giving back, how do you enjoy giving back to the community?
- [39:41]
Renault Laplanche
Yeah, so I wish I would give back more of my time. I don't. My time is very scarce resource right now. So I've tried to give the next best thing, which is money. So there are causes I feel pretty passionate about. I was already supporter of few causes in terms of social justice even before reading the Price of Mercy. So that's probably going to increase that bucket. I also enjoy doing local things. So for example, as you know, food stamps are in great danger of like either going away or getting cut quite a bit. So go together with a good group of friends and are funding more of the food stamp program locally and working with food banks in that context. So that's the kind of things I like to do that have very practical, sometimes local impact.
- [40:30]
Miguel Armaza
Well, we're now on the topic of having very little time and time being very scarce. Thank you for spending this hour with us and also thank you for always being a great supporter of Gilgamesh and we always enjoy learning from you.
- [40:45]
Renault Laplanche
Thank you. I mean, I want to say Gilgamesh, like in terms of that trajectory of being great entrepreneurs and turning into great investors. That's another example.
- [40:55]
Miguel Armaza
Thank you.
- [40:56]
Renault Laplanche
Hi Renault.
- [40:56]
Miguel Armaza
Well, it's great to spend some time
- [40:59]
Renault Laplanche
in San Francisco anytime. Appreciate it. You're always welcome.
- [41:03]
Miguel Armaza
Thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this great episode. Wade Renault from Upgrade. If you want more interviews, make sure to subscribe, follow and leave a review on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your shows.